The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  What the chaplain observed made a profound impression on me. It really made me feel good about my decision, helped me see that I could come to a decision and that was that. There is really no point, at the end of the day, to deceiving yourself. You can make excuses for this, that, and the other. But there is no point deceiving yourself. They wouldn’t have let me go had I not changed my thinking. I was genuinely looking for a way to reconcile that portion of my old life-style in my mind and saw it’s no good paying lip service. You have to dig under every emotion, feeling, everything. It’s no good leaving anything there. And I think that was one of the last issues of the addiction troubling to me.

  The joke on me is that in the first month after I came out, that guy, who had offered me a world of drugs, looked me up. My cocaine dealer friend who’d gone through the clinic with me came by to visit, and of course brought a big envelope of white powder. I just went, “Wow!” Then I broke it to him: “I definitely am not going to join you on this. I’m really determined to make my sobriety work.”

  That wasn’t too bad. I passed that test quite well. The next test was more lingering. For years driving around the freeway system of Los Angeles, I remembered every turnoff for a dealer. That was weird. The car wanted to turn off and go score! But, slowly, all that subsided. Through the help of my peers and all that, it slowly but surely receded. Eventually, after a year or two or more, the craving gets less and less, and at last you don’t even have to think about it at all in terms of “Do I want to do it?”

  My resolve when I came out of treatment was firm. Once I made that decision two weeks into treatment not to plan that run with Gary, I let that go. It had been fun talking about the pipe and the whole deal, but somewhere in the recess of my brain, my intelligence took over. It wasn’t anything spiritual, except in the sense of discovering something about my own humanity. But having said that, it must have been the Higher Power looking out for me. Not a great shining light, more mundane, more earthbound: “What the fuck am I doing? Am I insane? Let’s not talk about this escapade anymore because it’s not helpful. I’m not going to be doing it. It was fun, but I’m here to do serious work.” And, of course, it’s hard work, recovery. Less and less hard as the years have gone by, but you know, the way we live our lives is all recovery in one sense or another. We go through a shattering experience like that, and everything we do in life from then on is in a way influenced by what we’ve been through. It has to be. Otherwise you wouldn’t have any sensitivity at all, and we only learn by experiences, good or bad. I believe that there’s a code, sort of a Twelve Step program that we all try. We don’t succeed, but try to live by it. I’m not just talking about not taking a drink or a substance, but just the acts of living, the day-to-day being a good human being.

  After treatment I retained some of my old thinking, yes, but I had help: people like my friend Rift. Rift was a great influence on me because he had been there and done it way more than me. Made me look like a beginner as we compared stories. Wow, thank God I never used with him! Rift was a protector, but it’s all up to the individual how you can keep your sobriety intact.

  Touch wood, thank God, I’ve never had a slip. My son Charlie is twenty, so it’s been twenty years. My son has never seen me take a drop either of drugs or alcohol. By the same token, I’ve never seen him drink a beer or use anything because he knows what happened to me.

  I’ve told him, and my ex-wife has told him too. And I’ll be telling my new son, Beckett, when he is old enough to understand. I will tell him and warn him because it is obviously in the genes. But I’m very proud of my older son, how he’s resisted the peer pressure. He is a surfer and filmmaker. It’s very hard when everybody’s doing something.

  I’ve always been open with him about my problem, and I know that’s influenced him. Charlie has never told me, but his girlfriend told my wife that that was the reason. My son wouldn’t say it to me, but she told my wife, who told me. When I heard that, it was a wonderful moment. All I went through, the whole fucking thing, was worthwhile for that, to hear that. It may have saved him, and I hope the knowledge will save my small one, because I’ll tell him too. At first you don’t want to tell your child because you’re ashamed, but it’s wonderful! A very freeing and relieving thing to do. And of course, it’s brilliant for them to hear. Also means you’re a real person, not an actor in a family play. I’ve always been, oh my God, the bundle of energy “let’s have fun with” kind of dad that we see on weekends. Pa-pa-pa-pa, pa-pa-pa-pa, like, Mr. Energy. But it’s good for them to know the dark side too.

  But of course the other side of it is we are what we are because of what we’ve done—the experiences—and in a strange way, I would never change anything. Even though it destroyed elements in my life, I felt it was meant to be. I have a feeling I’m a much better person today than I would be had I not learnt about recovery and gone through those hard lessons. On appearance, that’s not a great message for young people, yet I know it to be true.

  My name is Franz, and I’m a recovering asshole.

  I’m a ghost

  that everyone can see;

  one of the rats

  who act

  like they own the place.

  —Franz Wright, “Empty Stage”

  Franz Wright

  (poet)

  * * *

  MANY OF THE WESTERN world’s most well-known poets have had a sorry life trajectory. Their lives or talents are almost without fail cut off in early bloom by one means or another. What if, instead of ending up insane, defeated by addiction or venereal disease, freezing in garrets, or languishing in asylums where their helpless relatives stashed them, they had conquered their problems and reined their sensibilities, led healthy, fulfilling lives and kept working? If, instead of spiraling down from being celebrated to being bitter pariahs, they reached the gute Endung of a Grimm’s fairy tale, the elusive happily-ever-after?

  Picture a great poet like Robert Lowell without giving in to his cups. Or John Clare, the farmer-poet, when he walked forty miles home from the lunatic asylum across the moors, staying there rather than being locked up again. What if, instead of being wrenched from his family, his farm, and the inspiration for his nature poems, he had found a sane life there: returned to the plow, been reborn, and once more enjoyed his craft? The mere concept rewrites the whole of Western literature!

  While the themes of a metaphysical poet cannot be pigeonholed, it is fascinating how the search into the meaning of recovery pervades Franz Wright’s poems. We see that this Pulitzer Prize–winning poet wears a mantle no previous great poet ever donned, as a poet of recovery. In a spare, understandable style, his work has been lauded as confessional in the grandest sense. It has been remarked that his poems will burn themselves onto the backs of your eyeballs. Charles Simic once said of Wright that he dares to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover. These are poems that set fire when you strike them.

  In the realm of letters, Franz Wright is an aristocrat, a poet whose father, James Wright, won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry too. He lives in a working-class near-suburb of Boston that’s like a location for the movie Mystic River. Down the block from Franz and Beth Wright’s, at Heidi’s, a popular coffee shop that seems to have been there forever, none of the friendly staff on a Sunday morning has heard of Franz Wright. None of Franz’s poems are posted either, nor the news when he, an alternative sort of poet with a cult following, won the coveted Pulitzer against tough establishment competition.

  Franz’s life has been poetry, and poetry is shoved in all the nooks and crannies of his home. Candles burn, flowers are artfully placed in vases, everything seems like sensible accessories to a discreetly bohemian domestic life. The cats, old and frisky, cuddle right up as we start with conversation and green tea—“our luxury,” Franz says. The living room has three prominent typewriters too—an Underhill, a Remington, and a Hermes that Franz has painted vermilion red—all decades vintage. He spills his mug of tea on one and liquidates a poem on
the curling paper in the Underhill. “Happens every day,” he says, sopping up half the spill. “Doesn’t matter. I know it by heart.”

  Franz is slender, of middle height, with finely wrought features, deep-set gray eyes, and an unusual, otherworldly timber to his voice. His speech is like rungs on a crystal staircase, where he tests each word to see whether it will hold as he climbs to the state of mind or idea he aims to express.

  Though the son of a famous man, his battles with his father are a recurring theme of the poems. Franz wasn’t crippled by the association; it was a rich legacy. Both his father and stepfather were terrible figures for him, one absent and the other abusive, but he was also surrounded by the most eminent poets of mid-century America as a boy. He cut his teeth on poetry. For his whole sentient life, he has been untwisting the intoxication of truth and beauty in language from the delusion of chemical highs, as he sizes it up in this excerpt from “Nothingsville, MN”:

  the smell

  of beer, urine, and the infinite

  sadness you dread

  and need so much of

  for some reason

  I work in a place called the Center for Grieving Children and Teenagers and watch the recovery process with seven- or eight-year-old children who have recently gone through the death of a parent. We watch the process by which they return. This happens much more rapidly with children, and it’s amazing to watch. Sometimes they come in and they’re really regressed. Then sometimes by the end of the first day, they’ll be running around playing with all the other children, because it dawns on them, just as it does on somebody in active recovery, that they’re in the one place in the world where everyone else knows what they’re going through.

  It’s the same model as for me. You leave the company of others in recovery and you enter a world where people don’t care, or if they care, they don’t understand, which is equally bad. Centers like this are springing up all over the country. This is the only one for the large area of New England and is getting more and more families. We have some 9/11 families now. It’s the most astounding experience. Engaging with children who are going through this kind of crisis is the most incredible thing I’ve done in my life. I had to go through a long period of training in bereavement issues that I knew nothing about except for my own experience. Then I realized I was doing it because my father left us when I was about that age. That hadn’t really occurred to me. After I was at the center for a while, I was seeing myself as an eight-year-old. I had an opportunity—never having had children of my own—to see just how fragile and delicate and easily crushed an eight-year-old boy can be. It was terrifying for me. I was quitting every week.

  Making a commitment to relate to these children was completely the result of my enthusiasm for being in recovery myself. Every single thing that’s happened in the last four years, including your being here, the Pulitzer Prize, my wife’s being with me, every single thing is a result of getting sober. And it’s been an amazing thing to watch in others. People come back from that long underworld experience, which can go on and on. Some people go there and they just stay there forever. I mean, I spent enough time in that state, clinically. I’ve been hospitalized five, six times for depression. The last time was in McLean Hospital and Mass General in ’97, ’98. I was in a psychotic depression, and the prognosis was that I was never going to get better. It was drug- and alcohol-induced partly, but I’ve also been diagnosed manic-depressive, suffer from post-traumatic stress, and so forth. So I have the combination. And I was in it for two years—that was the longest I’ve spent. Never believed I would come out of it. I was incapable of getting out of bed for sixteen hours a day. I didn’t leave my apartment for three months at a time. I attempted suicide. The hospitals didn’t work. That’s where drinking and drugs led me finally, and it went on for long enough it seemed it would never end. I mean, I was a dead person. I wasn’t a functioning person anymore. And it didn’t help to go to the hospital anymore.

  Until I was seven or eight years old, I believed that most adults were crazy. I was born in Vienna in 1953, where my parents lived during my father’s Fulbright fellowship. We returned to Seattle, where my father did a doctorate at the University of Washington, studying under Theodore Roethke. Our next home was Minneapolis, where he taught at the University of Minnesota, along with John Berryman. There was a lot of trouble between my parents when I was young, leading to their divorce in 1961 when I was eight. There was no way my father could stay there, my parents’ relationship having deteriorated to the point where one of them was someday going to murder the other. I witnessed a lot of violence from earliest childhood. My parents didn’t turn it on me as much as themselves. My mother took me and my younger brother to San Francisco. She remarried when I was eleven: a Hungarian refugee. He was more violent than my father. My stepfather had fought on the side of the Nazis. He’d been put in Siberia, in a slave-labor mine somewhere, by the Soviets. Then he got free and ended up in San Francisco where we were. And unerringly, my mother, who never had much luck with men, found her way to him. He turned out to be insane. He beat us, my brother and me. After about a year, he became very violent. Right on schedule, every six weeks, he would beat the shit out of us. We almost knew when it was coming. The rest of the time he was utterly silent and hostile. This was from when I was eleven to eighteen. We grew up feeling very isolated and afraid of the world. It wasn’t being beaten. That didn’t bother me so much as feeling constantly fearful and humiliated. So, later, I got the diagnosis in the eighties of manic depression and post-traumatic stress, along with the bipolar disorder I may have been born with. And I think that contributed a lot, although alcoholism runs in my family. I’m one of those people who has a dual diagnosis. I’ve led groups in mental health clinics with people who have that problem: who are mentally ill and addicts both. A more devastating form of affliction is hard to imagine. But if you drink, forget it, because you’re utterly lost! Drinking and drugs actually work for a long time, years, to cover your terror of life and to enable you to function socially.

  My father also remarried and moved to New York. We remained close despite … I loved and do love my father. We corresponded from the time he left until I was in my twenties. When I was fourteen, I began to write poetry. One morning I got up and wrote a poem. I was so elated I sent it to my father, who replied with a very brief letter. He wrote, “I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.” I have the letter today.

  When I discovered drinking as a teenager and in college, I was happy for the first time in my life. I loved it. Now I see I was an alcoholic. I never even drank socially. Right from the start, I used it as a drug, and people right away would look at me and say, “You know, Franz, you’re going to get drunk,” and I’d say, “No shit. Like, why do you drink?” It never occurred to me you would drink for any other reason. It was a door out of the world—my world—which I perceived as a hostile, nightmarish place, where I couldn’t function very well. From the moment I had a drink … which maybe means I was born with it, but it hardly matters, it’s an addictive substance and I used it addictively, so I became an addict or was born one. And for five years, it worked. I was able to talk to people, write. I excelled at school. One of the most sinister things about addiction is that it actually enables you to function for a while. If it made you horribly sick from the start, who would do it? The reason you do it is it literally improves your life for a number of years, and then you reach a point where it slowly dawns on you that you cannot function without it. So then you’re fucked! But up until then, it works. In some ways, it was the happiest time in my life.

  In the late sixties and through the seventies, it was very difficult to tell if you had a problem with compulsive and addictive substance use because everyone was using drugs socially. I went to high school in northern California, the mecca for all of this in the years 1967 to 1971. How would I not have been exposed to drugs and drinking! In high school, I was having these euphoric flights. I was on an exchange program in
Europe for a year, but my immaturity and instability cut that short. I worked at a gas station in Berkeley for a while, then got accepted in the middle of the year at Oberlin College, which saved my life. This was the early seventies. Oberlin was a great, rigorous school, filled with fantastic scholars and artists of all kinds. It was also a sheltered environment where it was perfectly normal to use LSD. Everyone else is doing it around you. Then your friends all get to the point like, they’re thirty and “Okay, I’ve got to stop,” and they stop. And you’re like just getting started! And that was me.

  I will do any substance that alters my mind and mood, and have done them all. There is no drug I have not used and abused. They don’t exist. I’ve used everything from opiates (all of them) to cocaine to amphetamines to benzodiazepines to marijuana. And drank with it. They always went together for me; I didn’t do one without the other. That was my way of life for twenty-five years until I got sober. It made me sick periodically, and I would lose jobs. Then I would feel better and start doing it again. I often did my writing during these in-between periods. This went right on until my final illness in 1997, when I became so ill that I literally was too terrified to leave my house to walk to a liquor store. I wasn’t even drinking. I was in bed for sixteen hours a day. I was trying to commit suicide. I was trying to jump off the Tobin Bridge. I tried to electrocute myself in the bathtub. I tried to hang myself. I tried to overdose with opiates and alcohol. I bought that book about how to kill yourself, put the garbage bag around my head and all that. But for some reason I did not—it was not for lack of trying. There was some reason for that not to work….