The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  I had no job, I owed rents, I had a wife and daughter to take care of, and I panicked. I went and bought a bottle, and that was my last drink. That was over three years ago. I started back in the recovery program for real this time. In reviewing my life and looking at the choices I’d made, I knew down deep in my heart it was me. Nobody else had done this to me. I knew I had run out of options. I was going to die a drunk if I didn’t stop. I also thought that there was a convening power in my life that was pushing me to where I’m at now. Wanting me to be sober.

  My dad passed away in these last three years. That was a big loss to me. I loved my daddy even though he was a drunk. So, I finally surrender and start going to these recovery meetings every weekend. I was working twelve hours a day at a welding shop. The thought of rodeoing hadn’t entered my mind. I didn’t think I could do that again because I had been so busted up from horse wrecks and previous rodeos. I also knew I would be able to get drunk again. You know, my grandfather was a cowboy. So was my dad. Cowboys and drunkenness was all I knew. I never saw a cowboy that didn’t drink. It was part of the West. So being in a rodeo just wasn’t an option no more.

  Horses. I love horses and love ranch work, so that’s what I was going to pursue. A couple months went by and I met some people here at Gatehouse [a treatment center in Wickenburg, Arizona]. I started to hear what they had to say and where they came from. I actually started to listen to people.

  You know, in the Navy, I’d been around the world three times. Every once in a while, I’d go to a meeting just to keep the officers off my back. To look good and show ’em I was doing something about my drinking problem. I never went with the intent to stop drinking.

  After about eight months of sobriety, I got offered this job at Gatehouse Academy for a lot more money than I ever made in my life, but still thought, “I don’t have anything to offer anybody. I haven’t been sober that long.” But I went ahead and made a decision to give it a try. A year went by, and I was really getting into the program. Dealing with my character defects and asking God for help. Trying to help other people. I was moving forward and staying sober. It’s better than getting on any bucking horse in the world!

  I never experienced anything like this. You know, I’ve helped my mother and I’ve helped my sister and my brother, but to help some of these kids in recovery … Whoa! … You know, I’m forty-five years old and some of them are seventeen and eighteen and they’re getting a wake-up call. I’m like Rip Van Winkle, asleep for twenty years.

  I thought I was destined to be a ranch hand, a cowboy, in a go-nowhere job, until I went to work at Gatehouse. After about a year here, I started to find some happiness. I started to find some serenity. I’m meeting all kinds of wonderful people. I got friends that come here to visit me. People call and say, “Hey, Destry, we hear you’re sober. Is that right?”

  I even started thinking about rodeoing again. I got all fired up about it. I got a brother-in-law who’s fifty-four years old, and he started riding bulls again. He’s been sober twenty-three years. So now I have the courage, without anything to alter my mind to lend me the artificial courage. I still have the passion for horses and rodeo. I also think that it’s sort of a test to see if I was ready, ready to stay sober while being around the rodeo crowd. And I’d do it again tomorrow if the opportunity presented itself.

  My first rodeo in Prescott, I entered the bareback riding. I hadn’t been on a bareback horse in about sixteen years. I joined the PRCA [Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association] and went to the rodeo. I was standing behind the chutes, talking to a couple of cowboys. They gave me some guidance about the different things they are doing. I climbed up the chute and sat down on my horse, and pretty soon it was over. I got bucked off. I got up and walked out of the arena and discovered that my wrist was broken. There was some big pain, but I told my wife that if I’d had a rodeo the next day, I would have rode because of the elation I was feeling. That I did it and I didn’t have to drink!

  You know, I drank to get the courage to ride, the courage to do a lot of things. If I had to talk to somebody that I was afraid of, I’d have a couple of drinks. I needed a couple of shots to get on a bucking horse, to push me to the edge. There were times where I’d have no memory of getting on a horse. I’d always have a couple of shots. I went to a lot of rodeos in the military where I’d enter as a local contestant (not as a member of the cowboy association at that time). And every time I rode, I’d go behind the chutes to take a shot or two of whiskey … liquid courage! The courage I didn’t have to follow through. Otherwise I couldn’t have done it because of the fear. The fear of getting hurt, looking bad, not being able to cover your horse (ride him in the required time). This last time I felt better. Whether I got bucked off or not, it didn’t matter. It was just something I had to prove to myself. I had to experience it clearheaded.

  Before I was always there for the drink and chasing the girls. I wasn’t there to get on the horse. The party. That’s what rodeo was to me. This was the first time I went to the rodeo to get on the horse, and I plan on doing it until I can’t.

  I met a girl whom I got pregnant when I was seventeen. She was twenty-four. I was going to do the honorable thing. Since I was in the military, we were going to get married in a military chapel. Three days before the wedding, she comes to me and says, “You’re not ready for this, Destry. You’ve got too much living to do. You can’t handle this right now.” She said, “I’ll tell him about you when the time is right.”

  I was twenty-one when I’d entered a rodeo and got hurt, and in the hospital, I wrote a poem about how things go with being a cowboy on the rodeo circuit. It goes like this:

  I was sitting at the bar back home.

  I was staring at my beer, and stoned.

  This big fella walked in and come up and sat down,

  And me and him got to talkin’,

  And he asked me what was wrong.

  I looked at him and decided to tell him my unhappy song.

  I said, “I was just thinkin’ about a girl that left a long time ago, with a boy I didn’t know.

  I was thinkin’ what my boy’d grow up to be,

  And I was praying to God that he was nothing like me.

  But you see, Stranger, she moved away from where she used to stay.

  All she left me was a letter that said I had a son whose eyes were brown.

  So I traveled through the years from town to town.

  I finally said I’d quit lookin’ and came back here.

  But through those years became nothing but a drunken ole rodeo clown with a lot of cares.”

  You know that big fella looked at me with a tear in his eye,

  And for a moment I thought he was going to cry.

  This is what he said …

  He said, “You can quit lookin’ now,

  ’Cause you came to the right town.

  That lady you was lookin’ for, well,

  I’m sorry, sir, she passed on about nine years before.

  Well, me, I’ve grown and became a world champion in professional rodeo.

  So put down your drink. Get rid of those tears.

  You ought to be happy.

  I know I’ve never met you before—

  I’m your son, Dad. It’s been almost forty years.”

  I wrote that poem when I was twenty-one and thinking about the girls that I’d left, and how I had a boy I was never going to see, and about drinking and the despair and loneliness that go with it, and how life has a twist and a turn.

  So the lady took off and went back to San Diego, and my mom got a letter saying she had a baby boy. He’d be twenty-seven. He called me not too long ago. I was in the hospital with a broken back. I’d entered a rodeo and got hurt, just like when I wrote that poem, only today I am sober with a beautiful loving wife and daughter. I am thankful for what God has given me in my sobriety. Of course, there were many people and events affected negatively by my alcoholism and behaviors. Today, by being sober and of service, my life an
d behaviors have changed.

  A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.

  —Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur

  Nile Rodgers

  (musician)

  * * *

  ONE OF MY FAVORITE MOVIE bits from the inimitable Three Stooges features the lovable buffoon, Curly, on the receiving end of a piano being moved down two flights of stairs. Moe and Larry are above, guiding the piano down the stairs, inquiring every few steps as to how Curly is holding up. “I got it, I got it, I got it, I got it … I ain’t got it” he understates, as the piano starts to roll over him.

  This was exactly how I felt while chasing down Nile Rodgers, one of the preeminent R & B music makers, in pursuit of an interview for our book. “I got him, I got him, I got him, I got him … I ain’t got him.”

  Nile and I both live in Westport, Connecticut, a fashionable community for around 27,000 seemingly prosperous inhabitants. As small as our town is, you couldn’t help but run into Nile every once in a while. In these parts, it’s hard to miss a dreadlock-sporting African American driving in a new yellow Range Rover.

  I knew of Nile from recovery circles as well as from the music business, though our paths had never truly crossed. I had this sense, though, that his story would make an important contribution to this book, so I made a few inquiries and finally was given his home number by a helpful friend. Calling cold, I caught him home one winter afternoon about a year ago. When I explained the nature of my call and my desire to interview him, Nile tentatively agreed but asked that I set it up through his New York office. I quickly called the number he gave me and was greeted by his most accommodating English assistant, Sooze. “Why of course we’ll set this up,” she assured me. And set it up she did. Several times.

  “Nile is delayed in the recording studio.” “Nile had to leave for Milan.” “Nile’s on a conference call he just can’t get out of.” I ain’t got it. After doing the Nile shuffle for several months, and with the deadline to deliver the book fast approaching, I made one last try. “Sooze, this is it. If we don’t do the interview today, I’m sunk.” “Don’t worry, dear,” I was assured. “Nile has an appointment that will end at 10:30 a.m., and he has instructed me to set it up right after that.” At 11:30 I got an e-mail from Sooze: “He had to take a call but should be done around 1:00 p.m. Why don’t you call me then.” Dancing with Sooze throughout the day led to a combination of anxiety mixed with no small amount of despair. I was losing my last chance to get this interview. Exchanges of e-mails during the afternoon were getting nowhere, and finally, at around 7:00 p.m., I admitted defeat to myself, packed up a few things from my office, and headed home.

  After catching up with my kids and eating a brief dinner, I went upstairs to check my computer one last time in hopes of some sort of miracle. And there it was: a note from Sooze: “Nile is home expecting your call.” I dashed down the stairs, scared the dog into one of his yapping fits, kicked my unsuspecting daughter off of the phone, plugged in my handy-dandy recording device, and sat down to listen to what turned out to be a riveting recounting of a truly amazing story from a man who speaks with rare insight and candor.

  I was a very shy kid, born to a mother who was very young. She got pregnant at thirteen, so, needless to say, she was ill equipped for motherhood. Consequently I had a very nomadic childhood. All my family are substance abusers. My natural father died of cirrhosis of the liver before he was forty, which is incredible. In his mid-thirties, he had no liver. My stepfather, the guy my mom married, was a heroin addict all of his life, and both of his siblings died of drug abuse when I was quite young. Drug abuse and alcoholism is very, very prevalent in my family. It was everywhere.

  Let me put it to you like this—one picture is worth a thousand words. For many, many years, I believed that only children slept lying down, and adults slept standing up, because when I would come home from school, the number of junkies nodding in our living room was amazing. All the adults would be standing up with cigarette ashes dangling, never falling and hitting the ground. They looked like they were asleep standing up. I didn’t know they were heroin addicts. They were just adults—family and friends—just standing up sleeping. Sort of the opposite of vampires!

  When you’re a child and you see images like that, it’s just normal to you. So me being a typical rebellious kid, the last thing I wanted to be was like them. So alcohol, heroin, and drugs like that were the furthest thing from my mind. You know, most kids don’t want to be anything like their parents, and I was no different.

  I came up in the hippie era of the sixties, when psychedelic drugs were very popular. I started out sniffing glue. That was sort of the rage in my community. We went from sniffing glue to amyl nitrate. In the junior high school I went to, they had amyl nitrate in the athletic department. It was used to revive people who passed out. We’d go in there and raid the medical chest. It wasn’t under lock-and-key in those days. We used to steal the amyl nitrate from the gym. We had a poor man’s teenage speedball. We’d sniff glue and do amyl nitrate. Boy, how deadly was that?

  When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I met Timothy Leary in Los Angeles. We went to this event called The Teenage Fair, and somehow we ended up in the Hollywood Hills with Tim Leary and a bunch of hippies …

  I’m sorry … my family was sort of bicoastal. Most of the time when I’m talking about my family, I’m talking about our life in New York, mainly in Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and the Bronx. My mom was always sort of pawning me off to my grandparents, either my paternal or maternal grandparents, who all lived in Los Angeles by that time. So I was bicoastal. At thirteen, I was doing a stint with my paternal grandmother, who was a great influence in my life. She named me after my dad. I’m Nile Rodgers Jr. She tried to instill in me stuff that my dad just didn’t get. When I was born, my dad was eighteen or nineteen, but it was already clear that he was not going to make it. He was a musician and hot guy around town, but he just couldn’t overcome his problems. Even though I was thirteen and my dad wasn’t much older than me, I guess she felt like she had a second chance.

  I was in L.A. with my grandmother at the time, and I was just doing the glue sniffing and amyl nitrate, and I went to this thing called The Teenage Fair, and somehow wound up meeting Timothy Leary. I didn’t know that he was anything special. He may have been in the news in those days, but it was just starting to happen. He just looked cool and interesting. Leary asked us if we wanted to take a trip, and we thought he meant to go away someplace, so we said yes. I was with my friend who also did the same kind of recreational drug-taking that I did. We used to go to a place in Hollywood to roller-skate. It was in close proximity to the Hollywood Palladium, which is where The Teenage Fair was. So we happened to see those very odd-looking people … In Los Angeles I hung out with only black people. In New York it was a very mixed crowd, because my stepfather is white. My stepfather is Jewish. So they were the sort of heroin addict beatnik hip crew in New York.

  My parents were very, very cool. My family, now that I understand addiction, were always doing geographics. We never lived in the same place more than a few weeks at a time. So consequently, I never completed a semester in a school, ever, until I was about fourteen years old, and I was somewhat in control of my own destiny. I was at the mercy of whomever I was staying with. I never checked into a school the day that every other kid checked in, like the first day of school. And I never made it to the last day of school. Ever! I never completed one semester in any school in my life until I was fourteen, which I find extraordinary.

  In those days, the American public school system basically had a standardized curriculum. For a kid that had a nomadic existence like I did, it sort of helped, because no matter what city I was in, what school, or what district, I could pretty much walk into a class and they were reading the same books. I would go to L.A. and be in the hard-core ghetto, and it was still “See Spot run. See Dick go. See Jane run.” Same thing. I’d go back to New York and it was “Se
e Spot run.” That helped me to be somewhat grounded. Intellectually I sort of excelled. I could enter a classroom and, even though the other kids made fun of me ’cause they do that to a new kid, and usually I was the only black kid in an all-white class or something, I just sort of took to reading. That helped me adjust. Even though I would check into a class late, I knew all the lessons or could fake my way through it at least. I felt like an outcast, but I would grab on to any little thing that would masquerade as consistency. Even though I was the new kid and everyone made fun of me, I could pick up the reader and say, “Yes, on page 37 Dick said … whatever.” That would sort of impress the teachers on some level. I was really a people pleaser, who did everything to belong and try to fit, because I never fit. Kids are trendy, and I’d move to a new neighborhood, a new school system, and the kids would have their own little fads that they were into, and of course I wouldn’t know what they were into. I never fit in.