My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life

by Adam Nimoy

  Justin walks in. He’s wearing black slacks, a black jacket, and an orange silk shirt that shows his tan chest. He’s also wearing black flip-flop sandals and with his long, dark hair, he looks really cool. The two blondes hit on him immediately. It’s like Hugh Hefner cavorting with his bunnies.

  The secretary calls the meeting to order, which snaps me out of my Playboy After Dark reverie. I’ve never been to this meeting before and I’m surprised to find that when the meeting starts, they turn off the lights. There’s just a little desk light next to me illuminating my face as I speak, but it’s weird because I’m looking out into a crowd of seated silhouettes.

  I take a deep breath and tell my incredibly wonderful, miserable story.

  “Hi, my name is Adam and I’m an alcoholic and an addict.”

  “Hi, Adam.”

  “I want to thank Justin for asking me to speak tonight and I want to start by saying that my recovery began on a Friday evening in December 2003. December 19, 2003, to be exact. I was in my study in the studio out back; we had converted our garage into a little studio. And there’s no one around and I’ve had my shot of Canadian Club and my hit of Humboldt homegrown and I’m not feeling any pain and I’m typing away thinking I’m being so artistic and so creative when the phone rings.

  “The voice on the other end is a neighbor of mine whom I met at the dog park. She’s calling from rehab in Utah and she tells me I should stop smoking pot. She tells me it’s my turn to clean up my act and start living my life instead of numbing myself every day. And then out of nowhere comes the sound of church bells. And the heavens open up and light rays start shooting down from the sky and angels sing and rainbows and butterflies appear and this huge lightbulb turns on over my head. And that was it. After years of struggling to go straight, after countless hours in therapy, after sleepwalking stoned through most of my life, all it took was that phone call.

  “Putting down drugs and alcohol wasn’t really that hard for me, because by then, I was ready. After thirty years of drinking and using, I was ready. But living my life once I became sober, that’s been the real killer. Because a month later, I started feeling my feelings and I realized I had to do something about a marriage that even some pretty damn good counselors and therapists could not help salvage. So I left my wife and my kids and my big beautiful house and I found myself waking up in a sleeping bag on an air mattress in an empty apartment off Venice Boulevard. And for the first few months, I would wake up in the morning and think, How the hell did I get here?

  “But I knew very well how I got there. Because, like lots of people, I started by getting high in high school. I was an introvert and I wanted to fit in and I was on the gymnastics team and most of the seniors on the team got high and when we had these pool parties at my house after the meet, they taught me how to inhale. And I had an older neighbor who knew a lot about getting high and I thought he was the coolest thing. And I had a dad who was a workaholic and was never around, so there was a lot of unsupervised freedom to do whatever I wanted. I’m from an upper-middle-class family and never had to work except that I scooped ice cream and pumped gas basically so I could buy weed or blow or ludes or shrooms or acid or whatever happened to be available. And my dad was a song-and-dance man and he’d be out of town on weekends making personal appearances at state fairs all over the country. And they’d pay him in cash and he’d ‘hide’ the envelope in his shoe closet. And when I discovered it, it was like finding buried treasure. It was an envelope full of cash but I only took the twenties. I’d never take the fifties or the hundreds because those are thicker and easier to notice when they’re gone. And there were plenty of twenties. It was like my own personal ATM twenty years before they were invented. Because all addicts need to find the resources to keep their habit going. The shoe closet was mine.

  “At first I drank and used because it was cool and fun. And there were a lot of people I knew doing it too. It’s amazing how when you start drinking and using, you discover there are so many ‘cool’ kids doing exactly the same thing. I came from a family that wasn’t particularly close, and I was feeling pretty isolated at home. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I was a part of a big family and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And I was always able to justify getting high because I did well in school.

  “But then, as I went through my life drinking and using, what was once fun became fun with problems, and then, decades later, while I’m still trying to re-create the fun days of my youth, drinking and using just brought on problems.

  “It wasn’t that long ago when I would literally get drunk or high and then wonder what bad thing was going to happen to me next. I’d wake up in the morning and get the kids off to school. But then I no longer had a job to go to because my career crashed and burned due in no small part to my drinking and using, and an attitude problem that came along with it. So finally there was no job to go back to. And as my downward slide continued, my pot and alcohol consumption escalated.

  “And so I’d drop my kids off at school and go to my home office and do the mental gymnastics: Should I take a bong hit now or wait ’til later? Well, I can’t take one now because I have to make phone calls to look for work and I can’t risk saying something stupid on the phone if I’m stoned. I’ll smoke later. Well, I can’t smoke later because if I make the calls and I have to wait for a return call, it could come in later and that’s no good. I’ll smoke in the afternoon. Well, I can’t smoke in the afternoon because that’s when I have to get my kids and I don’t want them to see me stoned or smell it on my breath. I’ll smoke tonight. Well, I can’t smoke tonight because I need to help the kids with their homework. I’ll smoke after they’re in bed. Well, I can’t do that because then it’ll be too late and I’ll be up all night. Oh, fuck it! Where’s my bong?!

  “The other thing that’s so insidious about pot smoking is that it’s quite possible to never really hit ‘rock’ bottom, you just keep gliding along the ‘soft’ bottom. I mean, being stoned is not like being drunk. You have more control of your motor skills and it’s easy to fool people. You just have to act straight, which makes absolutely no sense because you get stoned or high or wasted or whatever and then you go out and about your business and have to act straight? What’s the freakin’ point of that? So you don’t really hit bottom, like some of my friends who are recovering junkies, who tell me it gets to the point where you get so desperate that you’re down on your knees looking up at the sky begging God to either cure you or kill you. So I could have gone on with my miserable life taking shots of vodka or whiskey or whatever and then topping it off with a bong hit. I knew I was just checking out of my life. One time I called this big meeting to discuss my mother’s financial situation with her business manager and my sister, and I totally spaced out and took a nice big bong hit that morning. I swear, while I’m holding that hit in, that’s when I get the call from my sister. ‘Where are you? We’re all sitting here waiting for this meeting to start.’

  “And my kids kept growing and suddenly, I’m having all these paranoid thoughts about their safety, that I’ll do something while I’m high that’ll cause them to get hurt. And then I start having these thoughts about my thirteen-year-old son who likes to surf and skateboard and play rock ’n’ roll and watch back-to-back episodes of Family Guy. I’m thinking that someday he may discover how much more fun all those things are after you’ve burned down a fatty. And in my mind’s eye, I could see myself coming home and smelling that sweet smell and going into my boy’s room and he’s there with his friends and I go up to him and ask, ‘Who brought the bud?’

  “And he just stands there, stoned. He stands there with his friends looking on and I can smell it on his breath and the four-foot bong is in the corner and the light streams through the bedroom giving a nice backlight to the wafting smoke. And he just looks at me with this puzzled look, and says quite simply, ‘No one brought the bud, Dad. We pinched it from your stash. But don’t worry, we’re going to score over the w
eekend so we’ll put it back. With interest.’

  “And that’s when I know I’m totally screwed, that I’m just a complete hypocrite and have no credibility whatsoever to dissuade my kid from smoking pot.

  “That’s why when I got that phone call on December 19, I was ready.

  “And in terms of my life today, the best I can say is that I really appreciate the program. Because therapy is good for self-reflection and seeing patterns in your life and understanding why you and other people do the things you and they do. But when it comes to behavior modification, to actually making changes in your life, it’s the program that’s been most helpful to me. It just feels like I’ve done more to change my life being in recovery for the last year and a half than I have in decades of therapy. And the thing is, with drink in hand I warped my mind. With drink or pill or joint or pipe or straw in hand, I warped my mind. And have you ever seen a warped record? There ain’t no way to put it back. That’s why I need the steps and the readings and the sponsorship and the commitments and the meetings and the shares to help change my standard mode of thinking. I need all these things to help me deviate from neural pathways that were set in stone when I started regularly drinking and using way back when I was seventeen. That’s what’s so weird about becoming an addict or an alcoholic, because it’s like a part of me was in arrested development and I stopped growing at the point I started drinking and using to fill this black hole in my life. And since I’ve stopped, it’s like I’m growing feelings that I’ve never had before, that I’m starting to see things and experience things for the first time. And sometimes it’s painful as hell. And sometimes it’s just plain beautiful.

  “And I can see my time is up, so thank you for letting me share.”

  ROLL OVER, DEAD SENATOR

  I THINK I SMOKED pot just about every day during my senior year in high school. Never actually in school, I was way too paranoid for that, but after school, at home, I’d get wasted. I started smoking because I wanted to be social, as I was pretty much a loner up to that point. Then I fell in with a fast crowd that liked to get high, trip out at concerts, and crash parties. Unlike me, most of those people weren’t terribly interested in prepping for college. But it was fun, I felt like I belonged, I had friends, I met girls.

  During that period, Dad was around more and he clearly didn’t appreciate my new lifestyle. I think the worst of it occurred when he tried to get one of my new friends busted for ripping off a triple-beam balance scale from his science class which we kept in my bedroom. Pretty dumb on my part, actually, because it wasn’t like I was dealing, so there really wasn’t any need for the scale.

  When it came time to apply to college for the fall ’74 term, I expressed some interest in CU Boulder, and Dad took me out there to have a look. When we took the campus tour, the words party school came to mind, which I thought was a little ironic. Though I was accepted at Boulder and desperately wanted to leave home, I decided I wasn’t really ready to go as far as Colorado. So I settled on UC Santa Barbara, a party school much closer to home.

  In the four and a half years I was in college, first at UCSB and then at Berkeley, Dad came to visit only once, which I was okay with at the time. Despite a few academic mishaps, I was doing well in school. I was smoking pot daily, ingesting whatever else I could get my hands on, and learning how to drink vast quantities of beer. I was chasing the Grateful Dead up and down the state of California. I was happy.

  In 1976, responding to my good work in political science, Dad took me on a whirlwind trip to Washington, D.C. Because of his political connections, we had tea with South Dakota Senator George McGovern, lunch with Colorado Senator Gary Hart, and a meeting with newly appointed House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who offered me an internship for the following summer. We saw the sights, then drove out to Washington’s home at Mount Vernon and toured Jefferson’s home in Charlottesville. We were quite a sight, Dad and I: he looking sharp with his ascot, I with my hair. It was a fun trip and it felt like we were making some progress, but I was still using and he knew it. No real discussion other than his concern about me smoking paraquat, an herbicide being used in Mexico to eradicate the pot fields. When the trip was over, it was pretty much back to our separate corners.

  I returned to Washington in the summer of ’77 to work as an intern, which was a good way to avoid going home. I cut my hair so that I looked straighter, but I was still stoned. The internship lasted eight weeks in 100-degree heat and 100 percent humidity. I learned legislative research skills, witnessed laws being passed, and enjoyed the sights, including the college coeds who were also working in Washington that summer.

  Katherine was a blind date. I think she was an undergraduate from some school in Georgia and I thought she said her dad ran a horse farm in Kentucky, but I was so stoned I honestly don’t remember. I do remember she was interning for Lawton Chiles, a Democratic senator from Florida.

  Katherine was petite and cute in a perky, Southern sort of way, and she had this gorgeous mane of dark hair. She was also fairly conservative. As we walked through Georgetown, she kept doing the end run so she could walk on the inside—I didn’t know that men were supposed to walk on the street side of the sidewalk. She explained that this was because in yesteryear, people threw garbage out second-story windows and men were better candidates to get trashed.

  But sometimes, I just can’t control myself. “We have trash cans now and special trucks that come around to empty them.”

  When the conversation somehow turned to premarital sex, Katherine was saying stuff like, “Well, I don’t know how y’all do things out in California, but where I come from, a woman is taught to save herself. I mean, I could kiss a man all night, but the rest is for my wedding night.”

  “Yeah, but what happens when you get to your wedding night, and you get down and dirty, and then discover that you’re sexually incompatible?”

  “Oh, my Lord, Adam, where did you learn your manners?”

  * * *

  I had nothing better to do the following Saturday night and I guess neither did she so we went to dinner. While I was in D.C., Dad was in New York starring in Equus on Broadway. I must have been drunk and stoned on that second date because I invited Katherine to accompany me to New York the following weekend to visit my parents. Once I realized what I had done, I figured there was no way in hell she would do it because she was so proper and I was so “wild.” But Katherine said she had never been to New York. The next day, she said that, because my parents were going to be there, her daddy said she could go. On Friday afternoon, we were at National Airport boarding the shuttle.

  She met my parents and we went to dinner. Katherine was sickeningly charming. Then we went to the play. I had no clue what we were in for because here was Equus, where the psychiatrist, played by Dad, tries to help a twisted teenage boy who, when he was about to get laid in some horse stable, freaks out and blinds all the horses with a hoof pick. And then there was the nude scene. At the end of the play, the boy starts to remember in flashback how he and the girl took off their clothes before tragedy struck. And because we’re sitting in the sixth row center, the actors are literally fifteen feet away from us—buck naked. I looked sideways at Katherine, half expecting her to be averting her eyes. She was riveted.

  The play was absolutely fabulous, one of the most incredible shows I had ever seen because it dealt with religion and history and psychology and passion and sex—a lot of things that I was wrestling with at the time. And it was beautifully staged, with muscular men in black stomping around in elevated platform hooves and wearing metal, shaped horse heads. Dad was brilliant as the psychiatrist: The strength of his conviction was so powerful, he was totally unrecognizable to me as my own father.

  Afterward, Katherine told my parents that she found the play “stimulating.”

  That night, we made out in the living room of my parents’ rented apartment at the Hotel des Artistes. When it was over, she went off to the guest bedroom and I slept on the couch. Her wedding
night was safe.

  The next morning at breakfast, she charmed my mother. When she excused herself from the table to powder her nose, Mom turned to me. “She’s so cute!”

  After breakfast, Katherine and I walked through Central Park. She became very excited at the sight of a street vendor. She wore a pea-green skirt with a poodle embroidered on it. It would have looked really cute . . . on a bobby-soxer in the ’40s. When we returned to D.C., our cab dropped her off at her dorm and that was it. Did I open her door and help her with her bag? I hope so.

  A few days later, I received a letter from her thanking me for such a memorable weekend. Her handwriting was perfect and so were her manners.

  To this day, I try to walk on the street side of the sidewalk. And I try to be courteous and send thank-you notes. And I try not to judge people.

  Unless they happen to be rednecks, jingoists, or neocons.

  * * *

  Fast-forward to the year 2000: It’s December and I’m in a production office at Warner Bros. working on a script I’m about to direct. Someone in the bullpen announces there’s going to be a news conference about the recent election. We all pile into the executive producer’s office and watch his big-screen TV. The secretary of the state of Florida is about to make an announcement. She’s about to certify the election results in favor of George Bush. She comes out of a back office and steps up to the podium. She has dark wavy hair. No effing way. No. Effing. Way. Under all that pancake, it’s her.

  * * *

  Telephone call to my mother. This is going to be fun because my mother is a rabid, dyed-in-the-wool, flaming liberal.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mom, it’s me.”