by Marky Ramone
The two weeks had gone slowly but were almost over. I was sober. I did it and would walk out with a certificate to prove it. My lawyer would show the certificate to the judge, and the judge would have to let me go. My father would stop crying, and my mother would stop yelling. Marion would stop worrying. Maybe I could start playing music. It all sounded pretty good. But I wasn’t that interested. What I really wanted was a drink.
A few days after I got home, we adopted a dog. He was a half-Labrador mutt and still a puppy. I thought the dog would help with my sobriety. Labs were known as assistance dogs and even therapy dogs. They were man’s best friend and then some. Besides, responsibility was important at this point in my life. I wasn’t going to three AA meetings a day, but walking the dog three times a day seemed doable.
My first drink was at a neighborhood bar. It was a beer on tap. Just one and I walked home. As far as I was concerned, I proved something that night. I earned my way back and was in control. There were a lot of rules I was supposed to be following, but in my mind they were for weaker people who used them like a crutch. It was much better to be your own boss.
Boss’s orders were to hang out in the Village a few nights later. It was a shot here and a shot there. Nothing too serious. I worked my way down to CBGB, which was like a homecoming. It was good to be somewhere where you were appreciated and treated like an adult. The only problem, however, was quickly apparent when I stepped outside. I no longer had an apartment downtown.
I had to call Marion and let her know I’d be taking a cab and would be home soon. Around one in the morning, I spotted a pay phone at the corner of Bowery and Bond Streets. When I got a little closer, I noticed there was a guy already in the booth. I needed to make a call and told myself I’d give him five minutes. I knew Marion was already upset with me and when I called, she’d probably give me a hard time about the dog. But it was better to call ahead than to get hit all at once when I got home. I looked around at the first real signs of fall—a few leaves and loose newspaper pages blowing around in circles. The streets were nearly empty. I thought about going back into CBGB.
Five minutes were up. If not six or seven. I tapped on the glass of the phone booth. The guy on the phone inside glanced back at me for a split second and shook his head. I didn’t like that. Now all I could see was his blue corduroy jacket pressed up against the glass, in my face. He looked like he thought he owned the phone booth. He blabbed and blabbed into the receiver, leaning into the pay phone, and now refused to make any eye contact with me as I hovered around to the other side of the booth. Then he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out some change. He didn’t know it yet, but the call was already over.
I opened the door with one hand, grabbed the collar of his jacket with the other, and yanked him out of the booth. As he stumbled on the pavement, I stepped inside the booth and shut the door. It was all one easy motion, like a drumroll. He pounded on the door, and I flipped him the finger. By the time Marion picked up on the other end, he was gone.
Marion was all pissed off. I was out too late, I was obviously drinking, and I hadn’t walked the dog since the morning. Why did I get a dog if she was going to have to walk it all the time? It wasn’t fair to her and it wasn’t fair to the dog. I told her not to worry. I would be home soon, and we’d talk about it then.
I hailed a cab up the block from CBGB, but a guy about my age dressed in a business suit caught it from the other side and got in at the same time I did.
“Guess what?” I said looking straight at him from the other end of the backseat. “You’re leaving, not me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Who cares what the fuck you think?”
I reached across with one hand, leaned on the door handle, and pushed it open. With the other hand, I pushed the guy out of the cab before slamming and locking the door. Another drumroll. The cabdriver looked back at me.
“Can we go now?”
“Definitely,” I said. “Go down to Canal and over the bridge.”
Marion was working in the city when I got up late the next morning with a slight hangover. My first step out of bed was a rough landing. My second step was even worse. I felt the ball of my right foot in a pile of something slimy and knew right away the dog had shit on the rug. He had probably waited there all morning for me to wake up till he finally couldn’t wait any longer. I felt bad for him. It wasn’t like he could just yank me out of bed like a guy in a phone booth. But I felt worse for myself because I had to clean up his mess. By the early afternoon, he was already barking at me because he had to go again. I was in no mood to get dressed and start walking around the neighborhood at this hour. So I took him up to the roof to shit.
I waited a few more nights to go back to Manhattan. At CBGB, I ran into a couple of friends I had known since before the Ramones. We always drank a lot back in the day, and it seemed natural to pick up where we left off. One of them had an apartment a few blocks away, so we continued the party up there. He had an annoying little Chihuahua that wouldn’t shut up. When I drank I liked loud music, not loud barking. This was high-pitched and penetrated my eardrums like a drill. Then the dog started climbing up my leg and jumping around like some kind of wind-up toy. I shook it off, but it came right back. The dog belonged wrapped up in some rich lady’s mink coat, not near my crotch. I needed to drink my vodka in peace. I picked up the dog and put it in the refrigerator.
“Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” my friend said.
“Let him cool the fuck off.”
My friend laughed a little bit. Then he poured us all another round. As we continued drinking and laughing, I could hear the dog through the door still barking in the refrigerator. Good, I thought. Let him learn a lesson.
After about ten minutes, the barking was fainter and inconsistent. I put my shot glass down on the coffee table and went into the kitchen. When I opened the door to the refrigerator the Chihuahua was shivering between a container of Parmesan cheese and a six-pack. I reached in, grabbed him, and placed him down on the linoleum floor. He pedaled out the door, frazzled but somehow calmer. The treatment worked. Except now I was shaking.
I slept it off at my friend’s apartment. When I put the key in the door of my own apartment in the late afternoon, I knew I was in the doghouse. It was a bad month for dogs, period. But when I opened the door, there was something different about the air inside. It was calm and stale like in a funeral parlor. When I found Marion in the kitchen sitting at the table going through some mail, she told me I had to leave.
She was expressionless. She told me absolutely nothing had changed since I went to rehab. In fact, it was worse. I had a piece of paper and the consent of the court and was living a complete lie. She knew the longer I stayed, the more she was enabling me to live that lie. Most of all, she was exhausted. On any given night, she didn’t know if I was going to come back wrecked or if I was going to come back at all. There was no point in going over it again and again. I didn’t argue. I knew she was right.
I called a couple of days later to tell Marion I was staying in Brooklyn at my friend’s apartment. Freddie Anselma could be a pain in the ass, and that was what I needed. He was a Vietnam veteran and a recovering alcoholic. He was going to meetings, and when it came to getting me to go, he was like a drill sergeant. If I did anything stupid, he collared me. The leash was short. I wanted Marion to know I made a good decision by moving in. She wasn’t all that impressed. And why should she be?
Over the next couple weeks, my thoughts started to come together in a way they had not before. I happened to hear “Sedated” on the radio. I liked what I heard. The drumming was good. Everything was good. When music was honest, it changed your trajectory. Even if you were having a bad day. Especially if you were having a bad day. I was glad to have been a part of it and that it lived on. I knew I wanted to live on.
There were times when music became a job. There were times when music
became a burden. But I understood now, maybe for the first time, that playing was not a job. Playing was not a burden. I lived to play. I was born to play. The elements that surrounded playing could be hell. But once I took that seat, all the bullshit dropped away. When I drank, all the bullshit seemed to drop away, even while it got worse. For so many years, I drank and I played but never at the same time. Both activities calmed me down. One gave me a purpose. The other was destroying me.
There was no doubt alcohol was destroying me. I was able to kid myself for a long time, but even for the most stubborn among us there came a time, and mine had arrived. I lost my band. I was twenty pounds overweight and looked puffy. My brain was filled with images that sent me running. My mother didn’t want to speak to me. My father, the Rock of Gibraltar, was broken. I left shattered glass, scattered furniture, and shrieking people in my wake. Worst of all, the person I cared about most in my life had nothing left. I had drained her. As if calling her and telling her I was dry for a few days was supposed to make her do cartwheels.
Anyone can be told anything they want to hear. I had gotten good at it. Like alcohol, it just made things worse. The two went hand in hand. I had brought both those arts, those skills, into rehab at Freeport and polished them a little more. There were more people to convince. More people to impress. Some wore nice coats. Some wore gowns. No matter what impression they walked away with, I was the same. I was doing something for them. Not even. I was pretending to do something for them.
It was a game. I could see how the game had turned out so far. And I could see how it was going to end. Today one thing was different. I wanted to change. But I didn’t know how.
17
ROAD FROM RUIN
I took the Staten Island Ferry alone. Getting dropped off by a car service in front of the rehab facility would have been self-defeating. If you really wanted it, the very first step and the very last step had to be hard, like the ones in between.
A few weeks earlier, I ran into my old friend Anthony, a good wholesome Italian boy from Brooklyn. When you looked at Anthony, it was hard to imagine he had once hit rock bottom, but he had. I told him where I was in life, and his eyes lit up. They didn’t exactly light up with joy. It was more like he saw what I would have to face and was glad it was already behind him.
Bayley Seton was the hard-core drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility of New York. According to Anthony, it was the polar opposite of what I experienced in Freeport. At Freeport, no one wanted to ruffle your feathers. At Bayley Seton, you were stripped down. I was ready. I had only one change of clothes. The facility had once been run by the United States as a military hospital but had been taken over by the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic organization. They named the hospital after New York’s Saint Elizabeth Seton. It was hard to imagine a saint coming out of New York.
The New York I knew, with its imposing downtown skyline, looked small and distant now. The St. George area of Staten Island seemed as a whole like a campus or an institution with smaller, stately brick buildings lining the shore. Bayley Seton was one of them. I walked about ten minutes south along Bay Avenue, made a right, and walked in the front entrance. When the door closed behind me, it was as close a feeling to final as I had ever had. It could have been the marines. But that would have been too easy.
I was nameless and faceless in Bayley Seton. Where my days used to be marked by tour destinations and scheduled interviews, they were now marked by floors washed and toilets cleaned. There were no doors on the bathroom stalls. I knew there was a practical reason for that. The effect was to rip away any remaining arrogance.
I slept with the other male patients in a long, open room with a row of about forty army cots. A security guard was posted at every door. There was no TV to watch. No tapes to listen to. No phone calls to make. No magazines to flip through. No midnight snack to grab. I was alone with my thoughts. Every last thought—about why I was here, what I could learn, what was that strange spot on the ceiling—was coupled with the only lasting thought I had. I wanted, more than anything I ever wanted, to get out.
Along with the close quarters I shared with dozens of men in the other cots, we all shared at least one distinction. We were not in the other wing. The other wing, across an interior hallway, was for alcoholics whose relationship to life was touch and go. These were men who had been drinking heavily for thirty or forty years. Wars and eras had come and gone, and they were all strung together by a bottle from which these men were now being weaned. Throughout the night, we heard screams and moans that were seared into our dreams.
It was much worse than the movie version of a sanitarium. In the movie version, the sounds of agony came from a speaker in the theater and were always just a little bit fake. Here agony bounced off the four walls and came from the bowels. Every few minutes the screams were punctuated by fierce, vicious ranting and raving as these men fought a cockfight with whatever demons the cruel detox process happened to release. Just like the missing bathroom stall doors, the nearness to these deathly sick men had a purpose. We were listening to our future.
I kept to myself during the day. I didn’t want a close companion. I was just getting to know myself, and that was more than enough. I had brief conversations with people, mainly speaking when I was spoken to. I saved my speech for the meetings. There were three a day. The idea wasn’t to go to meetings just because we were in here. The idea was to go to meetings wherever we were or might ever be, from now on.
This time I really listened to what other people said. Whatever and whoever I thought I had outsmarted in the past, there was no outsmarting these people. They had seen it, done it, and gone down the same drain to wind up in the exact same place I was. They had thought of the same excuses, wrecked the same friendships, hurt the same parents, worn out the same girlfriends and wives, and crushed the same dreams. Only the details changed. One thing was no longer hard. When I got up to speak, I knew exactly what to say.
“Hi, I’m Marc. I’m an alcoholic.”
I was not guessing.
It was the longest month of my life. No other month came close. No other year came close. With only three nights to go, staring at the ceiling and trying to shut out the screams from across the hall, I noticed another change in my thoughts. I still wanted more than anything to get out. But now I had a plan for when I did. It wasn’t a very elaborate plan, but it was a start. I swore to myself I would never take a drink again.
My last breakfast at Bayley Seton was different only because I knew it was my last. When I finished, I gathered the few items I had brought, put them in my bag, signed a few papers, and checked out. I walked up Bay Avenue, took the ferry, and headed across the bay back to Brooklyn. I sat out on the top deck and let the cold crisp air hit my face. Based on when I took the ferry the other way it had to be getting close to Thanksgiving.
I took a subway to Sheepshead Bay and rang the bell to our apartment. Marion had let me back in before Bayley Seton, but this time when she opened the door and welcomed me, I knew I had earned it. I had a new craving lately—to sleep in my own bed. But first, I had something else to do. I pulled out the pamphlet from my bag, made a few phone calls, and went to a meeting that night.
I carried my Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet with me wherever I went. In it were the addresses of morning, afternoon, and evening meetings throughout the city. Wherever I happened to be, I made sure to make a meeting. Sometimes there was a meeting within walking distance of our apartment. Other times the next one was farther, so I rode my bicycle. I would chain the bike up to the gate of the church, temple, Lions Club, or VFW hall. If I had someplace to be during the day, I would map out my route around these meetings. I was on tour again—a different kind of tour.
Alcoholics Anonymous was an organization like no other. Started in the thirties, it had no political affiliation, no restrictions on the type of person who could join, and accepted no money from outside sources. The organization eventually acquired millions of members across dozens of countri
es and stuck to the principle of its name. It was truly anonymous. AA wasn’t out there trying to make news, do the talk show circuit, or win awards. Its focus was simply and quietly helping people to stay sober the only way it could be done in reality—one day at a time.
Over time, AA developed the Twelve Steps that, if followed seriously, could lead to sobriety. The full Twelve Steps were a life’s work. I had gotten through the first one, admitting that I had become powerless over alcohol. I was an addict. The next steps were believing that a power greater than myself could restore my sanity and acknowledging that I had to turn my life over to the care of God as I understood Him. The last part was problematic for me. I wasn’t religious and didn’t believe in a little old white-haired man sitting in a chair ruling over the universe. That, to me, was just another form of insanity. But I understood in my bones that the important things were to go to meetings and take sobriety seriously. The rest would have to work itself out.
The meetings were definitely the core of the program. With the meetings, sobriety was a struggle. Without them, it was nearly impossible. The idea that an alcoholic was a homeless guy sleeping in a box on skid row had begun to leave my mind weeks earlier; now it was gone for good.
The people at meetings were doctors, lawyers, teachers, sanitation workers, housewives, students, businessmen, and even one punk rock drummer. Some had lost the respect of their partner, others had lost everything—houses, cars, jobs, their life savings. Some had plummeted from tremendous heights, others had quietly slipped through the cracks. The details of their stories—the agony, the denial, the humiliation, the stripping away of things they didn’t know were important till they were gone—were different. Some had been to jail. Many were divorced. Some had gone through their child’s education savings. Others had suffered tragic accidents. Regardless, these people were all basically the same—lucky to be alive, and sick and tired of being sick and tired. I was one of them.