Right now, I’m a productive member of society. I’m involved in other people’s lives, I have three great kids, I write books, I make movies, I speak all over the world. I get to do all this stuff because I’m in recovery and I’ve learned how to put one foot in front of the other. Normal people probably already know this on some level. Addicts and alcoholics, we’ve got to learn all that.
What I think happens for a lot of people , people who’ve had a road like mine, is that at the end you’re hanging out with users and dealers only. At the end I just had drug dealer friends, so I stopped calling them. It wasn’t like they were big losses when they were gone, although there was a part of me that thought, “What about that guy, that really nice pharmacist that I used to know?” Because you have to come to terms with the fact that your relationships aren’t really friendships, they don’t really mean that much, they’re just accommodations to the 800-pound gorilla.
The other thing that’s hard is the whole family thing. This is not an individual disease, it’s a family disease. Even if there’s just one alcoholic in the family, everybody’s affected by it on some level. I had a difficult time with that. Even though people were very happy that I wasn’t ending up in emergency rooms or on the front pages of newspapers anymore, they didn’t like how I was different. My mom once said, “You can’t make the daiquiris anymore?” She didn’t get it. “That’s great you’re not going to shoot heroin anymore, but that doesn’t mean you can’t drink, right?”
xxiii | introduction
Plus other people who may have problems have to look at their own stuff when you’re around. You become like a giant mirror. People start projecting their worries and problems on you. The fact is, I’m too busy worrying about my own problems to pay attention to yours. But if you decide you want to get sober, I’m your guy, on whatever level, whatever I can do—because what I’ve learned is that in order to keep this thing, I’ve got to give it away.
Somehow I was picked to move from the darkness into the light. I don’t know why. I didn’t do anything for it, I didn’t “earn” it or “deserve” it. At all. At all. I just stayed alive. I stayed alive and I stayed connected to some kind of treatment, or some motivation, some goal. I hung on to hope, and hope opens you up to change.
That’s what this book and the stories in it are about, and that’s what I want people who read it to take away from it—the hope that this thing can change. No matter how long it’s gone on, no matter how bad it is. And also, these are interesting stories. Lives that are transformed inexplicably are interesting. They’re interesting to read about, they’re interesting to ponder, they’re interesting to meditate on.
But more than anything else, they show us that what’s right in front of us is not all there is. There’s something else going on out there. I have evidence of it in my life, the people in this book have evidence of it, and it’s reinforced for us over and over again, as long as we keep ourselves open to it. And that is grace.
introduction | xxiv
Jim Vance
Jim described himself this way: “I’m a cocaine addict, a father, a husband, a man trying to make a difference in the world.” Jim also anchors the nightly news at WRC-TV in Washington, DC, where he’s worked since 1969. He was one of the first people to break the color barrier on TV, and he’s earned seventeen Emmys and a spot in the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. He’s also one of the stalwarts of the DC recovery community. A couple of things stand out to me about his story: his humor in telling it, and the way he feels most ashamed when he’s being recognized for his success. That sense of being a fraud is so common among addicts.
I
haven’t known hopelessness since 1987, but I remember very well what it felt like. I had a total, complete, full conviction that I was going to die. I did not believe that I had a chance at getting a decent life.
I knew I was going to die, and not just die, but die a miserable death. I had decided that if I could get any “good” out of this misery, it would be that I died more miserable than my father. My father died in 1951. I was nine years old. He was thirty-eight. He died of cirrhosis and DTs. I don’t know a worse way to die than DTs. Jesus, what agony. But my condition in April 1987 was that I’ll find a way to die worse than he did.
I think that speaks to the hopeless state of mind that I was in. I didn’t want to die, but if I was going to die, then let me die even worse off than my father was. What kind of insanity is that? That, my friend, pretty much defines hopelessness.
I’m a broadcast journalist and I had been the anchor at the NBC station in Washington, DC, since 1972. In 1987, in August, somehow or other I was still hanging on, but I had been missing in action for two days again. I was down in Southeast DC, where people were living hard lives, and still are. There was a public housing complex that had been abandoned or determined to be shut down—huge, as most of them were, from an urban renewal program in ’62. In one of the buildings, there were two apartments that were still occupied. There were no utilities: no water, no electricity, no telephone, no anything. There were some mattresses on the floor. And for two days, I was in one of those apartments, desperately trying to get one more hit off the pipe. I’m in that apartment, I didn’t have any clothes on, couldn’t get an erection, and couldn’t get high. I don’t know how that is for most normal people, but for this colored boy, that was as low as he could get. You couldn’t get your dick up and you couldn’t get high. What is left?
I finally got out of there at some point. I didn’t have a car because my car had been repossessed. I went back to where Kathy, who later became my wife, was living and I got cleaned up. She had nothing to say, because by that time, there was nothing else to say. There comes a point when silence becomes deafening and cruel. I mean, silence can cut like a knife.
I went to work and got through it, I don’t know how. I have some pictures from back then, and I’m not sure why they allowed me to go on the air. Cheeks sunken in, eyes way back in the sockets, dark circles around the eyes because I hadn’t slept in probably three days. My teeth were falling out. Literally falling out, because my gums were deteriorating and the bone under the gums was deteriorating. I had to talk in a certain kind of way just to keep my teeth in my head.
On a Thursday night, I did the six o’clock show and I left work at seven o’clock. Richard, who worked at the station, had loaned me his car. I was supposed to turn left to go home but I turned right. I drove around for a couple of hours, stopping every now and again at some phone booth, trying to get somebody to get me something. I finally got a guy in another part of Southeast Washington. I went to his place and got an eight ball* and fired it up. Didn’t even pay him, just smoked it right there. When the ball was smoked up, at this point I was geeking. You got to get more. You
* An eighth of an ounce of cocaine or methamphetamine.
can’t be still, you’re bouncing around, kind of like when people want to speed. Geeking was the term at that time, and I was geeking.
I told the guy, and he said he had more but he wouldn’t give me any more without seeing some cash. I said, “Let me go over to the money machine.” I walked out of the apartment and I left the keys to Richard’s car because I was just going to walk over to the bank right across the street. But I hailed a cab. As it pulled out from the curb, I saw the guy running out of the house. He had a pistol in his hand, and he ran this way and ran that way looking for me. I got down in the cab, and the guy was still running around when we turned the corner. Oh, he was pissed off.
I got home and got Kathy to pay the cab. She went to bed. I went downstairs, got the shotgun, took Kathy’s car, and went to Great Falls Park. The Potomac River runs through it, and there’s a serious drop that creates some big rapids. The Olympic kayaking team practices at Great Falls. I was upstream, where you don’t have the roar of the river as it drops off the precipice. It’s more brooklike, more tranquil, but on that night it was deafening where it should have been melodic and soot
hing. Deafening and discordant. Jagged and unnerving. It was a violent noise that didn’t really exist. My, it was horrible!
I loaded the shotgun—it was a Remington 1100. I used to do bird hunting. Remington 1100 twelve-gauge number four shot. I loaded it, and I had the stock between my legs, against a rock, and I had my thumb on the trigger, and I was ready to go, man. I was ready to go because I just couldn’t stand the pain anymore. I had heard tales of heroin addicts when they’re trying to kick it, this agonizing phase that they go through when every cell in their body was on fire. Every cell in my body was not on fire, but it seemed like every cell in my body was in pain, just physical pain. I couldn’t think of any other way to stop the pain except to just check out.
Why didn’t I pull the trigger? I think probably there are two reasons. One is because of what I choose to call God. The other reason was, I had the thought of Kathy or one of my children being asked to come and identify the body. I knew what number four shot from a twelve-gauge shotgun would do. I knew what they would be forced to see, because somebody would have to identify this body. That seemed like such a punk- ass thing to do. I thought about how much I had already devastated them, hurt them, almost destroyed them, but that I could not abide. Even in my total insanity, I couldn’t abide the thought of one of them seeing me with the back of my head blown out. And I relaxed my grip.
Oh man, did I cry then. I just lay down in a fetal position and I cried and cried. I don’t know, truly, how long I lay there crying. I know it started raining and I was soaking wet and freezing cold. Finally I got up and I went back home. The next day I went down to this place called the Metropolis Club, a real old-school recovery support group, full of oldtime drunks. When you go in the building it’s just an old rickety door, and when you open the door, what you see are these crumbling old rank stairs. You go up those stairs for a long time. I remember standing there looking up those stairs, thinking, “These are drunks in here.” You know what I mean? I’m standing there thinking, “I’m not going in with these fucking drunks.”
For what ever reason—and I truly don’t remember why—I did climb the stairs and I walked into the meeting room. It was almost full. I don’t remember who was speaking at the time, but he looked over to me and there was this little grin on his face, and then he turned around and he continued. I just slunk down the wall to the back of the room, as far back as I could go. When I got back there—talk about things happening as they do—all eyes followed me back, they all knew who I was—and when I got to the back of the room, there was a small guy sitting there, and he said out loud so that everybody can hear, “We were wondering when you were going to get here.” And he broke into this big grin and got up and came over. He grabbed me and hugged me, and I swear to God it was like being filthy and then being washed clean. It was energizing. It was fulfilling. It was comforting. It was every wonderful thing you can think of. He didn’t let go. He didn’t let go. He stood there and he held me, I don’t know, a couple minutes. And nobody else said anything. They grinned and smiled all around the room, and I sat down. I don’t know that I’ve ever been anywhere where I ever felt more loved.
That was my first support group meeting.
I got to tell you , it took a while to get comfortable in those groups. I was comfortable in the first moment because I was comforted in that moment. But it took me a while to get comfortable because every time I went in there for the next couple of months, I went in there as Jim Vance, the anchor guy. It was a little while before I went in there as Jim the Junkie. Jim Vance sitting in there, he never had a chance of getting clean. Never had a fucking chance. Jim Vance is convinced “I got this. I can handle this because I have been through as much fire as you and I’ve had many challenges as you. I have overcome all of them and I have prevailed. And I will prevail over this too, no matter what it is, because I got what it takes and I can beat this.” That’s Jim Vance. That’s Jim Vance with his finger on the trigger. That’s Jim Vance crying in a fetal position in the rain because he’s desperate and out of answers and doesn’t know what else to try except maybe death. Death might work because nothing else was working. That guy isn’t going to get clean. That guy is going to die.
Jim the Junkie, he had a chance, because Jim gave the fuck up. I’d like to be more eloquent, but that’s what it was. Jim gave the fuck up on everything. “What ever you say, I will do. I’m done. I got no answers. I got no solutions. I got no hope. I got nothing.” That’s the guy that got clean. That’s the guy that gave himself a chance to become clean, because Jim Vance was a dead man walking. Jim the Junkie just needed a way he could go on. Jim the Junkie needed to sit down, shut up, and listen. And that’s what the Metropolis Club was all about. Some hard-core dudes in there, and to this day I bless them one and all. I will bless them until the day I die and then beyond that, because their full thing was “You’ve got nothing to say that we need, and we’ve got everything that you’re needing. So shut up, sit down, and listen.”
It could not have happened sooner. It happened when it happened because that’s when it was supposed to happen. One thing I will never forget is something a guy named Reggie said to me. I was miserable, just geeking again one day, this time without dope. I called him, and I was telling him that I’m in a miserable state of being and I am not liking this shit, and I am not liking you either, Reggie. He chuckled and said, “You are exactly where you’re supposed to be.” I’m like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” He said to me, “Vance, everything that happens does so because it’s supposed to. If it doesn’t happen, it’s because it isn’t supposed to.” I wanted to go all Descartes and Nietzsche on him, I wanted to pull out my philosophical library on this guy. Jim Vance was pissed, but Jim the Junkie, he didn’t try to argue that. I accepted it. I really did, man, and I remember it was like a wave crossing over me. I accepted the fact that I’m supposed to feel like this today. But just because I feel like this now, that doesn’t mean that at four o’clock I’m still going to feel like this. This is what it is now. I’ll deal with this.
That’s as close as I got to an epiphany, that willingness to accept whatever was happening at that given time. There was no bolt of lightning. There was no revelation of any kind. It was simply the fact that I had begun the pro cess and embraced the pro cess of surrender, which was foreign to me, by the way. Surrender, my ass.
My grandfather was a plumber. He had sixteen kids, nine sons including my father. I was an only child, but I had tons of uncles, aunts, and cousins. From the time I can remember walking until I left home, I remember one or another of my uncles chucking me under the chin and pushing my head back up. The point being, “Hold your head up. Never let me see you cry.”
I remember tearing up my knee one time. I had a brace on it, and my Uncle Spunky went to the hospital with me to get the brace taken off, and he brought me back to the house. I was going up the stairs to my house, climbing the stairs with a stiff leg. And he’s like, “Why are you walking like that?” I said, “I can’t bend my knee.” And he hit the back of my knee, to make it bend, and it hurt—not a little bit, it hurt like hell. I started to cry, and his words to me were “Do you think that hurt? I can do some hurt that’ll make you really want to cry.” I walked up the stairs like a man. Now that sounds cruel. That sounds abusive. It was not. Those people were loving me just as hard as they possibly could. They were black men in 1950-whatever who got shit on every which way they turned. All they were saying to me was “Little Jimmy, stand up. Man up. Never surrender.” You see what I’m saying?
So when I get to this dope thing, and all of a sudden these guys are telling me “You have to surrender,” I’m like “What the fuck are you talking about? There’s no way. I got here by being a stand-up kind of guy.” And their thing was “Yeah, you’ll kick the rest of the way only if you surrender.” It just didn’t connect. It only connected at the point when Jim Vance went away and Jim the Junkie came in.
Jim Vance died in 1987. Jim the Junkie is the one tha
t lived. Jim Vance is the one who killed himself then. And that’s how that works.
I surrendered, but Jesus, I was scared. For days and days and days, I had to adjust as the embryo of the new Jim grew. As a colored man, it was the first time in my life that I didn’t try to assert some control over my life, or at least make some effort to manage the forces coming at me, whatever they might have been. I had no strength, no power. I had no will. And that all put me in a state of terror. I remember being afraid like I have never been afraid before in my life.
And there was something else too—crying. God, I never cried so much in my life. I could be on the way to 7-Eleven and I’d sit in the parking lot and just break out in tears. Unreal, sobbing tears. And that would terrify me, because I wasn’t even sure why I was crying. “What the fuck is happening to me?” I felt shifting and changing shapes and lines and colors and shadings. The word that comes into my head now is rebirth. That’s a little melodramatic, I think, but it’s not that far off what my feeling was. I really was being reshaped, reconfigured, remolded, maybe even reborn. But whatever it was, the change was scary.
That night in the park with the shotgun is still the most absolutely painful recollection that I have, and I don’t revisit it often. When I do, it’s not because I seek it and go there. I think it’s because of the bounty of blessings that have come my way. The memory of that moment usually comes up when I’m about to be celebrated. I remember there was a celebration of mytwenty-five years at the station. This was twelve years ago. It was at the Four Seasons. It was a big go-to-hell blowout thing, and people are making speeches and giving tributes and stuff. When it’s finally my turn to take the mike, I swear to God I remember Great Falls. Whenever Jim Vance is about to come back in, that’s when I remember.
Moments of Clarity Page 3