At the same time, I grew up going straight from first base to home plate without going to second and third. I always found the shortcut. I was getting over and getting around, and that was my life. I did not hold fast to anything because none of it was real to me. I was just playing a game. In recovery, I found out that in real life, you got to go to first base, then second base, then third base before you come home.
It took two and a half years for the fight with Michael Spinks to happen. The fight was on, the fight was off, the fight was on, the fight was off. I didn’t believe the fight was ever going to take place and I started drinking every day. When the night of the fight came, I still didn’t believe it was going to take place and I was in no shape and in no condition. I got stopped in five rounds. With all that fear, anxiety, loss, I said to myself, “I will take a break for six months.” I had a nice place out in the Hamptons and I’d hang out there every day with this old guy who’d go and drink with you anytime. I remember one day I’m driving home, and I figure that the transmission was going or there was ice on the road because I was sliding all over, but it was me, driving drunk. I remember going on dates, and I wouldn’t be thinking about the girl, I’d be planning my drinking. Four o’clock or four thirty, “Where am I going? What am I going to have?”
I was a good drinker and I could handle my stuff pretty well, but I reached the point in life that I knew that I wanted to deal with this. I woke up one day, all alone in this beautiful beach house, and I said to myself, “I am scared. What is going on here? Who is in charge? What has happened?” I said, “I quit,” and so I quit. Then the next day I woke at the same time, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the same way. I was on my bed, awake and hungover. What happened? I really got scared, and I realized that this is an illness that I have. That’s the moment I cried out loud to God. I said, “God, please help me now. You got to help me out of this one.”
I turned on the television, and there was a commercial for a center out in the Hamptons. I called them up because I thought I might have a problem. Three months into sobriety, this girl told me, “You better be careful because when you get five or six months sober, you’re going to think you’re better.” I thought, “You got to be crazy.” And after five months, I met this French girl, she was saying, “Oui, oui, let’s go,” and I got complacent and I fell down again, drinking.
Two months later, I’m driving down the road with my buddy and I say, “Let’s stop for breakfast.” I pull into the restaurant, and there was a guy in there I used to party with. He bet people that he could put a cigarette out on his hand—and he would. And now he was three years sober. Here I am, after a night of drinking, and he said to me, “Jerry, you know you never have to drink again.” Now I’d heard that a thousand times already, but I really heard it that day from him. I stopped drinking right there, and I still stay in touch with that guy. I mean I was twenty-nine years old. I’m thinking, “Hey man, time is running out on me here. I really got to take hold, you know that?”
That was the best thing that could have happened to me. I thought I was the boss, and I found out in those two months, I am not the boss. The booze wasn’t working anymore. It was no more fun. But I couldn’t stop. I had such a fear that I’d have to go through everything sober. I used alcohol for everything. No matter where I went or what I did, alcohol was my friend.
I had to look into myself and see that I made some mistakes. I never wanted to look at my mistakes, but you really have to look inside yourself and get down to the real source of the trouble in your life. When I was done fooling around, I was talking to this therapist and he asked me, “When you close your eyes, what do you see?” I said, “I see a dark hole.” He said, “We got to go in the hole. You got to go in there. You got to feel around to see what is going on.” I did not want to go there but I had no other place to go. I felt very uncomfortable, frightened, angry, but I did it, and then it gave me a little more courage to reach out some more, and then some more.
That’s what you’ve got to do, and I know some great athletes who cannot do it. They cannot go into the hole and they cannot reach out. I give them information, I tell them my own experience, and I tell them I love them. That it’s a great life that we have in sobriety and we’re lucky to get it. There are those guys that you try and try and try and try, and after a while you got to say, “Well, listen, you got to find somebody else. You’re not finished with your story yet, but I don’t think I can help you more.” Hopefully, some later day, if I can serve them, I am ready.
You can row the boat, but God’s got to steer. When I first got sober I would figure, “Oh, I’ll be done when I have three years. I won’t have to work at it. Okay, I’ve got three years and I’m not done. I’ll be done when I
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have five years.” Well, I’ve got over twenty years now and there are areas in my life where I still have fear and I still have trust issues. But in recovery, I’ve had these amazing awakenings that gave me the courage to move. When I’ve got such pain that I feel like I can’t keep going, there’s always someone in the room to tell me how to get out of it. You work your program and you keep working it until you’re done with that part of it. It’s like a toothache. You go to a dentist and he takes out 98 percent of the cavity and fills it up again. Well, that cavity is coming back, just from that 2 percent that’s left. It’s the same with the program. You got to get 100 percent. So I keep working on my recovery. I want to work it. I do not want to go back to where I was.
My recovery is a fight, a great fight. I take my shots, but I get my shots in, and I know I will go all fifteen rounds. That’s what life is about, being in the fight. When I was drinking, I was going around the circle. I wasn’t in the fight.
Steve Earle
Steve’s one of these guys who always knew what he wanted to do with his life. He dropped out of school in eighth grade so he could move to Houston and get started in the music business. In 1975 he moved to Nashville and got his start writing songs and singing backup. He worked steadily and released his first album in 1986, but by 1993, addiction had caught up with him. In recovery, he’s become enormously productive: setting up his own record label, producing about an album a year, touring constantly, writing a collection of short stories and a play. He is also very active in the anti–death penalty movement and does a lot of work with prisoners.
I met Steve not long after I came back from Cuba, when I was trying to get a movie made down there and he was involved in a musician’s cultural exchange. I was impressed with his commitment to human rights; digging into his music was just icing on the cake. When we talked about recovery, he had a lot to say and was incredibly passionate about the idea of the human soul becoming unshackled.
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he very first song that I wrote sober was “Goodbye,” and it’s still one of my most durable songs. People keep recording it. I wrote it while I was in treatment. There was a guitar there that everybody else was
allowed to play, but I had to get permission, and I was not allowed to play more than a couple of hours a day. It was my own counselor who made that damn rule for me. That’s how I wrote “Goodbye,” and that song is the very first thing I created after being so spiritually bankrupt for so long. For four and a half years, I had not written a single solitary word or note.
I never believed that I was more creative when I was high. I tried to avoid performing when I was high and writing when I was high, but toward the end I didn’t have a choice because I had to use all the time. I don’t think I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to create if I stopped using. I believed I had a right to take drugs because it allowed me to stare into the darkness without blinking. When I look back at what I created then and what I create now, it’s not that what I created before wasn’t good. A lot of it was really good. But the way I wrote it, that’s such an addict’s attitude. The idea that numbing yourself out and preventing yourself from feeling what you should feel and then thinking that you’re going to translate
that into a piece of art that’s worth anything—that is so flawed. It’s cheating. You’re writing about feelings and not really feeling them.
I grew up with the Serenity Prayer on the wall, literally. My step- grandfather, my mother’s stepfather, was from northeast Texas. He went into the army and mustered out at the end of World War II and ended up in New York City. He was a tennis bum, basically, a ne’er-do-well tennis pro on Long Island. He was teaching tennis at different country clubs, and he would change jobs three or four times every couple of years, so you know what was going on there. He was a playboy, and he was really digging being a bachelor in New York City after World War II, but eventually he started to figure out that he was drinking differently than some of the other people that he knew.
Keep in mind, this is 1946 in New York City. Alcoholics Anonymous is eleven years old. My granddad was a real live old-timer who knew Bill W. and Dr. Bob. When he had about two years sober his father died, and as the only son, he goes back to Jacksonville, Texas, to run the family’s hardware store. He went back kicking and screaming, and once there, he started most of the meetings in northeast Texas. He met my mother’s mother in a meeting. She was an alcoholic who could not stay sober except in this program, and by the end of her life, she was running three halfway houses for women. After they got married, my uncle was born. The weird thing, for me, was that my uncle was only five years older than me. He gave me my first guitar and my first joint. I worshipped my uncle. He had this disease and it wrecked his life.
It took me a long time to really be successful. I was thirty-one when Guitar Town, my first release on a major record label, came out. But as soon as I had money and was traveling where there was decent heroin, I had a problem. I stayed reasonably sober while I was actually performing. Most of the time. I’d have one really big drink of whiskey before I walked onstage every night, but after the show was over I didn’t give a fuck about alcohol anymore. It’s an inefficient drug and I just didn’t bother with it. Opiates were the deal. That being said, at the end, I smoked a ton of cocaine because I couldn’t get high on heroin anymore. I had to resort to a methadone pill just to keep from being sick, and I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and all day chasing after a drug that I don’t even like.
Basically, the slow burn started when I got pulled over by the cops in a borrowed car with a tenth of a gram of really bad heroin wrapped up in piece of tinfoil hidden in the ashtray. After a whole bunch of bullshit, it ended with me going to jail, one year and eleven months hanging over my head. That was the twelfth of September, 1994. My bottom was probably sitting in front of a television camera that I allowed to come in because I thought I could make a public plea to get the judge to let me go back on a methadone program, because I thought methadone was treatment. I embarrassed the fuck out of myself. By that time, I got no front teeth. I’m overweight even though I smoke crack every day because methadone does that. My diet was Dr Pepper and Cherry Garcia floats and those burritos they have in 7-Eleven. Those fuckers are good. Junkie food, no doubt about it.
This kid that worked in my lawyer’s office finally said, “I can probably get you into treatment if you’ll go.” I said sure. I thought, “Once I get to feeling better, then I can walk out.” This guy came to get me, and I still talk to him. His name is Chuck and he’s a stalwart in recovery in middle Tennessee. His job then was to drive from Buffalo Valley treatment center, which is in western Tennessee, to jails all over the state to pick guys up and bring them in.
So I went to Buffalo Valley for no other reason except to get out of an orange suit. But something happened, and I have a hard time explaining it. I don’t think I would have seen a flash of light even if there had been one, because I was really sick by that time. It began more subtly because that’s what it needed to be for me.
First thing that happened was I started thinking, “Well, I don’t think I can stay clean, but maybe I can stay here and get healthy. Then when I get out I’ll do it better and I’ll use it more successfully.” Then I started seeing guys that I looked up to. They had twenty- six, twenty- seven days clean at the most, but they looked like they knew something, and at some point I started listening to them. Then two things happened right in a row.
At Buffallo Valley they showed movies in the common room, and the option was you could sit and read your fucking recovery book or you could watch the movie. So we were a bunch of inmates, we’re watching the movie My Name Is Bill W. James Garner was in it and I knew who he was. In the movie he was Dr. Bob and James Woods was Bill W.
What happened was one of those feelings that you can only have when you’re detoxing. Everything is so out of control. Most people when they get clean, they probably haven’t cried in months, and then suddenly everything makes you cry. You cry at commercials. Great big hairy guys turn into little girls when they are watching movies in treatment. I cried several times during the movie, but it was weird—I would disconnect from the plot of the movie and go directly to my grandfather. Suddenly it dawned on me who those guys were that were sleeping on my grandfather’s couch when I was a kid. That was old school back then, 1957 to 1961. There was no place to take anybody except for the state hospital, and my grandfather always had at least one of these guys staying with him, trying to get sober.
When I was a child I admired my grandfather, and I grew up with evidence in my life that recovery can happen, and I avoided it like the plague. But watching that movie, some gear shifted. I needed to figure out my connection to that history and where recovery comes from and how recovery works. In other words, how do you devise a spiritual system for both the spiritually bankrupt and people that are just too smart for their own good? It literally is a spiritual program of recovery for agnostics, a way to connect yourself spiritually to something.
Then the next day, I connected my grandfather to Chuck, this older gentleman that had picked me up in jail. Chuck comes in with some raggedy-looking motherfucker and I realized that that’s what I looked like two weeks ago when I came in. Chuck goes, “How do you do, Steve?” and I said, “Well, I’m not in jail,” which is my standard answer—“I’m too cool to be here, but this is better than being in jail.” And Chuck said, “Yes. And you know what? You don’t ever have to be in either place.” It was like my grandfather talking to me, because Chuck was the age I remember my grandfather being.
And suddenly I filled in all the blanks. I never knew my grandfather to drink. I knew recovery was a big part of his life. He talked about going to meetings all the time. I’ve still got his Serenity Prayer, in a frame that he got on his tenth anniversary of being sober. My grandmother had given me a bunch of his stuff when he died, but it wasn’t until that moment that I really felt it. It was like he was there, and he was the person that I needed to connect all of this history to me, personally.
I remember when I realized that I had turned some sort of corner. I did not want to say—hell, I was afraid to say—“Okay, I’m not going to use.” For me, it was more like “I will not use today.” But I also had to have some sort of admission that my ass was kicked. I had to admit that here’s something I knew about all of my life and now I need it. I had to admit, “Okay. I’m the same thing that my grandfather was, and I’m the same thing that my uncle was.”
The concept of anonymity isn’t just about the neighbors not knowing that we’re addicts and alcoholics. It’s also about us being able to downplay our own self-importance long enough to hear God, to pay attention to what is going on around us. You think I ever went to the Anne Frank House before I got sober? They don’t have any dope there, so no, I did not go. Amsterdam is a beautiful city, and I had no idea. I went to Australia and never even saw a fucking kangaroo. They’ve got the strongest heroin in the world, and I almost died there. That’s all I knew about Australia.
This is why some people have to reach an absolute bottom and lose fucking everything. I think that the people that have the hardest time getting sobriety are the people that are the most individualistic, the
people whose own identity is most important to them. And making art, you’ve got to literally not pay any attention to what other people tell you, to what other people do. That is a positive thing, it is a force of nature, but it has a pitfall. After a while you start believing that these special abilities that you have make you exempt from stuff that happens to everybody.
There were eighty- six or eighty- seven people in Buffalo Valley when I was there, and I am the only that has stayed sober continuously for thirteen years. Why me? Maybe it’s as simple as this: For once in my life, I listened to those people. And maybe for once in my life, I do it exactly the way somebody else tells me how to do it. And you know what? I almost never fuck it up, because I am working with this huge body of experience.
Early on, the woman I lived with was using right in the house, and I had my head so far down in my recovery that I did not see it. She had a methadone habit going that I had no idea about until it went to code red. When I had less than six months of sobriety, I found a bottle of methadone under the front seat of my car, and that’s how I found out about it. She went to treatment, and as soon as she got out, she started using again. At that point I had to go. I was not going to survive in that environment. Since then I’ve watched other people go through it, people that I really love a lot.
If you become aware of someone else’s problem, then you’ve got to do something. You at least have to make yourself available. I just try to suit up and show up. Normally, if people aren’t at least thinking about getting help and they know you’re in recovery, they’ll avoid you. You will never even see them. But if they start coming into your orbit repeatedly, if they’re not avoiding you, then they’re asking for something. At some point I will say something, and I have to say it for me, not for them. The two guys who started Alcoholics Anonymous literally started out by going to a fucking sanitarium and going up to some poor guy sitting there detoxing, and they’d sit down and say, “Hey! How are you? We don’t drink anymore.” That was really it. That was the whole spiel.
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