This story breaks the pattern a little. Most of the time, I’ve cut out the places where the interviewee talks directly to me, but with this one, I left that in because it turns out I had a role in his recovery. I had no idea. I’ve included this not to blow my own horn—I’m just the guy that picked up the phone—but to show the nature of recovery. If you keep asking for help, you’ll get it.
I
lost my brother two years ago to addiction. He was the closest person to me my entire life, and I lost him to this disease because he was incapable of being honest with himself. That’s ultimately what it took
for me. I was afraid. It was way too big for me and it was killing me. I was hiding from it, and it just got heavier and heavier every day, because the more I hid from it, the more I tried to hide from myself, which is an impossible task. You just create more damage and more wreckage. I got to the point that it was life or death for me, and I hit bottom, thinking, “I’m just not going to make it.”
I put together ninety days of sobriety five times before I finally really got it. I did the first five times because people were on my back and they wouldn’t get off my back, and I did it to shut them up. Finally I had a moment of clarity after a night of debauchery—a week of debauchery—in the Bahamas. It was the next morning after a long night in a long week, a long night hiding in the grass on the beach, alone, hearing people whispering my name, scared to death, realizing that I had a problem that was completely out of control. I finally reached a point where I knew that if I didn’t do something, if somebody didn’t help me, I was going to die.
That was the first time I ever realized that. I’d been in tight spots before. You know, the next day I’d shake it off and I’d be okay for a while, I’d find some way to manage my problem. Or I’d find some people to tell me that I didn’t have a problem, and there are certainly enough of them around, people who are in the disease with you. “Oh, probably you just had a bad night, man. Everyone has a couple of those.” But that night on the beach, I hit that point when I really had to see I couldn’t drink normally, I couldn’t recreationally take drugs. I had to see that once I started, I couldn’t stop.
Up until that point, giving it up was never an option, because I was taught my whole life that to surrender was to fail. But I finally realized, “You know what, I’m done if I don’t surrender. I’m not going to have anything anyway.” Not that I really had much. I didn’t own anything. I had these suits, these two suits that I never wore, but they were like everything to me. I was so afraid that I’d lose these two suits that I had, that I would get in an argument with my girlfriend and she’d cut the suits up. That was my biggest fear. I had to persevere for fear of losing these two cheap suits that I never even wore. It was like they were all I had, the only things that proved I was a success or a grown-up or something.
But finally I just knew I was done. I had no control, I couldn’t stop, I was afraid, and I didn’t have anybody to tell me that it was going to be okay. I was afraid for a long time. I came into recovery and I was still afraid, but I thought, “Okay, these guys tell me that there is a way that I can be relieved of this obsession that’s killing me.” I showed up and I went to the meetings and I heard stories that spoke to me. I heard people saying things that were very familiar to me, things that I could relate to. Slowly things started getting better. The longer I stayed and the more I worked, the better things got. They started off as little miracles, because when you’re first sober, you’re pretty raw, and little things can set you off. You get a parking spot and you’re sure God picked it out for you. Then I did the “fearless and searching moral inventory.” I went through and I searched my soul. I put everything down, which was really scary, and I hid it. It was a big thick volume of all this trash—my fears and my resentments and my misdeeds and my sexual conduct and everything. My biggest fear was that revealing all this would define me as a person. I would be stuck in a box.
This guy I was working with in recovery told me to come over, and I was all set to read it to him. We’re out in his backyard, and he kept getting interrupted with phone calls and stuff. I’d read a paragraph and he’d say, “Oh, can you hold on a second?” He was a big business guy. After half an hour, he came back after one of his phone calls and he said, “Okay, that’s good for today. Come back next Saturday and we’ll read some more.” I’m like, “My God. This is going to take eight months at this pace.”
I called another guy, and he was outraged by it. “What an asshole! Fire this guy. Call him up right now, fire him, and come over here. You can read it to me.” So I went over there, so incredibly grateful and so incredibly scared. I remember every inch of the drive over with that book that I’d written, that thing that I just was so afraid to hand over. It was like the sound track of Jaws was playing. And then I showed up and, well, you know this, Chris, it was you. You were really there for me.
We went out and sat on the side of a hill, and I read through it. At the end of it, I was drenched in sweat. I mean, I couldn’t even believe it. Some of the stuff as I was reading it, I almost wanted to hold back. But you know what, I walked through the fear. I was so afraid that you would judge me, and you didn’t. In fact you still spoke to me a couple of days later, and it didn’t seem to color your attitude toward me at all, all of this stuff that I felt that was just further proof of what a piece of shit I was. It was so incredible to have crossed that threshold. And after it was over, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. It really wasn’t. I just felt like more of a human being. I felt whole for the first time in my life, really. It was like the first time I got drunk, when I thought, “I suddenly don’t care anymore what everybody is thinking”—it was a very similar moment to that. I didn’t have to be afraid anymore.
I was with my brother Mike a few days before he died. I was about to do a movie, and I hadn’t seen him in a long time. He sounded so great. When you’re talking to someone, you know if they’re living a program of honesty in life. I mean you just hear it in their voice, and I heard that in his voice. I just couldn’t believe it. I really felt like I’d got my brother back. Then I saw him on the morning of the day he died, and he was a little weird. I said something about it, and he brushed it off and he went off on his way. He was going to see Mom. He died that night. She found him.
It was hard. I had to start working the next day, carrying this. It was a very difficult period for me, but I had to stop my feelings. It’s just something you do. I think as a result of being sober, I’m able to do what I need to do, to suit up and show up and take care of business. I can feel the pain and not be afraid of feeling it, and not feel like I have to stuff something into my body so that I don’t feel it. And the pain is pretty horrible. When Mike died, the pain was just unbelievable. At the same time, I was told, and I believe this, that if you feel the feelings, they’ll go away, but if you don’t feel them, they’re not going anywhere. They’re just going to manifest in some other way. I did the movie, and when I was done, I knew that I hadn’t grieved for him, and so I took the time to do that. I did it in my way, and I’m probably still doing it. I still think about him a lot. I had a little trouble with my faith afterward, because I prayed for him all the time. I thought, “If there is a God, then why was Mike allowed to die this way?” I mean I prayed. Every night I prayed for him. And he died anyway.
I talked to somebody, and he said, “Maybe your prayers were answered. Maybe when he died, he didn’t have to hang around in limbo, for lack of a better word. He was able to pass on and get going to the next incarnation or what ever’s next.” That was cool. That was something that I could believe in. I’m not a religious zealot. I don’t profess to follow any one particular training of God. I just find stuff that I can believe. I know that God’s working in my life—I’ve seen the miracles happen.
It’s really hard to live in the moment when you’re always focused on the future or the past. But I have these things that can bring me back to being right here with God. So none of the things that
happened were as scary and as horrible and as severe as I had imagined them to be. They really wound up being nothing. Or they were transcendent gifts. Things got better because of them.
When I was first getting sober, I was up for a big role. This seemed like the thing that I needed. This was going to change everything, finally. I went to a meeting early in the day, and I was told by a friend in recovery to put up my hand and share about this big screen test. I put up my hand to share and the guy wouldn’t pick me. This one guy in this meeting would never pick me—I don’t know what it was. And finally, about three quarters of the way through the meeting, I felt an enormous resentment. I got up and I stormed out and I went home.
In my mailbox was this letter from a guy who was my best friend at the time, telling me I was a piece of crap. He was mad about something that really hadn’t happened. So I’m armed with the major resentment that I got at that recovery meeting, and my best friend in the world never wants to speak to me again, and now I’ve got to go to this screen test. I’m driving there, and a car made an illegal left turn and t-boned me. Just came out of nowhere and destroyed my car, the only car that I had. And I’ve still got to get to this screen test. I call a cab, because the car was totaled. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a car. I’m at the edge of financial disaster. I finally get to the audition and I walk in there and I look around, and there’s about twenty-five suits staring at me. I start to read, and I just completely fall apart.
The next day, my agent calls and said, “The casting people want you to come and see them now. They want to talk to you. You didn’t get the job, but they want to see you.” So I drive over there, I go in the room, and there are these big high-powered casting people. They said, “What the hell happened to you? That was your job going in and you blew it. You embarrassed us. You embarrassed yourself. You’re finished.”
I left. I thought, “How much worse can it be? I turned my will and my life over to you, God, and you grind me into your boot heel.” But by some miracle, I stayed sober. I went to another recovery meeting. I talked to some people. I really had nowhere else to go. I knew even in that insanity that drinking wasn’t an option. But in the back of my mind—and I had to admit it to myself—I’d had plans. I’d been thinking that if I got that job, the first thing I was going to do was get rid of these people who were a pain in the ass. I was going to leave my girlfriend. I was going to get high. And it didn’t happen, and I didn’t work for a while.
Around this time I started working with someone new on my recovery and he started telling me stuff like “Don’t worry about believing. Don’t let that get in your way. I’ll believe for you.” I remember him telling me that, and I only hung in to prove him wrong. “I’ll fucking show you, man. You are so wrong. I’ll wait it out here, because it’s not going to get better, and then I’m going to go out and get high and prove that you are wrong.” And he was right about it. Absolutely.
Nothing is ever perfect. Nothing is ever absolutely perfect. But it’s such a relief to not have to orchestrate anymore. My arms were getting tired.
Tom Arnold
Tom got his first big break when Roseanne Barr spotted him doing stand- up and hired him as a writer for the Roseanne show. Anyone who read a magazine in the early nineties knows how that turned out. Since then, Tom has played Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in True Lies, hosted Fox’s Best Damn Sports Show Period, and written a very funny autobiography, How I Lost 5 Pounds in 6 Years. I met him when we were both hanging around L.A., begging for acting jobs, and he’s become a friend, as well as a powerful example of how to stay sober and sane in the nutty world of show business—through service and not taking yourself too seriously. When I asked Tom how he wanted to be described, he said, “Just say I’m a recovering alcoholic and addict. I mean, I also act and write and stuff, but that’s the thing I have to remember first.”
M
y mother was an alcoholic. She left when I was four. When I was ten my dad married the next-door neighbor. She had kids and I was the oldest, and we did not have a good relationship.
It was hard. I remember when I was fourteen, I said, “I’m moving in with my mom and her sixth husband.” Because she would let me do whatever I wanted, basically.
I had my boxes packed and my dad picked me up. He was putting them in the car, and he said, “I just want you to know that I love you.” And I don’t know if we’d had that conversation before, but when my dad said that, I knew he meant it, because he fought for us. I mean he fought; he was there. I mean how many twenty-two-year-old guys have three kids and fight for them in court? I mean this is in 1963 or something and the mother always got the kids. They went to court, and the last day they were going to have me testify, which was basically a four-year-old boy having to say who he loved more, his mother or his father, and my dad said, “Forget it, I can’t do that to him.” So he gave up and let it go. The very next day my mom came to his office and said, “Here’s the keys to the house. The kids are there with a babysitter, and they’re yours.”
So anyway, I remember going right to my mom’s house and the first thing she says is—I’m fourteen—she says, “There’s beer in the fridge. If you want to bring your girlfriend over here and screw her, she can stay all night. I’ll see you in a couple of days.” I just remember thinking, “I just made a big mistake.” I mean this is what I supposedly wanted, but it felt so bad.
Leading up to my moment, I’d been up for five days, doing a lot of coke, and I was driving home. I was driving my blue Taurus, and I’m surprised it ran, because like two days before, I’d pulled all the wires out from under the dash, thinking the car was bugged. In our house we had fabric walls, and I actually believed that I was being secretly filmed for a documentary on drug abuse. I would talk to the mirror. I was that crazy.
Our code on the gate was my birthday, and I couldn’t remember what it was. At that time you couldn’t get a signal over on Mulholland, so I couldn’t call the house. I had to flag a car down and say, “Would you call this number and have whoever answers let me into the gate?”
I just remember Roseanne drove her car down our long driveway and opened the gate. She got out of her car and started walking toward me. I pulled my car over, and I thought, “Well, she’s gonna lose it, as always. She’s gonna freak out, hit me, what ever. And okay, maybe I deserve it, but I’m not gonna take it.”
Instead, she hugged me and said, “I just want you to come home.” And as messed up as I was, I felt it. I felt this compassion from her and that was, I think, God working through her, and it just broke through my BS. Somebody who knew the truth still cared—that threw me off completely. I was ready to defend myself, to fight back, and I didn’t have to. That was a real spiritual moment that I take with me to this day.
I asked Roseanne about it later and she said she was mad and then all of a sudden, walking toward me, she said that it just went away, all that rage went away. She said she just realized that I was sick and, you know, that it wasn’t personal. That I wasn’t trying to make her miserable. You know, that’s a good thing for me to remember too.
That moment, it was a feeling of unconditional love, and I don’t remember ever feeling anything like it before. I can’t really explain it, but it sobered me up. I felt it. And I really hadn’t felt anything except self-hate and contempt for myself and defensiveness and just living the lie and being in survival mode for so long, and it was a very peaceful, warm feeling, which led to me finally breaking down and being honest for the first time. I told her, “I can’t stop. I know I always said I’d stop using drugs, but I tried, and I just can’t.” And it was the first time I was able to admit that.
I felt like the biggest weight in the world was lifted off my shoulders. It was so hard to live that lie and maintain it. I worked hard at it. I mean telling you now that I’m an addict and capable of being addicted to anything and that I still need to work on myself—that’s freeing to me. But that particular moment, I felt that if anybody really knew how bad
I was, really how bad I was, then they couldn’t possibly love me. That turned out not to be true at all. I’m still amazed sometimes at the generosity and the compassion and support of other people. That moment and all the moments like that—to me, it’s everything I didn’t get from my mother.
Roseanne and I had been through the whole rehab thing about seven months before. I started hemorrhaging blood from my nose and I couldn’t even stand up. Roseanne took me to this place, and I talked my way out after four days. I said, “I’ll go to recovery meetings, it’ll be fine.” But soon enough, I was back at it. I mean it was so quick. I found some cocaine at home and just did it. I mean after all that. I think a lot of us are very manipulative in protecting our disease and lying to people that care about us the most and pushing them away and hiding—just doing these things that make us feel worse about ourselves.
So I was back to living the lie, and after I admitted all this, she did the right thing and said, “You know what? You can’t be here. I’ve got kids. I want you to get help, but you have to do it.” So I made the calls myself and got in a cab.
My second time in rehab, my roommate was a guy with AIDS. This is 1989, and AIDS was basically a death sentence. I just remember after three or four days sort of coming around and talking to him and saying, “Oh my God. You know, honestly, if I had a broken arm, that’d be an excuse to get out. But you have AIDS, and you’re here, and you want to be sober?” And the guy said, “I want to die sober. I know I’m going to die, but I want to die sober.” That hit me.
Then, on the eighth day, I looked around the room at the people in my group from all different places, all struggling and fighting for this sobriety thing—I mean Jesus. So that all added up. I had never even considered doing it for myself, and then it just hit me . . . that’s what I have to do, but I hated the guy in the mirror. But strangely, when I was packing for rehab I accidentally threw in with my papers a picture of myself when I was four. That’s when my mom left, and I loved and had compassion for that little kid. I decided to get sober for him—the little Tommy—because he didn’t deserve to die.
Moments of Clarity Page 15