Moments of Clarity

by Christopher Kennedy Lawford

  I knew immediately that something terrible had happened. I knew it because for the first time in my life I felt okay inside my skin. I knew it because the very next thought I had was that nothing had better ever come between me and getting more crystal.

  By the end of 2006, beginning of 2007, my life was falling completely apart. It hadn’t occurred to me that things weren’t normal, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t really been employable or employed for years. I had a relationship with somebody who was only using me for drugs, and I was unable to see that for what it was. I was evicted from my apartment, and in the pro cess of moving, I managed to lose most of my material possessions. I wasn’t working, I was rapidly running out of friends, I was out of money, and I was quickly losing any hope that it was ever going to be any different.

  It was my birthday, and this person I was dating said he’d take me out. He was seven hours late, and I decided to try and hunt him down at the places where I knew he might be. Not only did I not find him, I found nobody home at all. At this point it was about three o’clock in the morning. I was in a nice older neighborhood with Christmas lights and decorated trees in the windows and everybody asleep, and the snow has just begun to fall. It was cold, and I didn’t even have an adequate coat because I hadn’t expected to be out there for so long. I was standing under a street lamp, and I remember the particular sensation of little snowflakes against my face.

  It was very cold and I was very tired and I sat down against the light post and cried. I didn’t believe that it was possible for things to get any worse, and I didn’t think that it was possible for things to get any better. I could see a light on in one of the houses, and I couldn’t figure out how those people got there, just having normal, happy lives.

  I was smart, I knew I was smart, but apparently having some smarts wasn’t enough to give me the things that other people had. It wasn’t enough to make me happy. How come these people had managed to end up secure and happy, and I, with all the same advantages, had managed to let that slip through my fingers? I knew there must be something wrong with me, something fundamentally defective, and that’s why I was so miserable. And I had no idea how to change that. I couldn’t even identify what exactly it was that was wrong with me. I knew that meth was part of the problem, but I didn’t know how to live without meth.

  I was sitting there, with the snow falling, with all this turmoil and all this noise inside my head, all this pain. I just kept asking what ever power was out there, “What is wrong with me?” Then everything just got incredibly quiet. All the noise in my head stopped, and all the pain in my heart stopped, and I could breathe again, and I could see that if anything was going to change, I had to start changing what I was doing. For the first time, I felt like I was being given the opportunity and the strength to follow that through, that the path would open for me if I just started walking. I could feel the calm settle down on me, like the light from the street lamp. I felt so quiet, so at peace, and I hadn’t felt like that since I was a little kid.

  I walked back to the place where I was staying and I went to bed, and the next morning I got up and contacted some friends in the recovery community and arranged to go to a sober-living house, and I stayed there until I got into an in-patient treatment program. When I made those phone calls that morning, part of me still didn’t believe that there were people who stayed sober permanently. I still didn’t believe that I was going to have to practice complete abstinence, forever. That just was incomprehensible to me. But I knew the path forward was to start reaching out to people who seemed to have the answer I was looking for.

  As I’ve gone down that road, obviously my views have developed and my willingness to be completely abstinent has developed. But all that began with that one moment, that first step, and I think that was a gift of my Creator. I don’t think it’s something we can work for or will into existence. I think of addiction as a box, and at any given moment, I think a lot of people are trying to beat their way out of whatever box they’re in, and they’re too busy and making too much noise to stop and listen to somebody who’s reading the instructions from the outside. I simply reached a place and time and a level of brokenness where there was nothing I could do but stop and listen.

  For the first time I was completely out of answers. I was always so sure I could think my way out of everything, but I couldn’t. I’d managed to keep a pretty sophisticated denial mechanism in place for years and years and years, and it just all stopped working.

  Those first few weeks—oh my God, I was angry. I don’t think I realized it, but going back and looking at stuff, I can see how angry I was. I managed to place myself in the care of a few friends who were actually sober, and then in places where I knew I wasn’t going to be around people who would influence whether or not I used. But all that was complicated to arrange, and there were money issues to deal with. I was in a lot of pain physically and a lot of pain emotionally. And suddenly there were these demands placed on me for certain levels of behavior. I didn’t want to be told where to go, or what to do, or how to do it, or who I should talk to, or what to eat and when, or what voluntary work I was supposed to do. I was so tired and hungry. Starving, really. When you get off crystal meth and start eating again, you’re really hungry.

  But I managed to get through that. I just plugged away and made sure that I was in a place that was at least somewhat safe. I burned all my meth bridges. I closed all of those doors and just threw myself on the mercy of people who were sober. I did not want to continue doing what I was doing, but I knew that left to my own devices, I would have relapsed. So I made sure I wasn’t left to my own devices.

  I think of that moment, with the snow falling on my face, all the time. I still live in that same neighborhood, so the visual cues are never really very far away, and some of the people that I used with have made their way into the same kind of recovery that I’m following. There are always little things to remind me, so when I need to connect with that moment in a profound way, it’s not very hard. Anytime I’m working with somebody who’s new, anytime I’m offering my phone number to someone who has just a few days clean, wondering how the hell they are going to do it, I can see in their faces exactly where I was.

  I resisted a program of recovery because I kept telling myself that I could think my way out of my problems, that I’m smarter than your average bear, that relying on something outside yourself means you’re stupid. And with so much of my sexual identity tied up in my use of crystal meth, I was sure that I’d never have sex again. That has turned out to be true so far. I still don’t know how to be intimate with people and be sober. It’s probably going to take a while more, but right now, that doesn’t seem to matter as much anymore. I thought that sexual intimacy and love were the same thing, and I no longer think that. Now I see that there are lots of people who love me in ways that are far more significant than a physical relationship.

  Those were the big fears. I thought that I wouldn’t be smart anymore, I thought I’d never have any energy anymore, I thought I was so broken that I should just give up. None of those things turned out to be true.

  Of course I can’t say that everything has suddenly become wonderful in my life. I still don’t have a boyfriend, and it’s hard to meet other sober gay guys here. I’m still dealing with the consequences of my bad decisions, and that causes job problems, legal problems, money problems. Some days my head, my disease, tells me that the price I’m paying is too high, that the world is unfair, that I’m being punished for being biologically defective.

  That insane idea is as much a part of the problem as anything else, and luckily there’s a set of simple instructions I can follow to try and override it. I don’t always follow those instructions right away. I seem to have to reach a certain level of misery before I understand that the only effective solution to my worst problems is the same solution I’ve learned to apply to my drug and alcohol problem. I don’t know why, but it seems to take me a while to get there.

  I
don’t think I earned that moment of peace, the moment when I knew I could change. The trauma didn’t earn me that gift; it just came when it came. If I could talk to that pre-moment self, I’d say, “How much longer are you going to put me through this?” And even if I could go back and say that, I’m not sure it would have made any difference. I was absolutely helpless to effect any change on my own, and I was absolutely incapable of asking for help. I don’t think there’s anything anybody could have said that would have changed things. I was just completely off on my own, and goddamn anybody who tried to stand in my way.

  I remember that when I see someone who’s struggling. I let them know that I’m there, but I allow them to be the one to reach out. I don’t do anything except try to live by example and remain open. There was nothing that my friends or family could have said to me to change what I was doing, but at the time I was able to reach out for help, I was really glad they were there.

  Everybody comes to it in their own time, and that time might be never. All we can do is wait and hope for them to get there.

  Karl Fleming

  As Newsweek’s civil rights correspondent, Karl covered most of the pivotal moments of the civil rights movement: James Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi; the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi; the Watts riots, where he was badly beaten. He recently wrote a terrific memoir, Son of the Rough South. I interviewed Karl at his home, and it was a humbling experience to sit in his office, surrounded by his personal photographs from that time. Karl’s an imposing figure, the epitome of a man’s man, and I admire his courage, revealing his secrets. As I was leaving, he pointed to a photo of Dr. King and said, “Martin Luther King taught me everything I needed to know about being a man.”

  W

  hen someone asks for help, I say, “You know, I was about as hopeless and lowdown as a human being can get, and here I am today. And here’s what I did, and if you want to try this,

  I’ll be glad to help you.” I don’t judge them. How can I? I’m one of them, still. All I do is just try to be honest, to show up and be who I am. You know the great thing about me now? My insides are exactly like my outsides. Exactly. You may not like me. That’s fine. Sometimes I don’t like myself either. But I am a completely authentic human being now. There’s no pretense. I don’t have to pretend anything, and everybody who knows me knows everything about me. I don’t care. And that’s just a fabulous feeling of liberation.

  I was born down in the tobacco lands of eastern North Carolina during the Depression. My father died of a heart attack when I was five months old. He was fifty-four. My mother was younger, she was twenty-eight. She struggled to take care of me, without much success—tried to sell dishes door-to-door at one point. Finally, in desperation, she married my father’s best friend, also a much older man. We moved to a tenant shack, down on a swamp, and soon he got ill and died. My mother sank into bad health herself, and we struggled along until finally, when I was eight, she put me into an institution in Raleigh, North Carolina, called the Methodist Orphanage.

  You know, I grew up hearing all about this loving Jesus who took care of children, a God who was, according to all the advertising, kind and loving and embracing. I went into this orphanage with a sense of being betrayed by my father, by my mother, by God, and by Jesus. I had such a sense of shame, of being just a piece of trash. And a big part of this shame was something I couldn’t even talk about at all. When I was five, I was surrounded by a bunch of older kids and forced into a garage and forced to my knees and forced to commit a sexual act on this kid, and then they laughed at me. I went home and was in the bathroom crying and my mother said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Nothing.” I spoke not one word of that secret until I was sixty years old, but it ruled my life in a way.

  So I was in this orphanage, which was a very harsh place, and that was when I began to develop hostility toward religion, toward authority. The matron of the cottage I was in was a kind woman, but she was no protection against bullying, and I was bullied a lot. My nickname was Pretty Boy, and there was a kid named Fatty Clark who beat me up every day. You know, I look back now, and if you’re a kid named Fatty Clark and there’s a kid called Pretty Boy, you are going to beat him up.

  I became a very withdrawn kid who found refuge in books. I read every book in this orphanage’s library, about three thousand of them, and I lived in this fantasy world. But I soon learned that I had to be a tough guy if I was going to survive this experience. I became just as rebellious and pugnacious and ready to fight as the others were, and I ran away from there when I was seventeen and joined the navy.

  The superintendent of the orphanage was this towering figure, this Somerset Maugham character who preached about the evils of sex and particularly the evils of drink. You take one drink and you’re on the certain road to hell—he preached that over and over and over again. So naturally, on my first boot camp leave, I went with two buddies down to Baltimore to a strip joint, a burlesque house. We proceeded to have some drinks, and I got very sick and threw up on the side of the highway, and the highway patrol threw me in jail. The first drink I ever had, I got put in jail. You would think an intelligent person would get some sort of message from that. But obviously, I didn’t. It was part of the southern tradition: tough guys drink. Also, all my literary heroes were big drinkers: Hemingway, Damon Runyon, Somerset Maugham, Fitzgerald. They were all big drinkers, and these were my heroes, the people who rebelled against convention, who more or less told the church and society to stick it. And I became one of them.

  I got a job on a newspaper, and I became your typical rebellious young reporter. Reporting was a craft, not a calling. I was cynical about authority and contemptuous of people who made money as a way of life. And I drank a lot, even though nothing good ever happened when I drank. I got in fights. I threw up. I came to work with hangovers every day. That’s the way my early life unfolded.

  After my first job as a reporter, I got a job on a bigger newspaper in Durham, North Carolina, with a bunch of hard- bitten, hard-drinking guys, all of whom wanted to be novelists. We’d rent a hotel room and drink all night and play poker. I never drank during working hours. Then I moved up to Asheville, where Thomas Wolfe, the writer, had thumbed his nose at society. You Can’t Go Home Again. Look Homeward, Angel. I drank a lot up there, then I wandered on and got a job on the Atlanta Constitution, and I continued to drink really hard. I still never drank during working hours. I did my job.

  Around 1960, when the civil rights movement was just kicking in, Newsweek magazine hired me, and I covered all the major events in the civil rights movement—the Birmingham church bombings, the marches in Birmingham with Bull Conner and the police dogs and fire hoses, Selma, Montgomery. Jackson, Mississippi, and the assassination of Medgar Evers. Philadelphia, Mississippi, with three civil rights workers assassinated by the Klan. James Meredith and the violence when he integrated the University of Mississippi. I covered all that stuff, and by this time I was 210 pounds of swaggering, crew-cut, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking, cynical tough guy. Again, I never drank during working hours, so I never really thought I had a drinking problem. It was part of the culture. That’s what newspaper guys did, what southern tough guys did.

  I came out to California in 1965, just in time to get almost killed by black people after the whole Watts riots got going. I got my head opened up and I was beaten and stomped nearly to death by a bunch of black guys— which was a tremendous psychic shock, because I had been very much committed to the black civil rights cause. I lay in the hospital, thinking about how I’d nearly died, and I thought, “You know what? I should stop drinking.” And I did.

  Then I went up to San Francisco. This was ’67 or ’68 and the Vietnam War protest was beginning to get really strong. I went up to San Francisco to cover a peace march in Golden Gate Park, and I got into marijuana. It was fabulous. The food was great. The sex was great. The colors were great. The music was great. I had a great time. For
the next twenty years, I didn’t have one drink. I just smoked marijuana.

  During this period, I left Newsweek. I got divorced. I rented an apartment on the beach out in Malibu. And I fell in love with Anne, my wife now of thirty- seven years. I started a newspaper here with the help of a wealthy backer, which lasted about a year before the guy jerked out his money and left me stranded. The newspaper died. All the talented young people I had hired lost their jobs. Then I got involved in a very humiliating event. I was caught in the middle of a con game, which caused me tremendous personal embarrassment, with my name in the New York Times, subjected to public humiliation. I was taking a lot of ste roids for asthma, which kicked up after I got hurt in the riots. That affected my judgment.

  I was still smoking a lot of marijuana, suffering from a lot of hubris and then a lot of humiliation. I began on this absolute downward slide. For over a year, I lay on a sofa in my office, hoping I would die. I thought my life was over. I wanted it to be over. I was a failure and a counterfeit and a phony. Finally, I had a complete breakdown. I ended up in a nut house, lying in a straitjacket on the gurney, trying to choke myself with the sheet.

  I got out of that place by strength of will, and I began to get back on my feet. An old colleague came to L.A. to be the general manager of the CBS affiliate station, and he hired me to be managing editor, and then an on- air reporter. At the height of my insanity, I had a ’65 Mustang convertible. I would go out to the CBS parking lot and smoke a joint and go on the air live with Connie Chung, stoned out of my mind. I mean I was really nuts. And then, on my sixtieth birthday, I decided that I would quit smoking marijuana. And I did. I got a big sixtieth birthday party, and I made a vow I was not going to do this anymore.

  I had tried and tried and tried and tried to quit before, but I could never make it past 10 a.m. The pain was too great. I just wanted to be novocained from the shame and the pain and the humiliation—not just being fired and losing my newspaper but the old shame from the sexual humiliation and growing up in this orphanage and not having much education. But I decided to quit, and I did.