Moments of Clarity

by Christopher Kennedy Lawford

  The God that I believe in is totally merciful, gives us totally unconditional love, and would not condemn anything or anybody to an eternity of hell. It would never do that, couldn’t do that. If it created us, then it knows what we are, so it wouldn’t fuck around with us. Why do that? We attribute things to God that are just human. We attribute anger to God. Why would God get angry? Anger is losing control. A perfect, pure being loses control? That kind of thing annoys me.

  Where is my higher power? It’s here, it’s in books, there’s yourself, there’s your voice. It’s an aura that surrounds me, and it’s almost like a spiritual sustenance I can take in. Breath, the act of breathing . . . for seventy-five years I have not stopped breathing or my heart has not stopped beating. For seventy-five years, bump, bump, bump, bump. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that a miracle?

  Greg Behrendt

  Greg says he’s tall. “Unusually tall. Unexpectedly tall, for a guy who’s five ten and a half.” He started out in stand- up comedy, part of a circle of San Francisco comics that included Patton Oswalt, Margaret Cho, and David Cross. He still does stand- up, but he’s also the author of two bestsellers: He’s Just Not That Into You and It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken. The success of his first book led to a cable talk show, and while I was promoting Symptoms, he invited me on to talk about relationships. I proceeded to humiliate myself in front of a large group of women. It’s funny, thinking about his story now, there’s a certain amount of humiliation there too—which is true of most recovery stories.

  H

  opelessness is when you feel like you’ve turned over every stone and you found nothing. You just cannot find the answers, because you’ve been searching so far outside of yourself that you’re

  totally lost. And that’s where I was before I quit drinking.

  A week before, it was business as usual. I had this routine pattern of being fucked up. It was very ritualized. Throughout all of my drinking, I still managed to lift weights and go to the gym and run, and at five o’clock I’d get fucked up beyond belief and not remember where I was and wake up the next day and not have a job and go do an open mike and start over. I would quit drinking and then not quit and then bargain with myself and tell myself I was going to have a drink. But it was repetitive. It was really the same. It was lots and lots and lots of the same. There’s a phrase called “routine misery,” where you’re not aware of it because it’s business as usual. I didn’t realize how fucked-up and how sad I was till weeks, months, even years later when I finally got some perspective on it.

  The one thing I do remember is a couple of days before I got sober, I met a girl and we went to have coffee. She asked me, “How much do you drink?” And I couldn’t answer the question. “Not a lot. I mean, more than . . . it depends.” I just couldn’t get it out. So then I asked, “Why do you want to know?” And she goes, “One of the things that I really don’t like is when somebody is all fucked up and calls me in the middle of the night. I hate that. It’s like my pet peeve.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, I get that. That sucks.”

  And then three nights later, I got super fucked-up and called her at two o’clock in the morning. I liked her because she was sober and had this bright light burning inside of her and her friends were sober and she was funny and fun. I guess I wanted to fuck that up so that she would go away. I was constantly doing the one thing I knew I shouldn’t be doing.

  I woke up sweaty and fat, belly distended, midmorning, at an apartment that I shared with another comic. On my futon. And my first thought was “Fuck, I am so fat.” My belly was really distended, and I could feel it. I could feel my belly sticking out. And I remember thinking, “I’m just fat. I’m fat. I got so fat.” And then that just sort of broke the dam of “How the fuck did I end up like this?” Truly, that was my first thought. How did I end up like this? And then the next thought was, “This was not the plan for you. This is not what your parents had hoped for you. This is not what you had hoped for you. You need to make some changes pronto.” That was it. “You’re fucked up. You need to fix this.” I’d heard this voice before, but it was always a quiet voice. I’d heard it since high school, since the first time I threw up in my parents’ bar sink—“This is not good for you.” But I just ignored it until finally the quiet voice got real loud and finally it just fucking won.

  You have to understand. I grew up with wealthy and loving parents who gave me everything. I’d never done for myself. I didn’t earn shit. My roommate was a guy who didn’t grow up with as much. Grew up a Jewish kid in the South, and he fucking earned everything. He had his own TV show, and I had zero. I was like, “This is just not how this is supposed to work out. I can’t be done at thirty-three.” But I had no career. I had no girl. I had nothing.

  A couple months before that, I’d run into a friend I drank with, and he looked fantastic. I said, “What’s been going on? Haven’t seen you in a while.” And he goes, “Yeah, I quit drinking like six months ago. I started going to this mutual support group.” And I thought about him and I thought, “I’m going to call.” So I just fucking picked up the phone and called 411. Got the group’s number, called, said, “Here’s where I live. Where’s the nearest meeting?” There was one in an hour, down the street. So I went, and then I went to an audition, because I was acting at that time. I had the shakes, and I was totally ill-prepared and whatever, but I didn’t care because I’d been to a meeting.

  I go to this audition, and I was terrible. An ant crawled out onto my arm. My shirt was dirty, and it had been on the floor, and there was an ant in it, and it crawled out from underneath my arm during the audition. It was bad. The casting lady said, “Why would you come in if that’s how you were going to read? That was terrible.” I know, lady. But I just quit drinking today and I don’t know what I’m doing.

  That was the last time I ever worried about it. After that, it was just “Go to the group,” and I went to the group. “Listen to the people at the group and do what they say.” Literally. It was not my decision. I didn’t feel like I was controlling things. Every time I’d quit before, I would just say, “I’m going to quit. I’m not drinking.” Just willpower, and that never worked. I had no tools. I had no guidance. I had zero spirituality, no faith in anything. I’d go to a meeting, but I never actually made a commitment. I’d go to one and then I’d not go back. I’d go to another one and then never go back. They would bring up God or some foreign concept, and I would just find some reason to leave. “I don’t believe in that. I’ll just go to the gym.”

  But this time, I had no willpower. I just went to the recovery meetings, and very quickly I lost the desire to drink. At first I didn’t want to drink because I was so fucking sick, liver all swollen and everything. Then there was a period of “What am I going to do with my time? How am I going to socialize?” But I didn’t want to go back to drinking, to all of that, to being completely and utterly fucking miserable and hopeless, to feeling like it would be okay if I was hit by a bus. I was thinking, “There has to be something better than this, because I would like to die, and I’m not a guy that likes to die.” I’m chemically fortunate. My body chemistry allows me to be happy most of the time, my outlook is generally pretty sunny. But there was nothing happy, nothing sunny then. My mom drank until she died, and I’m thinking, “That’s where I’m going. The path has been set. I’m going to be that person, miserable and unable to find happiness. She was a good mom, a nice person. But she was miserable. So I guess I’m going to be shitty and miserable and unhappy for the rest of my life.” And I was like, “That just can’t be. There has got to be some other answer.”

  I got rescued from oblivion. I had all of these warnings, and none of them meant anything to me, not even when I had a doctor tell me my liver was going, and all that shit. I had all those warnings, and none of that did it. I just woke up one shitty morning and I’m like, “Okay. Enough is enough. I have another purpose.” I finally listened to that voice saying, “You need to get your shit together.�
� And I wouldn’t have anything I have now otherwise. There’s no way I’d have my wife or my kids or anything. None of that.

  About three months after I started going to that mutual support group, I met God. I was at home visiting my father and stepmother and I was out for a run, and all I can say is, for the first time, I really got the whole God thing. There was a voice, for lack of a better description, that said, “I’ve always been here.” And then I’m like, “Right. Of course.” And all I had to do was turn it over—turn over my life, my will. Just “You show me the fucking way and I’ll do what ever you say.” And I did. I went to meetings, but I didn’t share for the whole first year. I just listened, because I like to talk. I like to tell my story because it’s far more interesting than yours. So I shut up and I listened.

  I called my dad and said, “You have to stop funding my excess. You have to stop. It’s not your fault, but I can’t fucking tie my shoes. When I call you and I’m in tears about some bullshit, you got to go tough. You got to fucking bring the hammer, dude. I have no job skills, I have no life, I have nothing going on. I’ve never built or made anything for myself. I’ve never earned anything myself. I’ve got just nothing, and I’ve got to get something on my own.”

  Then I called the IRS and I said, “I owe you an enormous amount of money and I don’t have it. And we have to figure something out.” And they’re like, “All right. Well, let’s get on a plan.”

  And then I called a friend and I said, “I need to get a job. Any job.” He said, “They’re hiring at this show.” So I went down there, and within a couple of weeks I got this job. I said to my roommate, “Look, I don’t have money to pay rent right now. But I’ll be, for lack of a better word, the house boy. I’ll clean and I’ll make food and I’ll bake and I’ll do shit until I have money, and then I’ll pay you. If you’re cool with that.” And he was fine with it. I worked on his show a couple of times in cameos to earn a day’s pay and then paid him.

  I’d done everything my way the whole time and it wasn’t working, so I was going to do it like everybody else does. Get a fucking job. Earn my own money. I just went for it. It was time. A year later I got an HBO special, and it sort of just went up from there, so I knew right away. The change was so quick, once I finally connected to the spiritual side of things, that I was like, “Oh, this is what’s been missing the whole time.”

  I think about that friend of mine, the one I ran into who’d turned his life around. He didn’t say anything to me about going into recovery or about not drinking, nothing. But he looked great, and happy, and I wanted that. So I try to be that guy for other people. I try and live an exemplary life and hope they ask me about it.

  When I quit drinking, I gave up an entire social life. I gave up the only way that I knew how to meet women. I gave all that shit up. At first I was bound and determined to keep my old friends. I wanted my lifestyle, I just wasn’t going to drink. And then I’d hang out with my old friends and think, “Fuck, I hate this.”

  I think the thing I was most afraid of, the thing that made me want to hang on to those people, was sex and women, because it never worked any other way. That was the only thing I was really scared of, that I wasn’t going to be able to meet anybody. What are sober women going to be like? I don’t want to meet someone that doesn’t want to fuck. And we’ll have to do it sober. That’s gonna be weird. Like how is that going to be?

  I think my drinking and my fucking was always a search for the spiritual. I was always looking for something, but I was doing it my way. And eventually I said, “I want to do it your way, because I don’t fucking know what to do anymore. I don’t know how to do it. I’m going to die if I keep trying to do it my way.” But I was always trying to find something. We had no religion growing up, and I wanted it. I wanted some kind of god. But I was such a cynic that I didn’t want to have anything to do with churches. I just had this built-in cynicism about spirituality, and yet all I wanted was to be spiritually sound. So I think God just came and said, “Get off your futon and go to a recovery meeting. Meet me there. Go find me. I’m here, but you have to go find me.” That’s the best way I could describe it.

  I’m not looking for that giant rush anymore. I had it. I had the dramatic moments, those TV moments, and they were all short-term things. Now I want sustainability. I want something that lasts. That’s what God is. That’s what life is. It’s not heroin. It’s not whoosh. Whoosh doesn’t last.

  Marie Morning- Glory

  I heard Marie speak at a recovery mutual support group two years ago, and I never forgot the grace and clarity she shared that morning. I called her and asked if she would be willing to tell her story in this book. She said yes, and we met at the recovery house she runs with her husband called Miracle House, established in 1995 to provide an environment for living without the use of alcohol or drugs.

  I

  ’m Native American, a full- blooded Apache, and I grew up on the reservation in Arizona. Once, when I was about ten years old, I was standing on top of a mountain and I looked down and saw a light in

  this old burned-down church. I’d never seen a light there before, so I walked down the trail to the church. I went inside, and there was a man sitting in a broken pew. I walked up to him and I said, “Are you okay?”

  He stood up, and he was a Franciscan priest, in the robes. I looked up at him and I asked him again, “Are you okay?” And he said, “Oh, yes, Marie.” I said, “How do you know my name?” He didn’t answer. He said, “You’re going to be okay. Don’t worry, you’re going to be fine.” And he put his hand on my shoulder and he walked with me outside.

  I went to my church on the reservation and I told the priest that there was a priest at this old church, all by himself, and he needed a place to stay. We went over to the old church, and by now it was dark. Nobody was there.

  The priest called me a liar. He said I was making it up to get attention. I said, “No, look, he walked me outside and you can see the footprints.” He said, “Those are from somebody else that you brought down here.” He didn’t believe me, so I just shrugged it off. I forgot it, and I didn’t remember it until years and years later.

  I went to prison at the age of thirteen and a half for killing my cousin. My grandma had made some liquor, and I drank two jars and I don’t remember what happened, but my cousin was dead and I was covered with blood. I was tried and convicted and I went to prison. I was just a little girl, and they did things to me in prison that little girls don’t deserve.

  I had an aunt there who got me a job in the kitchen, and I drank vanilla extract every day because it has alcohol in it. I drank shoe polish. We had a smoke, tea with crushed aspirins in it. I just wanted oblivion, because I had killed my cousin in a blackout.

  The good things I got out of prison were my GED and a certificate that said I was a cosmetologist. The bad thing was, I left with the disease of alcoholism even worse in me. I left with the attitude of “I’m going to show them.” I hated everyone and I was going to get even with everybody. I got home and I just started partying.

  One night I met the man who was going to take me away from everything, and he turned out to be an alcoholic like me but even worse, and a heroin addict. He was a musician, and he did take me places and show me things, but once I got pregnant, I didn’t go anywhere. I stayed at home and I drank at home.

  We were married for twelve years, and we had four boys. We fought all the time. I had this ugly mouth. I wanted to get back at everybody through him, and he put me in the hospital more than once. The last time he sent me to the hospital, they put me in traction for the broken bones and they wired my broken jaw. I figured I couldn’t do this anymore. When I got out of the hospital I found a new place to live. On December the fourth, we moved in and I put my kids to bed and I told them that I loved them. I always told my kids that I loved them and I always hugged them, because I never got that from my mother. I never had a mother’s love, as far back as I can remember.

  Anyway, I put my k
ids to bed and I drank my bottle, because that’s what I did to put myself to sleep every night. My husband came during the night and burned down my house. I lost my four boys, and I nearly died. I wound up in a catatonic state and I was in the hospital about eleven months. The first thought that came into my mind was, I didn’t get to kiss them good- bye.

  I decided this was God’s punishment for what I did when I was thirteen and a half, killing my cousin. That’s the thought I had, and I said, “I don’t want God. I hate God.” I hated everybody. Mostly I hated myself.

  I got a job at the VA hospital, and that’s where I met my second husband. First I thought he was a cuckoo bird. He said he recognized me, that he knew me. He didn’t know me, he was just talking. A week later I moved in with him. We got married on Thanksgiving and I always said, “I married a turkey, a real turkey.” He was sober and he went to recovery meetings. I thought, “Well, I’ll go to those meetings too.” I’d stick my head in the door and then go to the bar across the street.

  By this time I was working at Lockheed, and I had a good job paying fifteen dollars an hour. Back in the late seventies that was a lot of money. My apartment was only $235 a month. My husband wasn’t working and I was supporting him, so I moved out.

  I went to a lot of places, those last five years of drinking. I went to a lot of places, not just in my head, but physically I went places that I thought I would never go. One night I smoked a supercool, at Griffith Park. That’s where we’d go on Thursday nights, after we got paid. I smoked the supercool, and next thing I know, I’m in a van, naked. I banged on the door and I asked the guy, “Hey, what happened to me?” He said, “Don’t worry, baby, nobody touched you. You took all your clothes off and got on the merry-go-round. It took eight guys to get you off that horse.”