I got tired of that and I quit. I was sober nineteen months. In April 1982, I called my aunt in Arizona to wish her a happy Easter. She said, “How come you didn’t come to your mother’s burial?” That’s how I found out my mother had died. My family back in Arizona had my number and my address, but they never told me.
I said to my aunt, “I didn’t know my mom was dead.” She said, “Well, you should have been here,” and I said, “I didn’t know.” I hung up the phone and sat there for the rest of the day.
A few days later I was driving around Burbank like a nut. I had this beer between my legs and I am drinking it and then I just threw it out the window. I didn’t know it was going to be my last drink, but a voice inside my head told me, “You don’t have to do this anymore.” It was a soft voice, it didn’t sound like me. It was the same voice I heard in that church when I was ten years old. It was that same voice telling me, “You’re going to be okay.” My life was going to be good. I drove home and I went to sleep.
That week went by, and Mother’s Day was coming up. That Friday I was on my way to a retreat up in Redlands, and I was like a caged lion. This priest said to me, “What’s wrong, Marie?” and I said, “Nothing,” thinking I’m tough.
He said again, “What’s wrong, Marie?” and his voice was so soft. I started to cry and I told him, “I don’t know.” So I told him my whole story. I told him about my kids dying and how I missed them every day. I went home after the retreat, and the next morning I went to wash my face. That’s when I saw the reflection of God looking back at me through my eyes.
I never looked into my eyes, ever, but that day I caught my eyes in the mirror and I said, “You are an alcoholic.” I called that priest, and the priest suggested I go to a meeting. I went. I did what he said and raised my hand and now I’m here.
I don’t believe in what I used to believe in. I don’t believe in my thinking anymore, for one thing. My thinking gets me in trouble.
A few years ago, when I was seventeen years sober, I was at a women’s retreat, one I was running, and I was supposed to speak at another women’s retreat too, but I was contemplating suicide. My head was telling me, “You don’t deserve a good life. You don’t deserve the good things that you have, because your kids aren’t with you. Why should you enjoy life when your kids didn’t get to enjoy it?”
Saturday morning when I woke up at the first retreat, I went into the dining room to get my coffee, and my sponsor, Angie, was there. She said, “Sit here and talk to me.” I looked at her and I said, “Just because you have a lot of time, that doesn’t mean that you can order me around.” I went and got my coffee and I was walking out and Angie said, “Marie, you want to talk to me. Let’s go to my room.” I said, “No, I don’t want to talk to you,” and I went back to my room. When I’d finished blow-drying my hair, I came out and Angie was sitting out there at my door. She said, “Why do you want to kill yourself?”
I started crying. I told her, “I don’t want to speak tomorrow. How can I give the Sunday morning feature speech when I want to die? I don’t deserve the life I’m living. I need to be with my kids.”
She said, “What makes you think that if you kill yourself you’re going to be with your kids?” And I started crying even more.
She handed me a hankie and she said, “I am going to help you embrace that pain. We are going to do it together. I’m telling you, you’re going to be okay. This morning I saw in you what I saw in myself almost twenty years ago, when I had eighteen years of sobriety. I got through it with help, and now I’m helping you, and you’ll be able help someone else when you see it in that person.”
I believe God does for me what I can’t do for myself.
What I’m afraid of is disappointing myself, because I’ve done that all my life. I’ve been a loser all my life before I came into recovery. My mother always told me, “You’re worthless, you’re good for nothing, you’ll never amount to anything.” I was at Portland, Oregon, speaking in front of thirty-eight hundred women. I got up there and the first thing that came into my mind was “What if my mama could see me now?”
I did become something. First I became an alcoholic, and then I became someone who helps other alcoholics. And that’s what keeps me going. That day in Portland, women were coming up to me and hugging me and thanking me for my honesty and for my courage. I kept thinking, “You don’t know how I feel inside. I don’t have courage.” I don’t. Sometimes I give in to my thinking. I am human. I make mistakes. I am guilty of a lot of things. But I don’t drink, no matter what. That’s the bottom line.
Miracle House is a place for addicts and alcoholics to live without drugs or alcohol. People come here from prison, from the street, from other recovery places. I work with the women and they call me Mom. That feels good. It feels really good.
I encourage them to do things that are positive. I encourage them to do it for themselves, not for their kids, even though it’s good for the kids too. Their recovery has to belong to them. I encourage them to learn to be good mothers and good daughters and good friends. I tell them that life is too short. I’ve seen a lot of women die, I’ve seen a lot of men die from this disease, and it’s not a pretty sight.
After I heard that voice—“You don’t have to do this anymore”—and I threw out that beer, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was so empty. I was so empty inside that I felt hollow. I was walking around, and I had to touch my heart a couple of times to see if it was beating. I didn’t know what was happening to me. All I knew was, there was something I was looking for. I was looking for love, and like the song says, I was looking in all the wrong places, but love was always here. I didn’t know that.
I know it now. Love is here with my husband, and we’ve been together for over twenty- six years now. Love is here with the women at Miracle House, with people in recovery all over the world. I live a good life, and that’s something beyond my wildest drunken dreams.
Thomas Henderson
Thomas has had a colorful life. From 1975 to 1979, he was an outstanding linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, as well known for his outlandish behavior as for his incredible speed. (He wasn’t nicknamed “Hollywood” for nothing.) By 1980, his football career was over and his life rapidly spiraled out of control. He says, “Hollywood died on November 8, 1983,” after an arrest on drug and assault charges. He maintained his sobriety through two years in prison, and became a dynamic, inspiring, in- your-face motivational speaker. In 2000 he won the Texas state lottery and used part of the money to start East Side Youth Services and Street Outreach to help at- risk youth in his hometown, Austin, Texas.
Telling his story, Thomas talks about crying—not just in sorrow but also in gratitude. In his interview and all the others, any time two alcoholics connect in recovery, there’s an enormous sense of gratitude for the way our lives have been transformed.
I
saw too much as a kid. I’m a little bit of everybody I’ve ever met, and I met too many people. I’m talking about pimps, whores, drug addicts, and heroin users, and that messed me up. But I have to tell you something. For twenty- something years now, my pain has been the greatest library of sharing. I can go a lot of places deep down in my pain, in my shame, and find something that’s useful to another human being. That’s the gift of this thing I’m in, this recovery.
In 1983 I was in Long Beach, California, living near the beach. I was working for a construction company as a foreman, and basically my days were spent working six to seven hours a day and the rest of the time I was smoking crack. I had lost my football career because of a neck injury, so I ended up in California. I was going to be an actor. I had O. J. Simpson’s agent, and I was his only other African-American client. I went on some interviews with network television executives, and my agent got me into this acting school. But I was smoking crack at such a crazy rate that I couldn’t even make appointments. I couldn’t go to auditions and I couldn’t show up for the classes because I was too busy smoking crack.
At the end of October, I called the Long Beach Fire Department because I was convinced there was a bomb under my car. Here comes three fire trucks, the bomb squad, and twenty police officers to my address. I’m lying on the ground, on top of all these rocks and the asphalt, and I’m showing this fireman and this cop this wire under my Mercedes-Benz, and it has to be a bomb. And of course, it wasn’t true. I was completely paranoid. Mentally, physically, and spiritually . . . I was completely annihilated by crack cocaine.
You know, different drugs have their different tortures, but the torture of crack cocaine use is extreme paranoia. You think people are looking for you, out to get you. You think there’s somebody in the bushes and the weeds, on the roof and in the light sockets. It took me a long time to get this, but now I know who was really looking for me when I was torturing myself smoking crack, and that was death. Death was looking for me, and death just about found me. Everything I was doing every minute was killing me. That’s the crack experience. You think there’s somebody out there looking for you. You peep out the window, you think you see a shadow, and you wonder, “Who is that?” It’s death.
A week after the bomb squad came, there was a scene that had happened with me a hundred times, at least, with a gal or a couple of gals— some cocaine and some sex. That’s pretty much all I thought it was. I was accused of threatening these two girls, waving a gun at them, but that’s not what I saw then. In that cocaine culture, the deal was, I bring the cocaine and the girls bring the sex. Who says no?
Of course, that’s not the culture everywhere, not in the moral society, not in the normal world. But in the dope- addict world, that is normal, unfortunately.
People who have been to jail know that you’d rather be in prison than city jail, but there I was, in city jail. I’m sick and I’m humiliated. I remember standing over a sink, which is right over the toilet. The sink is dirty, the toilet is dirty, the mirror is dirty, everything around me is dirty . . . and I catch a glimpse of my soul. I’m looking in this mirror and I think, “Who the fuck are you, and what have you done with Thomas?” I saw a stranger that I didn’t recognize, the stranger I had become.
But then I got out on bail and I was back at that Long Beach apartment. I had a check, so the first thing I did, I cashed it and I went and bought more cocaine. This is after being arrested. This is after putting up my Super Bowl ring for my bond. This is after looking into that mirror.
The next few days are a blur of crack annihilation. I mean just sucking it into my lungs, brain, and spirit, all day and all night. Then a friend came to the house. I think he heard about my arrest on the news. Anyway, he showed up, and he literally had to pry the pipe out of my hand. He got me in his car and took me out to Orange, California, to the care unit.
I don’t recall much about that day. I know I didn’t have insurance. I had no money by then. But this little doctor took me in, Dr. Joseph Pursch. After my assessment, he looked directly at me and said the words I needed to hear: “Thomas Henderson, anything is possible if you stay sober. Nothing is possible if you ever drink or drug again.”
It was that statement that gave me a choice. That was my moment of clarity. I understood what I had to do, I understood what my choices were, and thus began my introduction to treatment and to halfway houses and all of that.
I’m in the treatment facility a week, two weeks, and I’m still trying to get my hands around this depression, this suicidal thinking, this constant noise of “I can’t do this. I can’t fix this. What are people thinking about me?” in my head. I can’t defend myself. How do you explain “Oh, I’ve been doing this for years. You know, I give girls coke for sexual favors. It was just a misunderstanding.” How does that make it any better?
So I did not know how I was going to handle this. I was thirty years old, I’d never been arrested for anything, never even been accused of any kind of sexual force. Yeah, I did a lot of drugs, I got in trouble with coaches, but this stuff . . . I’m just thinking, “That isn’t Thomas.” Well, then . . . who did it? And where did Thomas go?
I’m going through the program and I’m saying, “Oh, this is finally good.” But in my soul, I’m not feeling so good. I’m feeling hopelessness and helplessness. My esteem is negative- something. My self-worth is nowhere. All those things that keep you sane and alive—I was on empty. I had nothing.
And then I got a phone call. The lady says, “A Roger Staubach called you and wants you to call him back.” Well, Roger Staubach was the Cowboys’ quarterback when I was linebacker, but that’s not even . . . Roger Staubach is a Naval Academy guy, Heisman Trophy winner, Super Bowl champion, All-Pro, a man of God, a man of family, just one of the greatest human beings that I have ever known, as a man and as a friend.
I pick up the phone but I can’t call Roger. I just didn’t know how to speak to him, so I didn’t call him that day. But I finally did call, and he picked up the phone. If there’s a moment when I thought maybe I was going to make it, that maybe it was going to be okay, that was the moment.
The conversation basically goes like this. “Hey Thomas, how are you doing?”
“Well, not so good.”
And he said, “Thomas, let me tell you something. You are a good guy. You have always been a good guy.”
I have to tell you, at that point I did not know I was a good guy. But if Roger Staubach says that I’m a good guy . . . at that moment in time, that was enough for me. I was at zero and he says, “You’re a good guy.” I’ve got nothing and he gives me something to build on.
Roger says, “Now, you’ve screwed up. Get it straight. Pay your dues. Get the consequences out of the way. But you are a good guy.”
And that saved my life.
When I was a boy, we were poor. Not starving, but poor. I’d come home from school or get up in the morning and go to have some cereal, and there’d be no milk. Or we’d have milk but no cereal. I’d take walks and talk to God. I’d scream at God, crying. That little boy said, “I am going to do better than this. When I grow up, I’m going to college. I’m going to make lots of money and we’re going to have lots of goddamn milk in the house, and we’re going to have bread, and peanut butter and jelly, and eggs. And I’m going to take care of Mom and I’m going to buy her a car. I’ll buy her two cars.” I would tell God, “I do not want to live like this my whole life.”
The strength of that eleven-year-old boy . . . That’s who got me through high school and college. That’s who got me to the Super Bowl and the World Championship, that determined little boy. That day in jail, when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t see him, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again. That scared me so much I never forgot it. Then when Roger told me, “You are a good guy”—I went back to that spirit. I found that strong little boy in my darkest times.
I ended up getting twenty-eight months in prison, on a plea bargain. I mean I was guilty, so why torture anybody else, making them testify and so on. So I’m at Chino Prison, and my brother—I have a younger brother on my DNA-donor side. That’s what I call the man who caused my life, my DNA donor, because he was no father to me. He had other children, and one of those boys was Allen, a great kid, good-looking kid. Allen was a correctional officer in New York, and he got busted for bringing in substances to work, and he goes home and he hangs himself.
I’m in prison, just about to start my sentence. I get this phone call and it’s my Aunt Gwen, and she says, “Allen’s dead. He committed suicide.”
I hang up the phone and I start to walk down the corridor back to my cell, and this corridor looks like it’s half a mile long, just concrete corridor as far as you could see. I take a few steps and then I fall out on the floor in this primal, guttural crying. I don’t think I’d cried since I was twelve years old, about anything. Anything. And I know I’d never cried like this in my life. The sounds that are coming out of me—barking, screaming, wailing. The guards come and I am spasmatic, crying, crying, crying. It felt like an hour, but it was probably only two or three minutes
of just the hardest crying you can imagine.
When I got back to my cell, my eyes are swollen, I’m clearing my throat, snot everywhere. Another moment of clarity. I wasn’t crying for Allen. Not just him. I was crying for him, and for me, and for all the men who are hurting so bad and can’t ask for help. I give talks to men’s groups and I say, “There’ll be times when you need to cry and you don’t cry. But you can’t keep that up forever. Sometimes you just got to cry, about all of it. All of us.”
When I’m with somebody who’s struggling, I tell them the truth. I have this ability to be honest about my own stuff, and I’m really not judgmental. But I have to speak the truth. I’ve had some success with people by just telling the truth. I think they know it is the truth, and not a lot of people are willing to tell the truth. That’s the whole magic of this thing, that some of us get to live—live and tell the truth.
I read recently somewhere that 2 percent of recovering people get twenty years. And there goes the 1 percent at thirty years. It’s not even measurable at forty. You go to enough recovery meetings and you’ll run into that one guy in there with forty years.
So I’m really still humble in this. In November 1983, Roger Staubach said I was a good guy, and I’ve been trying to live up to that ever since. I’m still working on keeping the spirit of that eleven-year-old boy who didn’t have any milk. ’Cause I don’t want to see that other guy in the mirror again. Not ever.
Mike Early
Mike is the chief operating officer of the Caron Treatment Centers, and he’s worked in the recovery field for thirty- five years—almost as long as he’s been sober. Mike is the one who persuaded me to work with Caron, hitting the road to talk about addiction issues as public policy. He’s one of the people we all look up to in the field, and a tremendous example of someone who’s made recovery his life’s work. He spent a while in the limbo of “not drinking but not sober,” and his family was instrumental in getting him out of that limbo.
Moments of Clarity Page 23