I’d gone to the doctor in the East Village with the steel door, the kind with a little window, like a bookie joint. Everyone in the waiting room had the shakes when they came in and a prescription in their hand when they left, myself included. I don’t remember what they were—some kind of uppers, I’m sure—but I took a few pills and went to my acting class with Uta Hagen. What a great lady. She threw me out of class that day, saying, as I recall, “You can fool the critics but you can’t fool me.” I didn’t have a clue what she meant.
At the time, I was living with Kathy, a high-priced call girl/wayward actress from Nashville. I’d made it my duty to rescue her from this Mafia guy who’d been paying for her apartment. I guess she was a lost soul like me. She was perfect: a beautiful southern damsel in distress, and best of all, she didn’t mind my drinking. At least, I thought she didn’t. I didn’t realize she simply had no idea how much I drank. I was shocked when she came back from a trip and asked about this half- gallon of vodka we kept in the freezer. It had been full when she left, and now it was almost empty. “Did you drink that whole bottle in two weeks?” I was embarrassed and cornered, so I lied and told her that friends had come over while she was gone. They drank it. She seemed happy with that, but now I was on alert; if she was ticked off about me possibly drinking a half- gallon in two weeks, for sure I wasn’t going to tell her I drank a half- gallon every two days. And that was at-home drinking, before going out to do the serious drinking. If I couldn’t be honest with myself about how much I drank, I sure as hell couldn’t be honest with her.
Anyway, that week I was home more than usual. For some reason I’d quit my job waiting on tables. Every morning Kathy would give me some shit about messing up the kitchen in the middle of the night. I’d deny it, and rightly so. I didn’t eat in the middle of the night, and I’d never leave a mess. It was only the two of us in a one-room studio apartment, so I don’t know who I thought did it. Elves, maybe. I didn’t care. “Just get the fuck off my back, or you’ll go on the list.”
I had this list in my head of the people who’d embarrassed me, who didn’t understand me. The fuckers who’d hassle me about stupid shit, like maybe stealing their booze or money or drugs. My response was always “I didn’t do it. Shit happens. Get over it.” Then I was out the door to find some new place where people weren’t so paranoid and suspicious. Sure, things kind of disappeared when I was around, but I certainly didn’t do it. Of course, I had done all those things and more, but if I believed I hadn’t, then I hadn’t, period.
If my denial about stealing was rock solid, my denial about my drinking was ironclad. I had a real capacity to disassociate myself from whatever I did, so that I could believe I hadn’t done it enough to deny it convincingly. I must have begun to suspect that booze was a problem, because around this time I’d started to lie about going to meetings during a couple of those late-night drunken phone calls to whoever lived far away and still took my calls. I don’t know how I even knew about meetings. I’d only met one guy who went to meetings, and he was a total loser.
People just don’t understand. As far as alcoholics are concerned, they aren’t afraid of the truth. Everyone else is.
I think Carl Jung is right about the need for an alcoholic to experience some kind of psychic change if they’re ever going to recover. For me, a psychic change means a new way of looking at things, a paradigmatic shift in awareness or consciousness or perception that’s totally unpredictable and completely unfathomable up to the moment it happens.
Even though it happened over thirty years ago, I remember the moment it happened to me like it was yesterday.
One night I go to bed and pass out as usual, and next thing I know I’m standing in my kitchen, looking into Kathy’s eyes. I knew a couple of things simultaneously: we were in the middle of a conversation, and whatever it was about, I’d just said something completely insane, because she had that look on her face like a puppy gets when you make a high-pitched whistle and they cock their head to one side and look at you like “What the fuck was that?” In that nanosecond, I saw myself through her eyes. I saw not the guy I’d convinced myself I was, but—accurately—who and what I’d become. A stranger. A monster. Out of control.
I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of the end. I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. I mean after that night, I really couldn’t. I knew what I’d become. It no longer mattered if I convinced you I didn’t have a problem. I knew.
I remember turning away from her, toward the only light in the kitchen, a sickly candle-flicker behind me. I saw what our conversation was about. I’d been cooking a grilled cheese sandwich on the stove, without benefit of a pan. Directly on the burner. There was this silence, just the hiss of a grilled cheese becoming charcoal.
I know now that blackouts are considered a sure sign of the disease of alcoholism. Normal drinkers don’t seem to have them. It’s when your body walks and talks, and maybe drives or gets arrested or worse, without your knowledge. Whatever makes you aware of you isn’t in there. As a friend once put it, “Blackouts are like leaving the house with all the doors and windows open. Anyone can walk in and do whatever they want.”
This happened right around June 16, 1977, my twenty-eighth birthday. I was doing a play on forty-second Street. The theater had a bathroom with one of those old overhead ceramic tanks, up high, right at the ceiling. Every day I’d hide a pint of vodka in the tank, and drink when I took a bathroom break. I’d be loaded by lunch. Somehow I confessed that I couldn’t stop drinking to this wonderful woman, Claire Heller—God bless her—who was producing the play. I have no idea why I told her. I’d never told anyone. I think she must have asked me about my drinking.
Turns out she had a friend who was in recovery, and get this, he was one of the three other people in the play. She told me I could ask him for help if I needed it. I called him, and he took me to one of those recovery meetings. I stayed sober a week, and I was so happy I wasn’t an alcoholic anymore, I got a pint of vodka and went to see a noon show of Star Wars. I’m sitting in the back row of this theater, drinking this bottle, and as I finished, I started crying. It hit me that I was an alcohol addict, just like a drug addict. I had to drink. Me thinking I was choosing to drink was just bullshit.
I went back to meetings, but even then I didn’t stop drinking until July thirteenth. I know I had my last drink, one lousy beer, on July 13, 1977, because it was the night of the big blackout in New York. I was doing a production of Butterflies Are Free and in the middle of the play the lights went out. My character was blind, and I ad-libbed what I think was my all-time best: “Mom, somebody turned off the radio.” We finished the play, as I recall, but what I remember clearly is that earlier that night I’d bought two 16-ounce Coors to drink before the show, and I never got to the second. The first one had gotten me so drunk I could barely walk. I was in that stage where I could drink a quart of vodka and not get stoned or, as on this night, get plotzed on one beer. I knew my drinking had chewed me up and spit me out.
In order to stay sober, I’ve had to become a totally different human. Nobody knows how somebody like me gets sober. I couldn’t stop and couldn’t conceive of stopping. I was without hope. There was no way, through my own power, that I could change. Then it happened, zapped out of the blue. I’m in the kitchen, having this experience, which is the beginning of the end. You can’t make that happen. It just does. I now believe that things happen in this world that defy easy explanation. It’s certainly not a matter of virtue, because my dad was a great guy, and he was dead at fifty-four from complications of alcoholism. All I did that he didn’t do was I got to a place where I really wanted to stop but I couldn’t.
Before that moment in the kitchen, there is nothing that anyone could have said to get through my denial. My denial was impenetrable. That’s why that moment, when it happens, is so profound. Some people get put off by the whole spiritual thing in the program, but I think it’s as simple as, they didn’t know what else to call it. S
topping is not a mental experience—at least it isn’t for an alcoholic of my type, because I decided to get sober a hundred times and it never lasted. Getting sober is not a physical experience either. There’s no predictable cure for chronic drinkers except total abstinence, and if that was easy, more people would do it. If you’re doing it on will alone and you don’t change inside . . . well, the only person who’s as miserable to be around as an active drunk is a sober drunk who needs a drink.
When I was drinking, I wasn’t afraid of anything. That was the point. After I was sober a while, that’s when I discovered I was full of fear. It never occurred to me that I’d never had sober sex until I did, and I had a lot of feelings about it. I hadn’t worked without a drink in a long time, because I was afraid to. Turns out I was afraid of pretty much everything, in some way. That’s why the idea of living sober was so terrifying. I think that’s why the long-term success rate for most people who try to stop by themselves—at least, alcoholics of my type—is so bad. Stopping isn’t really the problem. Living sober and surviving sobriety . . . that’s the problem.
I have no idea if God ultimately exists or not; I choose to believe because it’s like the wind—you can’t see it, but you can see its effects. I’ve seen too many miracles, too many incredible coincidences, too many lives restored, to not believe in an intelligent universe that responds to intention. There’s an axiom that says, “I see the world as I am, not as it is.” When I’m toxic, the world looks toxic to me, and my effect on people feels poisonous. When I’m in a good place, the world ain’t so bad. Believing in a loving God with a great sense of humor is how I stay in a good place.
Martin Sheen
In a career that’s spanned over four decades, Martin has played hundreds of roles, but he’s best known for three: Kit, the seductive killer in Badlands; Captain Willard, the tormented would- be assassin in Apocalypse Now; and President Bartlet in The West Wing. I first met Martin at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, when he was coming back from sailing with my Aunt Ethel. This was not long after he’d had his heart attack during the filming of Apocalypse Now, and he looked like he was about to have another one. He said, “Coppola couldn’t kill me, but your aunt almost did.”
Martin’s activism on behalf of peace and social justice goes back as long as his career, and his passion and commitment have only gotten stronger over the years. I know he’s been a great friend and supporter of Patrick Kennedy’s work on mental health and insurance parity issues. When Martin and I sat down at his house in Malibu for the interview, he told me the only reason he’d agreed to talk about his—and his family’s—history with addiction was because he’d read Symptoms of Withdrawal. He said, “If you could be that honest, so can I.”
I
was drinking quite often, and when I drank, it gave me permission to do things that I normally would not do. I had a moral frame of reference. I never played around or anything except when I drank. I
was one person here in this house and I was quite another person out there, ass-kissing and trying to get the job, and if I didn’t get the job or I got a bad review, they all suffered. If I was sleeping late, it was “Don’t wake him up, don’t get him upset,” because I was a rageaholic, and you know that is the word. But no one out there ever saw my rage, unless I got a part where I could ratchet it up. Then you’d see some anger or some rage behavior through a character. The real rage, that was here in this house.
If I could change anything in my life, it would be the violence that I did to my children—the extremely rare physical violence, the more frequent emotional violence, and of course the spiritual violence. If I was at the last breath of my life and I was offered one wish, that’s the thing I would ask for. Please let me take back the violence. Let me heal the wounds that I inflicted with my behavior, my alcoholism, my ego, my dishonesty. The people I love the most paid the price for all that.
The moment I’m going to share with you, there are two witnesses to it, Janet and Charlie. Charlie was a very dear, very shy kid. Because he was so sensitive, because my anger affected him so much, I would overcompensate. I would either be too nice to him or too mean to him.
Charlie was a very good baseball player, just a wonderful athlete generally. When he was about fifteen, a sophomore in high school, we were playing basketball at the house. He had never beaten me one-on-one. I used to be pretty good. But that day, he had me. He was whipping me, and I kept coming back and coming back. He had to win by two, right? He was one up, and I missed a shot and he got the rebound, drove around the back, zinged that thing, and got it. He was dancing around, and I said, “No, no . . . we play by the rules, right?”
“Yes, but I won!”
“No, you stepped on the line right here. You went out of bounds.” I could not let him have it. He beat me fair and square, and I could not
let him have it, and he was so furious. That’s the ego. That’s what he had to deal with in me, what the whole family had to deal with.
One morning about a year later, he came in to our bedroom. Maybe we were out the night before, maybe I was hungover, I don’t remember the specifics—just that we were sleeping late and he came barging in. Boom! The door flies open and he says, “I need some money for lunch.” I wake up, “What the hell is this?” and he said, “Come on, I’m late. I need some money!” and he was not pleased. No “May I?” No “Please.” Nothing.
Janet said, “Well, darling, get something out of my purse over there.” He grabbed the purse and looked in and said, “There’s nothing in here!” and he threw the purse down and he said some vulgarity, used the F-word. That set me off. I am stark naked and I bolted out of bed and I said something awful. I said, “You little son of a bitch!” I was going to knock him cold with every thing I had. He turned to look at me and he threw his head back, and as my hand was flying toward him, just flying right at his face, I opened it and I hit him in the chest hard enough that I knocked him down on the floor. He looked up at me, and for the first time in my life I saw myself. I saw the mirror, I saw me. I saw what I looked like in his eyes. I was a monster. I was this raging lunatic who would physically assault his son, this little boy.
He started scooting on his elbows and his ass, trying to get away from me, and I just lost it. I kept pursuing him, saying, “Oh, Jesus, I am sorry. I am so sorry. Forgive me,” and he was not having it. He was cursing me and trying to get away, just desperate to get away from me, and I kept following him. When he got to the kitchen, he got up and he headed for the door and I said, “Please, no, wait, Charlie, I am so sorry. Forgive me.” “You asshole,” he said, and he opened the door and I followed him out. I said, “I’m not going to let you get away. Please don’t leave. I’m going to follow you.” I just reach for him, and I’m naked, and the guys and kids, his friends, are all watching the scene. He’s dodging around the car, trying to get away, and we’re both weeping, and finally he just stayed still long enough, I walked in, and I just hugged him and held him and I kissed him and I said, “Forgive me . . . just forgive me,” and that was it.
It made all the difference in both of our lives and it changed me forever. I began to realize that I had done this kind of thing to all of them, all my children, for all their lives. I had emotionally traumatized them with my violence, with my temper, with my ego. It was all about me, and if they were anything, they were decorations. I began to become aware of how I had hurt my kids with my ego and with my desperate desire to be liked. Well, loved, really. Being an actor is about being loved. If you’re not loved, unless you get big box office or something, you can’t work here. We know that. We all know that. So you try desperately not to offend anybody, and then you treat your family like shit, and that’s what I was doing. I hurt my children most obviously by raging at them and I hurt my children subtly by not looking at them. By not looking across the table and seeing them. That happened most with Charlie. He would be in terrible, terrible shape, and I would rage and I would weep, “Look what you’re doing to me!” What
have I done to him? I taught him how to do it. I taught him everything he knew. I never got into the drugs in that way, but I used to drink with the lads on a few occasions, not falling-down drunk but certainly not presentable either.
But because of that incident when he was sixteen, he knew I had a good heart. He knew I was a desperate man. He knew I was addicted.
I became very aware of my drinking, but I thought I deserved to drink. I deserved to get drunk every now and then. After all, wasn’t I carrying this burden? I’m entitled. If anyone’s entitled, certainly it’s me, and I don’t do it that often, and I rarely do it at home.
It took me a long time to stop because I always felt, in a lot of ways, that someday I’m going to have a life. This is not it right now. I’ve got to raise these children, I’ve got to have this career, I’ve to do all this stuff, but this isn’t really my life. Someday I’ll be myself, but what’s happening here isn’t me.
That’s changed. I know this is me, this is my life, and I’m grateful for it. Janet and I have been together, through all the ups and downs, and she has become my hero. I adore her. I adore my children, I adore my grandchildren. Gosh, I just couldn’t have it any better.
We did three interventions with Charlie, and the final one, I said, “Well, I need some help here.” He had broken his parole and I knew it. He left the hospital, and they gave me what he’d left behind. I saw what he took for the overdose. I got to see it, I owned it. I had the evidence that he’d broken his parole. I said, “Janet, I’ve got to go out and see the judge. I’ve got to see the sheriff.” Oh, Jesus. That was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but I knew that I had to do it. I was thinking, “Who am I going to invite to the funeral? What am I going to say?” This was the last thing I could try.
The sheriff called Charlie, because he was barricaded in his apartment, a penthouse where the elevator opened inside the apartment, one of those places, so he knew who was coming and going. I gave them the number. I did the only thing that I could do.
Moments of Clarity Page 29