Let It Flow — Bigger Than Christmas

When you've found yourself in the seemingly endless loop of patches of sobriety and then relapses and rehabs, you tend to spend a lot of time on your own. The people that love you and whose hearts you keep filling with hope and then shattering at some point start drifting away. I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone, but, of course, it happens regularly when you're a junkie or drunk or aficionado of any sort of self-destruction. I suspect that there are people out there, friends, who at one point loved me, and my habits turned that off in them. No one's ever told me, "I don't love you anymore as a friend because of your insane relationship with something that is undoubtedly killing you." Generally, when people get to this point, and again, I'm talking about friends, they just vanish. We wear them down. People can only take so much heartbreak and being lied to. So I'm not sure if any friends stopped loving me, but they had to do it from a very safe distance and get on with their lives. They have to heal. It's quite a feeling as I write this and think of it in this manner. Certainly, I'm very clear on how much collateral damage my firing for effect caused, but I've never considered that I'd become a health issue for them. Simply being my friend at times was, for them, an affliction that would ultimately require them to leave and heal. I became something to be cured out of the people who loved me. I'd become something you could catch.

When I was sober, and I've been sober well more than I've been strung out, I'm an ok guy, I think. This is the issue tho. It draws them in or back in again, given enough time. I'd get sober after a relapse, most of which seemed to last a couple months; I don't think I've ever used straight through for a year. Then I'd usually wind up in rehab, or maybe not, and I'd go back to AA and get my life back on track. And the next thing you know, my friends are all back around and hoping that this'll be the one. This is when he's gonna make it stick. Or perhaps they think, well, I hope he can keep it together at least longer than the last time. But they're back, and their guard has been lowered at least a little bit. And then, at some point, I just give in and revert to type, and the shrapnel of my selfish choice hits anyone close enough.

If there's some sort of demented and sad Hall of Fame for relapsing yet always coming back, I'd have to be in it. I wouldn't bet my life right now on this figure, but at one point, I'd counted at least 15 periods of at least one year of sobriety only to relapse again. I've had five years at one point. There have been a few 2 or so year stretches. This, of course, also leads to countless rehabs and detoxes. It feels bad writing this. There's nothing remotely within any of this that I take even some sort of twisted pride in. I wasted a whole lot of my life and hurt a whole lot of people with this cycle of selfishness and greed. The greed for comfort and escape. These things that are generally meant to be earned, they aren't meant to be immediately available to someone so fast and easy. It's an abomination.

I'd reached one of these periods in the near Melinda years. I just know it was during the time that we either lived together on one side of Silver Lake Blvd or when we walked across the street one day and moved into separate apartments in the same building. So this memory that has remained with me all these years seems to have been untethered from a dated timeline, but it happened. I was strung out again. I'm pretty sure Lifter had formed its nascent version, and I feel like we had already hooked up with Scott and Jake, our managers. A little about Scotty Cybala and Jake Ottman. We were the first band they'd ever managed, and as we did so many times in Lifter, we just excitedly said yes to anything offered. Scotty lived in LA, so he was generally a daily presence, but Jake lived in New York. They and Lifter were truly learning this whole thing together. I suspect things would have been different for us at Interscope had we gone with an actual high-powered manager, but we liked these guys. And they did their best. But Going up against a behemoth like Interscope and fighting for a newly signed, relatively unknown band was easygoing for them. In any case, we loved this odd couple of a management team. Scotty was a chain-smoking, cynical bastard at times who was very direct with good or bad news. Dispassionate almost. Not that he didn't care, far from it, actually, but his style was to just drop a bomb on you and figure out what to do next.

On the other hand, Jake was the seemingly happiest guy on Earth. He always seemed to be in a state of perpetual childlike glee, and he'd tell us basically yes to anything we'd ask about. At times it was preposterous how much he claimed we had coming to us. This guy just was not wired to give bad news. We used to joke that if we were going to NY and asked Jake if he could arrange for us to pitch an inning of a Yankee game (I surely would have pitched for whoever they were playing. Fuck the Yankees), his immediate response would be "Oh, dude, of course. No problem, I can definitely make that happen." Ultimately as I look back, I'm truly grateful we gave these guys a chance and really, the chances of my life ending up wildly different than it is had we got some bigshot manager are pretty slim. I'd much rather have made 2 friends with two pretty good guys.

So I'm back at the point where I've relapsed again and just in full shame and guilt mode. I can't believe I've done this again. Jesus, if I only knew how relentless it would become. I've written elsewhere that virtually all of my drug use has been during periods of relapse after having connected with and become tight with some very good friends while going to AA. That's a really horrible place to be getting high in. Sure, you get high but have this ever-present shrowd of self-loathing and always hoping you don't run into anyone from AA, and if you do, they have the same "conversation" that happens every time. They know you're loaded, and so they ask, "hey man, how's it going? How've you been." It's asked with the barest of curiosity because they know exactly how you're doing. They know you're fucked and putting yourself through the wringer. And so now it's your turn, and you always say the same thing, as you break eye contact and look down at your shoes, "I'm good, man, thanks. I'll hopefully see you tonight at Tropical," or Atwater or whatever meeting the tribe is going to that night. And they wrap it up by saying, "Cool man, I hope I see you there." Of course, you're not even remotely planning on going. Not only do you have to keep getting high, but even if you went high, and surely that happens, the dread and fear of enduring walking into a roomful of friends who are literally plagued by your constant letting them down, even if it's just in your own imagination and seeing the looks in their eyes is torture. And I just kept doing it over and over. Eventually, I'd go back and endure the shrowd of shame and stand up as a newcomer…again. But it was fucking tough. These words we use to describe the self-loathing we feel are many and varied, but they drive us to stay high just to try and get some sort of container around them like a spilled box of cockroaches on the dead pet store of your soul.

People had stopped calling. I still spoke with Scotty, but even those conversations were empty and perfunctory. I'd see Johhny and Jeff, and they surely weren't charged up upon the return, again, of the prodigal son junky. Everyone had had with me. Perfectly understandable. I never once resented anyone for drifting away when I'd relapse. I've done it with friends as well. But there was one guy who never floated away, and Jesus, there were times when he felt like my only true friend in the world.

Jerry Stahl is a great writer, and we became friends through LA in those early 90 days. I really looked up to him. He felt almost like a celebrity to me. He wrote the book Permanent Midnight which basically chronicled his own heroin addiction while frantically trying to keep a family and a daughter and a very successful television writing career. I think he even wrote for that show, Alf. My details are very foggy about the book since it's been so long since I read it. I do know I read it before I met him, so I was already primed to look up to him. And he was easily the most classically cool guy in AA. Now that's a bit of a sideways compliment. The truth is he'd have been the coolest guy in any world he found himself in. Tall guy always wore black. I have no memory of ever seeing a stitch of color or white on him. Ha! I imagine him walking in here right now dressed in those horrible too-many-pockets shorts with a fanny pack and an Affliction shirt. Hell, we'll give him Tevas and socks to round it out. That guy knew how to dress despite its monotone color character. To imagine him breaking every rule of how men should dress all at once kills me. Anyway, we became friends.

One day, and in my memory, I'm still living in Silverlake; he calls me up and asks me if I need anything or, better yet, want to meet for lunch. Now at this point, it had been quite a while since I'd gotten such a pure call and invite to hang out with a friend. And well, that's not quite right because I remember him calling a short time earlier one day asking me if I was eating and did I want him to take me grocery shopping. I was almost surely not eating and could have used a trip and allowed a friend to stock up the fridge a little, but I couldn't do it. It was too much. So I thanked him, and he said, "Ok, man, we'll talk soon” or such. Because he knew exactly what was going on with me, and while he cared about me, he didn't give a fuck that I was a junky. Two very different things. And so, while I couldn't endure a charity grocery shopping trip, I could handle going to lunch. At the time, there was a restaurant called Nettie's at the end of my block. Right across where Spaceland would eventually come to life. It was catercorner to the 7-11. It looked like a shack. I hated the place. I'd been maybe once or twice earlier, and while I don't remember the food, I just remember that there seemed to be an unkindness about the place, and it also felt like it had some acetate overlay of "Penis Equals War" feminism oozing from every bored and kinda angry waitress. I probably just projected my stuff onto a restaurant, but when he suggested it, I, of course, just said, "Wow! Absolutely! Thanks, and I'll see you in 20 minutes."

I remember we sat outside; I'm fully convinced you could say it had no true indoors. It just seemed like a big mean circus tent to me. But here we sat. Jerry, all in black and in shape and me in whatever clothes that I very likely hadn't removed from my body for a week or so.

Ok, I just Googled, and I see that Permanent Midnight came out in 1995. So I'm very off base with my timeline. Man, memories just loop and lurch and sliver all around the miasma of our minds. So let's get straight what we actually do know to be true. I became friends with Jerry at some point. I now remember reading his book before it was published. I know I read it in its manuscript form on my bed in the upstairs apartment in Echo Park. I definitely remember feeling incredibly special and honored that he gave me the manuscript to read. Like I'd been given some Golden Ticket to see behind the scenes, and my way in was this talisman, this manuscript. I know he offered to buy me groceries, and at some point, we wound up sitting at a little table next to the hate tent. And we just talked like friends. He never went in with the whole serious talk about getting sober and all that. Those conversations with people who love you and are very afraid for you are intrinsically beautiful because they come from love. But there's really nothing you can do with them while you're in one except avoid eye contact and just endure the shame. I've had a million of those concerned pep talks, and I always almost religiously would graciously listen and in no way defend myself. It always felt like an atonement to me, and I think that appealed to me, or a least I figured I deserved nothing better. So to all of you who took it upon yourself to confront me with these sorts of talks, I love you.

Jerry never ever went anywhere near that stuff with me unless I brought it up. He was just a friend who knew precisely how I was feeling, and his idea of helping and showing love was to just treat me with basic human kindness and generosity. I also have this weird fragment of memory of him giving a baseball glove at that lunch table. I know we talked about baseball. But I can't fully commit to the mitt memory. I've always had a fairly good mental handle on all the gloves I've had, and I don't remember an odd one. But Jesus, I think by now it's clear that my memory missed a whole lot of life.

It seems for a while during that period that, we'd talk fairly regularly, and I was always so fucking grateful to have at least one person in my life who wasn't in "Save Mike Mode." Although the fact is he probably had a lot more to do with me eventually getting sober for another go at it than either of us know.

Eventually, I did get sober again. I always do. It's truly shocking all the real and metaphorical bullets I've dodged in my life with all this lunacy. At some point, Permanent Midnight was published. I think I went to a reading of it when it came out. I can't imagine not going, but it's a fairly ephemeral memory. The book did well, and eventually, it was picked up and turned into a film starring Ben Stiller. At some point, Jerry asked me if I wanted to go to dinner with him and Ben. I don't know if it was like meeting up with Ben after a meeting that Jerry and I might have gone to. There's another idea banging around in there that maybe the night started watching some band at Spaceland. Who knows? It's not important. But on some evening of this life, I wound up at House of Pies in Loz Feliz with Jerry and Ben. I don't know if the film had been released yet, but they'd clearly become friends working on it together. So just three guys eating at a diner in LA. I can almost guarantee that none of us got any pie. I'm not, and they don't strike me as pie guys. We're just talking. And I want to tell Ben something. But you know, I'm human, I'm a little nervous and star-struck, but I used to be a fan of this late-night comedy show, and there was some skit or something which I thought was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. I can't even begin to remember what it was, but it was still very fresh at that point. So in an effort to connect with Ben and graciously show appreciation for something he's created and I launch into this whole thing, "Man! I really loved your show.", "Oh, thanks, man I appreciate that." I continue: " there was this one skit where you…" and I just continue with a very detailed description of this thing, and I'm laughing while I'm describing. And I'm feeling like, yeah, Ben and I are having a moment! He dutifully sits, listens, takes it all in, waits for a beat, and says, "Um, yeah, that wasn't my show." I'm stunned. I actually ask him if he's sure. "Yeah, I'm very sure. It wasn’t my show." "Oh, well, sorry." I say and then add, "Well, it's really funny." The table was very quiet. No one came close to sorta easing the tension by pointing out the absurdity of the moment. It felt like I had definitely fucked something up. Oh well, we finished dinner, and I never saw Ben again. I hope he's well (and there's still a part of me that thinks that thing actually was on show.)

At some point, Jerry and I just drifted apart. I just kept relapsing, and he just didn't, and eventually, we got to the point where we'd cross paths and maybe say high at Arty and Naomi's yearly Christmas feast of the seven fishes. Just two acquaintances. It's been years since I've laid eyes on him. Man, I hope he's well. That guy did a real number on me. He was there exactly how I needed him when I needed it the most. Kind. Generous. Absolute zero judgment.