… I thought that love was in the drugs
But the more I took, the more it took away
And I could never get enough
I thought that love was on the stage
You give yourself to strangers
You don’t have to be afraid
Then it tries to find a home with people, or when I’m alone
Picking it apart and staring at your phone
… We all have a hunger

We all have a hunger
We all have a hunger
We all have a hunger

Alcoholism runs deep in my family and I own it, too. Genetics, though, are too convenient— and bringing out ancestral ghosts is too glib— to excuse me. Drinking was my choice, and I was smitten with it from the beginning. Once, I chose to be sober for six years. My relapse has lasted five. I have now been sober, as of Friday, for one week, and it is hard work, folks.

I have always been a hard worker and my life’s been punctuated by awards for writing and for teaching, ego boosts. I’ve had three babies named for me. Those are far more meaningful awards. And I have the devotion of thousands of students, some now in their fifties, who somehow still love me—I just don’t understand this— every bit as much as I have always loved them.

But my reality is that I’m an alcoholic, not a hero.

What I drank for was that fifteen minutes of bliss that hit somewhere between the third and fourth beers, now gone. So are the hangovers that always follow. Here is what’s different: today, for the first time, I am feeling electric sparks, fireflies, that last no longer than an eyelid’s blink. They tell me I am getting better.

Getting just to his very early and dangerous place has meant trembling hands; hypersensitivity, as if you can hear houseflies’ footsteps on the outside glass of the kitchen window; sudden unexpected bursts of anger; waking up at 2 a.m. fighting off the covers that are strangling you; aching lungs when you breathe and flushes of adrenaline that flood your chest because that’s what the cravings do. (There is, of course, a drug for that. It’s a trade-off: moderated cravings for constant low-grade nausea.)

And it’s still hard to look in the mirror when your face is bloated and your eyes, bleak, have big dark circles beneath them.

When I used the words “dangerous place,” I was reminded of the incredible opening scene to Kubrick’s The Shining, when the director’s camera leaves the mountain road, a recurring dream of mine. You are this close to the edge at this point in sobriety:

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There are other symptoms. It’s hard to do anything sequentially, even something you love, like preparing a meal, because you suddenly find yourself standing in the kitchen with a spatula in your hand, staring vacantly because you’ve forgotten what comes next.

That’s what recovery’s like.

My other addiction is to hard work. Every day in thirty-plus years of teaching I made massive “to-do” lists. Curiously, the accomplishment that was supposed to come when the list was finished never really happened. It still doesn’t happen, not even when you use a big broad-point black pen to cross off each item on the list.

With retirement and without the structure of high school teaching, of five or six classes a day, I still try to make lists, because being organized is far more difficult now. The lists are hopelessly long. It is so terribly hard for me to accept the fact that I cannot possibly do all of those things. In not doing them, I am terrified that I’m going to upset people, hurt their feelings, let them down.

I am going to have to say no, something that is unbearable to me.

I have other work to do now. That means two, three or five hours of group and individual therapy five days a week in what they call a “partial hospitalization.” At least I don’t have to wear one of those stupid tie-in-the-back hospital gowns, the kind where you can feel your bare rear end hanging out in the cold.

But there are, sigh, the AA meetings I’ll need to take up again. They’ve worked for millions of good people and so have been a blessing to all people. They did not work for me. The AA I’ve experienced is based on a cultish jargon that’s in turn based on an eighty-five-year-old book that is dreadfully written. I need to find a cult-free meeting that doesn’t make me feel like it’s going to end with a round of Jonestown Kool-Aid. Or cyanide-laced black coffee, coffee being the AA beverage of choice.

I guess that there are groups that are out there for me—or programs like Dharma, whose Buddhist underpinnings appeal to me instinctively. I need to find a group that fits.

This business of recovery also means, for the first time, confronting and treating a lifetime of profound ADHD. It means learning to talk back to the murmuring voices in the tape that runs in my mind. The insistent voices tell me I am a terrible human being, a fuckup. They’re murmuring liars, these voices. They are also as powerful as the flying monkeys that sweep Dorothy and Toto up. They are clinical depression’s harbingers and handmaidens.

The voices lied to this beautiful woman, my mother, who taught me how to read when I was four. She remains the most influential person in my life. She tolerated me—an ADHD child can be a monstrous pain in the ass— and, beyond that, she loved me. The voices finally killed her. She was forty-eight. I was seventeen.

Now that I am seventy-one, I still miss her.

Am I oversharing?

Good.

I do love Florence Welch, and I just found this song among some others that are recommended for recovering addicts like me. Knowing that she knows what I know is a blessing.

And one reason I love her is her beautiful red hair—Mom’s was auburn and the dearest friend of my life, Joe Loomis, one of my heroes, flawed like me, was a red redhead. Florence, in appearance only, is also a living embodiment of the ethereal Elizabeth Siddall. Siddall was the muse, an artist in her own right, of the Victorian painters who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Here she is, sketched by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

I taught the Pre-Raphaelites to my AP European History students (I loved teaching art) and I fell in love with her, too.

And that’s Siddall as Ophelia, drowned, thanks to Hamlet, that cold-hearted bastard, in this painting. She posed in a bathtub, and lying for hours in cold water brought on the pneumonia that nearly killed her. It didn’t. Her addiction to laudanum did.

So Siddall’s like the rest of us. We all have a hunger. The hard part, I guess, is accepting it, naming it. Then, when you see it in the other people sitting a circle with you, it means embracing their humanity. That’s me. She’s me. That kid’s me.

Most of all, that guy who can’t take his eyes off the floor in front of him because he’s in so much pain is just like me. When he finally begins to talk, you listen and you feel your shoulders sag–that’s where you store the tension that’s now leaving your body–or you feel your eyes well with tears. Sometimes, when he opens up, that guy makes you laugh. His humanity begins to heal you.

We all have a hunger. I am learning that we are miraculous, too.

Okay, we watch America’s Got Talent so you don’t HAVE to. It can be one of the most painful television shows to watch, but three acts from last night’s auditions amazed us. And it was more like The World’s Got Talent, which is perfectly okay with Elizabeth and me.

Amazing act #1: Eduardo, the eleven-year-old Mariachi singer from Houston. Adorable, si, but the boy’s got some PIPES. Look at Simon’s face.

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Amazing act #2: Titos Tsai, a Taiwanese “contact juggler.” This was elegant and beautiful and touching. So was Tsai’s obvious love for his fiancé, watching just offstage with Terry Crews.

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Finally, after a slightly painful introduction—an engaging young man, but communications, including body language, between Japanese and English are sometimes awkward—his dance troupe, Chibi United, took the stage. They were simply unbelievable. Golden Buzzer from the judges, endorsed by the long-married couple watching the television from their bed with their doggies.

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And, of course, there’s a greater meaning to a television show so seemingly lowbrow. We are living in dark and ugly times—make no mistake about that—and sometimes, they seem hopeless, as well, because human beings can be so brutal and so obtuse. But we can be beautiful and graceful and we can, across language barriers and from vast distances, reach far enough to touch each others’ hearts. There’s hope in moments like these three.

Let’s just get this out of the way. I love cats. Always have. We once had fourteen at our house on Huasna Road. I love dogs, too, and with passion, and I can understand them for the most part.

Not this cat. I do not understand this cat. I have never had a cat like this cat.

Hattie, our Humane Society adoptee, is beautiful. We adopted her precisely because she is black, and black cats do not get adopted. I have always had good luck with black cats, and Hattie’s the same. She is one of the most affectionate cats I’ve ever known in my seventy-one years on this here Planet Earth.

She is also a hunter-killer. At least twice a week, we find the remains of a deceased animal—be it bird, lizard, rat or mouse—in pieces on the bathroom floor. One of the rats was almost her size.

Ew.

We’ve gotten her bell collars, which she periodically loses, and then she goes on another Kitty Rampage.

This morning it was a mouse: fore, aft and some various anatomical curiosities in between greeted me when I got up. Hattie was sleeping next to me, a blissful look on her face.

I guess bringing home the kill means that I am in her Pride. I guess, too, that I am honored, but, frankly, as much as I love her, and as lovable and loving as she is, I wish she’d acquire a knack for bringing home In ‘n’ Out Cheeseburgers.

In the meantime, I thought that “Oops! I Did It Again” aptly describes Hattie’s personality.

Lt. Robert Gregory, 1944; Vin Scully, about 1950

I grew up and I live in Arroyo Grande, in southern San Luis Obispo County.

San Luis Obispo County is pretty much evenly divided between Giants and Dodgers fans. We’re just above the cliffs, sometimes pink and sometimes gold at sunset, and the yucca spikes of the Gaviota Pass, which is where I believe Southern California begins. We refer to ourselves up here in SLO County as “The Central Coast.” But my baseball is Southern Cal. I grew up aDodger fan.

The fact that that my late father-in-law, Gail Bruce, who was kind of a surrogate father–I loved that man—was once a 49ers end cuts me no slack. Neither does my abiding love for San Francisco. My wife and I just visited and she took a picture of the alley named for Dashiell Hammett and she found the marker where Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s detective partner, was murdered.

But I am passionate, too, about Raymond Chandler and his detective, Philip Marlowe.

Gail Bruce, San Francisco 49ers, 1948-1951

To Giants fans around here, I am a disgrace.

The division here reminds me of my Dad, who grew up in the Ozarks during the Great Depression. Missouri was bloodily divided during the Civil War. The  wound didn’t heal.

In 1935, at the Texas County, Missouri, Fourth of July, an old Confederate snapped during the “The Star-Spangled Banner” and went after an old Yankee, once a drummer boy, with his Barlow knife.

In their personal Gettysburg, the two upset tubs of potato salad and platters of fried chicken and honeyed ham and sweet potato pies before young, strong men pried them apart and held them until the sheriff came.

By then, the onetime Confederate was jubilantly holding the onetime drummer boy’s ear aloft.

When Dad told that story, it was 1935 again and he was seventeen again. He was a marvelous storyteller.

The Dodgers-Giants divide here is less violent but just as deep. As a little boy, I feared two men: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Giants cleanup hitter Willie McCovey.

I am a Dodgers fan because I love Vin Scully.

Sandy Koufax was my other Dodger hero, and his retirement, when I was fourteen, hurt. When I learned what pitching had done to his arm, that hurt even more.

My relationship with my father was shot through with hurt. He was brilliant–-the comptroller for San Luis Obispo’s Madonna Construction, he of the hot-pink Inn–-but Dad had demons, too. He was a hard drinker and that made him fearful.

But he had moments of intuitive kindness, and, as a Sixties teen, I was no angel. Once, in high school, Dad sensed that I was deeply depressed. I was. I’d just dropped acid. I sneaked home in the morning dark, but the drug’s aftereffects stuck to me like nightmare cobwebs.

He took the day off from work and scrambled some eggs. Then we sat down in front of the television and watched the 1970 World Series.

Brooks Robinson, as he’d done to the 1966 Dodgers, scrambled the Reds.

I got my feet on the ground again.

I was closest to Dad when we were close to a radio—sometimes, a Zenith Transoceanic, whose twin I’ve seen in photos next to Ernest Hemingway in Kenya. Dad had introduced me, at sixteen, to For Whom the Bell Tolls, and when Robert Jordan breaks his leg near the novel’s end, mine began to hurt as I was reading. John McCain loved that book, and me, and Dad.

Of course, Dad and I listened to the call of Koufax’s perfect game. In the ninth, we didn’t breathe much. When Koufax struck out the side, he hugged me.

Because Dad so hard and often worked late, I often listened to Dodger games by myself on a little transistor radio with a single earplug. Vinny was my radio father. He was that way to hundreds of thousands of little boys and girls he’d never meet.

Sometimes, especially during a home stand, when games ran into extra innings, I’d fall asleep with his voice in my ear, only to have the Farm Report wake me the next morning.

Dad died in a morning dark in 1985. Vinny died a year ago August 2. Death is both a coward and a liar, as Milton noted. I became a high school history teacher because my father and Vin Scully taught me how to teach.

The teenaged students I loved so much resembled the fans in the Coliseum, where I saw my first Dodgers game in 1958, against Stan Musial’s Cards (the Gashouse Gang was Dad’s team growing up). Even then, just seeing the game wasn’t enough for Dodger fans. Transistor radios and Vin’s stories made it real.

I became determined to make history real, too, from Botticelli to Wasily Kandinsky, from Elizabeth I to Lincoln, from Emily Wilding Davison to Rosa Parks.

Last week, I got a message from a former student who’d visited the Uffizi. She stood transfixed before Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

Now, she told me, she understood why I was so passionate about a painting that was completed in 1486.

My older son, John, was just three days old when Scully called Gibson’s home run in 1988. I felt completed. Now, after Dad, Gail and Vinny, I was a father, too.

John and me, October 1988