The Harder They Fall (48 page)

Sometime during the day I’d say to myself, “Well, today is different,” and I would start to drink. The next morning I would get up and declare, “Well, last night was different. Today’s the day.” It wasn’t long before when I brushed my teeth I had to open up the medicine cabinet and face the mirrors to the wall because I couldn’t stand looking at myself and lying. Each time I saw my face I’d think, “You are so weak and pathetic. You’re such a bad person.”

All of these horrible things I couldn’t stop, but I was a functioning alcoholic, and so it wasn’t afflicting my business. In fact, Mark Mays, who now runs Clear Channel, called me once at about 11 p.m. my time and said, “Are you still up?” I was hammered out of my mind but I said, “Yeah.” So he said, “Listen, I want to talk to you about something we were
discussing today.” We spent about a half-hour in conversation and I took the phone in bed with me, close to my wife. Looking at me, she noticed the self-doubt and said, “You look funny, what are you doing? What’s wrong?” When I hung up I said to her, “What did you think of that conversation?”

She looked at me like I was from the moon and said, “Fine, why?” … Well, I was just dripping with sweat, thinking, “This guy’s going to know that I’m drunk out of my mind on a Wednesday.” But he didn’t. I was really good at hiding it.

The turning point was when I had a hard time playing with my children—a hard time slowing down enough to play with them. I’m also riddled with ADD [attention deficit disorder]. Alcohol would slow me down. I could lie on the floor and play with them for a couple of hours. I was never a mean drunk, always a fun drunk. Not necessarily the life of the party, but a nice drunk. I was nicer drunk than when I was sober.

So every night when I would tuck in my kids I told them a story about Inky, Blinky, and Stinky, the three little mice, and I would make it up. They went to the Island of Cheese where it would rain Parmesan and they would sail out in their marshmallow boat. I’d make it an adventure. Every night I would invent as I went along. One night I tucked my children into bed, told them a story, and the next morning, a Saturday, they came running down the stairs and into the kitchen. They sat down and began pouring their cereal when my daughter said, “Dad, you’ve got to tell us that story again, the one you told us last night. That was the best ever.”

I almost said to them, “I didn’t tell you a story last night.” I realized that I had no recollection of telling a story or even taking them upstairs and tucking them into bed. I had absolutely no recollection of that. This wasn’t my first blackout, but it was the first where I was missing time with my children. I suddenly realized that I was going to miss a portion of my children’s childhood.

Then I did something worse. I tricked them and said, “Let’s see how much you remember,” and I made them recount the story of which I had absolutely no recollection. And that was my bottom. That’s when it dawned on me that “I’ve got to get to a recovery meeting.”

So I delayed one more day and went on Sunday night to a Twelve Step
meeting in the Congregational church in Cheshire, Connecticut. Cheshire’s this sort of snotty community, and I expected to see “alcoholics.” I didn’t think I was alcoholic. I’d seen winos depicted. You know, movie alcoholics. They were out of control, didn’t wear nice clothes or look like respectable business people. I went in and all these people were there, like Buffy in her stylish sweater and pearls … I’d arrived a little early and stood in the back of the room. I thought, “When are these church people going to leave and when will the alcoholics arrive?” I sat down and soon realized, “Wow, these guys
are
the alcoholics!”

When I saw alcoholics who looked like me and had jobs like me, it was an eye-opener! So I introduced myself to the group and said, “I’m not sure if I’m an alcoholic,” and everybody laughed. An old lady sitting in the row in front of me said, “Then why are you here?” And I said, “Because I just don’t want to drink tonight.” I sat down and somebody else talked. Then about a half-hour later I stood up again and said, “My name is Glenn, and I’m an alcoholic.”

My recovery has been a miraculous, edge-of-your-seat ride. It’s funny—I did some self-examination before I got sober. I’m not the brightest guy in the world but I’m not a dummy, so I was thinking, “What do I need to do to be able to stop drinking?” So I started working the program. Doing the Steps, making an inventory of all my bad actions. For instance, I knew I had to go and apologize to that guy I had fired for the pen. All the things that had been piling up. So regarding the Steps I thought to myself, “This stuff is so self-evident.” What I didn’t see at first was service. I didn’t understand how important service is.

A friend of mine who’s an alcoholic called me one day and told me, “When you least expect it, expect it. One day you will be presented with a very logical reason why you should have a drink just this once.” The best piece of advice I ever got. He said, “Watch for it. Know it’s coming.”

It has to come—several times. My first two years of sobriety were extraordinarily tough. I was doing my inventory and going through all the things I had done, and I became tired—tired of all the self-examination, dredging up all the horrible things. You know, when you are drinking for a reason, it’s scary. To say to yourself “I’m going to look at everything” is
scary. At this period of my life, even though I had a profound belief in God, I became an atheist. I realized that I believed in God because somebody told me to believe in God, ever since I was a child.

Now I question everything. I took everything off the board and only put it back on the board if I found the reason. It was the same with politics as with religion. I’d only been following the patterns others set for me. So I cleaned the slate and it was terrifying, but the result was only taking in what I felt was proved or true.

I had a dream that I remember vividly. In the middle of the night, I woke up and sat straight up in my bed. I’m also a painter, so I went straight for my paints and canvas. It was three o’clock in the morning and I was painting. I pushed the paintbrush into the canvas as hard as I could. I kept dabbing it into the black, as if I couldn’t get the black to be black enough. Here’s the dream: I stood on a road either side of which were cornstalks, bent over and dead. Everything was dead. The cornstalks were lying flat, smelly and dirty. There was one long straight road where I stood looking at the horizon, and there was the darkest, blackest, deadliest cloud right at the end of the road. The whole sky was stormy, and everything below it lay dead. Then a man came up next to me and he had a gray, dingy, dirty, nicotine-stained beard. He wore tattered brown and yellow clothes. The guy came over and stood beside me. And he said, “Walk through it.” And I said, “What? Are you nuts? Look at that thing!” And he said, “Walk through it. There’s nothing to it. Go on, walk through it.”

And I stood and planted my feet and said, “I am not going through that. That would kill me. I don’t know where I’m going, but not there.” And he said, “Trust me.” And he grabbed my hand, and somehow or other I found myself flying through the cloud, and I came out the other side. And there was the road again, but everything was the most vivid Technicolor. Blues and greens, and everything was beautiful. And I looked at him and his clothes were all white. His hair and beard were pure white, too. And he said, “You have nothing to fear. Walk through the cloud.”

I got up and tried to paint that scene because I didn’t want ever to forget it. I can still see every detail from the dream. It was that dream that prompted me to never stop aspiring to the good. It’s so profoundly true that
there is nothing but warmth in the sunshine and there is nothing to that cloud. There is no one that is going to point their finger and say, “You, you bad person, you did these awful things.” And if there are these people that disparage you, it doesn’t matter anyway. If that’s the way they feel, well, they’re nothing to you and they’re not going to bring you down. In my position, many reject me as a person—they don’t just disagree. But it doesn’t have import, because I’m only made by me. Praise or blame doesn’t affect me because I’m more built by the inner spirit. The watch or the car or what somebody said about me didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t carrying my ego with me anymore, knowing it led to emptiness.

If you just drop your fear of something that you think you can’t face, then it isn’t real anymore. It may look real but it’s not. You’ll come through the fear, and it’s beautiful. Just like that guy’s hair and beard changed, every bit of you can change. If you shed self-loathing and hatred, everything else in your life changes.

After I quit drinking, I remember I was on the radio one day and my producer said to me, “Glenn, you’ve got to cut the people off sooner. Dump the phone calls!” What became apparent to me when he said that was that I was taking these calls because I was actually interested in listening to them, in place of staying frozen in my world of ego. Now I was actually interested in their lives; it was fascinating.

Soon after, I left radio and decided to go back to school to study theology, science, and philosophy. My head was about to explode with new questions and anticipation. My father said to me, “What are you going to do with a theology degree?” and I said, “I’m not sure.” And he said, “Maybe you ought to figure that out before you throw away a career you have been working on since you were thirteen. You are gifted. Don’t just throw that away. Find a way to do something that has meaning for you.”

At that time I was doing a Top 40 morning show, you know, stupid phony phone calls, that kind of stuff, and it was meaningless to me. But then, once you sober up, everything can seem to be meaningless alongside your new consciousness.

So I was about to throw my career away. This was three years after I got sober, and somebody asked me a question on the air. This was one of
the biggest markers in my sobriety. Somebody called and said, “Oh, Mister Perfect, like you’ve never gotten high before.” Everybody in the room expected me to blast the guy but instead I said, “Let me tell you a story …” And I shared with him the darkest part of my life, and when I finished and turned off the microphones, I turned to my producer and said, “Mark this day down on your calendar. Today I ended my career.”… Just the opposite happened! This was in the days before e-mail. Subsequent to that show I got more postal mail than I ever had received. People would stop me in the streets and say, “I thought it was just me!” And what I realized was that we are all protecting something inside of us that we are ashamed of, and we think it’s going to kill us.

We’re all alike in hiding something. It goes like this: “If they knew they’d hate me and realize I’m inferior.” However, since everyone is hiding or embarrassed about something, or has made a huge mistake, that makes us not imperfect but human. If you are comfortable saying “I regret and learned from my mistake,” you have a deeper and richer experience with like-minded people on the journey toward being better. You unite with those people and enrich the experience of your fellow journeymen.

In my field it’s clear: if you protect something you hide out of fear, someone will use that card against you. If you have a proper respect for honesty and wisdom, your fear will go away. You can say, “I’ve already addressed that years ago!” Your past has no negative power unless you give it power.

If we just don’t care that other people are judging us, we can be who we are. If we just don’t care and are willing to help one another, we throw each other lifelines … You become free. No one and no thing can destroy you—because you already played that card.

(world music pioneer)