180 x 24 Hours

Six months ago today I finally admitted that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable. I woke up in a strange bed and somebody was yelling something at me about 911 and there were cops at the door. Of course my first thought was a delusional one – I was pissed off that someone had come into my room and woken me up. But then I started to wake up. I was sleeping on my girlfriend's roommate's bed. Actually she was probably more of an alcohol and sex partner than any kind of a girlfriend. We most likely had some kind of brilliant argument the night before and I'd wandered off and fallen into the nearest empty bed I'd found. Fortunately I still had some of my clothes on. The roommate was well acquainted with me and had for several months been the violent enforcer of the landlord's edict that I was not allowed anywhere near that house. Even the neighbors had been notified to keep an eye out for me. And of course I was never ashamed of that – it wasn't me, it wasn't my fault – it was that stupid roommate and that evil landlord. They didn't have any sense of humor. They didn't understand that my girl and I were destined to become legendary poets one day and that we had to carry on the way we did because that's what artists do. Stupid illiterate fools they were. I'll show them some day. They'll regret having wronged the famous writer that I'm going to be.

That morning my girl backed me up and the roommate didn't press charges and the cops seemed to think the whole thing was kind of amusing and I wandered off down the alley with my backpack not yet realizing that I was wearing somebody else's pants. At this point my life and my genius had evolved to the point where I'd been homeless for about seven months. I slept on the back loading dock of a warehouse next to the railroad tracks. Whiskey and beer cushioned me from the hard and sometimes wet concrete, the piercing whistle of the trains that went past every twenty minutes, and the clouds of mosquitoes that were feeding on me when the hot sun finally woke me up each afternoon.

Sometimes I slept in the bushes outside of a church. The janitor would politely ask me to leave an hour or two before the services started in the morning. He called me “Buddy” and he said he was sorry. I'd roll up my sheet because I was sophisticated enough to sleep on one so that my clothes wouldn't soil and I'd start another long day of walking and wandering. One of the worst things about living on the streets is that there is no place to sit down for long before they start fucking with you. At night you never get any decent length of sleep and in the day you still get no rest. This is a great recipe for severe mental instability. And it's always good to add some alcohol to that. I think they call it “incomprehensible demoralization” or something like that.

This last night with my alcohol and sex partner I was supposed to be somewhere else. By the grace of God I had been accepted into a program for the homeless called “Project Hospitality.” Every afternoon about 30-40 of us destitutes would meet at the Salvation Army at 5:00 and vans from one church or another would come pick us up. They fed us generously, gave us showers and whatever clothing they could, and set out mats and blankets on the church floor so that we could sleep. One thing I'll never forget is how ungrateful some of my whining and complaining fellow bums were. Of course I'd never be like that. I'm a decent person, right? Just a decent person in a bad situation. Right.

Well, every now and then my girl would feel some need for sex and drama, and she'd sneak me into her room for another night of drunken chaos. I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have engaged in some emotional manipulation a few times here and there. Of course I always told myself that she was the crazy one; she was the insane drunk. I might still believe a little of that today. But today, with six months of sobriety behind me, I am continuously shocked and embarrassed with the gradual realizations of just how insane and delusional I was.

When I left her place six months ago this morning, I was in a panic because I hadn't shown up for the homeless program the night before and I knew that I was about to be kicked out of my fifth and last chance with Tucson's homeless shelters. I wandered around in a panic all that day still highly intoxicated from the night before and trying desperately to sober up. I showed up at the Salvation Army at the regular time and again by the grace of God, I somehow slipped through the cracks and got away with it. That's when I started working my second step. There is no doubt in my mind that this is when God took hold of me, slapped a molecule of sense into me, and started to turn my life around.

The next day I went to the AA Alano Club on a whim. For the millionth and last time I wanted to quit drinking and I was finally broken and scared shitless. I knew that I had reached the point where I was going to die if I kept drinking. It wouldn't be a quick death, either. I knew that I had finally crossed the line where the next step would be an irreversible death of my soul and I would soon be sleeping in my own drool and piss not caring where my body fell, no longer caring about trying to look clean. I knew that I was about to get that far away glassy look in the eyes of someone who has left the building. The very last shreds of my delusional dignity had finally collapsed and for the first time it occurred to me that I might not have all the answers.

And that's what saved me. I came to AA completely willing, ready to be honest, and desperately open-minded. I guess I'm just lucky like that. I had absolutely no fight left in me. I was just smart enough to know that I didn't know a damned thing about how to live sober. So I should probably shut up and listen and do what the fuck I'm told. Again, I believe that I was insanely lucky to have been completely smashed by alcohol. I heard someone say once in a meeting, “I wish you as much pain as it takes.” Today I think I understand that. I had very little ego left in me and fortunately I got a sponsor right away who saw to it that I got rid of that too.

At my first meeting, someone gave me a pocket Big Book and I dove into that like my life depended on it, which it did and does. Halfway through that I went and got myself the full version with all the stories in it because I had heard someone say that the stories will tell you how other people found God. I read that whole thing – not just the first 164 like they tell you – in less than a week. I needed God and I needed sobriety Right Now, damn it! And I'm one of those freaks that loves to read and write and so I figured I was definitely going to be able to master this thing.

Six months later I can say happily with hope and optimism that I haven't mastered anything other than the talent of being able to prove to myself on a moment's notice how idiotic and destructive self-will can be.

That first week of sobriety I began a simple prayer like a message in a bottle thrown into the vast cosmos. “If you're out there God, if you find this, please help me.” Basically I was just praying for something or someone to pray to and it turns out that was exactly the right thing to pray for. I haven't heard any bells or whistles or angels singing. The sky doesn't open up and give me warm fuzzies – well, actually it does sometimes. But I just count that as an occasional bonus. I have never asked God to show himself to me or prove himself to me or any crap like that because I have been learning that whenever I get that big huge “me” out of the way and look past that delusional construct of “my” mind, God is right there – all over the fucking place.

After I'd prayed my simple prayer for a while and began to gain a little confidence that there was someone on the other end of the line listening. I started a new prayer equally simple. I asked God to direct my thinking. I said, “Alright God, I got out of bed this morning, I put my clothes on, I have a general idea of what I need to do today, now I trust you to handle all of the details.”

It turns out that those prayers saved my life. I don't know where I got the idea to pray them. Maybe it was God. And ever since, my prayers have remained simple. I don't pray for work or food or anything material. I don't pray for relationships or happiness or comfort. I don't even pray for world peace. For a while I prayed that God's will be done until I realized that God's probably going to get his way whether I pray for it or not. Today my prayers are mostly wordless. When it comes to spirituality and my relationship with God, I just don't trust words. My experience is that words are too closely connected to the bullshit that keeps coming out of this broken machine on top of my neck. That's a pretty hardcore realization for someone who's spent the last few decades wanting more than anything else to be a writer. Today my prayers and my meditations are intertwined. They say that prayer is talking to God and meditation is listening. I have found that by doing both at the same time and keeping words out of it I have a real conscious contact with God. Like a conduit that flows back and forth in a rhythm with my breath and my heartbeat and the sunrise and the moonset and the seasons and most importantly the vibration of this moment right now. Okay. There. See? All that hokey pokey hoohah? That's all that words'll get you. I make no effort to define God – I don't need any kind of label or doctrine or dogma to make it work for me. I simply believe that there is something out there that has a better and bigger grip on things than I do and I trust that it's doing a very good job of it – certainly better than any of the genius ideas that I've come up with.

So for the past six months I've mostly kept my mouth shut and I've done a lot of listening and watching and very slowly, one day at a time, I've been learning how to stay sober today.

Now, regarding sobriety and recovery, it turns out they are two completely separate things. In reality it was very, very easy for me to quit drinking. I just decided that I didn't want to die and the compulsion to drink mostly vanished. What has been difficult these past six months is the living part. Once I stopped numbing my fears and resentments with alcohol, I had to start facing this incredible thing called life and that has been at times an emotionally devastating experience. I mean sometimes I just want to puke. I started hiding from reality in my late teens with various hallucinogenic and stupefying drugs and then I grew up and found shelter in alcohol. And all those years, the world never went away no matter how hard I tried to make it. Today I am physically 42 years old with some serious mileage on me and yet I am emotionally as mature as a 19 year old with the lack of life skills to prove it. The good news is that by the grace of God I still have a few brain cells left, I am fairly healthy, I have an unstoppable optimism, and my key ingredient is a deadly realistic sense of humor that keeps me from beating the shit out of myself and others.

So today I trust God and I listen to others who have some experience with learning how to live sober. I constantly remind myself that I don't have it all figured out and never will – that's God's job. I constantly thank God for doing such a good job. I don't beat myself up over the past. I look at the future as an imaginary fiction and I make every effort to thoroughly live this here moment right now. This moment I am sober. This moment God is leading the way.

If I had it all to do over again, would I change anything? No.