This is a letter to a young man who is going through it. He is me and I am him. This is written to both of us. A month ago, I didn’t know him at all. On many levels, I still don’t. On another level, I’ve known him all my life.

I’m writing this to you from my tool shed, my happy place. Find your own happy place, don’t worry about those who don’t understand you. They never will…

October 28, 1993… that was the day I dumped the last of my Oxy, Percodan, Xanax and sweet Seconal down the toilet. God, I do love Reds and Percs and vodka. Vodka is like oxygen to me. I didn’t need the doctors to tell me I was dying. I could smell and taste my death. The medical community simply confirmed what I knew. That day, 30 years ago today, I simply could not hallucinate and puke and bleed and shake anymore.

Those days and the remembered taste in my throat of blood and vomit are still here and close at hand. Those days, those times, never leave. They slip under the surface, they don’t ever leave. Time doesn’t even dull the jagged edges, all time does it let you forget they are there sometimes, but they are still there, waiting for me to come back. Your demon will live with you forever. Never, ever think you have defeated him.

That night in 1993 I didn’t flush all the vodka, I kept my last emergency half gallon. Actually, my first day not using I drank a quart. To survive a day with only a quart of vodka and no pills was quite an accomplishment.

I didn’t want to die around my little girl’s birthday, in December. The plan was to die in January. I’m forever grateful to her for unwittingly gifting me this life. Without her knowledge she literally saved me.

At some point in those end years, my world shrunk to the singularity of that child. I know with absolute certainty if it was not for my baby girl my headstone would read a day in 1993 or 1994, as the day I died. I am sure it would have been an ugly and violent death. I also know the list of attendees of that funeral would have been sparse, a very thin group. I’m pretty sure the daughter and Cousin Osama Bob would have come. But others, I’m not so sure. Make no mistake, that meager attendance would have been fully deserved. I owned that. I own it all. You need to own your mess, too. The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll be allowed to heal.

It was actually late November before I can recall anything but hurt or being able to eat much solid food. There’s not much I took with me from those first two weeks, but shaking and puking. Detoxing alone is a colorful experience. If offered to you, please ponder the irony of taking a pill to give up taking pills and booze. I chose not to. Lithium used to give me days without drugs, but never clarity. I’m sure there are fancy new drugs now. The experience of cold detox leaves an indelible message. I can’t imagine getting clean in a hospital watching cartoons on TV.

It’s your choice; how to end this, but know this: There is no such thing as “California Sober,” there is no such thing as cutting back. A doctor told me years after the fact I could have died from detoxing alone. I laughed at him and said, “No shit, I was already dead when I started to detox.”

I’m glad I saw that horror—all of it, scared to death. It’s the only way it could have worked for me. When you choose to move past this, it’s an absolute. If you go back, you’ll die. If you think you can still party a little, you’ll die. If you don’t stop, you’ll die. Those are all the options at the bottom.

The first sensations of clarity are subtle. You can get there. I remember the first morning not shaking, then realized I didn’t need to puke. Then I realized I could walk. I remember putting on a pair of jeans for the first time in a long time. My stomach had become so bloated and distended I’d taken to wearing sweatpants for a few years.

Aim for clarity. Sobriety has too many strings and interpretations bound to it. And there are those, especially the religious fanatics, that will take advantage of you as you seek sobriety. The religious fanatics; will try to feed on your vulnerability. Know this. Heed the words of Buddha, “Believe nothing, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.”

Aim for clarity and everything else you need will follow.

Recently, sitting with some friends on a hot summer day, a glass, iced, filled with Blue Moon Ale. A sip and then another and it’s like a hidden door is open. Like a sea rushing in. That moment as I tasted that ice cold beer was a fast ticket to my rage and my insanity. I jumped up and left quickly. No one asked why. They knew, as I knew, why. Your last drink will be your last drink or it will be one of your last acts. It’s that simple. It’s binary. Yes or no, on or off. There is no third choice.

I still sit in amazement at those who can take it or leave it. But if I suddenly stand up at a table and have to leave—immediately —never ask why. Nobody wants to know why. I’ve reached the point now where being around people drinking or getting high doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve pondered smoking weed a few times, but then I see him sitting there waiting… that bastard I tried so hard to run from. My demon never takes a day off. Neither can I. Neither can you.

Getting high and having fun and partying stopped so long ago. No fun and laughter is to be found here. You know what it’s like, as do I. Clarity, even sobriety; isn’t a death knell, it’s not the end of fun. Be honest, the shit you are living in now is not fun. Clarity will bring you insight and humor and perspective you never imagined drunk.

The addict, me, the doper-drunk is still very much alive and strong. Don’t give me an inch. Don’t think for a moment I won’t rob you blind and cut you to get away from here, to get away from me. You don’t matter, family doesn’t matter, friends don’t matter, trust me, the law doesn’t matter; nothing matters. There is no right or wrong. There is only the need—not desire—the need to get fucked up, big and hard. Again, the edges may have dulled, but they still shine and they will cut you in less than a flash of light.

My young friend, don’t rebel against a higher power. I was never big on all twelve steps, it took a woman throwing the AA Blue Book at my head and screaming at me, as she pointed to a doorknob, “That thing there has more control of your life than you do!” You have no control. Your higher power is literally anyone and anything. When you find your absolute bottom, you’ll know all too well what I mean. You’d rob the woman whose tits fed you for a handful of Reds or a bottle of Jack Daniels. Don’t ask me how I know this. I just know this.

You can find God or Allah or the Easter Bunny, or whatever you need to find. Just know that higher power is not you. The voices that tell you that you are in control are lying to you. Look at your life, yourself. You know you are lying.

The relentless self-inventory is important. You won’t heal until you face that asshole in the mirror and all he’s become and done. Own your every act and deed.

Making amends to those you harmed is important.

Some days, I wonder why the gift of sobriety was wasted on someone like me. There are many more deserving who never see this gift. Take the gift and share it so someday you can be the old guy telling some drunk kid the same story. It will never, ever change.

You are out of options. That train left the station a long while back. Maybe we were born broken like this. I’ve often considered that reality. You now only have one choice. My dad used to say, “Your best friends are those who are not afraid to tell you that you’re full of shit.” In that regard, consider me your best friend.

I’ve been writing for a long time. I’ve only taken any of this writing stuff seriously for maybe the past ten years. More like the past eight.

I’m truly honored when someone reads my books or essays. Writing is a personal act and, at times, a defiant act. When someone reads my work, and enjoys it, I feel a rush. I genuinely feel unworthy of anyone’s compliments or praise. That’s not just false modesty. I write more crap than good stuff.

I have people who have offered to adapt my work to screen plays. I’ve had people re-write entire chapters and send them back to me to show me how I should have done it. I just take those emails, no point in getting all worked up about it. I’ve worked with some horrible editors who want to re-write my work as their work. That’s one reason I’m so grateful to my editor Mark. He does a remarkable job. He offers necessary suggestions (you should see some of the messes before he fixes them) but he never re-writes, he hones and polishes.

I’ve also had people offer to do audio work for me, and again, I’ve heard some of it, and it was quickly and mercifully forgotten.

I’m Facebook friends with a woman, Lori Gomez. She is a truly talented and prolific writer. I’m honestly confounded how she puts out so much work, and quality, engaging work. I didn’t know, or realize, she is also a voice actor. Lori mentioned a few weeks ago she’d like to record one of my essays. I said sure, have at it, and forgot about it.

Today, I stumbled on this video Lori made of an essay I wrote about my addictions and a dead old friend. I think I posted the essay a few weeks ago here on this blog.

This is her work: I was honored and brought to tears. That anyone would think something I wrote was worth the effort required to produce this piece; I’m humbled.

Thank you, Lori. You make my stuff sound good!

Bill

On the nights like this, I take out the fake teeth and put them in a jar. I feel the old broken bones, and the rods and screws, and miscellaneous replacement parts. I consider that piece of metal that was left in my body and we never talked about it again. I felt it there for years, by my left shoulder, and then one day I didn’t. These are the nights I think of Hector Luis. Coming up on thirty years clean from booze and chemicals, I think of Luis on these nights.

On the nights when I sit alone, in the dark, and run my fingers over the scars from the cuts, and the fingertips touch the violence that was 1977, and 1978, and 1979…I feel an odd nostalgic pain.

Hector Luis, he didn’t make it.

On nights like this, I think about him. When he died, his wife found an old, crumpled piece of paper with a phone number written on it in pencil, tucked into a corner of his wallet. The number was my mom’s old house phone. Luis and I had not seen each other in 20 years, but he always told his wife to call me if he got arrested or was in trouble. My mom loved Luis, she called him her other son. Luis would tell me, “Your moms love me better, cause you is too ooogly to love…”

Ma called me and told me Luis was dead. I could tell she was crying. I called his wife, wanting no details. Dead is all the information I need. Dead says it all. She told me where he was buried.

On nights like this I remember when Luis and I would sit in his father’s car, pop a handful of Seconal and split a quart of Clan MacGregor scotch, to take the edge off, then go to AA meetings. Then we’d split another quart after the meeting ended and commend ourselves for getting sober. It was a long time after our time of committing crimes against man and God together ended before I imagined the possibility of sobriety, before I considered it at all. That was always hill too big to climb, and for others less damaged by the wars of the streets and bars.

I’d been clean for five years when I got that call. Even with his long list of crimes, Luis was a fundamentally better person than me. To this day, I’ll never understand why some of us never cross that line again, and some do. Sobriety is razor thin, and veiled in a transparent sheet. Impossibly easy to cross back over into madness.

When I heard he had died, I didn’t have the time or the connections for pills. My plan was simply to become profoundly drunk. It wasn’t a decision; it wasn’t a need or a hunger. I was being summoned.

The liquor store was strange, yet familiar, a scene from another life. I’d forgotten how to walk in, find the cheap stuff in the half gallon plastic bottle, pay for it and leave without making eye contact. I wanted to steal the booze. It felt right to steal it. I paid for it instead. Walking out and crumpling the bag around the throat of the bottle, feeling that pathway in my hand. In my hand, I held a weapon. A tool of my distraction and my destruction.

I drove to the cemetery in silence.

Even the voices in my head and the million memories of this semi-psychotic Puerto Rican gang-banger refugee from the Bronx had gone silent. I could still see him. Sometimes I called him Pancho. Short, stocky, strong as a mule, jet black hair and a handlebar mustache. He was almost as handsome as he claimed to be. He’d often tell the ladies about his mad skills in bed, and remind them he was gorgeous, but he scared them, he scared me; he scared himself.

I could always sense the tension, the pending explosion. He’d light a Marlboro and his black eyes would glow with rage, and I’d know we were off again. Another battle, another score to settle, another deal.

His life was plagued by idle threats. He hated white people and often, daily, told me I was the whitest motherfucker he’d ever met. One day, he asked me if I ever saw Pat Boone singing Blue Berry Hill. I said unfortunately I had. He said, “You dat white!”

On nights like this, late ,when we were both totaled, He’d speak of his grandmother, from Guayama Puerto Rico, the town of witches and how he had witches’ blood and he was cursed. Some days I believed him. That night as I drove to the grave, I believed him.

I walked to the plot, his was solitary and off to the side of a cemetery of rolling hills, and stones dating back to the 1700’s. The dirt was fresh, and an inscription read “Loving husband and father”. He was, though his son, Little Luis, frequently said he hated him, and called him a criminal. He was, he was all of that and more. He was some things only known to him and I, and now just to me.

I kneeled and felt the dampness of the fresh soil absorb into the cotton of my jeans. I recalled the cowboys from the Mexican westerns we’d watch together and he’d translate. Real cowboys always die with their boots on. I suppose Luis faced it coming at him. I hope he did. I know he did.

And now this was his Boot Hill.

Cracking the booze open, breaking the paper seal, I took a long, deep breathless draw on the bottle. I tasted the rage in my throat. I was at war again. I didn’t drink vodka. I became one with vodka, and I passed instantly into insanity. That evil and crazy bastard, me, the one I had successfully suppressed, thought dead, silent for years, was alive and again open for business. I took another long draw from the bottle, from the sexy neck. I could feel my body fighting to reject it, but I needed it in me. I needed it now. Suddenly, I was there, just as I’d left it, the entire rancid and putrid mess. I was with my troops. The devil himself in attendance.

I could smell Luis’ death, I could feel his death. Something punched my chest, pushing me back against the headstone. I puked out the poison. I was pushed back across the razor thin line, through the veil. Fleeting glimpses of sanity rose in me, holding the long and no longer sexy neck. I slammed the vodka bottle into the headstone, watching as the clear liquid and ten thousand shards of glass flew in a hundred directions. I pummeled the cemetery dirt with my hands until my knuckles bled, cut from the dirt and the glass. I sat back and cried and wailed hard at the passing of my friend. My partner in crime. My brother.

I fully understand the tenet of gratitude and its role in sobriety. I could never fully apply it to my life after Luis. I still, to this day, think something, a cut in the fabric of time, a cosmic mistake, allowed the demons to take the wrong guy. I know who I am. I’ve no more reason to be taking this next breath than my friend. A roll of the dice, a quick and poor decision and a life gone, buried six feet down in the cemetery dirt.

On a night like this, my fingers again touch the old and deep scars on my skin.

The cuts are still there, faded now, but I feel them. I question if any of it was real. In some ways, it is like it never happened. Then I feel the old bones, and I touch my shoulder where that mysterious metal used to be and I know… it was real.

My father-in-law was an accomplished photographer. He traveled the world and brought home some beautiful images of African photo safaris, the Australian outback, even from the Darian Gap that separates Panama and Columbia. I wasn’t so sure he’d make it back from that one, but there was a special bird in that deadly place, full of pumas and scary snakes and drug cartels, so off he went.

He passed a couple of years ago, and one of his photos came to me. It’s not a picture of a rhino or a lion, or some exotic adventure; rather it’s a photo of some old and rusted 1949-1951 shoebox Fords, and a couple of teepees.

I inherited my love of these old Fords from my parents. My mom had a ‘49, and my dad a ‘51, both ragtops. Some of my earliest memories are Saturdays somewhere under the hood or underneath one of these cars. By the time I came around, both cars were quite old, and worn out, but my father had a mechanical knack for keeping what would be another man’s junk running.

I found out recently that this is a photo of a place somewhere on US Route 66, a motel or rest stop. If it’s still there now, or if it’s been bulldozed, I do not know. I framed the photo and put it up on the wall of my office, it’s one of my most prized possessions. I’m not sure my father-in-law knew about my father’s, or my inherited love of the old ‘50s shoeboxes, but the day I found this photo going through my father-in-law’s stuff it was like I’d just glimpsed Nirvana. I’ve always loved this Buddhist definition of the place at the end of all our madness: where the spirit loses the illusions of self and transcends all pain, and finally finds peace.

I’ve never been a big heaven or hell guy, although a lot of religion was certainly offered to me. I believe there is a power greater than ourselves, and I like to think in the end, our soul goes some place other than a hole in the dirt. If any of that is true, please make mine a teepee on some grassy American plain, working on an old flathead Ford. Maybe I’ll find my dad there too, with his boxes of old Craftsman and New Britain tools, and a cold Rheingold beer, when the day’s work is through. That’s heaven enough for me.

I’m suffering from a form of writer’s block today. That’s pretty unusual for me. I can always think of something to write even when it’s not very good. I’ve been struggling all day, trying to distract myself. I even went up to my old tool barn and just sat there looking for inspiration. For a reason I’ll never understand, that’s one of my favorite places on earth.

It did come to me it’s hard to force any kind of creative process when you’re upset, and I am upset, I think I’m actually more disappointed and sad. I seem to spend my days now watching things I used to believe in crumble and questioning why I ever believed in much of it in the first place.

I’m disappointed in the level of dysfunction in the United States government. I think the people we elect to Congress ought to be able to figure out how to fund the government, or if it’s broken beyond repair admit it. I don’t think that would really be shocking to many. All I see are theatrics and partisan nonsense. I’ve never understood the spending caps anyway. They always raise it. To me it’s just a dog and pony show, while we slide deeper into the abyss of uncontrolled spending. I’ll always wonder why the US needs a trillion-dollar military budget, and why it subsidizes wealthy corporations, but we are told the single mom with three kids getting some food stamps is driving us to ruin.

I’m disappointed that we mistake entertainment as news. The daily onslaught of nonsense is staggering, but we suffer a drought of useful and factual information.

I’m deeply disappointed that my grandkids must accept school shootings as the norm. For Christ’s sake, how screwed up is it that the best we can do is accept this madness and make sure our kids know what to do when there’s an active shooter in their school. Kids should not even know what an active shooter is. We normalize and rationalize this madness like it’s as much a part of the school day as lunch and recess.

The subject also came up this week that I need to speak to the nine-year old grandboy about drugs. I guess it’s a natural assumption, what with my storied past, that I’m the guy for that job. I hear they are giving away these test strips to check for fentanyl. When I first heard about this, I thought it was a really stupid idea. I don’t know a lot of junkies that would be worried about the content or quality of their dope as long as they got off. What I learned is kids are using these strips to test their bags of weed for this killer drug before they smoke it. Again, how did it get this broken? I used to worry about having enough Doritos and Cheese Doodles to eat when I smoked, not dying instantly from a deadly chemical it was laced with. Once during the Nixon/Rockefeller years a lot of Mexican weed was being intentionally tainted with Paraguat. That was making kids sick, not killing us. It’s terrifying now. I’m scared for all my kid’s children. Experimentation is part of growing up. Now it seems one hit off a joint may actually kill you.

I’ve got a car to troubleshoot and fix this weekend. I’m looking forward to that. I know a lot of people think I’m odd because I really like working on cars. It’s not odd, it’s having one thing in my life that’s tangible. It’s something I can take apart and put back together and it’s fixed. When I wipe the grease off my hands and put my tools away, what didn’t work properly now does. I need that. I need to know some things can be fixed.

Maybe you can’t be creative when you’re just so goddamn sad and disappointed.