What goes around can include a tangent

Okay it's story time. But it's a long one so brace yourself. This one takes place outside of Little Ceasar's Pizza. Mostly there. It started on the inside actually, after hours. I worked there, it must have been 83 or maybe 84. It was on Goldenwest street, across from the college. I wonder if it's still there. the pizza place, not the college. I worked there about a year, I am going to say in 84 because I went to college across the street. dated a delivery driver, hung out and played spades in the cafeteria with her and some others. I was a small time dope dealer. Real small time, if I am honest about it. Until I get to talking about it in meetings and I realize, even among sober alcoholics, not so many of us were dealers.

We got hold of an eight ball that night. I think I was one third in or so and another kid who worked there had the money for the rest. Come closing time we were inside the pizza place dividing it up. Doing lines and going out back to smoke pot. Awesome skunk bud, i remember. Pot is so much different nowadays but when I see the rare pictures of it, from dispensaries in california and now in Colorado and such, it was that kind of sticky buds. Then dividing it up again for sale. And more pot. We were stupid. and no that's not justa metaphor for how high we were. We went out to the car. It wasn't mine, so this would have been those same couple of years I quit driving. Quit bumping into things with other people's cars. 

Can you picture it with me here? It's a strip mall. Goldenwest is a pretty active street, north to south. It's now maybe one thirty or two in the morning, and deserted. Except for our car sitting in front of the little take out pizza place. We were not yet high enough. One more joint should work. Here lets put a little more cocaine on the tip too. The baggie goes back into the glove box and the bindle into the cigarette pack, which is beside me in the passenger side door handle, that little opening some cars have to lose change into. And now comes the knock on the window.

It's been what, thirty years now since then. I can still almost picture the officer. Or maybe I can't. i got a ticket a few weeks ago, mad at that officer, and maybe it's his face I picture now instead. I know the car we were sitting in was blue, but not the make or model. Lyle and his brother owned the Little Ceasar's. For all the fuzziness in my life, for the short term memory failures I have now in my later years, there are moments in time I can revisit unchanged. this is one of them. He was on my side. I rolled the window down. It was straight out of that movie with Sean Penn in it. They get out of the VW microbus surrounded by smoke. "That's my skull, I'm so wasted." In a movie it would be awesome, thinking the character is screwed, better him than me. Except it was me this time, in person, red eyed and suddenly pulled into reality, looking up at the cop looking down into this haze of smoke at me.

I have another officer related story here, too, from the same period of time, that one year of drinking between high school and adulthood. I told you this was a long story, a full circle with a tangent. The same delivery driver, we dated sort of a few times. I was 19, all my college friends 21. And maybe a bit older. I took them to see the band. The high school band, jim still a year or two younger than me. They were playing another pizza place this particular night. It was the juxtuposition of my two worlds. I brought the girl and five or six more of our friends from that college across the street. university Behind Levitts. there were some tarot card readings, too, before we went to the show. But there we were, one table of college kids, sitting near the back a room full of underage kids I knew from high school, drinking pitchers of beer and rocking to the band. I had my back to the exit, so I never saw the officer. There were three or four inside all of a sudden. Everything was growing quiet. And this particular officer walked past everybody and straight back to me, as I am swallowing a swig of whatever it was on tap. Wanted ID and I had none and I was taken to jail. Only me, the oldest minor in the place, going to jail for underage drinking.

This was all before the drinking got bad, by the way. just as you know, these were the fun years. So back to the other pizza place, the blue four door in the strip mall parking lot, the window rolled down and the blue lights lit up behind us.

"Ok go ahead and give it up." Those were all the words he needed. we were busted and there was no wweaseling out. So I opened up the glove box and handed him the baggie of weed. That was good weed, too. It was a loss. I don't know yet if I am going to jail. This was the eighties. we were locals. Anybody from Los Angeles was definitely getting locked up for the night, but local boys got warnings.
"Okay, come on out of the car." he opened the door for me. He pulled out my pack of cigarettes, opened them. Pulled out the bindle. I am no good with the math any more, but about 1 third of an eight ball, I am remembering two or three hundred dollars worth of coke. The rest of which, remember, is sitting in my coworkers pocket, bundled for individual sale. This was about to be serious. So he pulled me aside and he asked me where I got it, and I lied. And I told him he could go anywhere in Santa Ana, and he wanted to know where this came from. And the dude is in the driver's seat and I lied again and he made me dump it out.

That doesn't happen any more. That didn't happen then, i don't think. All my cocaine floating to the pavement in this parking lot. Then we did the marijuana shuffle, his words, not mine. He dumped it there, next to the car, and told me to rub it into the concrete with my shoe. i am assuming it was supposed to crumble up and dissipate. but this was sticky bud. It just kind of rolled up in itself and imbedded into the cracks in the parking lot. And I walked away. Well, drove away, with the kid whose pocket was full of cocaine and who was never even asked to get out of the car.

So where is the point? What's the purpose of this little tale? I keep wanting to think it's not real, that doesn't happen. But it did, it's who I am, now, based on those events. I let things slip to my son now. not to much yet of the drug use. Told him a bit about the carnival. About being homeless and eating from trash cans. I want him to experience life, but not like that. And I can stand here now and see what I put my parents through. It amazes me. How did I make it out? Where once I thought I was being picked on by god I can see I was being guided, pushed, toward the only solution available. If you know what I mean you get it. But to explain that sentence might take another ramble.

It's more than just a physical likeness

Fonzie literally jumped a shark the same year the writers of Happy Days decided to give us an alien from Ork. I have said it before but the 70's were a weird time to grow up in. Tween-aged Robert watched the show because of Pam Dawber, and it may be fantasy but I am pretty sure at least one episode had a good look at her woman bumps* poking through her t-shirt. This was right before they started having those athletic contests between networks where Patrick Duffy and Greg Evigan would go shirtless and Farah Faucett and Suzanne Sommers would be in tight cut off shirts and dolphin shorts.

Life before internet, in other words, wasn't always as bad as we make it seem.

*nipples, by the way. Pokies, Puffies, headlights. I haven't written in a while, and woman bumps were the first thing to come from the keyboard.

Anyway, enough with the smut.

I grew up with Robin Williams. Obviously, just like the rest of us. It was in later years I explored the older SNL episodes and the tales about him and Belushi. Everyone talks about Dead Poets Society but the Fisher King blew me away with his performance. About the time he quit drinking (1982) I was just dropping out of high school and joining the carnival, drinking in bars at seven o'clock in the morning before showing up for work that day. By the time I joined the program, he was already sober, as were the members of Aerosmith and Stevie Ray Vaughn and a scattering of others, some still anonymous and some in and out of the program.

It was in the last ten years or so when people started telling me I looked like Robin Williams. I maybe took it and ran with it, decided to embrace it and act as if I was funny. There are a hundred other celebrities I would prefer to look like, but when I embrace myself for who I am I do well in this life. He was sober,. too. And I can relate to his depression and the ways in which he handled it.

I didn't know he was drinking again.

Man there are so many people here who don't know who Jeff was. Used to drive a taxi. He married Melinda. Funny man with a gift or the here and now. I didn't know he was drinking and new years a few years ago...that year that the meeting was held in Garden City, and we roller skated into the new year. The same night they towed my car because I didn't have insurance... he killed himself with an overdose. The very same night Peter was found (From the White Bluff group), dead and bled out. I didn't know he went back to drinking either.

Alcoholism kills. Fast and painful and without regard for anything else in your life. The book tells me that we have recovered. It repeats that statement five times, mostly in the first 50 pages. I believe that and I live like that. But as someone once pointed out to me as well, I can recover from a bullet wound one hundred percent and that still does not make me bullet proof.

Depression kills as well. Depression and alcoholism or addiction are quite contented bedfellows. One can cause the other, the other can exasperate (huh.. I spelled that correctly the first try) the first. I am not here to slight depression in any way at all, but you can't honestly keep talking about his depression without talking about his alcoholism. A hundred times in my facebook feed I see the suicide prevention line, and not once the number to a central office or a recovery center.

I deal with depression myself. It runs in my family. I was 15 the first time I tried to commit suicide. There was no note, no cry for help. There was a bottle of aspirin, a few demoral my mom had and a handful of benadryl (I was allergic to bee stings).  After that there was a toilet full of pink puke and stomach cramps for days. I wasn't even in the beginning stages of my active alcoholism yet, and I was done already.

I didn't know he went back to drinking. I never use the word "chose" to drink because I didn't have a choice in the matter then, and I still don't. I gave that to god finally and completely in '98, in the parking lot of the Union Plaza, flipping a coin over and over wishing I could drink again. God wouldn't let me.

The last time I felt truly hopeless was in Florida, just before finding the Broad Highway Group. I don't know, even after that there were times, working on Skidaway Island, when I thought I could drive off the bridge. But that's my depression expressing itself. That's the part I live with and who knows, maybe some day it will take me in the same manner as others. But I no longer feel hopeless since giving it to god. The last time I felt really hopeless, to get back to my story, was in Holiday Florida. I lived on Mary St, and at the end of my street, one street over, a package store with cigarettes and what nots and a wall of liquor behind the sales clerk. I remember looking up at that wall, knowing I wouldn't drink, knowing Connor would not see the throes of active alcoholism (because of those coin flips I mentioned) and wasn't life grand? And why was I contemplating homicide? Seriously. Why was I so lost and so scared and so done with living that I wanted to end it right there?

I gave it to god, and I really don't know why or how, but I did. Completely and finally in the same sense I gave him my alcoholism. And to prove it he took away my Florida customers and took away my Georgia employees. He repo'd my Suburban and bankrupted my business so that none of it would get in the way. And he gave me Broad Highway. I'm not cured,a nd most likely not even recovered yet. I shoved my ex, and called her some nasty names, during the meeting the last time I saw her. Depression is something I am dealing with but its my alcoholism that uses it as an excuse.

Robin Williams went back to drinking. And with us, to drink is to die. It's that simple and we hear it all the time, and we see it often enough that we shouldn't put blinders on it and pretend that it isn't there. He talked about his recovery, he talked about his depression. He lived this way of life for more than twenty years, one of those in front of me leading the way. Sobriety is a fragile slippery thing. His depression was not gone while he was sober, and it didn't magically return when he went back to drinking. He was another alcoholic on the precipice of a cliff, unable to drink anymore and unable to grasp at a life without it. That's exactly where I was that day in Florida, my emotional bottom. I believe that know exactly where he was in those final moments from my personal experiences on that cliff. Three weeks away from yet another celebration of continued unearned sobriety I have nothing but gratitude, to the old guys from Heil St (half at least now gone to their maker), Dick and Noel and Aaron and Jack and Helen and Ellory; to the kids now at the BH and those in between who paved the way either by good example or bad.

I wouldn't be here without Robin Williams influence as well, and I am deeply saddened the way the disease took him back from us. I wish I had some nice way to wrap this post up nicely, but I don't. It's just over.

Morning meditation forty two slash three sixty five

I don't want to be here. i am angry and sad. And I want to believe that if I type it here, I won't bring it up to her, because I shouldn't. But a part of me thinks that by typing it, it makes the feelings stronger and with that I will tell her even more convincingly.

That even make any sense? I want to go back to typing for imaginary Connor. I want to type and believe that somebody is understanding, and learning from my mistakes.

I typed all this, by the way, with a few back spaces to fix clumsy typing, but no typos or spelling mistakes.

I don't want to see her with somebody else. Ever. I don't want to be friends with her because some day in the future she will be with somebody else, happy and laughing and attending meetings together and I don't want to see that.That was supposed to be me.

Anyway. The meditation says I am supposed to wait patiently for god's instructions. Trying. The AlAnon book was all about the first step still. I can't fix this. Which is also true.

I pray now that I remember to pray later. I don't want to argue or confront her later, and I pray for the patience to pause and reflect and let the good stuff keep happening.

Let's see how it goes, then, shan't we?