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.
