Part Three: The Bail Out
Faced with the prospects of confronting our own darkness, we tend to do what any reasonable person might... We run away.
[Part Three of a Twelve-Part Series: A Roadmap to Freedom]
The fall of 2009 was one of the darkest several month stretches of my life. Now sober thanks to rehab, AA, and Rich—my ex-junkie counselor with the nice pants—I was feeling everything I’d drank and snorted away over the previous decade. Things were not cute. A typical day was cigarettes and sobbing on the terrace of my 85th street apartment, praying for death. I had no job and my ex-girlfriend wasn’t returning my calls.
A friend from college offered to set me up with Kristin. She was a bit of a snob, and drank an entire bottle of Sauv. B. on our first date. But she was an animal in bed. In fact, when I was having sex with Kristin, I was as high as I’d ever been on those afternoons blowing lines with Cub. Time disappeared. I’d leave her apartment in a flushed state of bewilderment, pleasantly far away from the harsh realities of my life.
Kristin didn’t last long, but she gave way to Jane. Then Erica, Ashley, Kate, Sarah, Rebecca, Anna, and Courtney. Eventually, I felt like I’d had sex with half of the Upper East Side, only Blair and Serena were missing. (Yes, we watched Gossip Girl back then.)
Desire was a salve for me in those dark days, but it kept me in a world I was trying purposefully to stay away from. Enter Maria, a 19 year-old NYU fashion student living in her parent’s palatial pied e terre on Park Avenue. Maria loved drugs, and was less than amused by the fact that I was sober. “Well, you’re really boring aren’t you, old man?” She’d say, applying her makeup before another long night out at the downtown clubs she frequented.
One night I agreed to join her on the Bowery. At the bar, I ordered a club soda with lime, but the waiter brought vodka. I took a few big sips. That night, as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling the alcohol move through my system, I remember being confronted with a choice: I had been sober for a year, working with Rich, crying on the fire escape every night, feeling my losses. I had, in essence, looked into the mouth of hell. But was this really the choice I wanted to make at 26 years old? Did I actually want to change?
In any good story, there is always a beat of hesitation before the hero agrees to the big adventure laid out to him. Frodo tries to pass the ring off on Gandolf, William Wallace vows not to fight, The Dude shrugs off the guys who pissed on his rug. And it makes sense. What investment would there be if the hero (us, in this case) agreed to the harrowing adventure immediately? That’s not how Gatsbys — or humans, for that matter — work. We are always, to paraphrase a common twelve step saying, looking for an easier, softer way.
In Part Two, we courageously stared down the cracks in our protective shells. Maybe we even grabbed a flashlight and began the descent into our own psychic basements. (High five for that! Lesser men never make it that far.) While in the basement, we met our blind spots, regrets, addictions, and some of the skeletons in our closets. It was illuminating, but we’d have to be total idiots to want to stick around marinating in our own sewage, wouldn’t we?
So we do what any protagonist worth his or her salt would do: We say a hearty NO to the challenge presented. We back out of the darkness and run, scrambling like Saxon villagers during a Viking raid, back up towards the sweet sunlight of day, the cozy familiarity of what we know. Back to cold beer, bags of Cheetos, and extra large pizzas with greasy, stretchy mozzarella. Back to A/C, comfortable furniture, and cheap entertainment. We are safe again in our ordinary lives. In fact, when we take in our surroundings, Part Three will look a lot like Part One, with one key difference: We now know what we are running from.
This little seed of doubt remains with us. We have seen the bruise on the underside of the apple, and can never truly unsee it. Therefore, to continue our unexamined life takes a Herculean effort of rationalization, which we will now attempt in…
…the bail out!
In rehab, I made friends with a Canadian investment banker named Dave. He told us his hilarious story of arriving to the airport on the island where the rehab center was, seeing the driver of the shuttle waiting for him and, immediately regretting his decision, bolting to the airport bar for a final, triumphant fix. Dave drank as much as he could, and even managed to score some not-so-great meth from a bartender before the shuttle driver found him, sitting there mumbling to himself like a child, and hauled him off to the destiny that was waiting for him — 30 days of sobriety with us. Whew!
To me, this story is the perfect metaphor for where we are in Part Three: fully knowing what we must do, we say a triumphant “Fuck it” and make one last stand of denial. There’s more than a little “Eat my shorts” present, here. It’s the middle finger to the passing cop car, the paper airplane zoomed at the teacher’s head. We are resisting ownership, and ultimately initiation into adulthood. We are, as Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette write in the classic, masculine psychology book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: still seeking the “ultimate and continuous orgasm” of our youth.
Ah, but the illusion that life can be all baseball and apple pie is about to be shattered permanently. And part of us knows that. Our first trip to the basement — like it or not — was the beginning of a rites of passage. It was our first fight, our first black eye, our first taste of manhood. We can never fully go back to our innocence now, and that’s devastating. So devastating, that for many men, Part Three signals a prolonged return to numbness: we let fear win, going deeper into our patterns and addictions to mask the pain we feel over settling for a life not fully lived: we remain in the dead-end relationship, we choose a comfortable salary over our burning urge to pursue a passion, we ditch the therapist, citing: I don’t have enough time/money/energy for personal growth right now.
This is also the stage when we see guys bailing out of life, too: My father, at 50 years-old, was faced with the option to descend and chose instead to hit the eject button. And I see similar themes in the stories of other wildly endearing, Peter Pan-like men: Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams, Elvis. Perhaps the ultimate masculine crime — repeated over and over again — is saying: I’m leaving. And all of us do it - physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually — more than we’d like to admit. So what really matters is: will we come back?
Questions for this stage include:
Is what I’m saying I want conflicting with my actions?
Where am I still resisting or running from what my heart truly desires?
Where am I still unnecessarily suffering?
When I sit in the silence, what emerges?
Are there things I know I want to do I’m not doing?
Where do I fall into self righteousness, or projection?
What pain have I turned my back on?
What are the next steps I’m avoiding taking in my life?
Where is my edge?
In what areas is fear still running my life?
Bailing is a natural part of the growth process. The hard truth is that it takes enough time for both our options and our ego layers to fall away, leaving us in a place of real surrender, and at Part Three, we aren’t there yet. We still believe there’s an express lane we haven’t found yet, a way to avoid going on the long, perilous road trip into the truth of who we are. Like Stephen King writes in Shawshank Redemption: Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. And most of us have to go a little nuts before we fully surrender our wills and jump into the boat.
I chose to go back to the circus that night after accidentally drinking the vodka with Maria. And that decision would lead me down a path of temporary insanity: seven more years of booze and cocaine induced craziness, seven more years of drowning my darkness in fruitless sexual escapades. Seven more years of doing battle with myself internally, trying to hold onto the Gatsby shell that kept me safe.
Ultimately, it took meeting Amy — who fulfilled all my adolescent desires and matched me in my hedonism — to finally show me myself. In Amy, I saw the life that was fated for me if I stayed on the path of numbness. And it woke me the fuck up. But not without breaking me down first. I tried to lose myself in Amy’s delicious world, and when she ended things between us, it sent me hurtling back down to the basement door again — humbled — ready for another attempt at descent.
But more on how that happened next time.
(Part Four will be published on August 22nd.)