Finding Ultra (12 page)

Meanwhile, the wedding plans proceeded, and with the big event a mere month away, I became more and more excited. But things started to take an odd turn a couple weeks before the ceremony. Up in San Francisco one Friday taking a deposition on a case I was working on with Bob Shapiro (the famous attorney who'd defended O.J. Simpson), I booked a nice hotel room that I extended for the weekend. The plan was for Michele to make the forty-five-minute drive north from Palo Alto so we could share a romantic evening. But when I called her late Friday afternoon to check on what time she'd be arriving, her tone revealed a change of heart.

“I'm not going to make it up tonight,” she said, her voice distant.

“What? Why not? I have dinner reservations and everything.”

“I'm just tired. All the wedding planning has me stressed out.”

“I understand. I know it's been a lot. What can I do to ease your stress?”

“Nothing. It's fine.” But I could tell there was more on her mind.

“Why don't I come down to you and we can just hang out?”

“No. I just need sleep. Go out. Have fun. We'll talk later.” Not the response I was looking for.

Clearly something was amiss. But despite my instincts, I refused to believe it was anything serious. So I decided to chalk it up to a simple case of pre-wedding nerves. But the interlude stuck in my brain like a splinter in the foot. It was a slow ache I just couldn't shake.

A week later, I took off from work and drove my green Ford Explorer up from Los Angeles to Palo Alto to get settled in a couple days prior to the big weekend. Friends and relatives slowly began arriving from all across the country. On the evening before all the group activities were to commence, I took Michele out for a quiet dinner in San Francisco. I'd picked a romantic restaurant near Telegraph Hill with a gorgeous view of the San Francisco Bay beyond. But Michele fidgeted in her seat, clearly uncomfortable. Finally, she began. She wanted, she explained, to wait until we got back from the honeymoon to sign the marriage certificate. She needed time, she explained. To decompress from the stress.

To say that her request made no sense to me is an understatement. In fact, I couldn't believe we were even having such an insane discussion. But I was desperate to mend the intimacy crevasse that was quickly expanding between us. I wanted her to be happy, excited about the wedding—and relaxed. And so, after distraught reflection, I relented. With everything I'd put her through with
the move, the DUIs, the lying, and the struggle with alcoholism, I figured it was the least I could do for her. In retrospect, I should have never agreed. And looking back now, it's unbelievable to me that I did.

And yet this ludicrous arrangement failed to bring her closer. In fact, she only grew more distant. During the rehearsal dinner at a beautiful winery high atop the foothills above Palo Alto, Michele avoided me entirely. Refused to hold my hand even. To the casual observer, everything seemed fine. But I was in my own private hell. Man, did I want to drink that night.
Just one strong drink to numb this misery
. But I knew I could never have just one drink.

The next day, as I mingled with my groomsmen getting dressed in the wedding venue anteroom, I put on a smile and did everything in my power to enjoy the moment, choosing to believe that all would be right in the world and refusing to accept that I was about to make the mistake of my life. I hadn't seen Michele since the previous evening when she ducked out of the rehearsal dinner with her friends, leaving me to venture back to the hotel alone with my parents—so I couldn't help wondering what her current mind-set might be. Was she even going to show up?

She did, and before I knew it, the “I do's” were said and we were pronounced married. After, when it came time to sign the marriage certificate, Michele rushed through a lie that somehow the judge who married us believed, and as crazy as it sounds, we did not, in fact, sign the certificate. In a sober but painfully confused daze, I stumbled through the reception, during which Michele was as chilly and unavailable as ever.

Our wedding night was even worse. From the threshold of our penthouse suite, I demanded answers for her inexplicable behavior. But Michele was unresponsive, retreating to the next room and refusing to even acknowledge the elephant looming between us.

As for our honeymoon, I have never had a more awful time in
such a beautiful place as I had in Jamaica. Privately, I decided I'd back off, give Michele the requested space to decompress. So for five days, we shared a room yet barely spoke. Forget making love—mere eye contact was a challenge.

On the morning of the fifth day, I went for a swim in the ocean. Since my days at Stanford, I rarely got wet unless I was taking a shower. But as I stroked offshore that day and enjoyed the warm Caribbean current, muscle memory took over. Suddenly, I was summoning my deep love for the water and lamenting how long it had been since I just
swam
. I reflected on how disconnected I'd become from this huge part of my core being, and without thought, I began paddling faster until I was flat-out sprinting. For that brief moment, I felt entirely comfortable in the world. Because out there everything made sense. I knew who I was.

Minutes passed. As I swung my left arm overhead to begin my next stroke, I suddenly felt my wedding band slip off my ring finger. In seconds it had sunk to the seafloor thirty feet below. I immediately dove down to search for it, but it was too deep. And too murky to even see, let alone retrieve it. No, the ring was gone.
Perfect
, I thought. Like something you'd expect to see in a cheesy movie.

I swam back to shore, walked up the beach, and stood before Michele, who was quietly tanning herself.

“I lost my ring,” I reported matter-of-factly.

“Oh, well. Probably for the best,” she replied, completely unfazed by the news.

I couldn't take her nonchalance one minute longer. With a deep breath, I girded myself for a reckoning.

“I'm done, Michele. It's time to get real.”

I pulled a large smooth stone out of the sand and plopped it down in front of her. “See this rock? That's you. An island. I thought if I gave you room to decompress like you asked, that you'd eventually open up to me. But it's just gotten worse. You don't talk
to me. You won't even let me touch you. I don't know who you are anymore. You have to tell me what's going on. Because I just can't handle this silence one minute longer.”

“I don't have anything to say,” she responded. I doubt her heart rate increased one bit.

How is that even possible?
I thought, altogether dumbfounded. But it was obvious this would go nowhere. My plan had failed. It was over. Before it had even begun, this “marriage” was kaput. Despair turned to anger. My move. “Time for you to go home. Pack your bags. I want you gone by tonight.”

“Fine.” And without any emotion other than possible relief, she raised herself up, calmly collected her things, and decamped to the room, leaving me alone on the beach without a single clue to explain how something that had once been so good had ended so terribly.

She was gone, and to this day, I've seen her only one time since, a brief and highly unpleasant occasion after my return from the honeymoon in which I visited her to retrieve the wedding gifts bestowed by my friends and family members so that they could be promptly returned.

But that night, just moments after Michele left, an old acquaintance showed up. My demon. Picking up the phone, I dialed.

“Room service? Yes. I'd like a twelve-pack of Red Stripe beer, please.”

Six months of sobriety out the window.

Somehow, after some several rough days deep into the bottle, I made it back to Los Angeles, and once there, I wasted no time seeking out Michele's friends to see if I could extract from them what had
really
been going on with my almost bride. I'm afraid I reverted to full Perry Mason mode, grilling these blameless people as if they
were on the witness stand. Finally, though, one of Michele's friends broke down crying.

“She's been having an affair. I'm so sorry.”

As it turns out, during our engagement, when I was down in Los Angeles, Michele had fallen in love with her next-door neighbor in her apartment complex. She wanted to call the wedding off but just couldn't summon the courage. So she did the next best thing, pushing me away in the expectation that I'd have enough spine and self-respect to do what she couldn't. But the whole thing backfired. And then it was too late. I should have seen it coming, I suppose. It was the one explanation that made sense out of this baffling mess. Yet I'd been utterly blind.

Armed with this new information, I hopped in my truck that night and drove north until dawn, arriving in Palo Alto to confront Michele and retrieve the wedding gifts. Her only remark?

“It was just a party. I don't see what the big deal is.”

Did she seriously just say that?
As I pulled my truck out of the cul-de-sac, all I felt was rage. All the feelings of betrayal, anger, and confusion that I'd begun to put behind me came rushing back.
I needed a drink
.

Certainly I wanted to be sober. But taking the necessary actions required not just to achieve but to maintain sobriety proved a task I was simply incapable of. During the nine months following my wedding fiasco, I rubber-banded in and out of recovery, but I couldn't make it stick. And with each successive relapse, my spirits sank lower, and I began to despair of ever managing to lead a “normal” life.

With my increasingly frequent absences, it was only a matter of time before I was fired. And my parents weren't just fed up; they were scared to death. During one painful visit from my father in January 1997, I was completely unable to show up for him sober. I had to drink two vodka tonics during my morning shower to calm my nerves enough to walk down the street with him to grab a simple cup of coffee.

“I know what's going on, Rich,” my dad sternly informed me when we returned to my apartment. “You know we love you more than anything. And I'm so sorry about everything that has happened. But your mom and I just can't continue to watch you destroy yourself like this. If you get sober, give us a call. But until then, we don't want to hear from you. You're on your own. Good-bye.”

Just like that, my family was gone. And so, too, my sanity. I'd become just another wet-brain, hopeless alcoholic certain to wither and die a slow, lonely death.

But unbeknownst to me at the time, back in D.C. my parents had sought out counseling to better understand not just the disease
of alcoholism, but how to insulate themselves from the pain of my downward spiral. They began attending Al-Anon meetings, finding solace in this support group for people suffering from the alcoholism of loved ones. And a couple months after my father's fateful visit, I received an unexpected call.

“I'm going to say this once. And then you're not going to hear from us anymore,” my dad said on the other end of the line. “We found a psychiatrist. He's helped a lot of alcoholics. What you do with this information is up to you. But we think it would be a good idea for you to go see him.”

Great. A shrink.
That's all I need
.

Maybe it was because despite all my screwups, I still desperately wanted his approval. With stinging remorse I recalled his loving words of support in the immediate aftermath of the wedding debacle.
We love you, Rich. And we will get through this … together
. Or maybe it was because deep down I still harbored a dim pilot light of hope that I could somehow beat this thing.
You can be a victim. Let this destroy you. Or you can be strong.…

Only after another painful relapse—opening up a brief and narrow window of willingness—did I book the appointment.

As I pulled into the parking lot of a nondescript two-story office building just beyond the perimeter of Los Angeles International Airport, in my battered Ford Explorer, its front end still decimated more than a year after my DUI collision, all I could think was
Same old shit, different day
.

But from the moment I sat down across the desk from Dr. Garrett O'Connor, a gray-haired Irish gentleman in tweed jacket and tie, I could tell this wouldn't be business as usual. Over the course of our first hour together, he wasted no time in taking me apart piece by piece, with laser precision.

“You're what I call terminally unique. You think you're special. Your problems remarkable and singular. People like you die.”

So much for easing into things. He continued, “But you're just a garden-variety alcoholic. Nothing more, nothing less. Just like me.” Garrett told me he'd been quite the drunk back in the day, but had been sober for decades. “What you need is treatment. And until you embrace this fact, you're never going to get sober.”

By “treatment,” Garrett meant rehab. A minimum of thirty days away, with nothing to do but focus on my problems in a highly controlled environment. All I heard was
mental institution
. And I wasn't buying.

But I agreed to see him again. And for the next two months I visited him weekly. Until one day I didn't, missing my appointment because of yet another relapse. The following week I told him what had happened, with a vulnerability and level of raw honesty that I'd been unable to muster in any of the A.A. meetings I'd attended over the last fifteen months.

“So, are you finally ready to talk about treatment?”

“I still think I can handle this without rehab. One more chance. If I relapse again, I'll go. You have my word.”

“Last time I heard that excuse the guy died choking on his own vomit. You sure you want to risk it?”