The Harder They Fall (47 page)

And we all looked at Lionel and said, “Lionel, come on man, we’re all professionals, we know that.” The next thing you know, we play the intro to the song, and Lionel starts the song off ’cause he wrote it. And as soon
as he goes to sing, he grabs his mike and starts stomping up and down just like what he told us not to do. What I realized is that people do what they’re comfortable with. They go back to the things that they know. I knew what it felt like to do the same thing over and over again until it became second nature. To me, getting through one day sober was the same as practicing the scales.

The words still resonate to this very day: “The working definition of discipline for me is the ability to delay gratification.” I don’t need the gold record today. I can work towards that gold record, and the day I get it, well that’s cool. My music teacher used to say, “Doing the work teaches you how to do the job.” And when I got into a program of recovery, the work was getting through a day. I was so glad to get through it without taking a drink. That was work. It wasn’t natural. Natural was “Forget this, let’s get some vodka.” So not to drink was almost an oxymoron, because not to do an action was an action. That’s how the practicing of the scales was the same as “don’t drink.” So I sat there and didn’t drink today. And it was incredible. Once I was able to come up with a philosophical approach to my recovery, it all felt natural.

To this very day it still feels natural. I’m in the rock-and-roll business. I’m around people who get drunk and do stuff all the time. I’m not a hypocrite—I loved it. I’d probably love it now if I could do it safely. But I’m an alcoholic, I’m a drug addict, and I can’t do it safely. If I take a glass of champagne, I’m not stoppin’. I want all the glasses of champagne. It’s pretty clear to me. A sip is not interesting. I’m a very grandiose personality. Working at being humble is discipline. That’s my job. I have to work hard at keeping grounded. It’s very natural for me to say, “All right, let’s go to Paris for lunch.” Now that the Concorde isn’t flying, it’s hard to be so grandiose, but I would do that just on a whim. Twenty thousand dollars to go have lunch. It was grandiose, and alcoholics are grandiose. Like they say, an alcoholic is the only person who could be lying in the gutter and think he is better than you. Do you know what an alcoholic uniform is? A crown, a scepter, and a diaper! And that’s how it is. There I am, I’m lying on the floor saying, “I’m the guy who wrote ‘We Are Family.’ I’m a genius.”

I’m so thankful that I found recovery, so thankful that I can be an
honest person and not be a hypocrite. I love alcohol. I love drugs. I have all my life. And I know, if I could use them safely, I probably wouldn’t be the person I am today. Now that I know that I do have a life without it, the person that I am would not choose to get high, because I like the way I feel sober. It took a long time before I could feel comfortable in a room full of strangers and face embarrassment. Now embarrassment doesn’t kill me. I go talk to strangers, and if they don’t like me, I’m not going to commit suicide. In the old days, I could walk past strangers and hear them laughing, and think they were laughing at me. Now I realize, whether they were or not, it’s none of my business. I can actually live by that now. I can be in situations that used to devastate me, and I handle them with relative peace.

(broadcaster)

My mother was an alcoholic and drug addict, which I didn’t fully know until right before she committed suicide when I was thirteen. I’m one of those guys who is not convinced that alcoholism is hereditary. Not that I much care. In my case I think it was self-fulfilling prophecy: seeing my mother’s patterns and thinking, “That’s the way I’m going to go.”

My family was relatively poor. Success to me was being able to afford a nice car and house, so in my early twenties, I was having great success. I was earning over $250,000 a year at twenty-two and thinking that I was absolutely the greatest thing ever. I was buying my own BS. The more I
acquired and the more I achieved my goals, the more empty I realized myself to be. It was always “I’ll be happy if I do this. I’ll be happy if I get that.”

My mother committed suicide when I was thirteen and I got into radio when I was thirteen, and I don’t believe that the two were a coincidence. My mother gave me a record album called
The Golden Days of Radio
when I was eight. I listened to the album and suddenly knew what I wanted to do, and so I buried myself in this.

It lit up my imagination to listen to old radio programs. I could imagine on my own something more powerfully than the TV producers could enact. That imaginative faculty, fostered so early, has allowed me to be successful. I see something in my head almost like a painting and know it can be done. Also, my father taught me that “as you believe, it shall be done.”

I was always a socially awkward guy and, at least in my twenties, a self-hating egomaniac. I started drinking at thirteen, taking drugs at fourteen, and from fifteen or sixteen smoked pot every day of my life until I was thirty-one. When I turned thirty I was friendless, my marriage was falling apart, and I hated myself. I had tried to commit suicide. I was a wreck as a human being. I was working in the smallest radio market I had worked in since I was sixteen, making the least amount of money since I was eighteen, and my whole life was in shambles. And I was still drinking and using.

And the alcohol and drugs were all that was keeping me going—for a while. In a sense they numbed me to the point where I could function without recognition of my internal struggles. For instance, for me cocaine served as an anesthetic, just as it might on a battlefield where you have multiple injuries yet can continue, on the drug, to fight.

What happened was that, because I was so successful in my career at such an early age, I believed that I was the “it kid,” whereas the truth was nobody wanted to work with me. Until recovery I was impossibly exacting and on the alert for any sign of mediocrity. My ego made me a nightmare. I was best described—and self-described—as a self-hating egomaniac. Looking back, I remember that I once fired a guy for bringing me the wrong kind of pen to sign autographs. I was so mean and nasty to people because if I could find fault in other people, I was somehow better.
I built myself up so I could believe in myself while tearing others apart. I just couldn’t find happiness at all. First it was money that would solve my problems, then drugs would solve them. Sex was going to solve them, or whatever. But I couldn’t find any solution.

It was my thirtieth birthday and I was lying in bed and looking at the clock. I watched it clock over to twelve midnight, which made it my birthday, and I looked up at my ceiling and was overwhelmed with a feeling that my life was about to change. I didn’t know why, but I knew with certainty that it was. A couple of months later I was having a physical and my doctor said to me, “You’ll be dead in six months if you keep drinking.” He asked me how much I drank and I said, “I dunno, probably one or two drinks a night.” What he didn’t know was that I was using a sixteen-ounce tumbler and filling it with Jack Daniel’s. So he said again, “You’ll be dead in six months if you continue to drink.” I said, “I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m fine.”

Eight months later I was still drinking. For two, maybe three years before that, I knew that I had a problem. The last year it got so bad for me that every day I promised myself I’d stop. “Today I’m not going to have a drink; today I’m not going to do drugs.” Each day I would see myself in the mirror and look myself in the eye while I was brushing my teeth and say, “You’re not an alcoholic. You’ve got it under control. You just have to say no. Don’t drink today. Don’t drink today and you’re not an alcoholic.”