Sober and Unwell

Sobriety in college didn’t stick. My father hired a psychiatrist for me after the assault, and she encouraged me to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Meeting topics didn’t seem to address my nineteen-year-old life situations, though. Meetings were full of older people who had lost homes, cars, marriages. I didn’t fit into these narratives. Besides, a grumbling inner attitude hinted, I wasn’t planning on sticking around for life much longer. What I needed was a peer group of other young adults navigating life without drugs and alcohol. This habit could not be kicked on my own.

Booze Betrayal

Blackout: A curious new word I learned at A.A. I was surprised to have a term for what I had experienced throughout my life. My mental escapes from the molestations had created several “time gaps” in my memory. Disengaging my conscious mind from anything frightening or stressful was one of my superpowers. The similar time gaps from pot and alcohol consumption therefore didn’t worry me much; leaving linear time had long been a way of life for me.

Without dope or booze, I was an angry jerk. I became the student who functioned poorly when sober. No one liked me when I wasn’t drunk or high, because I was jittery, argumentative, and unable to follow through on tasks. Bourbon or gin, ideally combined with pot, were medicinal tonics to quiet my inner howling chaos. I felt and acted normal only when tranquilized.

Chemical substances supercharged the escape modes I had created as a child. By college, alcohol and drugs were part of my regimen to maintain functionality. I earned decent grades and performed well in school ensembles. Yet as the blackouts increased, so did unpredictable outcomes whenever I drank or got high. Like winding up in Cincinnati, where I most certainly did not live or attend college.

Countless attempts to stop on my own will power lasted only a few days, a week at most. Earnest efforts to “clean up my act” ended inexplicably, my glassy-eyed nonchalance indicating to all that I was back at it. Maintaining a drunken and high state quelled the horrible noises inside, and I suspect it gave relief to everyone around me, for I was much more lighthearted when inebriated.

My senior year of college included student teaching at a local high school. Dave also proposed, and we planned to get married the summer before entering graduate school together. My parents were thrilled to see I had a future with a decent man, and felt reassured that I would be fine.

I wasn’t fine, and I knew it. Dave watched helplessly, during my occasional bouts of clean sobriety, as I swung from sad depression to furious rage. He coaxed me to return to the psychiatrist I had seen during my freshman year after the dorm assault. This time, I took the antidepressants she prescribed. Of course, I neglected to disclose that I was drinking and smoking pot; neither substance interacted compatibly with Amitriptyline.

Every morning I shook with a deep sensation of cold that didn’t abate, even with an extra sweater. Cold and shaky mornings devolved into afternoon moodiness. Sometimes the noise inside erupted outward in tantrums reminiscent of my childhood.

Then things got pretty weird, even for me.

Apparitions appeared in the corners of rooms, holding knives and coming at me. Auditory hallucinations, certain that someone was whispering in my ear. For several days I experienced spasms of wrenching pain in my gut that caused me to double over. Neither Dave nor I had any idea what to do when, unexpectedly, I would contort and fall to the floor, jerking wildly in spasms. We were perplexed when a glass of gin made it worse. Maybe, I thought, I should have my liver checked. I had blood drawn at a clinic downtown, but I don’t recall returning to find out the results.

Somehow I’d won an audition to perform one of my favorite horn solos with the conservatory orchestra: Richard Strauss’ Horn Concerto No. 1. Even that didn’t matter enough to stay clean and sober so that I could really work on the piece at the level of a featured soloist. Mr. Perrini tried to coax me back to lessons to practice the piece under his guidance, but I snarled at him and lied that I was too busy with student teaching to meet with him.

I adored the Strauss Horn Concerto. Yet it failed to keep me on task of staying grounded in the rituals of daily practice. Its heroic melodic arcs reflected perfectly my love for the quintessential “heroic” sound of the instrument. There’s nothing like the exhilaration of a full-bodied breath rushing through the horn at warp speed to nail the high Bb notes in that first movement. All of that takes mindful, strategic practice for a focused flow-state of performance, not my haphazard winging it on instinct. I would just have to bang through it using my strategy for managing performance anxiety: Getting so smashed the night before a performances that concert day I was “comfortably numb” (a Pink Floyd tune) on stage.

Resentful that my symptoms curbed my drinking, but also freaked out that I was physically unable to drink, I tried A.A. again. Technically, I was sober, but I felt awful. Battling headaches, shakiness, and cranky most of the time, I hated student teaching. After three weeks of truly sickening sobriety, I left an AA meeting determined to begin drinking immediately when I got to Dave’s apartment.

The windshield wipers patted a steady rhythm as I drove through the pouring rain, my mood brightening in anticipation of relief coming soon in a cool glass of gin. Poor Dave, he’d be disappointed again. He’d understand though, right? Maybe even buy me another ounce of dope; and this time I’d share it with him.

The Big Voice Returns

As I merged onto the freeway, I noticed the exit for Children’s Hospital. Momentarily I thought of my long appointments there with Dr. Kramer, experimenting on me without Novocaine. I vowed one of my drinks tonight to forget again how much I hated him.

Abruptly interrupting my thoughts, a semi-truck merged into my lane, headlights glaring and so close in my mirror that the light hurt my eyes. I heard an odd “thump” in the trunk just as my car begin to float on its own. My foot was off the accelerator and yet I was moving forward quickly, turning. No, I was spinning. Out of control. The steering wheel did not respond as the car spun leftward, skidding sideways across the four lane freeway. In front of me was a cement divider; I was heading directly into it. I didn’t have my seat belt on.

Suddenly a powerful presence filled the car. Intelligent, communicating clearly without audible sound, a kind of vibrant energy that went beyond hearing. It didn’t use sentences, but I understood. It reviewed my situation as dire. I was going through the windshield and into the cement divider. No more Dave, graduate school, life.

I’d sensed this presence before. The neighbor’s dogs rushing toward me. Yes, it’s back.

Right before impact, I felt a hand at the back of my head, though no one was in the car with me. The hand pressed me firmly down into the steering wheel right before impact. SLAM! Then silence. Calm surrounded and permeated me, just for a moment. Then it vanished.

I raised my head a bit to peek over the steering wheel. A sea of headlights was coming toward me, but I was in the freeway shoulder, car engine still running. I pulled up the parking brake and turned off the ignition. Another car pulled into the shoulder and a man got out, running toward me. Opening my car door and peering inside, he asked if I was all right.

“Are you alive?”  I asked him.

“What?”

“Are we still here on the earth, or are we both gone?”

“I’m alive, yes. I’m real.”

“Hug me to prove that you are alive and I’m still here.”

The stranger’s huge, loving bearhug soothed me awake to the present. Immediately the sounds and lights of our surroundings rushed into my physical senses. A massive re-set button clicked within my head.

I walked away from that accident unscathed, even though the car was totaled. I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt. Neither the truck driver nor the highway patrolman could explain how a collision of such force did not kill or seriously injure me. I sad nothing about the disembodied voice or its hand.

It was very late when the tow truck dropped me off at Dave’s apartment. Past bedtime even for musicians, Dave bundled me up into the bed covers and fell asleep with his arm protectively across my waist. I lay awake for a long time, marveling at the force that had come upon me in the car. I recognized its unmistakable presence as the same being that had appeared when I was a child in the front meadow with the neighbor’s attack dogs.

As if on cue, the presence emerged again. In the dark of night, I could yet feel it right in front of my face, sure as I felt Dave sleeping beside me.

“NOW, I WANT YOU ALIVE” the presence commanded, as it pressed my head firmly against the pillow. The drinking and drug use would end. Immediately.

The following morning – Saint Patrick’s Day, 1984 – I awoke to the first day of a truly clean and sober life that has not been compromised since. For months afterwards, I shook with jittery spasms from delirium tremens (“the DT’s” in A.A. parlance). My inner landscape snapped and popped with short-circuited sounds in momentary reconnection to my body, memory, senses. These moments seemed like little flashes of light bursting through the blackened dead-zones of my lifemap.

I went forward with performing the first movement of the Strauss Horn Concerto with the conservatory orchestra. It was the first time I had performed without being “comfortably numb” from excessive substance abuse the night before. The snapping sounds inside swirled around snippets of the music and the mental notes I’d made to breathe, compress lips and air, use alternate fingerings. I felt humbled by the overwhelming chaos of all that I had left untended

Unprepared for feeling fully the depth of my nervousness when I walked out onto the stage, the intensity  triggered an emotional blackout. I lost the thread of myself in the music, hiding behind my own self and watching the experience. Through the curtain of my mind, I heard myself crack both of the high B-flats in the first movement. I nailed the final high A. Backstage immediately afterward, I asked Mr. Perrini how I had performed because I really had no idea. He scooped me in an exuberant embrace, kissed the top of my head, and replied that I had played marvelously.

Half an hour after the performance, I collapsed in a heap of delayed stage fright. Shaking, stuttering, crying, this behavior continued when I performed as a sober – yet unwell – musician for many years to come.

Dissonant Cadences

Three months sober on my wedding day, I still shook with DT tremors. Unknowing guests cooed that I seemed an adorably nervous bride. My father began the day by pouring booze into his morning coffee. He was pretty lit by the dinner reception. Wisely, and with compassionate understanding of the “family condition,” my Aunt Betty steered the servers to give me non-sparkling grape juice for the wedding toasts. Our conservatory colleagues contributed music at the church service and reception as wedding gifts.

We headed northward soon after our wedding, excited to embark on graduate studies in music in Michigan. I had no idea how to do any of this sober. Inebriated or blanked-out crisis management was my only strategy. Even performing now felt uncertain, as the popping synaptic lights in my head bounced around more whenever I played my horn.

The first years of sobriety brought debilitating detox symptoms: Sweats, abscessing teeth, back pain, and a frustrating inability to retain what I read. Where I had previously zipped through pages of text and written essays quickly, I now struggled to read for more than fifteen minutes. Words on the pages of my textbooks seemed jumbled. I could not make sense of what I had just read, and not just because the material was hard core scholarly stuff. I couldn’t even write a simple paragraph without forgetting my words.

I botched every audition in graduate school. I couldn’t control my nervousness, and would suddenly forget how to play the music I’d prepared. The slightest change in plans or any unexpected situation provoked an emotional outburst. Conductors avoided assigning me to top ensembles or integral horn parts because of my unpredictability. One day as I was rushing to rehearsal, I tripped and dropped my horn. The damage fixable, I reacted as though I had sustained a mortal wound.

My performance as a masters student was barely average. Sobering up as a newlywed seemed more a burden than a blessing to Dave. It remains a mystery how/why he stayed, insistent on navigating through all my layers to find me. Beneath all the layers of emotional barricades I had created, he held on to the person he knew as truly me. Many times, he had to hold on for both of us.

It was a mighty humbling experience to struggle every day to stay sober and clean, well aware how poorly I functioned compared to my peers. They all brought to their graduate studies a strong self-discipline and advanced skills in critical thinking. They were not impeded by detox symptoms. All I seemed to bring was an alcoholic’s feeble mind and an impulsive emotional recklessness. When Denise came to visit from Pittsburgh, I felt embarrassed that I didn’t seem to be any better than the mess she saw when we were at college together. She likely harbored no such judgement, and her supportive friendship boosted my spirits tremendously.

Graduate school proved the best place for me to spend early sobriety. Too disabled to do anything besides continue with the familiar routines of student life, my task was  to find the person – and the music – that had gotten me this far.  It seemed such a long journey. Indeed, it took nearly two years before the compulsion to drink and get high subsided.

Patience was never a virtue I desired to possess. Nor was it forthcoming anytime soon.