Marc B.
DOB: 4/28/53; Ohio. I had owned these motorcycles. they would need like major work, so I would just get rid of the machine rather than just fixing it.
Click Here for Addict Out of the Dark and into the Light – 29_Marc.mp3
And you know, I would be involved with these women that would be a lot of fun for three weeks, three months, three years,
whatever, and then when they weren’t fun anymore I would get rid of them and find another one that wasn’t such a headache.
As a child I was always expected to excel, because I was the only son, the only male, carrying the family name. It was obvious early on in my education that I was gifted, of higher intelligence or whatever, better adapted to understand¬ing the education process.
So I was expected to excel, and when I didn’t excel it wasn’t that . . . it’s kind of like a reverse thing where if I did average I got admonished and if I excelled it was like expected. I didn’t even get any kind of positive strokes for that. I got . . . I did well in school, I accomplished a lot of things, I won a lot of respect through that.
When I was younger, the move from the city out to the suburbs, I continued to excel in school, but I also came into contact with . . . I think with myself, for the first time. I started realizing I didn’t like being who I was. I felt — evidently — I felt pressured, that uncomfortable feeling that I found that I could relieve by getting drunk and doing a lot of rotten mean juvenile delinquent type things. You know, stealing cars and breaking into houses, fighting, just doing a lot of cutting up, shoplifting, things like that. And I had done that when I was younger, stealing bicycles and stuff, but not on the scale I had gotten into it.
Looking back on it, I think I just looked for thrills, something to stimulate me, something that was not approved, because I did a lot of things for approval that were accept¬able. It was kind of like I had this alter ego or this Jekyll and Hyde, you know. I was a great student and got A’s and all that during the day, and then at night I would like break into garages and steal cars and get drunk and wreck them — things like that.
I got . . . never really thought twice about using things, finding pills in medicine chests, taking pills friends of mine gave me, smoking marijuana when I didn’t even smoke tobacco. I was always ready to try something different, something new, getting involved with sex, just getting involved for thrills, riding motorcycles, just all around fun things to do. It seemed like fun then.
I had immediate problems from the first time I ever got loaded and got sick. I had to lie about what I did. I had to cover up the problems that I created. And I didn’t really think anything was wrong with that.
Finally, when I started using narcotics — I was like sixteen, seventeen years old — and it just seemed like the right thing to do. I did even more things that I never thought I’d do. I got into theft, robberies, con games, frauds, car theft, house burglary, things like that.
I ended up in the military. Graduated from high-school real well. Ended up in the military, got real sick in the military. I ended up getting thrown out of the military. Although it didn’t state that it was drug related, but evidently it was involved in the discharge that it was drug related, I did get a good discharge and could get educational benefits. I tried going to college a number of times.
All I can say is my whole life from say age twelve until I got clean at the age of twenty six was just desperation, violence, denial, sickness, a lot of health problems, a lot of injuries, broken bones, a lot of wrecked vehicles, a lot of monetary losses incurred. I just went through jobs and careers, women, places to live, lifestyles, changed drugs to try to find that magic cure, quit using narcotics and started drinking liquor and started going to doctors for pills.
Ended up in a detox unit in Cleveland in 1979. I got involved in recovery with other clean addicts in October of 1979. I haven’t really changed that decision to stay clean, although I have found that the disease of addiction involves a lot more than just using drugs. I used to think that drugs were not my problem. It was everybody else in the world that didn’t like me or didn’t like what I was doing. I got loaded in order to cope with that kind of pressure.
I remember when I was in the military I developed an ulcer from drinking booze and I thought I drank booze to cope with the rigors of military life. And there I was, just some lower enlisted man — transient scum — who had no real responsibili¬ties, but it really didn’t matter to me, it was an excuse.
And it wasn’t until after I had gotten into recovery that I realized that drugs were one of the ways that I coped with the problems that I had dealing with reality, and that it wasn’t so much everyone else’s problems, it was my problem with everybody else. I had to deal with that and it was very hard to do that and I didn’t have any real tools to do that with. I hadn’t learned that I had to, basically, learn how to live. And here I was nearly thirty years old and had no idea of living. My favorite activities were stealing. I think that was my inability to accept reality on reality’s terms.
So in course of that, after a couple of years clean, I ended up in prison in Ohio for theft, “theft related offenses” as they term it. Through miracles beyond my control I got out of prison early. In all that time I maintained my recovery, I had maintained contact with the people in my support group, and I got more involved in service work in that support group. I got involved in the production of literature for that particular group and seemed to get a lot of positive reinforcement from that involvement, and it allowed me to start developing ways to interact with people on a real basis.
And it also taught me a lot about myself. Got me involved in living life on life’s terms, which was real hard for me to do. I always dealt with reality by altering my perception of it through drugs, or altering the reality around me by moving or running or changing lifestyles or whatever.
So I know that as a disease addiction demands that we avoid reality through whatever means. And even in my recovery I have found that I could avoid reality by travelling or through sex or through food or through working or through any number of things that would allow me to not look at where I was at in life, what I was doing, allow me to gloss over the negative aspects of my life at that present time and just continue on basically avoiding reality.
And I have gotten so I think that the disease demands that we end up really hurting ourselves. I have gotten suicidal a couple of times, and a number of times in my recovery with overt suicide attempts, I entered counseling for that, which seemed to sort out a lot of that depression and denial and anger, because I had no real way to vent it and felt very unique because of that.
And after I started getting in touch with that and talking to other people I found that it’s not so much a common occurrence, but it was some¬thing that happened to people that I knew, other recovery people, that they had gotten so to a point in their recovery where they were like backed against a wall because they weren’t willing to change and weren’t willing to adapt to reality.
And the alternative to use any drugs was removed from them, for whatever reason. Like they talk about jails, institutions, and death. I have already been in institutions and jails, and death seemed like the only alternative. In my adolescence I had been in a couple of mental institutions. All that really taught me was more lessons about “Better Living Through Chemistry,” and they never really offered me a solution to my problems.
I was kind of hesitant to go seek some sort of psychologi¬cal assistance when I did get depressed and suicidal, because of that old idea of nut houses. They do treat you, if you’re nuts, they just treat you for acting nuts. I operated under a lot of old truths that I developed through distorted perceptions, and I had to revamp a lot of those.
I eventually worked in the rehab treatment business for a few years, got totally disgusted with that. On my own personal level I think it damaged my recovery in certain ways, and that it enhanced it in some ways, but it was very hard for me to maintain that dichotomy of work and my own personal recovery, and I didn’t like that. It’s just my own personal thought on it.
It’s been a long process of recovery. I know I am still nowhere near where I could be. I found that I don’t have to feel so far away from myself. I don’t have to avoid reality now, even when I don’t like to, even though sometimes reality is really hard to take. I have got to remember I had a hand in it, I had a part in it.
Trying to correct those errors as they occur, or avoid them to begin with, has been something I have learned to do. And I guess that I am getting pretty good at it. Because my life seems to sort itself out quite a bit and the problems that occur now I am not afraid to ask for help, I am not afraid to like to face those problems any more.
One time I would have thought it was beyond my comprehension to deal with some of the things that I deal with on a daily basis now, almost out of hand, and it is just another miracle of recovery. I’ve told a lot of people that I am just another example, that you can make a lot of mistakes and still stay clean. But I have found that the mistakes . . . I have had to find solutions to mistakes, and I think that that has helped me out a lot more, because I have never been one to be afraid to try something different, try something new.
That might have been my primary motivation behind getting clean, was . . . it was something different, it was something I had never done before, because I could never remember staying clean for any amount of tine, other than if I was locked up. I stayed straight once for about a week just to see what it was like. And it got real boring. So I got loaded. I knew that would be exciting.
So it was just like a whole new life for me. It’s been like nine and one half years now and it never ceases to amaze me how good it can be, and it never ceases to amaze me how rotten things can get, and how I can really adult, and deal with them.
I try to sell myself short. I still have some problems. I don’t like feel I get a pat on the back enough. I still feel that I am under pressure to excel, although I don’t have much contact with my family. It’s mostly peers and employers and things like that. A lot of it I lay on myself too, because it . . . like the way I was trained as a child, that I should excel, that I shouldn’t settle for just good enough, and just being average is almost a negative rather than being something that is acceptable.
And I am still dealing with that, still coping with that, because it is real hard to get away from that. I have learned something along the way, that the way you’re trained is the way you react under pressure. And I’ve found that I have really trained myself poorly in certain areas. And I still think I have the same propensity for violence and mayhem and dishonesty, and my criminal mind is still there and still probably as good as it ever was.
But today I don’t have to act on that, because I can see that it would hinder my recovery, find it would make me feel a lot less in tune with myself than I am, and I have fought hard to get to that point, and I am not willing to give that up now. I think that a lot of things . . . I finally am able to accept myself to a certain degree. I don’t have to like look in the mirror, I don’t have to double think myself or question my actions or my ideas. I do trust myself to a certain extent.
But it’s taken a lot of work. It’s not been the easiest process I’ve ever had to go through. I have a lot of hope now, whereas I never did for a lot of years, even into the first part of my recovery. The first couple or three years I had very little hope, and it was kind of like hope was forced on me. I had to have faith, I learned about faith by having it, and I learned about surrendering by having no other alternatives, no other solutions, to the problems at hand.
So I had to let go of all that, I guess, by learning, by doing. I’ve learned real well today. I have a lot of hope and I have a good ability to surrender now and I feel comfortable with that. I try to keep learning, because as long as I am learning I’m getting better.
Some incidents that are vivid. There are a lot of things that happened to me over the years, but some that are real vivid that I remember. I was involved with this woman for like three and a half years, and it was a basic, probably one of the sickest relationships I was involved with in my life.
This girl seemed like — on the surface — seemed like my dream girl. She was young and lovely and my favorite little fat-butt blonde, blue eyes, greenish blue eyes. But anyways, it was like I was involved with her, and she was making some attempt to stay clean. We had gone through a break-up, and she disappeared and I found her outside. She was like hustling for Dilaudids.
And it was like a real sick scene. And I left. I rode one of my motorcycles. I just took off. I ran about ten red lights at about 80 miles an hour, running through town, totally didn’t care, didn’t give a fuck about anything. And was hoping that I would die. Just because of the pain, the inability to accept the situation as it was.
And I ended up at a friend of mine’s place — a guy I rode with, he is also recovering and he and I went out for a long ride that night, and I ended up having like five flat tires on my bike and kept my mind off the situation at hand. And eventually the woman made the effort to get clean again. We got back together, and it took a couple more years for the relationship to really go down the toilet hard.
But it got me in touch with that inability to accept reality, and wanting to see dying as an alternative to using drugs, and after that I had a couple more suicide attempts. I had one. I had seriously considered suicide, and it was almost comical as I look back on it, but it solved a lot, it helped me accomplish some surrenders that I had to take care of at that time concerning things that I could no longer mess up any worse than they were. So I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t want to keep messing up and I had to like let them. go.
I was mentioning to someone earlier about the consequences of my rotten living. I have health-problems. And I can tell when it’s going to rain like two days before it rains, because of broken bones and arthritis that I have from that . . . just a lot of, just memories of really unpleasant situations that situations that seemed pretty rotten at the time but looking back on them, they look kind of humorous.
I was involved in a fight in Europe and a guy who had . . . I was outnumbered like five to one or six to one in this bar brawl, and I was loaded and it was a rotten night. I didn’t know what in the hell was going on. A guy had my arm behind, had me in a hammer lock, and he was breaking my arm. And a guy had been kicked in the teeth, had lost a couple of teeth and the guy that kicked the teeth in, I could see him, and I kept telling myself, “I wish this guy would hurry up and break my arm so I could put this other guy’s eye out.”
Because at that point I couldn’t move on him, and eventually I did, but it was just one of those situations where I was in the face of all this insanity. I was having like these, cool thoughts of, “Oh, I am going to put this guy’s eye out.” And I want to like cut this guy. I want to do this and do that.
It was . . . I was lucky to get out of the whole thing alive. And looking back on it, I don’t know of any reason why I did, other than the fact that evidently there was some power greater than myself that was just keeping track of me that day, waking up in emergency rooms.
And sometimes I’ll watch the television or something and they’ll have a scene of like a shot of somebody you’d see looking up from a gurney in a hospital, and there would be heads all around, all peering down at them, and the light over¬head in the ceiling. And I look at that. I have to chuckle, because I’ve been there.
I’ve been waking up in emergency departments, not knowing what city I’m in — all I know is that it was good dope. It’s the only thing I knew for sure when I woke up, that it was really good, and my high just got blown. When I opened my eyes — I think it’s kind of humorous.
I still shudder when I hear cell doors shut on television and radio programs and stuff. Being in the prison system in Ohio, where they don’t really worry too much about inmates as long as they aren’t creating problems. One of the cheap thrills that I had while in prison in Ohio was in the morning, I think about 6:30 in the morning, the lights would come on in the cell block, and the cells were painted like this grey color — battleship grey — and the lights would come on and everything would be brown.
And then immediately it would all turn grey like the floor and all the surfaces in the cell — because it was covered with these little brown German cockroaches. It was just like a carpet of them. It was kind of funny.
But it also demonstrated to me how rotten life can get if you want life to be real rotten. It’s strange. It’s like I’ve been in a lot of different situations over the years. I remember being a local union officer, a local president for a union. And even then, probably on my way up the ladder of corporate America or whatever.
I’d go to these union functions and I would get like totally drunk and loaded, and get in brawls with other dele¬gates and other local presidents and create problems and across town, passed out in parking lots in my car, not knowing where the hell I was, and just have all these bizarre things happen to me, and still kind of dance through it.
Just never ceases to amaze me. I tell people I have been from the corporate board room to the penitentiary yard. It doesn’t mean a whole lot. It’s how I feel about myself, where I am at with me and the rest of the world. I am not too worried about today. If it doesn’t concern me I don’t worry about it. Which is kind of selfish, but then again I have to remember nobody is taking care of me but me. A lot of people may care about me but the bottom line is what am I going to do.
I got . . . I had to develop a lot of spiritual beliefs, because I couldn’t just rely on myself. I had to rely on other people for help. It’s kind of like I am the one who has to take the action in my life. But I can seek guidance from others, and I have got a lot of positive things in my life. I learn from watching and talking to, listening to other people.
And I had developed some aspects of my spiritual development over the years when I was using drugs, by investigating different theologies and different attitudes along those lines. A spiritual awareness. And I’ve come to find that there is a lot of common thought and a lot of religious ideas, a lot of spiritual training, and there is also a lot of diversity.
It’s a matter of identifying each individual thing. But some things have really just struck a cord with me and have really made sense to me, in light of what I have been through and where I am at in life.
I gained a lot of knowledge through observing nature. As a young kid coming up my grandfather taught me a lot about nature and the outdoors — the balance of nature and ecology and that sort of thing and how I fit into that. That played a lot into the development of my spirituality later on, although I was not so much aware of it as I am now.
I got involved with Taoist philosophies and some of the concepts put forth there really seemed to fit in well with my life. I would overcome obstacles by like a fluid resistance, flowing around, not in a line, and impedes my flow, but rather let them direct me in . . . I’ll be able to adjust my attitude and my direction, because of that — the influence would be there, but it wouldn’t totally change me, it would just like alter my course a bit, and force me to be innovative.
Today I realize that a lot of things happened in my life in order to shape me to where I am at today. I can look back on it and say, “Gee, that was rotten, or that was terrible, that happened.” But I know that without those things happen¬ing I wouldn’t be where I am at.
I could sit and wonder all day and all night about why this guy died or that guy died and I didn’t. The situation is that we were all in the same kind of situation. For that matter I realize that there is a reason for that.
The reason is that I am now able to understand that. To be able to ask that question to myself is part of that miracle. It just never ceases to amaze me. How someone can go through so many bizarre things.
And my life is seemingly, is sorting out real nice. I am almost . . . sometimes I get so goddamned middle-America, up¬standing, babyboomer, yuppie type lifestyle, that makes me ill. It’s usually about the time I just want to make some sort of drastic change in my life.
It seems like the older I get the less I really want to make the drastic changes. I am getting kind of comfy. Maybe I am just getting old, maybe I am just feeling old. I am pretty happy where I am at so far today. It could be better, but it could be a hell of a lot worse.
I understand that today. I have had a lot of problems with my family. My mother, like three years in my recovery, for her to accept the fact that I was an addict or that she could even have a son that was one of those. My younger brother and I don’t get along. I think he is probably as sick an addict as I ever was. Just through the course of his addiction, the problems he has caused for me in my life because of his addiction.
I don’t get along with him. I don’t speak with him. I have had violent encounters with him on a number of occasions. I can just see his disease getting worse. Every time I have contact with my family — and I hear, I get the reports on my brother. And just wonder how far down does he have to get before he makes that decision to get clean.
He has had contact with recovery in the past. But I guess he is having too much fun getting beat up and thrown in jail, losing jobs and things like — things that I went through. Although some of the things that he has gone through I haven’t had to go through. So I don’t know, I guess he has got to walk his own path to get to where he has to go to. He has got a pretty rotten path now. I am glad it’s his now and not mine.
I love motorcycles. Of all the things that I have found, a lot of things that divert my attentions from using drugs, although while I was still using . . . I have a daughter who is like 13 years old now. Her mother and I have lost contact — years.
I don’t know what’s going on with that. I have this infant son, born last October, in Ohio. And I had to deal with the situation at that time, where I was so into sexual activity that I had impregnated three women within the space of a few days, and as near as I can tell two of them on the same day, and then I had to deal with the aftermath, as one of them miscarried, and one opted for an abortion, and the other opted to have the child.
So I had to deal with the extremes of pregnancy in the modern world. And that was pretty rough on me, and of course made me reevaluate a lot of my attitudes about sex, responsibility, and my involvement in it.
And the attitudes that I developed over years in regards to women were that they were nice items, they were something nice to have around, because they were just another pleasur¬able thing. And when they weren’t pleasurable you got rid of them. I had owned these motorcycles — they would need like major work, so I would just get rid of the machine rather than just fixing it. And, you know, I would be involved with these women that would be a lot of fun for three weeks, three months, three years, whatever, and then when they weren’t fun anymore I would get rid of them and find another one that wasn’t such a headache.
And I think it goes back to that attitude of: I should feel good all the time, and reality can’t touch me when I am insulated by all these things that make me feel good. I think I was twelve years old. I started drinking booze, I started fucking girls, and I started riding motorcycles.
And I’ve cut back quite a bit on my girl fucking and I don’t drink booze anymore and I still like motorcycles and I am involved in that sport on different levels. It gives me a lot of pleasure, in ways that, not just from riding them, but building them, racing them, common interests.
I’ve developed a lot of friendships in the sport, that ah, fellows that really respect me and like me, and they have known me for years now and they have never gotten loaded with me. And they like me for who I am, not what I do. I respect their opinions and I ask them for advice on different things, not just motorcycle related things, but some life things. And they respect me enough to ask me advice on life and motorcycling.
I’ve learned to be a human being to some extent, and I do like interacting with normal people, with the real world now. I know at one time in my life and in my recovery, when I didn’t have anything to do with people that were normal, that weren’t recovering people, and I’ve found that really limited my base of support, and it limited my perception of reality.
It was kind of like when I was using drugs I had no con¬cept of reality, because I didn’t have a way of dealings with people who were involved in reality, and I think I got lost in recovery, where I was like dealing with nobody but recovering people, and I had . . . I didn’t know where the bottom of the pool was, as it were.
I think it’s real good and real healthy for me to develop those friendships with normal people, because I have found that for along time I didn’t like people and I didn’t like anybody else. I used to think that my opinion of other people was they were usually a waste of like good air. Whatever they had for me to get off of them was just about all they were good for.
Today I realize it’s not so negative, it’s not so cut and dry. They are still people that I wouldn’t piss on their pant leg if it was on fire and I had to go but I don’t have that many people like that around me today. I have found it just a lot easier just to avoid the problems of just having to put up with people by not having any dealings with them. It eliminates a lot of problems for me. It probably eliminates a lot of problems for them too. Because I am not the nicest guy in the world. I still have the ability to be a rotten son of a bitch when I want to.
But I have found less need to do that now. Maybe I am getting old and mellow and I am changing my ways or something. I’d like to say, about changing, where I live now, when I decided when I got off probation in Ohio. I decided to leave Ohio, because it didn’t seem like a real healthy place for me to be. It was kind of like my chapter there was done, and different alternatives of where to move.
I could of gone out west with my uncles, or could have gone down south with some friends of mine. I decided to come to the East Coast, because it seemed I had a really good feeling about when I would come down here. I had come down here once in my addiction, and I had again, in D.C., in con¬junction with a recovery related event, and also for a motorcycle rally.
So I got to really get in touch with the recovering community here and the community of my peers in the normal world and I liked it. And when the opportunity presented itself, I guess I went for it and I really haven’t looked back since. When I go back up to Northeast Ohio, I see how stagnated the area is, and how looking back on it how stagnated I was. I was kind of like trapped, and when I took that action to bust out of that. I think I did a lot for myself, not just outwardly but inwardly.
And I learned a lot about surrender and I learned I could adapt and even better than I thought I could. I’ve done all right. I’ve got nothing to complain about. I feel very good where I am at. I love it, which is a big change from where I used to be, where I didn’t feel good about anything, where I could get up and judge what a month is going to be like by what that morning looked like. Today I don’t have to do that. Today I can just deal with what’s going on right now, and not worry so much what might happen, or what used to happen, or what has already happened, just deal with right now.
From:motorcritter
to Chris K!
date Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 5:37 PM
subject Re: Opportunity to be involved in this with Chris Keeley
5:37 PM
My name is Marc B. I am fifty-seven years old, and have been a recovering addict for thirty-one years. I grew up in Akron, Ohio, and graduated high school and attended a couple of state universities. I did not attain a degree at either school, although I did well in the Business Administration course of study I pursued. I am a veteran, US Army, I served during the VietNam era, but was not in the combat areas, serving in the US and Germany.
I received a general (honorable) discharge and had drug-related arrests during my term of service. I also engaged in drug abuse counseling during my high school years, and had numerous drug and alcohol related arrests, violent incidents, criminal activities and overdoses. I had no contact with any effective recovery-oriented treatment until 1979.
I had two in-patient psychiatric treatments in 1976, one in a state hospital, the other in a Veterans Administration facility, both secondary to legal difficulties. I was viewed as a mental case, not an addict. This furthered my addiction.
I entered a two week detoxification and rehabilitation program in Cleveland, Ohio in February of 1979. It was a decision driven by job pressures and legal considerations, as I had no real intention of curtailing my usage of liquor and drugs, illegal or prescribed. While in treatment, I was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 Step-model of recovery.
I had never been in contact with this before, and as my withdrawal progressed (medically managed, of course), I realized that I had been riding a fine edge of life and death, via chemical addiction. I had long before resigned myself to the life of an addict, and manipulated those around me to shield me from unfortunate consequences.
I felt very positive about my recovery and have not used since then. I found that I am rather unique in my path of a relatively short rehabilitation and continued long-term abstinence. My youthful arrival at the doors of recovery was very unlikely, I only met a couple of other people my age in recovery. Many of those I met were male and about twice my age. Most of them had little or no experience with multiple drug use or extensive criminal activities. They did, however, offer me assistance in my quest for total abstinence.
I was introduced to Narcotics Anonymous later, in October 1979. I found a group of peers, people more like me than different. They were easier to identify with- not so much because of age (although that was a factor), but a deeper level of empathy and vision.
My recovery had begun in earnest, and I commit to that each day. My life has changed, with many triumphs and set-backs to mark the way, but overall, it is much better than all those years ago.
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