TODAY I LIVE
Bo S.
I was born, got older without growing up and found out I was a dope friend. I enjoyed the woods as a child. Trees and vines, mysterious creeks and lakes fascinated me. I spent a lot of time alone.
My family moved closer to the city, with less woods. I spent more time around people, without social skills equal to my age. I was forced to make my way the best I could. My first regular use of a substance to change my mood was homemade raisin jack wine, which I made myself on my window sill as a teenager.
I left home nine times between my 13th and 18th year. I was always good about
acting at my fantasies. As I got older, it was increasingly apparent to me that whatever the world and life was about, either no one knew or they weren’t telling.
I saw people working without happiness, raising children without believing in life and the whole world driven by a “donkey chasing the carrot” inertia.
When I was fifteen, I became Atlanta’s youngest beatnik. The next four years of my life was centered around coffee houses in Atlanta and Miami.
I read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and then went out and did all he had covered. I studied and painfully learned to play the guitar from the folksingers.
My high school principle told me I should be a writer and should go and join a Beatnik Colony for a couple of years to learn the arts. The coffee houses constituted my best colony. I could listen to the writers for hours, painters and musicians, drinking in the words. My first love was with a lady from the coffee houses and I spent the next day high on dexadrine listening to Stardust and Dreaming.
By eighteen, I had left home for good and lived in an old Baltimore Row house in
Atlanta called the “Baltimore Block.” I was into painting, but it was the people I
loved, people who seemed to be mysteriously in touch with what was happening.
Peyote was my first major drug experience. We had been drinking a lot, but after nine months of living on the Block; a load of peyote came in from Texas.
I had been hitching rides to high school, and painting signs to support myself in the
evenings. My friends and I would stay up all night talking of many things. I’ll say one thing for the “beats;” they didn’t approve of my excessive drinking. The peyote opened the magic door for me. I remember in the gray light of the morning saying to a friend that I’d learned all that dope could teach me that night.
Unfortunately, dope was seemingly the only medium for getting more of what I needed. I kept using on an ascending scale for the next seven years. A few weeks
after the peyote, I sat on the window sill of my “beat” apartment and looked over the city. I thought to myself that I should travel and try to find some answers before I began to commit myself to any particular way of life.
I went on the road for the first time. First to Durham, N. C., then to Miami, Fla. In Miami, I lived on the coffee houses for nine months. I slept all day and stayed up all night.
It was like being in heaven for awhile. I learned a lot, but finally, one night as I
was taking a shower, I had this feeling of uselessness sweep over me. I was desperate to get my life moving again. I had stayed on the scene long enough to see
the faces of the older guys copping buzzes off the vitality of the young. Their emptiness frightened me.
I returned home to Atlanta and got my high school diploma in a fine evening school
and got accepted into college. I also got married for the first time. It was so hard being a square, but at least it was different. After awhile I got on a two week acid trip, and it broke up my marriage which had reached the stage of resignation.
I kept on with college and wound up marrying the beatnik lady I’d first been with
seven years ago. She was older and taught me a lot about living. She would get
nervous and start crying if I so much as drank a beer.
Her father had died of alcoholism. I didn’t drink for about a year, but we smoked pot regularly. I was such a mess, she finally got rid of me. All along, my drug taking had been steadily increasing. I had experienced my first failures; failing high school and two marriages. The false feeling of importance and the lie of the high increased as
time wore on. College speed to cram for exams spilled over into the rest of the
quarter.
By 1968 I was using constantly. I didn’t know anyone who was not high all the time.
I got used to being on acid constantly with occasional speed. I used interpreters when I had to talk with straight people. I bought a two-hundred dollar pound of horse manure and smoked it two days before one of my less high friends got suspicious.
He tried to get back the ounces I had sold my friends and they told me it was good stuff! Dig it.
I had a bad motorcycle wreck on the way to college one day and it effectively cut my college career short. I tried one horrible night to go back to classes after being laid up for a month but it was awful. I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying – I never went back after that.
This left more time to use, and finally I was just so weird, we beat up a guy who ripped us off for a fronted few pounds of marijuana. I felt like an actor in a second rate movie. I got out of dealing by waiting until one day when all my connections happened to be in the same room.
I introduced them to one another and told them I was out. As far as I know, no one ever called me a narc.
I began to shoot a lot of Crystal Methardrine. I was supposed to deal it, and everytime I ran out, this guy would front me some more. I shot it all day long as much as I could with an unlimited supply.
After a few months, I would pass out on my bed and have visions. I took baths so hot my skin peeled. Sometimes during the visions, my whole body would buzz , and I would try to get up but my body was asleep. My mind felt totally awake, and I would
have to wait and relax so I could go back to sleep and wake up . . I encountered
ghosts which tried to take over my body and poltergeists.
I called friends and had them exorsize the place one night. Eventually, the guy got tired of fronting me the speed and I had to move on. I lived with a gay guy until I finally got sick of the whole thing. I got the word that my best girlfriend ever had died of a heroin overdose in California. 1 cried and cried. I went from really feeling like I had it made to being totally burnt out in a flash. My innuendoes were not funny anymore.
I could not reach normal ever. The death of the girl and seeing my beautiful friends fall apart and the growing suspicion that I didn’t have it together anymore sank in. I felt betrayed and desperate.
I had been an acid messiah for quite some time and had enormous blocks to admitting I had a drug problem. The pain of using grew, and I became angry at the dope on a deep level. I would try to use but each time was worse than the last. After a time, I called my parents to take me in.
I remember telling my mom that I was sorry- that I had not meant to turn out to be such a mess. I laid low for a time until a friend came into town that I had gone to Old Mexico with when we were sixteen.
We went out west for three months. We slept in the car and hit every town from Texas to San Francisco to Los Angeles. I visited a therapeutic community for recovery in Oakland and had at least an idea that people like me could get better. When I got back to Atlanta, I immediately got involved with some community service projects on the Strip between 10th and 14th streets in Atlanta.
We helped people get jobs, took a street stand against dope and got medical attention for those we could. 1 could think and feel as well as I can now, but I would lose track of what I was saying, and I became fond of short sentences. My feeling drew comfort from the work I was doing helping others.
My spirit stayed restless, especially at the puniness of our efforts against a problem which grew in size and complexity among the total population and was enhanced by the cultural upheaval in America. Still, we helped some and that helped wipe out some of the guilt we had from helping bring about the situation.
Eventually, 1 married again for awhile. The Strip died and I moved on. I was feeling a lot better, but I still sought some solution for my addiction and something that would help others without letting them down. I first sought help from Narcotics Anonymous at this time.
After great effort and some luck, I got hold of some N. A. literature and we held four weekly meetings. They didn’t take it. After another marriage, I went to another 12 Step Program for help. My drinking now qualified me, and I didn’t know where else to turn. A month later, a group of addicts seeking recovery formed a meeting of N. A. which I reluctantly attended.
I got plenty of help from another 12 Step Program but most of them thought I was
weird. I was. They knew I was sincere and never turned me away. I began working
the Steps. Every time I got too comfortable, I would feel my addiction creeping up on me. I went to more than seven meetings a week for years.
After about a year another N. A. group got started. Every time a new N. A. meeting was started, I would attend it regularly. The groups’ dynamics and growth problems
were as nothing to me. It irritated me that some of us would even take them seriously. After all, we were clean, growing and increasingly free from the
wreckage of our active addiction. Each series of mistakes led to a series of solutions.
After three years, our groups had grown to seven a week, and I stopped going to the other 12 Step Program’s meetings. I got very curious about N. A. as a whole. After lots of phone calls and letters, I felt driven to attend the 7th World Convention of N. A. in San Francisco. I wanted to know who was working on our book and what, if anything, we could do to help from Atlanta.
I met some oldtimers and stuck like glue. I asked a thousand questions and they graciously answered each one. I wound up in Los Angeles attending some of the original N. A. meetings and our World Service Office for the time. They made me feel
very welcome, but I found there was no one working on a book for N. A..
I knew from my own experience that N. A. was a viable program of recovery in its own right. I knew from my beatnik experience that books were things which yielded
to hard work over a sufficient period of time. I was outraged that such a basic task had not yet been undertaken even though some had tried.
I knew N. A. had a strong spoken tradition and that writing it down was the place to begin. As material piled up, it could be arranged into a comprehensible whole and the rest would be finishing touches. With a lot of prayer and encouragement from Californians that I was not letting self-will run riot, I did what I could. After a few years no one said addicts in recovery can’t write any more.
My own recovery has seen great moments of suffering and joy, but I have never been alone. The last time I was alone, I was nine months clean and thinking about surrender. I knew a lot of the N. A. people had terrible, embarrassing problems and surrender to me meant to be a part of them all.
I had to accept them all as members, totally without reservation. Then I thought, I’m really no better, and I surrendered. I felt the release from bondage of self. After that, I was willing to do whatever I could to help N.A. grow and spread. It was my Program. If someone criticized N. A., I felt it, and I learned to take up for the Program and myself.
The Program is a set of Steps and Traditions which work for every sort of addiction if there aren’t other non-addictive disorders and if an addict applies himself without using. I learned that it was OK to feel this way. My involvement with the literature made me think about the Program differently.
As someone said, “it’s hard to write down cobwebs.” There are so many beautiful addicts living clean and helping others to find a way out of their addictions. Their bravery and spirit keep me out of self-pity and preoccupation with my self. I have been guided in my Steps by many members. Prayer has become a real action to me. Conscious contact has become continuous.
I have seen many tragedies of ignorance and many glories of trust and faith. I have attended funerals of those who couldn’t hear our message of hope and been present when seventy-five addicts wrote our book.
Today, I can see miracles everywhere I look. I can love and be loved. I never feel alone, and have hope for the future. Never in my wildest dreams did I figure on such lasting happiness not attached to outcomes or dependent on selfish desires.
I have found that when I keep my home group or some individual member such as
my sponsor informed of my living situations, they can’t get very big before something
is done to keep them from getting bigger. If I cut myself off from this function of the group, my problems could get so big in my head that I would be unable to share them or ask for help.
Today, I have problems with my marriage, my work and other areas of my life.
Through applying what 1 have been able to learn so far from the Program of N. A.,
none of these concerns have the power over me that they once had. I can apply myself and expect improvement.
I have great faith that the God of my understanding is protecting me and what I used to see as overwhelming difficulties are only the means to greater happiness. Recovery has improved my sense of pain to where I can ask for help and stop doing the things that cause me physical, mental or spiritual pain. The Program does not ask me to tolerate the intolerable.