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When Things Fall Apart
I will never forget my first taste of alcohol.
It was l957. I had dropped out of college in an
attempt to put some money in the bank and was working
as a messenger with a law firm in Birmingham. Assigned
to deliver legal documents, I made my way across
town to the Tutwiler Hotel on a scorching-hot day
with a package marked “urgent.”
“Darling,” the client purred as the
door to her opulent suite swung open. “Come
in. Come in. In that little envelope you are carrying
the key to my prison cell.”
Though temporarily blinded by the sun streaming
through the large French windows, I could not help
but notice that the dishwater blonde standing before
me was an exotic woman with crushed ruby lips. She
was wearing a flamboyant red peignoir and a lot
of gold jewelry. She thrust a cold martini glass
into my hand.
“Cheers,” she said, clinking her glass
against mine.
Until that moment, alcohol had never touched my
lips. I grew up Baptist Christian in the deep South
in the 1940s and 1950s and had walked a path of
born-again living and Bible study. I emerged at
age twenty-one a rather self-righteous party-pooper.
After my beloved Blanche had retired, my devotion
had shifted to a new friend named Jesus. I foreswore
alcohol in His name. I vowed never to tip a glass
and had kept to my word.
Now I was draining the last drops of the forbidden
fruit and asking for more. For the next twenty years,
I couldn’t get enough. No matter how many
times I reached for a bottle, I heard a voice echoing
in my head, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
You’ll never amount to anything. When are
you going to straighten up and fly right?”
It was Momma’s voice. She had divorced Daddy
when I was nine years old. Although I like to think
that she did so because he was abusive to his children,
I suspect she had reasons of her own for ending
the marriage. Life in our house was hard, with little
income flowing in and many mouths to feed. Mother
worked every day as a secretary and her hard life
left her bitter, with precious little emotion to
shower on my brothers and sisters and me. Not once
do I remember Momma telling us that she loved us
or that she was proud of anything we did. As far
back as I can recall, each of us became an island,
separate and starving for some encouragement.
I sought refuge in the happy endings of double
features at the movies and got lifted higher than
a kite on music played in church and on the radio.
A chorus of the stir‘em-up gospel standard
“Nearer My God to Thee” could rouse
me to my feet much the same as a pop-chart hit like
“Earth Angel.” Art also lifted me up.
When our elementary school class visited the museum,
I would practically walk into the large splashy
paintings on display.
Looking back, I believe my sensitivity was leading
me into a life of escape which was taking shape
in my mind, where I would play make-believe games.
When I was a small child, for instance, I began
assigning gender designations to colors and numbers,
deciding that red was male and yellow was female,
while four and five were boys and three was a girl.
I believed in Santa Claus longer than most kids
and hoped that a guardian angel would rescue me
from the horrors of real life. These horrors included
my father’s behavior, my family’s poverty,
and especially my clubfeet which required intermittent
hospital visits and surgeries.
The period from 1957 until 1979 is something of
a blur for me. Moving from Birmingham to New York,
Atlanta to Mobile, Mobile to California, I never
felt connected to anything. I never kept a job for
very long. I worked in advertising, sold real estate
and ladies ready-to-wear. By 1979, I was dead broke,
unemployable, and living in a postage stamp-sized
apartment in Long Beach, California, driving a beat-up
old clunker. In the quiet of my mind, I would sometimes
drift back to the idyllic days I spent in church
memorizing the scriptures. One verse often reverberated
in my head. “What does the Lord require of
thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy and to
walk humbly with thy God?”
“Who was God, anyway?” I wondered.
Little did I know at the time, it was only when
I hit bottom and was ready to confront my alcoholism
some months later that I began to hear that voice.
Turning Up the Volume
I drank my last drop of alcohol on February 17,
1980.
After more than twenty years of destructive carousing,
my epiphany came when I was arrested for drunk driving.
When those whirling blue lights signaled for me
to pull over, I knew that the gig was up. It wasn’t
the first time I’d been thrown in jail for
drinking and driving, but something inside of me
knew, somehow, it would be the last.
Riding in the squad car, barreling down the back
streets of Long Beach in the wee hours of the morning,
I heard a voice in my head say, “It’s
over.” Now, I am not one to hear voices and
have always taken the magic of New Age spirituality
with a healthy dose of skepticism. Still, I knew
something special was happening. It was not just
the thought that had startled me, it was the accompanying
serenity that came upon me. Sitting in a police
car, which was the most stressful experience I have
ever had, I felt a tremendous calm. Yes, it is over,
I thought to myself. I could feel it. Within a week,
I had signed up for a drunk-driving diversion program.
Going from being a drunk to being a teetotaler
was a long process fueled by waves of intuition.
For me, it began each morning when I would lie in
bed trying to receive more inspiration, which is
what I called the voice I had heard after being
arrested. More real than anything I had ever experienced
in Sunday School, the voice reminded me of what
Blanche had described, the murmur of angels. I was
hungry to have that tingling feeling again. So I
began to dedicate time each morning to listening,
in case God had something to say. As I looked back
on my life, I realized that I had talked to God
often. That’s what praying was. But I never
paused even for a second to give Him a chance to
answer back.
In the beginning very little happened. I was quiet
and I did the best I could to still my mind, trying
to appreciate the meditative quality of the experience.
Sometimes my lips would tremble or I would get goose
bumps whenever I thought I heard something. But
I was cautious. The last thing I wanted was to fool
myself.
Then one day, most certainly, I heard the voice
in my head again and the message was clear and strong:
“Ego is enemy.”
Ego? I wondered. Whose ego? And what is ego, anyway?
In my own understanding of the word, the ego was
how I interacted with the world to satisfy my own
desires. Sometimes my ego served me well. It helped
me make my way in the world in a fair and conscientious
way. But for most of my adult life my ego had gotten
way out of control. And those were the times I got
into trouble, big trouble.
The next ten years I would rebuild my entire life,
embracing the ego—cajoling it to collaborate
with me to die to anger and resentment and false
promises of abject materialism to become a precious
child of God—to go where the God-self led
us to go to do the things that we had been put on
earth to do. It worked and still works today—when
I will awaken to God’s roadmap and to His
will. Then life is good.
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