Lost and Found

I’m grateful for a sunny Friday morning and for nearing the end of February. I’m grateful for reminders and lessons. I’m grateful for watching the sunrise, drinking coffee and knowing I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. I’m grateful for seeing what is. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

I think you’d be proud of me this week. Not that I’ve done anything particularly noteworthy. It’s that I had an idea for the song of the week all the way last weekend and despite the many siren calls of other great songs that were clamoring for song of the week status in my head, I stayed true. Even this morning, as I was sitting quietly, drinking that nearly-perfect first cup of coffee and letting my mind drift where it will, all of these other songs presented themselves, like matches on a musical dating app, and you know what?

I swiped left.

This was the first Steely Dan song I heard. I’m pretty sure it was in the way-back of my dad’s robin’s egg blue Ford station wagon and we were on the way to visit relatives in Minnesota. I’m not sure how it came to pass that the radio was set to something more “contemporary” than the usual horrific easy listening stuff that came dripping out of the radio and was unfortunately favored by the denizens of the front seats—my parents. But “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” started playing and made a pretty indelible impression on me.

Like most Steely Dan songs, I have no real idea what it’s about. Clearly, a relationship has ended, some people think prematurely, others seem to have just left.¹Donald Fagen is imploring Rikki: Don’t lose my number, don’t call anyone else, you’ll want this later, trust me, when you’re feeling better. Here, I’m even going to mail my number to you, so you’ll be sure to have it when you come to your senses.

This 6th Grader recognized the song was mostly about desperation and he always kind of vibed with that feeling—so, the lack of clarity in the story line didn’t get in the way of me really, really liking this song. Despite the weird stuff about “Slow Hand Road,” and friends in town who “have heard your name,” and “we could stay inside and play games,” this song just fit my evolving worldview. I knew there would come a day when these words, sung so desperately and plaintively, would speak for me, too:

You tell yourself you’re not my kind, 
but you don’t even know your mind, 
and you could have a change of heart

I started acquiring Steely Dan albums in high school and the post-Watergate, cynical, everything is f***ed-up so who cares attitude, was right in my sweet spot. It didn’t bother that the songs didn’t make too much sense, they hit the right notes and the fragments of weird lyrics were startlingly apposite at really interesting times. This song, became the “Lucky Song of 1977,”

This music has a lot of strange juju for me. Like I said, I don’t know what any of it means, I just love it when “Peg” comes on and I hear that drum part, at like 13 seconds in—pow, pow, pow and then the Donald Fagen whiny, nasally, very New York-y voice with the open-ended vowels at the end of words

“I’ve seen your picture, your name in lights above it, this is your big debut, like a dream come true”

I literally get goosebumps when I hear that. I walked around Iowa City, during my high school years and listened to a lot of Steely Dan. I loved all of those weird, sad, calmly catastrophic songs like “Haitian Divorce,” “Bad Sneakers” and “Doctor Wu.” They comprised this fictional world I kind of inhabited, I was the “Midnight Cruiser,” the simp in “Dirty Work,” except that I really didn’t know what any of it meant.²

Steely Dan was a big part of the romantic view I began to develop around the idea of one day living in New York. The street vendor cart on the cover of Pretzel Logic was what I wanted to see everyday. I imagined myself bumming around the avenues in a pair of beat-up sneakers, living this life of vague regret with a matching, defensive very cynical point of view. And now, I’m actually living that teenage vision of my own life.

I say this over and over, mostly to convince myself, recovery for me was less about battling a disease, it was more about finding what was lost. Lost is actually a generous way to say it; I was trying to find what I gave away way too cheaply a long, long time ago:

Myself.

I gave myself away to the false belief that I needed to be something other than what I was. I gave myself away to the idea that people would prefer a different version of me, same hair and smile, but a very different personality and a proclivity for clever but senseless stunts. We all do this as we grow up, try on different personalities, different ways of being and looking at the world. It’s a little like playing dress-up until you notice the the clothes fit a little too well.

I knew I was giving myself away that night at Magoo’s way back in 1981, when I realized the drinking version of me was now driving the car and he didn’t look like he needed a snack break anytime soon. That was the thing that gnawed at me, that made me feel so lost, so far away and so powerless to change the things that were so obviously destroying my life.

“Why can’t you stop?”

I was asked that question over and over and over. Mostly by myself. I didn’t have an answer then, it was just simply impossible. I now realize it was impossible because the version of myself that was in operation was built around lies and drinking; that version simply could not exist in a sober world. My many attempts at sobriety back then resembled what happens in a bathtub when one holds a toy duck underwater. It’s possible to hold the duck under for quite a while, but as soon as you relax a little, or lose your grip, the duck comes shooting to the surface with that maniacal duck grin.

And you knew it was going to happen all along.

My many attempts at sobriety were really just pantomime; I was acting out a part for the “benefit” of others, not actually changing. I played the role of the recovered alcoholic, usually with about 18 months of sobriety, for about ten years. I fooled a lot of people. I hurt a lot of people. The person who was always at the bottom of the heap?

Myself.

I would like to tell you that I got sober and was finally able to stop drinking because I had all of these really insightful realizations and then made a super courageous decision to change my life. The truth is, I got sober and stopped drinking because I simply ran out of options. That’s how the Universe works for me. I get lots and lots of very clear signals, lots of chances to exit the highway of doom that I love traversing at high speed, I hear the warnings, but never, ever, do I heed the warnings.

The Universe doesn’t get all prickly, it works on me by simply narrowing my options. In much the same way as Seminole tribe alligator traps worked, I swam right in and then found I could not just swim out. I had no options left. I think that’s one definition of “rock bottom.” The other might be this:

The realization that you are as far away from the person you were meant to be as is possible.

The journey back, the mission to find the missing Dr. Livingstone, is not easy. Remember, I didn’t just lose that person, I sent him packing and asked him to never darken my door again. He was quiet and thoughtful, had lots of crazy ideas, and very nerdy pursuits. He loved books and music and cooking and long walks on really cold days. He maybe thought he would be a writer living in New York one day, wearing corduroy sport coats and sneakers and walking around Avenue A thinking ironic thoughts.

He was too unlike everyone else, for my liking. So we cast him out and made a new version that was going to wow everyone, would excel at all of the things I really didn’t like doing and would generally just usher in a period of great success, satisfaction and fulfillment. I would make a big noise with all of the big boys. The issue was that this version of me required fairly significant infusions of alcohol on a pretty regular basis. Also, it wasn’t me and being something else, someone else, made me very, very, very unhappy. Like I had no center, no core, no real truth—except for all of that sauvignon blanc sloshing around in there.

Once the Universe had stripped enough away, had limited my options, I began to see a little more clearly. What I saw was that I had done a pretty effective job of losing just about everyone and everything that had mattered to me. I was very alone. It was the summer of 2020 and my world had really pretty much come to an end. Another relationship disaster, pretty much complete estrangement from my family and the pandemic-induced loss of the business enterprise I had been running left me with one question:

What the f*** was I going to do?

I listened to a very good and long-tenured friend, who said, “you did always want to live in New York.” And that was true. I had a New Yorker cover of the reading room at the Bryant Park library tacked up next to my desk in college, I consumed the New York Times (especially the Metropolitan Diary) and imagined myself as an actual New Yorker: Staring down motorists infringing on cross walks, staking out personal space on the subway, living in the worlds most glamorous and light-filled city. Walking the streets with my hands in my pockets, thinking about what I would write next.

That was the version of me that I thought was ridiculous when I was 17; the version I painstakingly hid and the version I was too embarrassed to tell anyone about. The dream I was too self-conscious and too afraid to share. When I arrived here in New York on Labor Day weekend in 2020, it wasn’t a triumphal entry with cloaks being spread on the FDR as I arrived from La Guardia. I moved into a sober house on 84th Street with a bunch of alcoholics and addicts that were mostly 20 years younger than me.

I took long, long walks owing to the calendar being so completely empty. I racked up tens of thousands of steps traversing the streets of my new city of residence. I made a surprising discovery: I started to find myself as I explored this place I had never lived. My Saturdays turned into long jaunts of exploring used bookstores and record shops looking for overlooked gems, afternoons of aimlessly walking and finding amazing and unique treasures along the way. I found umbrellas and umbrella stands, cool books, music I had always loved, thoughtful, kind, amazing people who showed up to move me from point to point. But the most amazing discovery:

Myself.

I found him one Saturday afternoon headed to Generation Records, always on the lookout for the real hard to find gems: The Cars first album, London Calling, Kenny Burrell playing “The Man I Love,” Bill Evans playing “My Foolish Heart.” He was wearing jeans and an old beat-up pair of black puma sneakers that you can’t get anymore and are just too cool to let go. He was blasting music right into his brain via the airpods, had a friendly smile for just about everyone (except don’t f*** with him on the subway or walk slow in front of him).

I came home to my beautiful apartment, maybe the first place I’ve lived that was really me, all me. I unloaded the bounty from the Farmers Market and the books from the Strand and the boxed set of Mozart operas I had stolen for only $20 from the lovely people at Academy Music. I realized, on that Saturday, even though I was very much alone, and didn’t have any plans, that I didn’t mind. Actually, it was way stronger than “didn’t mind.” I realized then that I spent a day by myself, being myself for the benefit of no one but myself.

That sounds selfish—but it’s different. I think it’s actually called acceptance. You see, the person I fought the longest, the person I waged the hardest campaign against, was me. As long as I didn’t see or realize that, well, the odds of getting sober were pretty f***ing long.

I finally accepted myself. That’s what finally made the difference. When my ability to be an improved, swankier, wine-fueled version of myself finally crashed and burned, as I had always known it would, I was left alone with the person who actually had the answer.

Myself.

And the startling answer was: Be Myself. When people read the “Acceptance” passage in the Big Book (p. 417), the most common assumption is that this is about our relations with other people; that our relationships with other people need to be amended so as to allow for sobriety to take root and grow. For this alcoholic, it was the relationship with myself that first needed mending. I could not be happy until I accepted that I had been placed exactly where I was supposed to be. I could not be happy until I accepted myself.

I’ve had lots of nice perches in my life, but maybe only one home. It’s here, watching the sun come up over the East River, watching my beloved young hawk make his own home high above 89th Street, donning the beloved black sneakers on Saturdays and spending the day bopping around the city I love so much. There are lots of romantic cities in the world; people fly off to places like Paris to get engaged and find everlasting love. I’m not sure I’ve loved living in a place as much as I love living here. It’s not the chinese food, or the fabulous restaurants or all the excitement and glitz and glamor. It’s what I discovered, walking around some kind of dirty streets in old sneakers and listening to old Steely Dan songs that no one else even knows anymore:

Myself.

Happy Friday.

1. Have you ever noticed that most of these break-up songs are set well after the time the break-upper has already made their mind up and departed? I’m thinking this could be a clue as to why the relationship ended.

2. I’ve seen a book at The Strand that purports to tell the backstory of Steely Dan songs. I think I’m better off not knowing at this point.