"She's Gone" and the Power of Sadness
I’m grateful for a sunny Friday morning and for a fairly dramatic sunrise. I’m grateful for standing where I am. I’m grateful for what I’ve built and for the chance to feel proud about it. I’m grateful for things coming together and for letting them. I’m grateful for the people who do have my back. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
I knew all week that it was an old-school week. I flirted with a lot of songs, married none. As I climbed into the saddle to choose the sotw, my mind was still kind of blank and then into the void, this song began playing. I know I say this every week, but I really love this song.1 I know where I was when I heard it the first time.
The scene was Moline, Illinois in 1973, I was ten years old and in the cavernous garage behind the house my grandparents lived in. It was set on an alley and several houses in the neighborhood had once shared it. There was room inside, behind the big-stable like doors, for at least 4 cars. Most folks had opted out of the communal garage over the years and had constructed small garages or carports that they could call their own.
This was fine with my grandfather, who was semi-retired, but had picked up a side hustle restoring wrecked rental cars and then reselling them. He and his friend Hank made bank on this enterprise and it also resulted in my brother getting to drive a rescued Chrysler Imperial for a bit.2 This particular summer day, we were working on Project X—the secret go-cart project.
We both understood that the power and capabilities of the go-cart had to be carefully masked. This was owing to the fact that we were building a really lethal, lawnmower-engine powered death missile, with a gigantic steering wheel from a wrecked Ford Galaxy 500.3 If my grandmother, or worse, my mom, saw this thing, that’s the end of Project X. When my grandmother was out getting her hair set on Friday mornings, we’d roll out the go-cart, I’d climb into the plywood death missile, grasp the oversized steering wheel and prepare for launch in the alley.4 My grandfather stood by the mouth of the alley to try and prevent me from being run over by a car.
The go-cart had no brakes, only less acceleration. We did a real astronaut-style countdown and he pulled the starting cord, got the engine going and then engaged the gears he had built and it was go-time in the go-cart. When I took my foot off the gas pedal, the go-cart still moved forward, but at a semi-manageable speed. I could actually complete a big looping turn and head back up the alley—the din of a 2.5 horsepower Briggs and Stratton lawn-mowing, beast engine roaring in my ears.
If you read, “My First Alcoholic,” you get the rest of that story. Not our point today. I was at the workbench in the cavernous garage and my grandfather had a portable am-fm radio there—he liked to listen to easy listening or country music while he worked on the cars. There were times when I was left to supervise the garage, while he smoked in the alley or ran a quick errand. I’d immediately change the dial on the radio to an FM station in Davenport that played songs like “She’s Gone."
It was on such a day that this song began to play, from the very first, very spare chords, I was entranced. This was the start of a real love affair with Hall and Oates. I loved the plaintive, soulfulness, the wretched realization in this line:
One less toothbrush hanging in the stand, yeah
Oh man, that sounded so sad, and letting all that sadness get choked away by the carbon and monoxide sounded even better. I loved the sense of desperation and the looming need to accept the monstrous reality,
She’s gone.
As I listened to this song for the very first time, I realized right away that there was something missing from my life, something that I really, really needed:
I needed an ex-girlfriend.
I realized the logistical problems involved. I was ten and didn’t have a girlfriend or really have any prospects of a girlfriend. I knew that having a girlfriend was a prerequisite to having an ex-girlfriend—and therein lay the rub.5 Ok, so I couldn’t really identify with the storyline, I didn’t have any friends named Charlie, and none of the friends I did have were allowed to pour me a drink, much less help with any quick decisions.6
You know what I loved about this song? I loved the sad feeling; the beaten, lost feeling I got when I listened to it. I know that sounds super odd, but really letting myself feel that song, imagining the living room with the rumpled blanket still on the sofa, where he slept the night before. It was the 1970’s, so he might have been smoking a cigarette to steel himself before heading to the bathroom to make the realization about there being only one toothbrush hanging in the stand and gazing into a mirror that isn’t making him look any younger.
Somehow we were all vibrating on the same frequency, and somehow I had already adopted a worldview where I kind of knew that I was going to be alone and kind of lovelorn. That’s why I liked all of the Burt Bacharach stuff. I know a lot more about neuroscience and epigenetics than I did in the 4th grade, and understand how a young brain can get wired to experience the world that way.
And that’s an incredibly windy and unnecessarily long path to this idea: Lots of things that get lumped in the mental health bucket these days—including addictions—are not entirely conscious adaptations. We might call them brain hacks today. When Dr. Ruth Fox wrote “Alcoholism: Its Scope, Cause and Treatment” way back in 1955, she recognized this:
The primary addict, from his first introduction to beverage alcohol, uses it as an aid to adjust to his environment.
Alcoholics are just people who learn to use alcohol to manage their lives. Alcohol is the thread that holds together the quilt, helps generate the brain chemicals that some people produce on their own. For me, it stilled the intense social anxiety I felt, the very strong sense that I was different, not like other people. The sense that I didn’t understand other people and foreknowledge that if they knew the real me, they would probably not like me.
I have no idea where all of that came from. I have no idea why a song like “She’s Gone,” would hit such a sympathetic vibration. I’m not sure it was meant to prepare for a semi-tragic life-to-come. No, I just think that I already felt a big pool of sadness, even at that age, and songs like that felt like understanding and empathy to me. When I think back to those days, when I discovered alcohol around 15 or so, well, that might have been the first time I fell in love:
The flood of chemicals that newly-discovered miracle elixir unleashed in my teenage brain are what literally generated that “white light moment.” The moment when I realized that alcohol was like making an incredibly cool, all knowing, all accepting friend. “Someone” who would literally make everything feel better. The “pool of sadness” might not have been sourced in terrible, violent trauma, but a simple shortage of the brain chemicals that provide feelings of happiness and motivation and overall well-being and satisfaction. Alcohol provided a super-convenient solution.
My mind went 800 mph, even in the dark. I was able to instantly see the tragedy that could attend every course of action. I was fearful and did not believe that I possessed the wherewithal to face the world on its terms. I was already unable to sleep most nights. When I finally got enough alcohol in me, enough to move the meter, it was revelatory. I was funny and slightly and unpredictably dangerous; people were drawn to me when I drank. I embraced the role and soon became the person who never faltered, never refused a drink, never waved off a flaming shot dropped in a beer glass.
I didn’t set out to be a bad person or to hurt other people or try to sabotage and ruin my own life. I started drinking because it helped me manage the world around me in a way that nothing else could. It let me leave behind the shackles of the world, but in a way that felt real and still connected. Drinking helped create a mirage of a normal life, like everyone else led. I could be like everyone else, too, I just needed to drink quite a bit so as to get adjusted properly.
At some point, after you’ve been doing this for a while, it is what is normal. The daily trip to the Logan Tavern was not because of the excellent wings (they were terrible and often left over from the day before—I recognized them). It was a fueling stop, a necessary re-attunement that would allow me to continue to exist in this world. Or just restore the chemical stasis that alcohol helped provide my brain.
The Steps do not function as a way to secretly instill religious belief, or to shame alcoholics into not repeating their evil deeds. The Steps were a form of cognitive therapy that helped me see the set of beliefs, the set of imagined needs that drove my need to drink. And it was an actual, real chemical need; when things were bad, the withdrawal symptoms came on very quickly.The first phase of recovery is the dark hard part of learning to live without the thing that you have believed is necessary to live. There are drugs that can help with these symptoms, but ultimately, it is the chance development of hope that makes the difference and sparks recovery instead of relapse.
The first three Steps are meant to inspire that hope, the hope that things could be different and that we could recover, with a little faith to help fan the flame. The hard work of Steps 4 through 9 are about clearing the underbrush from all of the synapses, wiping away the regret, shame, guilt, fear and selfishness that attend addiction, that maybe generate the need for the addiction, at some level. I believe that what one finds when they work the Steps is this:
Themselves.
I finally spied the real version of myself, the one that I had buried way back in 1978 or whatever. As I became more familiar with this person, as I read the words on page 417 for the ka-jillionth time, I began to make peace with this version of myself. It’s not like a “Freaky Friday” plot,7 there’s a lot of water under the bridge and the person I am is a consequence of all of that water flow and it can’t really be undone. That’s not the point.
The point is to discover what was lost and then recover it.
That’s what the Steps helped me do. Maybe not everyone is helped by finally seeing what happened, but for me, it helped illuminate the path back to what I needed to find.
Sometimes, even when things are good and the world is bright and I’m brimming with energy and all-around happy thoughts, it stills feels good to feel sad. Is that weird? It feels a little like going into a room in the house where you’re not really supposed to be; there’s a sort of dangerous, unhinged possibility in sadness, and it often creates exactly the right climate for change.
Now, I get goosebumps listening to “She’s Gone,” because I have seen the empty toothbrush holder and there was that period of time as a young lawyer where I was imposing on my friend Steve’s hospitality and basement mattress. But I can see now that there is no part of myself that is off-limits and when I touch that pool of sadness, I’ve started to feel the love that attended all of those lost moments instead of regret.
I know there are more sad times ahead, more happy times, too. The Steps helped me finally see what was real about myself and helped undo the terrible knot all of the self-lies tied: The lie that I wasn’t enough. What’s ahead is less important than what is now and what is now is pretty groovy. I don’t need the carbon and the monoxide to choke my thoughts away, yeah.
Happy Friday.
No, but I really do love all of them. That’s sincere.
A bench backseat that could comfortably accommodate 3-4 adults.
You’ve probably never been to a car junkyard, have you?
I always wished it had the little knob that allowed two-finger operation, like my grandfather had in his car, but the go-cart did not have power-steering or really any hydraulics.
You’ll not be surprised that I solved this problem later on. Maybe “solve the problem” is the wrong way to put that.
I did wonder, even back then, what quick decision is it you need to make, dude? She’s Gone. That’s the title of the song.
You know it’s Friday the 13th, right?