Freedom starts with personal salvation

Logan was a small Jewish neighborhood in North Philly. That’s were I was born, smack in the middle of the last century.

Let’s pan down to the Beth Judah Hebrew school, where the teacher, Mr. Silver, is sending me to the principal’s office for getting caught taking bets on that Sunday’s Eagles game. The Eagles were a big underdog and the other boys had never heard of a point spread. We were 12 years old. I, however, had already become a regular habitué of Cooper’s Candy Store. It was a place where Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bobby Fischer, Arnold Rothstein, Sandy Koufax and Lenny Bruce were held in as high esteem as our new young president, John F. Kennedy. And let’s not forget Frank Sinatra. I can never forget Sinatra (who I happen to share a birthday with — Dec. 12).

This was no ordinary candy store. This was home to an array of characters Philip Roth could only imagine. On any given Sunday, my surrogate tutors gathered to discuss politics, literature and the arts (movies).

My father had passed on when I was 3 weeks old. Here I found my teachers and spirit guides (God help me): gamblers, bookmakers, convivial conmen, scholars, poets and hucksters from the streets of Philly, where fights were rare and firearms unheard of. Before I left the house, my mother would warn me: “Be careful you don’t get hit by any stray insults.” When I had a problem or some question, my mom was too tired from working all day to give me the learned answers I sought — but not so for the guys on the corner. Whether it was Big Ed, Moxie, Fixie, Fox, the Eggman, Wingy (only one arm, of course), Fatty Moishe, the Fat Man (no relation to Moishe), Bruce the Flying Gooses and his brother The Geese — or just plain, “Yo, Klugman,” I could count on the most skewed answers a kid of 12 ever had. 

“Leonard,” shouted Mr. Silver, “get to the principal’s office!” I wasn’t petrified, not even scared. No, I was pissed off! I wasn’t done collecting all the kids’ bets yet. Shoving assorted lunch monies into my pants pocket, I’d sidle down to the office of Mr. Rothenberg. This was always very awkward. Not for me, but for Mr. Rothenberg. You see, he was having an affair with my mother. I guess the commandment “Thou shalt not shtup widows while you are still married” never made it into his prayer book or the principal’s code of ethics. Ah, ethics. My first lesson. It’s not who you are, it’s who you know.

“Leonard,” he advised, “just sit here for 10 minutes and tell your class I gave you a stern talking-to.” And I’m thinking, “I would give you a stern talking-to if I weren’t only 12 years old.”

I’ll bet that my first lawyer, the very well connected Bob Simone, would have told me to blackmail the bastard. I could have had gifts for all eight days of Chanukah or a scholarship to the yeshiva. (Yeah, like that’s where I was headed.) By the way, my mother’s decision to retain Bob Simone after my first bust was brilliant. He only charged us $3,000. He explained his Temple University law school defense strategy like this: $750 for the judge, $750 for the prosecutor, $750 for Mayor Rizzo, and $750 for him. I can’t tell you how my sense of civic duty was tainted by going to court knowing exactly what I was going to hear the judge declare: “Case dismissed!”

I think I know what happened to me in the ensuing years. J.D. Salinger explained it right before his most written-about character, Seymour Glass, commits suicide in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The story of the bananafish describes a fish that is always hungry, and one day he swims into a cave where all these bananas are. He eats one, then another, then another. He is consumed with consuming all these bananas because they satiate his hunger. When all the bananas are gone, he swims to the mouth of cave, but now he’s too fat to get out. Captive in the cave, he dies of hunger. Drugs and booze were my bananas.

I smoked my breakfast, drank my lunch and snorted my dinner.

Thirty-two years later, filled with drama and denial, and still only because I was having a nervous breakdown and thought I was about to be arrested, I decided to check into the Betty Ford Center. I drove there from the underworld. I had a reservation; I had lots of reservations. But I was late. Why? Because I got lost. Very lost. Imagine driving around Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage sweating more than David Hasselhoff before a roadside sobriety test — I was very stoned on Big Sur sinsemilla. I called the rehab for directions, and they guided me in, brought me in out of the cold, so to speak. Dinah Shore Road, Frank Sinatra Way (his way), Bob Hope Drive. I thought I was driving around an endless Republican cul-de-sac. Then I started to hallucinate. Suddenly I was 9 years old, and my mother and I were watching “Your Hit Parade” and devouring a quart of Breyers Vanilla Fudge.

I parked and found the front desk. I asked, “Is this where I check in?” The receptionist replied, “This is where you get admitted.” Soon I was in the nurse’s office wearing a blue paper bracelet, and Nurse Jackie was drawing blood. “We want to know exactly what’s in your system in case you’re about to go into benzodiazepine withdrawal.”

“I haven’t had any Valium since last night, and it was only 30 milligrams.”

“Do you have any more?”

“Why? You’re a nurse — can’t you get your own?”

During the previous 26 years, never knowing what great disappointments or triumphs might greet me when I left the house, I was always prepared to adjust my mood, alter my perspective or insulate my emotions with a full flask of vodka or tequila, five joints, Valium, Percodan, a vile of cocaine, some shrooms and a half-dozen hits of ecstasy. I never met a drink or drug that wasn’t useful.

That first night, I couldn’t sleep. I planned on leaving the next morning after roll call. I opened the Alcoholics Anonymous book to bore myself to sleep. When I read Page 26, I was suddenly wide awake. There in front of me was a most familiar name: Carl Jung. I’d been into Jung and those who circle within his orbit of influence for years. I regularly attended workshops with Robert Bly and read Joseph Campbell religiously. Carl Jung, I discovered, was credited with having set the course for what today is known as Alcoholics Anonymous.

When Jung was asked if there was any sure way for an alcoholic to recover — truly recover — he is quoted as saying, “Yes, there is .... Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. To me these are phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them.”

I stayed that first day because of Jung, but I was still resistant enough to plan a second-day getaway because of one word engraved in a 2-by-6-foot marble plaque. The fact that the word was engraved did not bother me. After all, hadn’t I stood many times before the main post office in Manhattan, where high above the Corinthian columns is engraved, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” My father died while working at the post office. I was always high as a kite when I was in Manhattan, but that didn’t keep me from feeling proud when I read those words. After all, he helped deliver me right before his heart attack.

My eyes zoomed in, sharp focus on the plaque. Step 3: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God ...” Step 5: “Admitted to God ...” And Step 6: “Were entirely ready to have God …” And look at Step 11, there it is again: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God.” Christ, where am I? Some Christian enclave where Elizabeth Taylor managed to fall in love again? I’m outta here. Thank God it was Friday, and I could use the phone on Saturday to call my brother in New York and complain about God being all over this place.

He lovingly reminded me I had prayed at the Western Wall, sat still in the temples of Kyoto, spent 40 days at a Sufi retreat on Maui, read “Be Here Now” by transcendental super-Jew Ram Dass a dozen times, chanted “Hare Krishna” with hundreds in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark before crying my eyes out at the Anne Frank House. He had a point. Except God had never been enlisted to help me stop drinking and doing drugs, which I had been doing every day for 26 years.

Like a sinner sensing salvation, a robber facing redemption, I decided to drop my defenses, postpone my paranoia, dispense with my disbelief, and settle into my seat and stay open to what was being said.

On my third day, I walked outside into the new morning’s light. Suddenly the desire and need for all drugs left me in an instant. Evaporated into history. I looked around to see who had done that. I was ostensibly, theoretically, alone. My addiction to all drugs was gone. The psychological sensation, while difficult to describe, was both liberating and slightly disquieting.

However, I still wanted to drink. I was still not convinced that living a 100 percent clean and sober life was a good idea for me. Three days after my release, on my way to a Labor Day wine-tasting party in Sonoma County, I stopped at an AA meeting. The speaker, an artist, drug abuser and heavy drinker, said something I’ll never forget. “The Dalai Lama called Alcoholics Anonymous the most important social and spiritual movement in America.” This is what I had been looking for my whole life! What an epiphany.

Getting through the desert is not easy. There’s no magic bullet train to ride. You make the journey one step at a time, and you do it on purpose. I attended the suggested 90 meetings in 90 days, made coffee, set up chairs, got a sponsor, worked the 12 steps, prayed and meditated. What a wonder it is to have a program of recovery that’s available all over the world. When asked to speak at an AA meeting in Brighton, England, I was able to connect and identify with the men and women there who, too, had opened their hearts and minds to the universality of love and a connection to a Higher Power.

While working as a certified substance abuse counselor at Beit T’Shuvah, I learned firsthand that you can’t force or guilt-trip true recovery down a drowning man’s throat. They’ll just choke more. As Alan Watts explains in his talk about enlightenment, “You can’t force satori in through the window, but you can make sure the window is open.”

Today I work for Writers in Treatment, a nonprofit organization I founded that helps individuals in the writing profession suffering from any self-destructive addiction get into a good treatment facility. We also produce educational and prevention programs for the recovering community, schools, businesses and civic groups. Our volunteers know that if they need a break to take a breath, call their sponsor or attend a meeting, it’s never a problem. I still participate in a 12-step meeting every morning before work. That’s a mitzvah. The days of the three-martini and matzah lunch are over. Today it’s leavened bread and brewed tea for me. 

Leonard Lee Buschel can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).