Ghost Writer - Part VI
I had just moved back to New York City and was staying with my parents temporarily while waiting for my own apartment to be ready. I was also desperately looking for a job. Eventually I had the luck of meeting a very unusual woman who was looking for a ghostwriter.
THIS IS PART 6 of a SEVEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
Image: Suzy Hazelwood
How did I get sober? Well, I couldn’t write anymore, which, for me, was the kiss of death. I’d sit down to work and no words would come out. I was totally blocked, my brain frozen and inaccessible. I’d spend hours in front of the typewriter and … nothing but inner voices telling me what a fool I was. I wanted to be sober, I was ready, so achingly ready, to be rid of the monkey on my back. But I didn’t know how to get myself on that path until a writer friend, who was also an alcoholic, came to stay with me over Columbus Day weekend and we spent the entire time talking about our addiction. After that, I never drank again. For some reason just talking at length to another drunk about the disease of alcoholism did the trick. I spent two weeks doing my best to avoid liquor, and then threw in the towel and went to an AA meeting because I knew I couldn’t stay sober on my own.
About a week after I’d started AA, Harry Rosen called to ask me out to dinner. I told him I couldn’t accept because I’d given up alcohol and had begun to attend meetings. “You have?” he exclaimed. “Me too!”
And so we had a sober dinner, which was okay – we had a lot to talk about, but without booze there was a certain deadness to the conversation. The following weekend he asked me to go to the movies with him and Chrysis, who, coincidentally, had also stopped drinking. We saw Far from the Madding Crowd and then repaired to a coffee shop. Harry was having a hard time managing his life without alcohol. “I need a drink,” he complained in a desperate, whiny voice, and Chrysis responded with an encouraging: “Now Harry, have some ice cream.”
“I don’t want ice cream!” he cried.
“Well then,” said Chrysis, “Let’s go to an AA meeting.”
The nearest meeting was in the Bowery (this was in 1981, when the Bowery was still a sketchy dump filled with drunks and vagrants). Thankfully, Harry agreed to come with us and we went out into the street, looking, in shape and size, like Goldilocks and the three bears: I was the smallest, Harry was medium, and Chrysis was tall as a tree. We linked arms and walked a few blocks until we came to the dark doorway of a small church. A few people stood in the street outside, smoking cigarettes and talking. From inside the building, we heard a loud, plaintive voice yelling words we couldn’t decipher. With our arms still linked, we entered the church and found our way into a room filled with down-and-out-looking people, most of them there for the cookies and coffee.
Cover Image: Nolita Studio LLC, CC BY-SA 4.0