Tag: Alcoholism

Categories
Death Gay Hollywood Los Angeles Queer

Fear and Faith

Easter 2022 Portugal

Last night I made Indian food at home for friends. A convivial evening. The weather has been spectacular this week. The religious parades a little lacklustre, they don’t compare with the magisterial opulence of the spanish equivalent. Yet, even though I don’t believe in christianity, I bow my head before those who do.

This morning the apartment is scented with cassia, cardamom, coriander…

Last week the rains were gratefully upon us.

The sky is dove gray, the cloud ombréd into anthracite onto the horizon. Spring storms are coming. Gulls wheeling over the Rio Gilao. The swifts are no longer screaming, they are hiding in their mud and saliva nests under the eves. The deluge comes, polishing the cobbles. Parasols flap and drip onto miserable tourists. An inescapable torrent. I may have left the window open.

I am unpacking my unhealthy, enmeshed relationship with women. I am the one… I have consistently had unhealthy relationships with women. I am the one. Ending in dismay, disloyalty, disappointment. I could make a million excuses but I am the one. Whether it is George or Samia, rich or poor, bright or not… they open the door to their misery and like a fool, I rush in.

I wanted to save my mother. I couldn’t. I was powerless. I wasn’t enough. I lay in bed listening to the screams. I couldn’t save her. I was just a boy! What could I do? In my teens I ended up resenting her because she couldn’t save herself. Nor us. I know my brothers were terribly wounded. They sabotaged their father’s funeral.

Truth never picks a side.

A famous friend is crying hard about the pressure of fame, success. She is crying because she hates talk shows, she hates the publicity grind. She is bleating and moaning, the hard rain is falling. It is difficult to listen, knowing just how they reaped the rewards of the entertainment industry. I am full of judgement until I admit I’ve been there myself, equally indulgent. I’ve written about it, the loneliness of success.

If I believe my creative gifts are god given, yet… when the universe delivers I wonder: am I deserving? ‘No, you are not.‘ I hear the voice in my head so clearly, speaking to me using my voice. ‘You are an imposter, you’ll always be an imposter.’

Remember that night? The night in question, that night, that great night… leaving the theatre deafened by applause, even though I had many who would have congratulated me I had no one to call. I was completely alone, enduring the discomfort of the moment, so fearful, I wanted to call my mother but that door was closed to me. I felt so fragile, it was impossible to enjoy my success. The intensity of the moment was nothing I had experienced before. It was so overwhelming I ran away, I fought it off. I am only deserving of punishment. I have stripped myself of every opportunity presented me. I have sabotaged each and every gift. I have behaved like a lunatic.

Ana, Samia, Donna, Eleanor, Georgina, Hilary. A longer list exists… I am sure. Women I wanted to save, save from husbands, boredom, grief, family, loneliness. When will I ever learn? Maybe this is the moment? I am the one? It always ends up the same way, even when I have set the boundaries, considered my motives, written the contract. The outcome is always the same: RESENTMENT.

Ana calls me her husband, George wants to marry me, Donna is furious when I tell her friends I am gay. Samia meets me in Paris for what? She woefully reminds me how old she is. What became of them?

Drawn to their helplessness, tiny Ana lost on her huge sofa, penniless. Donna consumed by her hoard, piss and shit saved in plastic bags, Samia shamed by her menopause. Georgina’s body wrecked by Parkinson’s, her bank accounts raped by her daughter. I have learned, just now. This day. Unless those who have becomes victims to circumstance take hold of their own lives no one can help them. What could I do? I was just a boy! I can momentarily drag her out of poverty, over the shingle to the restaurant in the wheelchair… but I cannot will them to live, to stop making the same mistakes.

By consorting with a woman and her shame, I can only fail. Those who saw me wrecked by grief must never lay eyes on me ever again. When ‘saved’ what do we need with our saviour? If incapable of saving, we slip into the oily, cold water of failure. Like Jack from Rose.

Men I know sharing how they drank and used drugs like heroes: they drank like Travis Bickle, snorted like Scarface, loved like Nick Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Their cinematic memories, their euphoric recall is so often vulgar and self-aggrandising. If I drank like a character in a movie? I am Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Baby Jane Hudson. King baby. Writing a letter to daddy. Knocking back the bourbon, controlling the outcome, taking hostages.

Looking in the mirror. Crying. Drowning in self pity.

Thank God I cast myself in another movie. The movie I am living right now. Am I happy because of the therapy or the anti depressants? I am luxuriating in the moment. I love my things. The temperature is perfect. I do not wish to shut the door on my past but, thank god, I am not my story. My story, the story of casual violence and hopelessness merely gave me excuses to behave badly. ‘If you had my story you too would be a monster’, that is the lie we tell ourselves. Without my story I have no excuse. I am the one.

My mother ended up saving herself. She has the life she wants. I respect and accept that. It has taken decades of reflection to own my part. It was a process aided by the voices of so many willing to share their truth. Faith overcomes fear. I know, no matter what, I will be ok.

For that, this Easter day, I am very thankful.

Categories
Hollywood

AA LA WTF

I just put my AA ‘Big Book’ in the trash.

Does this mean I will die? Well yes, eventually.

Does this mean I will drink again? Maybe, but not immediately.

Does this mean that I’ll stop believing in god? Definitely not.

“Like any cult, religion or philosophy, AA leans heavily on the good will and participation of its members. I like the saying “if you like everybody you meet in AA, you aren’t going to enough meetings“. People should not be accountable for ideas, only for their actions. I have never had high expectations of AA, and so they are usually exceeded by the results.

“Faith without works is dead.  The book is overrated, Duncan, everybody knows that. But the Love in AA is palpable.”

Dan my friend wrote the above. Men like him initially convinced me AA was good. I was attracted to the nuanced reasoning, the warmth of the members, their ‘spirituality’. I was not wrong, people like Dan were the reason I kept going back.

Explaining AA to the uninitiated is like teaching a baboon how to knit.

Writing this, even now, I can convince myself to haul the AA Big Book out of the trash…that things weren’t that bad, that I should look at ‘my part’, that if only I had worked the 12 steps just a little bit harder.  The reason I moved to LA?  The reason I uprooted my home, my life…myself? Alcoholics Anonymous.

The comfy Palisade stag meetings, the jolly Rodeo social, the stoic recovery center.  I loved UTA owner Jeremy Zimmer’s Saturday morning industry meeting where the producers, writers, actors and directors came to flay themselves before the UTA grandee.

I was rapt by the harrowing story of child sex abuse and violence therapist Sean McFarlane dramatically told when ever he was asked to testify.  I watched ‘Big’ Robert gather his flock of new comers/sponsees at the 7am Bank meeting and take them diligently through the twelve steps.

It took five years to see through each of these scam merchants.

Jeremy Zimmer uses his meeting to ensnare and compromise celebrities in trouble. Fellow alcoholic industry folk, realizing that Jeremy is a sick man do not risk leaving the meeting, nor do directors and actors who want his patronage. Jeremy Zimmer is a sadist. Laughing and joking as men cry pitifully about their ‘rock bottom’.  The only men he has compassion for are men that mean nothing to him professionally.

Sean McFarlane, perhaps the worst scam artist in the AA SAA organization, effectively getting rich men to pay to sponsor them.  Sponsorship is a service supposedly supplied ‘for fun and for free’ from elder AAers to the new comer, helping them understand the 12 steps, helping them understand the Big Book of AA…a sort of bible written by Bill Wilson the founder of AA.

Sean thinks nothing of taking huge amounts of money from naive new comers for his sponsorship services.  Sean (pronounced seen) McFarlane, provides counseling as a sex therapist but I have no proof that he has any formal training nor counseling himself, nor support, even a sponsor? If anyone has proof that this monster has any training… please provide it.

Sean oversees the fate of cheating celebrities who routinely fall from grace and into his Wednesday morning SAA meeting… needing their family back, their reputation saved, their need to disguise their pedophile peccadillos… putting humpty dumpty back together again.

Sean thinks he is a very big deal, a super hero, leaping over imagined cars to save his clients from tranny hookers bent on destroying his clients.

As for Big Robert, the multimillionaire ex basketball player…well it turns out that this self-proclaimed AA guru is in fact a compulsive liar who, whilst banging his sponsees heads with the big book bible… is in fact gorging on un-prescribed prescription meds. He routinely tells his group of sycophantic male followers that AA does not ‘shoot its wounded’… which is patently untrue.

I thought, when I moved to LA that finally… I had come home.

It is evident from the 2006/7 blogs that I loved it and it loved me. A family of men and women who could always forgive, would always forgive.  Well, that was the first of my mistakes. I was wrong about them. Perhaps when I moved here AA was different, I was different?

AA is a cult. Like scientology it trades on the secret lives of its members. Like scientology it requires devotion. Blind devotion. Like scientology there is a vile abuse of power. Those who want to wrestle the leadership, become gurus, lie and steal… all in the name of recovery.

Most so-called addicts and alcoholics are mental patients with no mental hospital to go to.  Look at the beautiful man at the top of this post. His name was Evan Landry. He was a friend of mine. An AA friend. Wow, I was bowled over with Evan, his aggressive, sexy ways… his vulnerability. He served in Iraq, he was an MMA fighter, I saw him fight.

He had a sexy girlfriend he shared with Mike Tyson but wasn’t above going to… how shall we say… the dark side.  Well, last night Evan Landry killed himself. Another AA tragedy. Today his friends think it is ‘sad but not unexpected’. They have buried so many friends, their indifference is as unexpected as Evan’s OD.

People like Sean McFarlane will remember him, use his death as evidence that we must never, ever leave AA.  His PTSD unaddressed, all he needed (according to his AA friends) was the 12 steps.

Like prescribing leaches for terminal cancer.

In the USA there are a hundred treatment centers where addiction can be fought with the ubiquitous 12 steps… if you have the money. In my experience getting help with any other mental condition is almost impossible.  Evan Landry put his faith in AA like so many of us did… but our problems were complicated by AA and sadly may have killed dear Evan and many men and women like him.

I don’t go to AA funerals because they are a sick joke. I might, however, go to this one. Just to laugh at the hypocrites who killed Evan with their medieval prescription for a better life.

Categories
Health

AA

This morning, Mel picked me up from the mountain at 6.30 am.   He drives a large, white Hummer, his dog and my dog are best friends.  They are a similar size and their fur is the same colour.

I left a young black internet date in my bed and the twins slumbering downstairs.  I wore the Martin Margiela sunglasses Joan bought for me last year and I only removed them when Mel dropped me off 6 hours later.

The last AA meeting I attended was held in the chapel in The Men’s County Jail.  The speakers valiantly trying to spread the word whilst 400 tranny hookers caught up on the ‘T’ (gossip).  I sat listening to them that Wednesday evening wondering if I would ever go back to AA, whether I would even remain soba when I eventually left the jail.

Last night I poured myself a glass of red wine.  I didn’t drink it.  I looked at it in the 17C crystal glass, I sniffed it occasionally but I didn’t have the guts to drink it. Just like I have not had the guts to kill myself, even though some of you seem like you’re waiting for me to do so.

Taking a drink is like the first step toward a painful death.  Those of you who have not drunk for some time know what I mean.

Perhaps death is the solution?  That’s what they promise in the preamble of Narcotics Anonymous:  Jails, Institutions, Death.

I have experienced the first two, now I wait patiently for the third.

AA.  I committed to it so many years ago. I was so damned willing, so entranced, so desperate.  Now, I loathe it.  I sat there this morning wishing I was drunk.  My lips stained with red wine…preferably a rich Multipulciano.  That twisted smile I smiled when I was drunk.  Do any of you old friends remember that?  That strange half-smile?

I sat there listening to their white, middle-aged, bourgeois stories, stories of their mediocre triumphs and their miserable disasters.  Their engagements, their dying wives, their wayward medicated children…reassuring us that they were nothing without AA.

The most bumptious of them all flaying himself before us, describing himself as an arrogant scoundrel.  His tearful confession masquerading as humility.   Knowing, of course, that his well rehearsed speech would garner rave reviews from his adoring fans.  He had, after all, relapsed publicly, he had gotten back on the wagon with the rest of us (even though he had deceived us) he reassured his brethren that ‘we do not shoot our wounded’.

When it was my turn to speak I felt that crooked smile on my lips.  As if I were drunk.  As if I had already taken the first sip.

They knew where I had been.  They looked down their manufactured noses at the hopeless alcoholic who could not stay on the straight and narrow.  The ‘arrogant scoundrel’ looked about him at his friends, scoffing, expecting me to prostrate myself before them…begging forgiveness.

Instead, I told them about the tranny hookers, I told them that I had been in resentment since Jake revealed himself.  I let them know that the cloud of resentment, loathing, hatred had thickened so it blocked out the sun.  I reminded them that, for the longest time, I had forgotten what it felt like to live in the light.  I told them to re-read steps four and five and let me be a lesson to them all.  Let my story remind them what it looks like when resentment smothers a recovering alcoholic like wisteria a stone house.

I told them that going to jail had been the best thing for me and they nodded and agreed but they had no idea what they were agreeing to.

After I spoke, others with similar ailments, similar pathologies felt able to share.  They thanked me, they said that there was a fine line between sobriety and insanity.  They reminded the others just how many of us kill ourselves after many years of sobriety.  The darkness in men’s souls.

I was envious of those who had killed themselves.  I have wanted to be dead for the longest time.  I know what some of you will say…like Chris in Sydney and those of you who would prefer it…you would tell me to hurry on and do it.  You would say, go on kill yourself, good riddance to you Duncan Roy.

But when the time comes and I hold the pills in my hand like a fist of squirming bugs…something stops me.  Something tells me that just one more day and the pain of losing the man/dog/home you love might just diminish.

I may very well have ended my relationship with AA.

My great friend John Adler, my sponsor these past few years in AA and SAA abandoned me a few weeks after I was locked up.  Even though his own sponsor is a child molester and child pornographer, even though his wife begged me to get her a club membership, apparently I am a danger to him and his family.

It was a betrayal that I never thought I would have to endure, it was the one and only time I cried in the jail.  My best friend was a coward.

He wasn’t the only one.

I learned many lessons in the jail.  I learned about America.  I learned more when I read the comments posted after the piece published in the online version of The Independent.  The difference between the British and the Americans.  I was proud to be British yesterday.

For the record, I have to see the doctors tomorrow to work out what we do about three months of medical inaction.  God may very well be doing for me what I cannot do for myself.  If you know what I mean.  The pain in my belly is occasionally overwhelming.  It feels like my insides are being ripped out.  My kidneys burning.  The blood in my urine a daily reminder.  A serious situation.

It is more serious than the stupid charges against me, charges I cannot find the time to take seriously.  More serious than DA Anne-Marie Wise would want you to believe.

We sat in the deli after the meeting, before the long walk in the canyon, and Michelle Bachman was on the TV.  She looks like Anne-Marie, she has that look those women who think they are powerful.  Women who work for men believing the glass ceiling has been broken.

She’ll read this and she’ll try and prove how powerful she is…she’ll try and make life difficult, like she did when I was inside the jail, tacking on extra weeks of incarceration before the trial…waiting for me to buckle and except her pathetic ‘deal’.

Do your worst Anne-Marie.  Your very worst will not hurt me.  You cannot hurt me.  You don’t know me.

You should have seen her in the court with her pile of papers, feeling very important.

Fingering that cheap jewelry as if it were Cartier.  Taking it all so personally.  She probably goes home and tells her children that mummy does very important work putting dangerous men behind bars.  Not that she has been colluding with the super rich to steal from the poor.

You see, the resentment overwhelms.  It gets me.  It bites me in the neck like a vampire.  It keep me alive…even though I should be dead.

Let my slow suicide be a lesson to you all.

Categories
Gay Love

It’s Over..

I had a great day today.  Started writing my script, the one that I intend to shoot this winter.  I am working with my deliciously talented co-writer GT.  This afternoon we sat for four hours  hammering out the big idea.  She is  wonderful, inspired and inspiring who generously and perfectly compliments the way I work.

It’s odd to be feeling so upbeat because this afternoon whilst I was out shopping with Jennie I ended my relationship with my NYC boy.

My relationship is over.   The past four months have been very emotional but actually so well worth the risk.  To fall in love and be loved.   To make love.  To risk saying I love you to another man..these are the gifts of sobriety.  We had, against the odds, a great deal of fun.  Not enough really but fun wasn’t the point.

He was so fragile and distraught when I met him.  In the short time I knew him he experienced momentous changes.  I was so blessed to have been given the time we spent together, to witness his bravery.   To see him tear down his old life and build another in the ruins.

It was wonderful, when we had the few chances we had, to lay in each other’s arms.  I loved every inch of his perfect body.  Even as he wept-and we did a great deal of crying-he was beautiful.  It was a beautiful and tender time.

I can tell you with my usual disarming candor-the best sex I ever had.

What, you may be asking did you end it for?  If I didn’t let him go I would have stolen something that he needed more than me-the chance to form a relationship with a man more his own age, a man who could fully give him what he needed and that man wasn’t going to be me.

To exit a relationship with grace and dignity is perhaps the hardest thing of all.  I needed with love to let this man go on his way.  Everything I ever let go of had cl;aw marks all over it..

In spite of the external problems we had a perfect chemistry.   Intellectually we were perfectly well matched, when we weren’t crying we laughed a great deal.  So, why the hell end this?  Why?  Couldn’t I have moved to NYC?  Couldn’t he have moved to LA?

I’m afraid that it all boiled down to one thing, and one thing only: my being sober.

When I met him I set aside my doubts.  I may not have trusted him to stay monogamous, something I’m afraid that the gays don’t do very well (please, dear readers, don’t give me a hard time for this accurate generalization) I forgave his constant references to his past relationship, his crippling guilt, his disapproving mother.  I chose to rationalize that I was in a relationship with a man who insisted that I was not allowed to call our relationship a RELATIONSHIP.   I loved a man who loved me but we were not allowed to call each other lovers.  We lived in the shadow of the wreckage of his past and it was slowly suffocating me.

I feel as if I have been living in somebody else’s closet.

To keep him I needed to change.  I became genius at having no expectations.  I was not genius at being patient so my patience very quickly ran out.  I overlooked the drinking and the pornography, the flirtations and half stories undermining my confidence in him.  I ignored that he kept me secret.  I could even overlook his occasional weed smoking. But late last night, after a hard time in the city. He drove home drunk.

He drove for one hour out of NYC DRUNK.

I was forced to admit the most profound difference between us: he continues to pickle his feelings with alcohol, drugs and sex.

When he drinks his personality changes and he makes appalling choices.

That, my friends, is the curse of every addict.

Driving home drunk is simply unforgivable to me, a recovering alcoholic.  Even if it were ‘just once’ it was once too often and by doing so he recklessly risked his own life and the lives of others. Within a matter of moments my desire for him crumbled.  Let’s face it, for the past few nights when we chatted on Skype he had been drunk, drunk or high or both.   It just made me feel very uncomfortable.

I really  loved my beautiful boy but I didn’t love his drinking.  I let this man into my life and by so doing put myself at risk of relapse.

Dinner with a stranger then driving home drunk.

Does this sound like a man who has any respect for himself?  How am I expected to respect a man who risks his own life by drinking and driving?   I can’t do this.  I didn’t get sober for this.

The neighbors are fighting again.  They may fight but they are in the same room.  They have a chance of making it work.  The cowardly end to this was to wait for time to pass, wait for our relationship to die of natural causes.

Tonight I am free to write my blog without censorship-without having to be obtuse.  I know that he is relieved, that tonight he will sleep better in his own skin.   I fear for him, I really do.  That he will sink into a world of gym hook ups, drinking and drugs and by doing so he will become just like every despicable gay we used to laugh about.

We are no longer lovers but we remain friends and I will help him as much as I can.

I even secretly entertain the idea of going to Europe with him one day.  If he pays for his own ticket.