Defining Moments

by Janet Levine

I’m sitting in the Family and Friends Support Group. I should be empathizing, sympathizing, supporting the addicts in the room and, especially, the addict in my life. Instead, I simply want to whack them.

”Get on with your lives,” I want to scream. Stop loving your addiction. But that, I have come to realize, is my fantasy. Theirs is a very different dream.

My sister tells me how she knows few, well two—her husband, me—people who can break their addictions alone. She wonders why, and I think back to the Family and Friends group. They not only love their addictions, they define themselves by them.

When I was first trying to stop drinking, I went to several AA meetings. I hated them. I did not want to stand up and introduce myself as an alcoholic. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life “recovering.” I wasn’t in denial. I was well aware of the fact that I had a drinking problem. But being an alcoholic seemed to me akin to being a teacher, a doctor, a salesperson. It was a definition. It told people who you were, what you did, how your saw yourself. And I did not see myself in that way.

So I stopped drinking—and no, it wasn’t all that easy. I pushed alcohol off the stage of my life, and decided that I would never, ever, ever let it back on. And when I wanted a drink, when I craved the feelings that alcohol brought me, oh well. I just could not, would not take that drink.

It wasn’t the only way to do it. It may not even be the best way to do it. Getting help from professionals is surely a smarter way than my insistence on going it alone. But the professional can only help the addict get where he or she really, truly, honestly wants to go. The addict in my life says all the right things, but doesn’t match his actions to his words. I don’t believe that he wants to go to sobriety yet.

It’s scary looking at the world through clear lenses. There is pain and fear and rejection and unhappiness. There is also warmth and security and acceptance and joy.

A friend who had far more reason than most to blunt her pain with drugs or booze says she got through by simply putting one foot in front of the other. Nothing heroic, just doing it, every day. While she wouldn’t, I define her as a hero.

I’m back in the group, looking and listening to too many people who don’t want to give up their addictions. They may stop drinking or taking drugs eventually, but most will cling to the persona of the alcoholic or addict. I am annoyed and disappointed with myself that I am so judgmental and yet, as I sit here, listening to their stories, I realize that this, too, is a defining moment.

I cannot chose their side; I’ve been there and it is not a place to which I will ever return. I also know that I can’t say anything. My very words would be suspect. Only they can chose how they want to be defined. Perhaps above all, that is the choice that shapes a person’s life.

Off With Their Heads

by Janet Levine

I’ve long been a fierce opponent of the death penalty. No matter how horrific the crime, I’ve always been a believer that if you lay down with dogs you get up with flies. In other words, killing someone for his or her crime makes you no better than the criminal. But lately, I’ve been having some second thoughts.

Yesterday, while walking through the Parco Monte Mario in Rome where I am traveling—already on edge from the visual assault of all the graffiti, everywhere in this Eternal City—I found myself both elated by the beauty and distraught over the vandalism, the litter and yes, that ever-present graffiti.

These people should be shot, I thought. Alas, it wasn’t the first time such a thought has occurred to me. In LA where I live, I frequently find myself appalled and worse at the blatant disregard for our city. I live around a park, and despite the presence of trash pails every few feet, in the mornings when I take my dogs for a walk, I am constantly confronted and affronted by the debris: fast food wrappers, bottles, cigarette butts, and assorted other trash.

At least at home there is an effort to clean things up. And over the past dozen years, the graffiti issue has lessened. Still, it wears on me.

Perhaps if the graffiti were pretty. Or interesting. At the very least, if it didn’t obscure interesting architectural lines or information it would be helpful to have. But none of the above is true, and so I find my thoughts turning as ugly as what I am finding so abhorrent. And what can you say about the wanton destruction of lampposts, park benches, windows, and more?

In Rome, the problem seems to be worse. My husband calls this the “land of the broken escalator.” It is also the land of parks overgrown with weeds (or when some particular point has been reached, weed-whacked into a barren desert), beautiful buildings gone to ruin, abandoned appliances and defaced walls.

I feel something shrivel inside of me. Worse, I am angry. I want to punish them. I think it is the selfishness, the arrogance, perhaps the pure spitefulness that makes my blood boil. And again I think about how appropriate it would be to deface them, these perpetrators of such heinous visual aggression. Death, I think, may be justified.

Ah, I know I am overreacting. Execution does seem a bit excessive. And what, really, would it solve? Maybe, I think, whack off their hands so they can no longer destroy. Or take out their eyes, so they can see no beauty. But they don’t see it now, so that would not stop the destruction.

What would be onerous enough to give these destroyers pause? I run through the usual punishments, rejecting all. And then, and then I know. It would be perfect. Make them clean up the mess they’ve made.

The Naming

by Janet Levine

The minutes of the committee meeting came via email at 10 am that Monday morning. We hadn’t gotten together for quite a while, so I was surprised by their appearance, but when I read the list of attendees, I realized I must have missed a meeting. Paul, the chair, attended, of course. As did Sally, Deb, John and Graham. And someone named Martha Lewis. I didn’t know a Martha Lewis, but the campus was large and I didn’t know everyone. I wondered what she did.
A woman named Martha Lewis would, I decided, do something substantial. Probably from the business office. Financial. I could picture here, this Martha Lewis. A large, solid-looking woman. Her no-nonsense clothes would be blocky and mostly brown. She’d have oxford-type shoes at the end of her stocky legs and her hair would tidy. Martha Lewis, I just knew, would be red faced and wear no makeup.

At first, I just skimmed the minutes. There really was no point in reading them carefully. Committee meetings were solame. Everyone talked around the issues, too afraid to take a concrete stand on anything. But then, suddenly, I found myself nodding and murmuring little sounds of assent. This Martha was taking a stand. She was saying meaningful things. Things I wish I had the gumption to say. I would, I realized, have to rethink this Martha Lewis. The woman, after all, made sense. She was reasonable but not priggish about it. There was a flair in her ideas and her sense of humor shone through.

All right. She was, yes, definitely tall, but not really large. Her clothes were comfortable, but not mannish or dull. Stylish, but not slavish. Her make-up—and I now saw that she must wear some—was tasteful, bringing out her best features. Her honey-colored hair would frame her strong face, lightly brush the high cheekbones and her un-furrowed forehead, bringing out the color of her clear, direct eyes. Martha Lewis, I was now convinced, was a woman to reckon with. A woman I wanted to know. A woman I wanted to be like. I would have to ask Paul to introduce us.

Paul, however, just laughed when I asked about Martha Lewis.
"I guess,” he said, “I can see how someone could mistype and get Lewis from Levine. But how in the hell do you get Martha out of Janet?

I almost choked on my coffee. I was Martha Lewis? I said sensible, substantive things? With a sense of humor, no less. Could I really be a woman to reckon with, just as Martha Lewis had been?

For a nanosecond I felt the power. I sat up straighter, my shoulders flung back. Then it passed and I slumped down in my chair. They were, then, my words. Words that would lack the heft and weight of what would have been spoken by a Martha Lewis.

Completely forgetting my first impression, I fixated on the final Martha Lewis of my imagination. “Martha,” I was sure, gave those words dignity. “Lewis” added an arrogance that was somehow compelling. If you googled Martha Lewis, you wouldn’t get 517,000 hits as you did with Janet Levine. People wouldn’t call you monthly to ask if you were the Martha Lewis who…like they called me.

If only my parents had given me a substantial, uncommon Martha-like name. If only my first husband hadn’t had such a common last name. If only I had had the right name then, like Stanley Kowalski, I coulda been a contender.

David's Gift

Brenda: My adopted brother, David, killed himself in February after struggling for many years with alcohol addiction. Unfortunately, the anguish and despair that drives someone to such an act is compounded by isolation that often prevents others from knowing how serious the situation has become until it is too late. His mother, Sally, died a couple years ago very unexpectedly and her death took a heavy toll on the family. I wrote this essay in an attempt to find some meaning in these terrible losses.

David’s Gift
by Brenda Knepper

My stepmother, Sally, once told me that she had a near-death experience during surgery when she was a young adult. During the experience, she said she hovered above her unconscious body observing what was happening below. Even though she seldom set foot in church, she believed that she had a soul and that there was something beyond this life; she believed in an afterlife. Who or what was the “her” that was doing the observing and was not located in her body?

I choose to believe that life goes on after this physical existence and that we are all moving towards reconciliation with a healing and loving God and a “peace that surpasses all understanding” – some of us slower than others, some by more direct paths, some by very wandering paths, and some by paths that may look like the wrong path.

I choose to believe that God was waiting for David with an open heart and outstretched arms, along with David’s mother, his aunt, grandparents and others who love him. I believe that there was healing waiting for David that was not possible on earth.

Megan Kanka and Polly Klass were children whose abduction and murder caused laws to be changed and organizations to come into being that have helped to prevent other children from suffering their same fate. They were seven and twelve when their lives ended and their true missions were revealed. I choose to believe that with David’s suicide, his mission in life was revealed – his life and death now dramatically serve as an example and catalyst for me and others to learn everything we can about how to stop cycles of abuse, provide support for loved ones and their families who suffer from substance addictions and depression, and prevent suicide from ever happening again in our families.

From the very night that I heard of David’s death, I have been taking a critical look at my relationship with my son. I ask myself what isn’t working, what works, where can I get additional support, and what should my role be in empowering him to lead a full and responsible and joyful life? One of David’s gifts to me is to understand more fully that how we love and support each other may be a matter of life and death.

While we are saddened that the light of David’s personality was dimmed by the battles that he and his family endured, we can hold on to the good times – when his true self came through – hopefully calling on those memories to help ease the shock, anger and sorrow of his death. David had many friends! He had the gift of an outgoing friendliness and charm that attracted lots of people to him over his lifetime. He was engaging, fun, and connected with others. He had also developed impeccable skills in the trades. I remember younger days – long days at the swimming pool in Georgia when we first met Sally and her boys. Both David and his brother, Don, were lively and bright-eyed guys; they are my adopted brothers even though we have been present in each other’s lives infrequently. I have always told people that I’m the eldest and only girl with six younger brothers.

The last time I saw David, I admired the beautiful flagstone patio that he had built at the back of the house in South Carolina and was surprised at how he instantly connected with my eight-year-old son, taking him on a long hike in the woods with the dog. I could see in David a person who might have made a good father, if he had not had to struggle with, what we can only see in hindsight, a terminal illness.

When one door closes, others open. While honoring the terrible grief that my Dad and Don have experienced with the tremendous losses of those most close to them, I hope that there is some comfort in the deepening connections and renewed relationships with the rest of the family that have resulted from these life changes. I know my other brothers feel the same as I – we are very grateful to have our Dad and Don more closely in our lives.

David left behind a note asking that his ashes be spread off the Gulf Coast of Florida where his Mom’s were spread. He signed his short note, “Love, David.” I choose to believe that David sincerely meant the very last two words that he chose to write – with everything his heart and soul had to give in those final moments. His life and love have been offered up, to learn from and to perhaps save the lives of others. Maybe David’s gift to you is different, but that is David’s gift to me.

Reader's Block

by Janet Levine

Hi. My name is Janet and I am a biblioholic.

It started when I just a kid. My sister wanted to be a teacher. When she was almost 9 and I not quite 4, I became her first captive student.

She made me read. And I haven’t been able to stop since.

I’ll read anything. I prefer books, but if they are not available, I’ll read newspapers, cereal boxes, can labels. Once I even read a People magazine. I know, and I am ashamed.

Reading has kept me from more important things in life. Like TV. There was a time when I tried to read and watch TV, but I haven’t set my eyes on a sitcom since 1978. It’s bad enough that I didn’t see the Sopranos (is that too last year?) , but I’ve never even watched a reality show. I’m not sure I even know what a reality show is.

I don’t think I’m a bad person. Just addicted. But I do know it’s not my fault. My sister pushed me into reading. Then school continued what she started. It’s a good thing that our schools learned their lessons. My older daughter is as addicted as I am, but my younger son, mercifully, views reading as something you sometimes can’t avoid. I’m sure my grandson will not have even that problem. Schools have stopped teaching. I was going to say they’ve stopped teaching reading, but I realized that was too fine a point.

I did stop reading once. In a way, it was very liberating. There weren’t any new ideas to play with and get tangled up in. Not too many facts cluttering up my thought processes. But it was a bit lonely. There were no other people crowding my head. It was all what I did; what I thought.

In a very short amount of time I found that I was desperate for a fix. Words. Any words. As long as they were printed. I tried to ease back slowly; keep myself from constantly gorging on all those beautiful letters. I joined a 12-step program.

I then read the twelve steps and realized that I was doomed.

The reading was fine, but I don’t actually believe that there IS a higher power than words. And I can’t think of many better mentors than book. I do admit my addiction, but I just can’t fathom a life without weekly visits to the library, or evenings spent without a book in hand.

My name is Janet and I am a biblioholic.

The Girl in the Flatbed Ford

Joanie: I wrote this last summer in the wake of my separation from e, a slightly fictionalized snapshot of our life together... the wounds were a bit fresh back then for me to share it, but the fact that i was able to even get it down was probably an indication of recovery...

It indulges my obsession with the tiny burg of Winslow, AZ, as immortalized in the Eagles' song, "Take it Easy"... and the one thing that was - and probably always will be - a bond between me and my soon-to-be ex-hubby: rock and roll...

The Girl in the Flatbed Ford
Or
Why I Should Have Left You Standing on the Corner in Winslow, Arizona

by Joanie Harmon

My editor told me that you would be standing on the corner of 2nd and Kinsley in the town of Winslow. I remember seeing a sign by the road one summer on the way to the Grand Canyon that read, “Winslow, 2 mi.” I thought, it couldn’t be, not the town in the song. As a kid, I never thought of it as a real place, just a random word that could be forced to rhyme with “standing on the corner.” I also thought, what a loser the guy in the song was, shouldn’t he be the one driving around in the flatbed Ford?

I pulled off at the exit and followed the arrows. I saw rundown houses that looked like the ones in an R.E.M. video, kids playing on Slip N’ Slides on dry, yellow lawns. The rough pavement gave way to roads that were in slightly better repair. I had read your books and heard your show on K-DIK when I was just a 15-year-old in my dad’s Malibu. Now I was going to meet you, ask you all sorts of pithy questions and write the story that would win a Pulitzer prize, assuming the award committee was aware of periodicals like Turtle Bay Today.

I arrived at the four corners, which was apparently the center of the town. Conveniently located on two corners were a couple of souvenir shops, one of which was blasting an Eagles soundtrack. The third corner was graced by the Winslow Tourist Information office. Finally, I saw the “Standin’ on the Corner” park, replete with bronze statue of the aforementioned vagabond with a guitar slung across his shoulder. Behind him was a mural on a crumbling wall of a desert, some horses and a blonde smiling from the window of a pickup truck. You were sitting on the lone bench in front of the mural with your eyes closed, your hands lying palms up and open on your knees. Your eyes were shut and apparently you were meditating. Or asleep.

I nervously checked my camera battery and the microphone on my Ipod. I clambered out of the rental truck, nearly missing the running board in my self-conscious attempt to seem calm. I sauntered over to you and introduced myself. You smiled your indulgent smile and gazed at me with those aquamarine eyes. Yet, something was amiss, as if you had knowingly served me some pork tamales from Trader Joe’s whose serve-by date had expired.

You asked me if I wanted to talk over drinks at La Posada and I said, why not. So we jumped into my tourist-white rental and drove down the block to the rustically decrepit hotel. I don’t know if it was the wrought iron candelabra, the two mojitos or the chance to meet one of my girlhood idols, but I lost my head that afternoon. The bar proved to be too impersonal a venue, so we checked into the Douglas Fairbanks suite and the rest is history. I got the story, you got the girl. Everything was going to be great.

It’s hard to know when it started to go so wrong. There were so many times that I could have walked away, but didn’t. You lied to me about the strange sunglasses in the car, the night you didn’t answer your phone just minutes after we hung up when I let it ring about fifty times. If you were there, wouldn’t you have picked up and told me to knock it off? I didn’t know any better and thought that everyone with a drinking problem slurred his speech, danced around the room with a lampshade on his head and wove in and out of traffic when he drove. You never did any of those things.

You simply lost all civility if you didn’t have your first glass of sauvignon blanc by 4:35 p.m., stared over my bare and perfumed shoulders at the redhead behind me at the Brasserie on New Year’s Eve and jovially asked my old boyfriend if you could compare notes sometime. I nearly killed myself on the nights that our lovemaking was scheduled, driving like a madwoman trying to get home before your twist-top bottle of Australian syrah took away the possibility of marital bliss.

The most innocuous questions about where you were all night or why you didn’t answer your phone for hours would get me an angrily roaring response that I would try to quell unsuccessfully by backing down out of desperation. No one had ever gotten that angry at me in my life, about so little. I even stopped drinking my own measly glass of merlot, which I had taken up mainly to keep you company. I had started to think it was my fault and my amateur drinking caused the fights to get out of hand.

But the uncontrollable rage continued, as did my now-routine retreat and attempts to calm you by just backing down. The only thing that would end it would be your eventual collapse into bed, where you lost consciousness as soon as your head hit the pillow. The next morning, as long as I didn’t speak to you before rushing off to the gym and as long as you got to meditate before I got home, everything was back to normal, even great, until the following evening.

The only thing that held us together sometimes was the music. I thrilled to your stories at first, about your early days as a party DJ in the disco-soaked 70s, your distinguished career on K-DIK as “The Lone Pony,” the time you partied with Linda Rondstadt and Stevie Nicks. When I was falling asleep with my ear to my Fred Flintstone radio, you were doing god-knows-what to the same songs I dreamt my pre-adolescent dreams to.

We each thought we had hit the jackpot, you with a bright-eyed young thing who knew what the Summer of Love was, me with a charming and distinguished Pygmalion who thought everybody should Wang Chung tonight. But maybe time can’t be transcended that way. Maybe I was too young, you too old, and both of us unable to understand what lay under the chords that created who we were inside. A seemingly shared history of what passed over the airwaves couldn’t hold us together when you didn’t want to sing a new song with me.

Last summer, I went back to Winslow to cover the “Standin’ on the Corner” Festival. As I threaded my way through the beer-swilling crowds, I saw an old couple sitting on the bench under the mural. As they watched the revelers, they would occasionally turn and gaze at each other, heads bobbing to some internal rhythm. As I got closer and nodded a polite greeting, I saw that they were both plugged into the same Walkman with two sets of earphones. His eyes were an aquamarine blue and he held her withered hand snugly in his own.

Out the Window

Joanie: In my youth, I thought that a great writer had to live somewhere squalid in order to really suffer for their art... guess I'm making up for lost time... I read this at an open mike night at a local art studio last weekend... like the song goes, they all laughed...

Out the Window
Or
Don’t Look Up…

by Joanie Harmon

Having grown up in the suburbs, where one is shag carpeted and mini-malled to death, I longed to feel the grit and grime the big city and live in a place that didn’t feel like it was built 15 minutes ago. So the charming (old) and picturesque (dingy) apartment on Lime Avenue seemed just perfect. The three windows of the corner unit afforded a view of rooftops, telephone poles and palm trees straight out of an Edward Hopper painting. A faux fireplace graced a corner, while the rounded cornered ceiling and arched doorways gave the place a romantic retro feeling.

In the glow of that fall afternoon, I neglected to notice that below the shingled roofs and dormer windows lay an alley. The skyline that I had admired belonged to a series of bungalows and other apartment buildings, which shared two or three dumpsters below, peppering a calm Sunday morning or a quiet weeknight with the slamming of their lids.

Unlike the car chases through alleyways on “The Streets of San Francisco,” where suspension brakes and driving skills are put to the ultimate test, the cars that drive through the alley at all hours of the night are more like an endless stream of shuttlebuses, dropping people off and picking others up. At least, that’s what I assumed at first. Then my inner cynic kicked in and I surmised that the visitors were buying drugs. Or that they were selling and delivering them, through a kind of home shopping enterprise, perhaps with a snappy name like CannabisClub.com or CrackFinders.net.

The most memorable episode featured the loud and inebriated voice of a man who yelled, “Heil, Hitler! Heil, Hitler!” while walking down the alley. Roused from a deep sleep, yet startled by his proximity and volume right under my window, I pictured him wielding a meat cleaver or some such instrument, although the yelling was brutal enough. I’ve been awakened by the screeching of mating cats and neighbors returning home from a night out, their stereos thumping away in the wee hours. This is accompanied by sounds of what is either the release of passengers from every door of the car and the trunk or the passengers exercising what we kids used to call a Chinese fire drill.

One Sunday morning, I saw an elderly woman in a pink jacket sorting bottles and cans into separate plastic shopping bags and hanging the bags neatly on the bar of the dumpster. I assumed this was for her more environmentally minded fellow street dwellers. I imagined her as someone who had perhaps slipped off her meds or had no one to take care of them, which was depressing. But I was heartened by her fastidious method of recycling.

When I finally locked myself out of my apartment last Sunday, leaving my keys on the desk, I went next door to our building’s manager to use his spare. As I waited outside his door for his wife to find it, I found out that the lady in the pink jacket lived across the hall from them. I saw her getting ready for a busy day, packing her bags and donning her pink jacket. I wondered if she went to church or visited anyone before her chores in the alley. I smiled guiltily as she passed me, thinking of the time I “spied” on her. But she had no way of recognizing me. When you’re in the alley, you never look up. I know I don’t when I walk through, keeping my eyes on the ground lest I step on something sharp, gooey or formerly alive.

Spring fever has hit the alley. What I first thought was a pair of amorous felines, turned out to be only one Miss Lonelyhearts of a cat in heat. I am tempted to place a personal ad for her manhunt, as she has been wailing for two weeks straight, with no prospects in sight. I have to admire her tenacity though, and wonder, as do many of my single girlfriends, where are all the men?

On any given night, I can hear sirens announcing the officers who are presumably protecting and serving our fair city, hordes of Roscoe’s diners, sluggish from too much fried food, moving slowly and often noisily toward their cars, and the comings and goings of my building’s residents, many of whom fell compelled to slam the metal screen door out back as hard as they could when they fling themselves into the alley.

But my favorite moment was on New Year’s Eve, when at the stroke of midnight, I had braced myself for a volley of traditional gunshots. This is the LBC, after all. Instead, the amplified chords of “Auld Lang Syne,” played a la Hendrix, twanged out tentatively across the night. I pictured a pimply faced teen, overcome by his abilities, thinking his performance was the ultimate homage to 2008 and the gods of rock. I hoped other people heard it and enjoyed it as much as I did. Evidently, he hoped so too, because he played it again five minutes later. And louder.

I think I’ve had my fill of big city grit and grime and will be a lot more observant when I pick my next apartment. I won’t be seduced so easily by a picturesque view. I can’t help but think that the alley has given me a new appreciation for the tranquility of the suburbs. But I will miss the microcosm of humanity below my window. And hope that my musical neighbor starts a new tradition and continues to greet the New Year with guitars, not gunshots.

- Long Beach, 2/08