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  Cocaine rammed my alcohol-soaked brain into a hot forge and then hammered its edge ax-sharp. My thoughts were no longer the sentimental, looping ramblings of a drunken dreamer; they were a speeding train with a full cargo of clarity and purpose and unshakable resolve. This, at last, was who I really was, who I was born to be. I was made new, glowing with possibility. I could be the man I wanted to be—and, yes, even the man my father wanted me to be. All I needed was to score a few more lines.

  I couldn’t have known then that I would spend the next ten years looking for the magical combination of coke and alcohol and friends and vibe that would re-create that life-altering first high.

  - - - -

  Like many people my age in the early 1980s, I looked at coke as a risk-free, albeit expensive, way to ratchet up the fun. My friends and I would split a $100 gram and dance and drink the night away. I liked that coke seemed to give me drinking superpowers: I could down a case of beer and whatever else was put in front me—shots of tequila, kamikazes, you name it—and still be on my feet.

  My friends loved to drink and do coke, too, but I soon realized we had one fundamental difference. At some point during the evening, they would remember that they had papers due and exams and classes. They would call it quits and head off to bed, leaving me alone and baffled by their departure; 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m.—I was just getting rolling.

  Soon, a shared gram wasn’t nearly enough for me. My habit was getting more expensive; to keep myself supplied, I started to sell it. At first I dealt only to my fraternity brothers and close friends. Then I got bolder, selling to friends of friends and then to just about anyone who approached me. I told myself I wasn’t some greedy lowlife, dealing so I could buy a fancy car or designer clothes. Selling cocaine allowed me to get more cocaine. More was what I wanted. It was simple.

  Of course, the more drugs I got my hands on, the more I used. I lived in a single room in my frat house, and no one knew if I was in there or not. I’d keep to myself, drinking and doing drugs during the day, then appear at night, when it was officially time to go out and party. My grades plummeted and I quit going to class.

  My multi-day binges ended only when I ran out of drugs and money. Crashing hard and sick with remorse, I’d promise myself I would never do it again. I swore I would get my shit together, eat healthy, study—right this sinking ship. Step one in my total transformation was almost always my lacing up my shoes and going out for a run.

  Still intoxicated and operating on no sleep, I’d pull a ball cap low over my eyes and slip out the side door of the frat house. I cut between campus buildings and crossed a graveyard to reach the athletic fields and the light blue track. Then I ran as if in a trance, knees pumping, arms swinging, eyes straight ahead. The UNC bell tower chimed every fifteen minutes, then tolled the hour. Joggers came and went, and still I ran. Thirty, forty, fifty laps—I pushed the pace until my lungs and legs burned. The more I had partied, the worse the running hurt. The more it hurt, the harder I pushed. When I finally stopped, I drank from the water fountain until my stomach was bloated and then vomited into the bushes until my throat was raw. I knew that I deserved this pain. I hated myself for failing at school, for failing as a person. Running was my penance.

  CHAPTER 3

  I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.

  —FRIDA KAHLO

  My nosedive had not escaped my fraternity brothers’ attention. Engle, they agreed, was in deep shit. I owed money that I didn’t have to my drug supplier, and I had heard the cops had started asking around about me. Behind my back, my friend Jimmy called my dad and told him he needed to come get me or something bad was going to happen.

  I had just returned from one of my purging runs when my father walked into my room without knocking. He looked at me and shook his head. I knew what he saw. I was ragged, unshaven, sweaty, dirty, and red eyed. I turned away and started cramming my things into a bag. In silence, my father and I loaded the rental car and drove to the airport. College was over for me.

  - - - -

  When my father, my stepmother, Molly, and my stepsister, Dina, moved to Carmel, California, I trailed along. It was just what I needed, we all said; a fresh start. Molly and my dad bought two Baskin-Robbins ice cream shops in Monterey and gamely hired me to run one of them. I went off to franchise training in Burbank—­sundae school, I called it—and two weeks later returned with a document that proclaimed me a certified cake decorator.

  I was grateful to Dad for giving me the opportunity. It was a leap of faith and I didn’t want to let him down. Things went well for a while, but for reasons I couldn’t comprehend, I could feel the pressure building again, the nagging need. After weeks of white-­knuckling it, I started partying again. To feed my habit, I’d take $300 out of the Baskin-Robbins register, buy coke, sell enough to recoup the money I’d swiped, snort the rest, stay up all night, and get back the next morning in time to open the store and return the money to the cash drawer. Then I started to skip the part where I replaced the $300. I knew my behavior was despicable, but I did it anyway.

  One morning, Dad walked into the store. I was in the back room counting cash and doing paperwork, getting ready to open.

  “Morning,” I said when he stepped into the office.

  “I know what you have been doing.”

  I looked up.

  His mouth was set in a hard straight line. “I hoped you would get your shit together but that’s obviously not happening.”

  “What? I’m here, aren’t I? Right on time.”

  “It’s just more of the same. You can’t do anything right, can you?” Dad glared at me.

  “No.” I looked at my hands. “No, I guess I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  I walked past him, put my keys and franchisee name tag on the glass ice cream counter, and went out the front door.

  - - - -

  I fled to Chapel Hill to see some old buddies, who had somehow managed to stay in school, albeit on the six-year plan. Late one night, at a frat party, I met Pam Smith. I had just come back from a beer run; no matter how fucked-up I was, I almost always managed to get to the Happy Store for a twelve-pack just before it closed. Pam walked up to me shyly, smiling as if she already knew a secret about me. She asked for a beer and I was happy to share my stash with her. She was slender, with shoulder-length brown hair and bright, clear eyes—even at 2:00 a.m. Her shorts revealed tan, athletic legs. I popped the top off a cold can and handed it over. When she reached for the beer, I caught a whiff of some flowery fragrance that was nice but not too much.

  She said she was about to finish her degree in biology at Carolina after taking a year off to earn money to pay for school. I told her I lived in California and was “between jobs.” She was born in the Bay Area, but her folks had moved to North Carolina when she was a baby and she grew up certain she’d go to UNC. We spent the next few days hanging out together. I loved that she was as passionate as I was about the Tar Heels—and she laughed at my jokes. Pam’s grandmother lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Pam said she visited her occasionally. I told her to look me up if she ever came West.

  About a week after I returned to California, she called. She had just bought a plane ticket and was coming to see me. I was surprised, but excited.

  Pam stayed with me in my tiny studio apartment in Carmel. One night, I took her to Jack London’s, a downtown pub where I was a regular and the bartender was a good enough friend to not let on that I spent many more hours parked on those barstools than I should have. We sat at the bar and ate fish and chips and drank chardonnay from Monterey County. Though I wanted more wine, I kept my drinking in check. After dinner we walked barefoot, hand in hand, on the cold sand of Carmel Beach. We marveled at the big, beautiful houses overlooking the rocks and the water and talked about what it would be like to wake up every morning to that view. It all seemed so norma
l, so solid—things I had little experience with. My life always felt tenuous, as if it were dangling from a fragile thread. Having a normal person interested in me made me feel good.

  Somehow during that week, Pam made me believe I was lovable, despite all the evidence to the contrary. I loved her—I guess mostly for loving me, which in retrospect was a shaky foundation for a relationship. I didn’t see that then. I just wanted to be with someone who wanted me.

  After spending a total of ten days together, we decided to move to Atlanta. My mother invited us to live with her until we could afford a place of our own. By then, she and Coke had separated and she was living with her partner, Julie. I wasn’t shocked when Mom told me she was a lesbian; I had sensed that one or two of the women who had hung around our house over the years were more than friends. And Mom had been writing plays about the gay community for as long as I could remember. Warren, about her close friend Warren Johnston, who died of AIDS in 1984, was one of the first plays produced in the world to address the disease.

  Pam got a job at the Emory University genetics research laboratory and I got one selling memberships at Bally’s fitness. My mother and Julie liked booze almost as much as I did, so we spent many nights sitting around the kitchen table drinking and talking about theater and art and the scourge of AIDS. I loved seeing my mom happy and in love, and she was thrilled to have me living under the same roof again for a little while. I turned out to be good at selling memberships, and Pam and I were able to get our own place. But, for me, having money was not a good thing.

  I started bingeing again, disappearing for days, then showing up wrecked and remorseful and pleading with Pam for forgiveness. That was the last time, I would tell her. Never again. Done, I’d said. I absolutely meant it. And then I’d feel it again, that hole that required filling.

  One night after Pam went to bed, I slipped out of the house and headed to a bar down the street. I knew the bartender there had coke to sell. My plan was to have a beer or two, do a couple of lines, and head home. Instead, I spent the next two days bouncing from dive to dive, drinking and snorting coke. When I was out of money, I staggered back to our apartment reeking, trembling, famished, and distraught. I was relieved that Pam wasn’t home when I arrived.

  I went into the kitchen and riffled through our cupboards. I ripped open of package of Chips Ahoy! cookies and ate the entire thing. I gulped milk out of a gallon jug, then tore into a box of Froot Loops, cramming handfuls into my mouth and littering the countertop and floor with cereal. Then I heard the apartment door open, and Pam and my mother walked in.

  I ran to the bathroom in a panic. I could not let my mother see me like this. She had no idea I was this awful person, this out-of-control low-life freak. I turned on the shower, stripped down, and stepped in, desperate for the hot water to make my skin stop crawling, to calm my pounding heart, to wash this nightmare away.

  “Charlie!” Pam yelled through the closed door.

  I heard my mother yell, “Are you okay?”

  I was not okay. I hated myself. I hated what I was doing to the people I cared about. I hated that I would once again have to try to make up with Pam. I could not see even a sliver of light in my life.

  I pulled my hand back and punched at the shower door. It shattered, sending glass shards everywhere. Blood streamed from my knuckles and down my arm. I slid down the wall of the shower, sobbing. My body blocked the drain, and water, tinted red, pooled on the tile floor. Then Pam and Mom were there, looking down at me. Pam was crying and my mother’s hand was over her mouth, her eyes wide with fear.

  Somehow, they got me out of the shower and into bed. Hours later, when I woke up, I had bandages on both arms and legs, and one above my right eye. I heard Pam and Mom speaking in quiet voices in the next room. I only caught a few words: “addicted” and “needs help” and “dangerous.” I didn’t want to hear it, so I let myself drift off again.

  I kept things together for a week or two and then went off the rails again. When I slunk home after another three-day binge, I found Pam packing her things.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t live like this, Charlie.”

  “I’m sorry! I swear. That was the last time. I’m done. I swear.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “No, you can’t leave. I want to be better. But I can’t do it alone. Please stay.”

  Pam looked at me and sighed. “Nothing will change.”

  “Yes, it will. I’ll change. I want you with me.”

  “Why? So I can watch you kill yourself?”

  “Stay. Marry me,” I blurted out. “Please. Let’s get married.”

  - - - -

  Mom and Julie threw us a wedding shower. The invitation said it was a “bar stocking” shower: guests were expected to give us a bottle of top-shelf booze. Perfect. Just what I needed to launch my life of moderation. The wedding was small and simple, held in Pam’s hometown of Weaverville, North Carolina. It was the first and only time I could remember having Mom and Coke and Dad and Molly in the same place. I loved seeing them together even if we’d never be one big happy family in a traditional sense. I had a few beers to calm my nerves, but I knew I had to limit myself and focus on demonstrating to my family and Pam that I was ready to get married.

  Not long after we got back from our honeymoon, I drove to a bar, had a couple of beers, a few shots of tequila, and then . . . what? I don’t know where I went or who I was with or how I drove home. When I reappeared a couple of days later, looking like hell, Pam and my mother were waiting for me at the kitchen table.

  “We’re worried about you,” my mother said. She had a bourbon on the rocks in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She said that she had a friend who had joined AA and it had worked like a charm.

  “We think you should try it,” Pam said.

  I wasn’t sure what AA was, but I figured it could help me learn how to be a social drinker and get everyone off my back. Plus, I reasoned, reducing my intake of alcohol would leave me better able to manage my cocaine use.

  The meeting was in a hospital cafeteria. I took a seat and Pam stood in the back of the room with her arms folded. My mother and Julie stayed outside to smoke while I got cured. Person after person stepped to the front of the room to speak. I was embarrassed for them—the way they sobbed as they told their stories about their drunken exploits. One had run over the family dog; one had made a scene at a PTA meeting. There were lost jobs, lost loves, deceptions, disasters. And something else about their tales I found very, very worrisome. These folks were referring to their drug and alcohol use as if it were behind them—a thing of the past. This, clearly, was not for me.

  All I needed was a fresh start. I convinced Pam to move back to the Monterey Peninsula, where I got a full-commission job selling Toyotas. I went three weeks without selling a single car and came close to quitting. Peter, my Italian manager, yelled at me with his hands and his voice. Every day he pulled me aside to get me to tweak my sales pitch. Stop suggesting they look at less expensive vehicles, he said. Don’t let them leave the showroom so quickly. Lighten up a little.

  Eventually, I sold a car—and then another and another. I learned how to loosen up the buyers with some laughs, get them to like and trust me, and then steer them toward a shiny new car. Within a few months, I was one of the dealership’s top salesmen. I even won Toyota’s biggest prize—the National Walk-Around Contest, which recognized me as the top sales presenter in the United States. As the winner, I could choose between a new truck or the cash value of the vehicle. I took the cash.

  Pam was smart to grab that check from me. We both knew the trouble I could get in with ten grand. We put the winnings toward buying our first house. I was twenty-six years old, and becoming a homeowner seemed like a box I needed to check; surely drug addicts didn’t buy houses. Our broker, who was my boss’s cousin, showed us a lot of great places—none of which
we could afford. Then one day he called and said he had a perfect property for us: a nine-hundred-square-foot bungalow. It happened to be under high-tension power lines, but Jeff assured us that after a while we probably wouldn’t even notice the buzzing.

  We didn’t love it, but since the Monterey housing market was so strong—“bulletproof,” everyone said—and we didn’t see ourselves living there for long, we decided it would be a good investment. The seller accepted our offer. Now all we had to do was get the bank to loan us money. We filled out the application forms and dropped them off the next day. The mortgage broker warned us that with our modest income, short time at our respective jobs, and our measly down payment, things didn’t look great. But when he shook my hand, he leaned in and said the words I would hear from mortgage brokers many times in the next twenty years:

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’ll get everything on the application squared away. We’ll make this happen.”

  - - - -

  After several weeks of supplying documents and information to the bank, our loan was approved and I was officially a homeowner and deeply in debt. The pressure was on to put up big numbers at Toyota and I did, selling more than thirty cars a month for several months in a row. For every qualifying sale I made, I got a cash bonus or “spiff.” I squirreled that money away, thinking someday I’d surprise Pam with it. But that stash called and called to me until finally I decided to dip into it. I had been working so hard. Hadn’t I earned the right to blow off a little steam?

  I fell into a pattern of going to a bar for “a couple of beers” most days after work. Two beers turned into six or ten—and once I was buzzed, that voice in my head saying I deserved something more—the more being cocaine—became impossible to ignore. I’d score, stay out all night, then show up late to work, still half in the bag. I was just barely staying in the good graces of my boss and Pam. Whenever they confronted me, I gave them my solemn word that it was absolutely the last time. And the thing was, I meant it. I meant it even as I lifted the shot glass of tequila to my lips the next night and felt that deep relief, that unburdening flowing into me.