(part 165) COURT

I have no recollections of who I contacted, or where I stayed, when I got back to Nashville, but I do remember taking a 3 grain tuinal, a sleeping pill, before going to court.

This act of stupidity left me slurring my words and unsteady on my feet while trying to maintain my composure in the court room. I suppose I believed I might go to jail so I'd opted for being high if in fact that occurred.

As I stated in previous posts, many of the people I knew in Nashville had grown up together and gone to the same schools. It was a very small town in a lot of ways, and because of this, the lines between the non law abiding and law abiding were blurred.

For instance, DP had become a cocaine dealer, while close friends of his had ended up in politics and the government. One of these friends of his was the prosecuting attorney in the case against me, who I'd met during my previous time in Nashville.

The fact was, that I'd introduced this particular attorney to a flaming red haired nymphomaniac who he'd fallen in love with, and subsequently married. Who would have guessed?

Anyway, that was the case, and in this guy's mind I'd done him the biggest favor of his life, at least that's the way he saw it. Couple that with the fact that I knew where the cocaine I'd sold had originated from, DP, and the prosecutor was a friend of DP's, you had a mighty interesting and unusual set of facts.

While I sat in court, waiting for the proceedings against me to get underway, the prosecutor informed the judge that the state was not going to proceed with it's case against me for various reasons.

I sat there in shocked silence, and then was ordered to stand up while the judge launched into a long rambling dissertation about how the state of Tennessee was being drug traumatized, and was going into debt trying to deal with all the drug cases. He said the state was running out of jail and prison space because of it.

The long and the short of it was, that the judge said Tennessee had enough of it's own people to deal with, and that the state wasn't interested in further burdening it's dwindling resources to prosecute, convict, and then house idiots like me from California, who had come to Nashville and gotten in trouble.

He ordered me to leave the state forthwith, and not to come back for a very long time, if ever. I stood in the court room with my mouth hanging open, while it quickly dawned on me that I'd just been cut loose and was free to go.

One would think that I could have seen that I'd been miraculously spared prison, and that I'd sober up and go back to L.A. and rededicate myself to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, but this was not to be the case. In fact, I ended up at Friday's bar celebrating with DP and his crowd, and was told repeatedly that I'd beaten both the odds and the system.

During this celebration, the prosecutor, whose name was Tom M., and who'd dropped the case against me, walked up with his hand outstretched and a big smile on his face saying, "Stay out of trouble Bobby and good luck."

As I reached out to shake his hand he slipped a neatly folded hundred dollar bill into mine saying, "I owed you one partner, now we're even." I always assumed this was due to the fact that he'd married the red head I'd introduced him to.

Again, I have no recollection of leaving Nashville or getting back to L.A., but I assume I was stoned out of my mind, and stayed that way.

Something had occurred in my psyche, which caused me to reject AA altogether at that point, yet in thinking about it now I can only guess as to what that was.

Maybe it was just wanting to be loaded more than I wanted to face the world sober. Possibly it was as simple as I got clean in the first place because I was faced with prison time for committing a felony, and now I was over that hurdle.

I may have thought that appearing to straighten out my life by going to AA in the first place would help me with the problem in Nashville, but now that the problem was resolved I simply returned to what I wanted to do all along, which was to get loaded. It may all have been nothing more than a charade to cover my tracks.

I can think of many reasons, but may never really know the whole truth. The fact that I needed sobriety was self evident, but wanting sobriety was not.

There was no hunger for it the way I had thirsted after success and fame. There did not exist for me in those days a driving need to stay clean and sober.

What I do know for sure is that when I went back to drinking and using, I went back with a vengeance, the likes of which I'd never known. It was as if I was daring life to take me out of my misery, and my aim was to push it to the outer edge of all things reasonable.

My ticket back to hell was in reality, spending the next fourteen months of my life trying to drink myself to death, and vowing never to go back to AA. In fact, I did everything I could to make it a reality.

(part 164) TICKET BACK TO HELL

As you read what I am writing here, try and remember that these are my opinions only. They are recollections of experiences I had in AA thirty five years ago and in no way represent anyone other than me, and do not attempt to speak for anyone else's experience or opinion of Alcoholics Anonymous. My experience is mine alone, and my opinions are nothing more than my opinions.

As badly as I'd been beaten by alcohol and drugs, I still had not been beaten enough to formulate the necessary willingness to accept AA as a way of life. My stubborn ego was still too inflated to surrender to the simple reality that drugs and alcohol had beaten me into a bloody pulp.

I turned away from Alcoholics Anonymous, in an attempt to drink in a controlled manner, which was of course destined to take me even further into darkness and to a new bottom.

I'd fooled myself into believing that if I put my mind to it I could drink responsibly and control my own behavior. This brave and totally insane idea is a hallmark myth of alcoholic thinking, and has maimed and killed many.

After some months of deluding myself in this manner, I was back in AA again, admitting that I could not control my drinking and using, no matter how hard I tried.

The saying "One is too many and a thousand not enough" took on new meaning for me as I bitterly admitted to my own defeat. This, in fact, was a real breakthrough for me in my own false belief about self sufficiency and ego-driven logic.

Willingness to accept defeat, and admit I could not drink and use successfully, was slowly and painfully being taught to me in the harshest of ways. My obvious problems with AA were centered around key issues.

The 12 step program is laid out simply and directly in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. My problem was I had heard about the program via individual member's opinions, rather than getting to know about the program directly from the text of the book.

The nuts and bolts of Alcoholics Anonymous is the literal first hand experience of the original one hundred sober alcoholics. It worked then, and continues to work to this day.

Opinions about the program from individual members are just that, opinions, nothing more! Until I could get the program into my head, by way of the instructions in the book, I was like a boat in a storm crashing into various rocks in the ocean.

Of course at the time I did not know this, so I blindly careened off one opinion after another, regarding what I should do and how I was to do it.

I had heard about the steps, but knew little about them or how they applied to my life. I knew about the book, but had no understanding of what it said within it's pages.

In other words, I was getting, or not getting, the program from a second hand source. I was not taking responsibility for my own recovery and progress, which I'd unwittingly assigned, or given, to any other person available other than me. I could then blame someone else for my failures, which were ongoing.

During this second attempt at getting clean and sober, I was informed by Carol Paulus's cleaning lady that she had seen my picture on television on the program "Suspects Wanted."

This startling revelation threw me into a panic when I realized that the lawyer I'd given $300 to, for the purpose of handling my legal problems in Nashville, had done absolutely nothing about it.

I ended up on "Suspects Wanted" because it was assumed by the Nashville authorities that I was in flight to avoid prosecution of a felony, which was not the case.

Anything of a positive nature I'd come to believe about AA went out the window with this new problem, and I railed, "that if this was what I could expect from the trusted members of AA, than the hell with it."

In my mind this was the last straw. I could not believe that a staunch member of the program would take my money, and then fail completely to do what was necessary for his client, even if that client happened to be me.

I borrowed more money from another member of the program to buy an airplane ticket back to Nashville to turn myself in. I was sober, but completely unsure of what to expect, and feared that I would be sentenced from two to ten years in Tenn. State Prison for sales of narcotics.

As my benefactor reluctantly handed me the money to buy my plane ticket, he told me to stay sober and trust God, which I assured him I would, but on the plane I gave into my fear and trepidation and ordered a scotch, and then another, and another.

I had succumbed once more to the old friendship in a bottle to cope with what life seemed to endlessly hurl at me. I did not possess the necessary faith to believe that the current crisis could be worked out in my favor, and so I chose my old ways over anything new.

I stared out the window at the sky wondering if anything would ever go right in my life.

(part 163) TRYING TO STAY SOBER

In 1974 I was twenty nine years old, and surrounded, for the most part, by people much older than I, who said things like, "I spilled more booze than you drank," which was nonsense. This condescending attitude was rampant in AA in back then.

I felt at times as though some people were doing their best to get me to leave the program rather than stay, insinuating that I had not hit bottom, because I was too young, in their opinion.

The old school drunks were not about to throw open the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous to a whole new swarm of addict-alcoholics without a fight, regarding the multiple addictions of people like me.

They were purists! They did not want to hear about drugs, or the sexual problems of those who came out of the 60's, where sexual behavior had been forever changed on the social scale, by my generation.

In their minds they were drunks only, alcoholics in the purest sense of the word. If they had sex, they, in most cases, were married, or got married, as a direct result of such an act.

The 60's generation had not, and did not, follow that old-style set of rules, and had started to rattle the fundamental restrictions of sexual behavior as soon as they began to frequent the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Sooner or later AA would have to come to grips with this phenomenon, as well as other new facts, no matter how reluctant they were in doing so.

The sheer numbers of new and different kinds of members would see to that. As well, the new view of sexual behavior was going to force the old "Bleeding Deacons" to open the gates even wider to encompass the gay and lesbian movement.

It became apparent to me that the old timers didn't want to hear about drugs, because many of those drugs were being prescribed by doctors to older alcoholics for medical needs, such as trouble sleeping, over eating, and anxiety.

People taking these drugs prescribed by their doctors, were in no mood to be lectured by the likes of me, that these were the exact drugs I got high on.

Diet pills and valium, along with various sleeping remedies, were off limits conversationally, according to many old school members. These were things that were prescribed and used with their doctor's blessing to help with everyday problems of daily living, according to them.

Their pills were not seen as a violation of sobriety by those who had not had a drink in a number of years. Their drugs were not considered drugs. They were thought of, with the help of denial, as medicine.

It was the 60's generation that eventually busted this myth wide open. I knew, from personal experience, as did others, that doctors, in fact, were the worst dope pushers on earth, and that the best drugs of all had always been pharmaceutical, the things you got from the drugstore by way of a prescription.

Valium, for instance, was probably the most abused drug on the planet, but was considered at that time to be a harmless medication for tension.

This incredible fable, which still persists today, is exemplified by those who refuse to admit they have a problem with physician prescribed medications.

Many of those people have fallen victim to the insidiousness of long-term drug abuse, which was and is, systematically denied as a problem, simply because it is obtained from a doctor.

For what it's worth, I was clear as a bell on this topic, and knew quite well that I had a dual, or multiple, addiction problem. I was addicted to multiple substances, and prone to become addicted to anything that served my purpose, whether it was drinking, snorting, dropping, injected, or shoved up my ass. It was not in question; I was clear on this.

All in all, I found too many reasons not to stay with the program along the way, during my first initiation into this new world of recovery. As I said, I probably wanted to get the world off my back more than I wanted to get clean and sober and stay clean and sober.

I doggedly remained, and reluctantly participated as best I could at the time, but began wavering in my commitment to do so. Because I was completely new, and had no experience with the basic fundamentals of how the program worked, I accepted at face value much of what was told to me at the time, which proved to be a mistake.

The confusing part was that everybody I talked to had an opinion of what I should do, but most of those opinions were at odds with each other. I became lost in the confusion of not having a clear idea of how to apply the principles of the program into my own life on a daily basis.

I was afraid to voice any opinion of my own, and was continuously warned that getting angry would be lethal, and would end up getting me drunk if I should succumb to it.

I walked around in a straight jacket of sorts, trying to fathom how someone like me could fit into such an organized place of suppression and repression of volatile emotions, the likes of which I carried around by the ton inside my battered mind and body.

The clever slogans like "Let go and let God," although well meaning, could not forever keep the explosive nature of my personality at bay.

Sooner rather than later, the person known as Bobby Jameson, would come out of seclusion and assert himself once more in this new world of reality, and the old will to challenge that world would take over.

(part 162) LONG ROAD HOME

LONG ROAD HOME
SEEMS FAR AWAY
LAY DOWN EACH MISERY
COME HOME TO STAY

LOAD OF OLD COTTON
ROLLIN' ALONG
MAKE ME A SOFT BED
SO I CAN GROW STRONG

BEEN ON THIS ROAD
MOST OF MY YEARS
LEFT A LONG TRAIL
OF OLD FRIENDS AND TEARS

GO DOWN VIRGINIA
STAY FOR AWHILE
NOTHIN' EXCITES ME
BUT YOU MAKE ME SMILE

LONG ROAD HOME
SOMEDAY I'LL FIND
JUST KEEP ON WALKIN'
THIS ROAD WILL UNWIND

Bobby Jameson June 1, 2009

(part 161) GETTING SOBER

The more I ran from my problems, the more I carried them with me, like a sack of rocks on my back. I could not escape them because, in essence, I was the problem.

My inability, or my refusal, to see this clearly and honestly, had finally trapped me in a corner where I came face to face with myself.

It was true that much had been done to me that was wrong, but it was truer still that my radical reaction to those wrongs had caused me more difficulty than the wrongs themselves.

I lived in a world of unreasonable demands. Those demands were made by me on myself, as well as on the world around me. The demands I made on myself to keep going at all costs, no matter how much destruction I wrought on my body, mind, and psyche, had to change.

My demands on the world and it's people, to treat me fairly, had to be altered as well. But the simple truth was, that there could be no change unless I came to grips with the central issue, which was my ongoing choice to get loaded and stay loaded.

As long as my reaction to the world at large was fueled by my consumption of alcohol and drugs, as a means to deal with that world, I was doomed to take each problem to the depths of hell, or conversely, to the pinnacle of public absurdity.

This was a bitter reality for me to contemplate, let alone to accept, but as I headed back to L.A., I knew I had all but run out of options.

If I stayed loaded, I would continue my head long assault into self destruction, because under the influence, I did not possess the capacity to maintain a sense of balance about anything. I was little more than a ticking time bomb at that point, waiting to explode.

I do not remember the events that led up to my first attempt at getting sober, but roughly, I approached the issue, out of desperation, sometime in 1974.

My mother's brother, Norm, had been a member of AA for years, so I was familiar with the organization from a distance. I was staying with Carol Paulus, and probably hit another bottom of bad behavior, and was attempting to deal with the situation by promising to get help.

Between the pending legal problems in Nashville, and being threatened with banishment to the streets again, I assume that sobriety began to appear to be my only real choice.

I longed for something better than what I'd had, and the possibility of that seemed to be directly linked to my giving up drugs and alcohol. I don't think I wanted to quit as much as I wanted to get the world off my back.

Stopping drinking was something I knew nothing about, because I'd never tried to do it before. Everything about it was foreign to me, but I managed over time to wean myself off alcohol and the drugs as well.

I used booze to get off the drugs, and then used the booze to get off the booze. I'd drink less and less until I got down to nothing. I was shaky as hell, and felt like an open wound, but managed to keep off the stuff for the time being.

I started going to AA meetings in the Hollywood and L.A. area, and would show up wearing my sense of defeat like an old coat. My failure as a human being flooded my thoughts and left me a nervous wreck. Gone now was the once sharp wit and creative force that I had grown accustomed to and depended on.

Now I was dulled like an unsharp knife, surrounded by the gloomy reality that my dreams were gone, and my life was destined to become one of drudgery and plainness. I sat in rooms full of folding chairs, and listened to the tales of those who inhabited those chairs.

In the stark difference of that picture, contrasted by the life I had been living, I drowned in a sea of regret and desire for that which was no more. I stubbornly stayed, even as I wished to run from those rooms. I did not drink or use, and sought out the promise of better times and things to come.

1974 was prior to the onslaught of the late 70's, when AA was flooded with the eventual masses from the 60's. At the time, I was hailed by no one for attempting to get sober.

If anything, I was ridiculed for the length of my hair and my previous life style. AA was still dominated, for the most part, by the old school drunks from an earlier era, who'd become set in their ways, and were not interested in or moved by my story.

I was expected to get a job, which I did, and pull myself up by my own bootstraps, which meant, forget who I had been, and learn to accept who I was to become. This, in fact, terrified me to no end, because who I was becoming, seemingly had nothing to do with who I was.

I started painting low rent apartments for a contractor on the program named "Blackie" for $5 an hour, and kept at it for as long as I could. I complained about the pain in my feet and ankle, but was dismissed as a whiner by those around me.

I managed to make contact with an attorney on the program, and paid him $300 to deal with my legal issues in Nashville. In short, I did what I was told, and waited for months to feel better, but never did. I just felt out of place and hopeless, and longed for a better way of life.

(part 160) YOU KNOW, PERFORMING

My brother Bill

On the flight back to L.A., I thought a lot about the things that had helped cause me to be in the trouble I was in. Back in Tennessee there were some who were trying to put me in prison for five to ten years for sales of a controlled substance, but here I was on a plane leaving town.

Because DP had grown up in Nashville, and knew a lot of the people in law enforcement, he was able to get permission for me to leave the state temporarily.

I knew that getting loaded was behind most of the crap I did, and was the central cause behind the continuing chaos, but there were other factors as well.

Looking out the window at the horizon, I knew I'd have to come back to Nashville at some point, or keep running, but right then I was reluctant to entertain either choice.

I was truly aware at that moment that I'd gotten myself into deep shit, and that "the police are out to get you" paranoia was now clawing its way into my brain.

The last time I'd felt this way was when I was running away from L.A. to get to Nashville. Now I was running away from Nashville to get back to L.A., and for the same kinds of reasons, bad decisions while loaded.

* * *

As I looked further back into my past, and the causes for what I did and why I was the way I was, I remembered Tucson, Arizona in 1957. My then stepfather Don Macdonald, and my older brother Bill did not get along at all, ever.

Bill, who was epileptic at the time, was taking phenobarbital for the epilepsy. Well phenobarbital is a barbiturate and can make you think you're bigger and badder than you may be.

So on a morning before going off to school, Alice Vail Jr. High, Bill and my stepfather, Don, got into a flat out fist fight in the kitchen. I mean it was like a fucking street fight on linoleum. They both got their licks in, but in the end Don was just too big for Bill to beat, so he had to concede the issue to my stepfather.

My part, other than terrified bystander, was to stand on a kitchen chair after the fight, and clean the blood splatters off the wall in the breakfast nook connected to the kitchen.

I stood on the chair with a damp sponge and wiped the walls down, removing the evidence of what had just happened to my morning. I remember feeling dazed and confused as I watched my arm go back and forth across the wall like a windshield wiper.

Shortly, I was on the bus headed off to Alice Vail Jr. Jail as we liked to call it. I just stared out the window and saw nothing except the instant replay in my head of Bill and Don beating the crap out of each other in the kitchen.

I could hear the yelling and swearing, and feel the anger and hatred the two of them felt toward each other, surging through my whole body. Later that day in school, I was reprimanded for staring out the window and day dreaming instead of studying. "Day dreaming, shit!" I was in semi-shock all day long, maybe all life long.

* * *

Staring out the window of the plane was like staring out the window of the bus that morning back in 1957. I looked out, but saw nothing except the inside of my head, and the world of bad memories that had haunted my every step since then.

My thoughts during the flight were a lot like they had always been, full of regrets and promises, and an undying resolve to somehow make it better. So far, I had not done anything but make it worse.

I didn't have any plan for what I'd do when I got to L.A., or where I'd go when I got there. I hoped I could get Carol Paulus to take me in since I hadn't seen her in quite awhile, and hoped she would be glad to hear from me, and maybe agreeable to having me around.

I vowed to be on my best behavior, and hoped I could maintain some sort of balance for a reasonable length of time. Other than that, I was like I'd always been, just show up and smile a lot, you know, "performing."