Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [95]
After checking in, I spent the first week in the hospital part of the clinic, where most new inmates go, because they are usually seriously addicted and have to be withdrawn medically. I was given a drug called Librium, which helps you to come off the alcohol and balances you out. It left me feeling very woozy. I didn’t really know who I was, or who the other people were, or what I was doing there. It was all just like being heroin-stoned again. Four times a day I was given my medicine in a little paper cup, and gradually they weaned me off booze.
Before you start, you are asked to write down a list of everything you have been taking and, since they often don’t have any medical records of new patients, they have to rely on your honesty. Of all the things I had been using, I neglected to include Valium on the list, because I considered that to be a ladies’ drug. The result was that I suffered another grand mal seizure, because they hadn’t medicated me for Valium withdrawal. I later learned that this can be a very dangerous drug indeed, and is highly underestimated.
The clinic, founded in 1949, was divided up into a series of units, each one named after a famous person connected with the twelve-step program. Mine was Silkworth, after William Silkworth, a New York doctor who is quoted in the Big Book of AA. The unit was divided into a living area, a small kitchen, and lots of little rooms, shared by two to four people. They had all been through the same as me, the new boy bouncing off the ceiling, and for the first few days they looked after me. I was put into a room with a New York fireman named Tommy, who had no idea who I was and didn’t care.
He was more concerned with the way I interacted with him on a personal level, and I had no idea how to do that, because I was either above or below everybody. I was either towering above as Clapton the guitar virtuoso, or cringing on the floor, because if you took away my guitar and my musical career, then I was nothing. My fear of loss of identity was phenomenal. This could have been born out of the “Clapton is God” thing, which had put so much of my self-worth onto my musical career. When the focus shifted toward my well-being as a human being, and to the realization that I was an alcoholic and suffering from the same disease everybody else was, I went into meltdown.
At first, I basically withdrew. My counselor and most of the other people concerned with me all reported that I was playing a game in not revealing anything of myself at all, but I think I’d forgotten how and had little ability to account for myself without my guitar. For over twenty years I had been attached to this partner that gave me my power and my accountability, and without it I didn’t have anything to refer to. I didn’t know how to begin to relate, so I just sort of shifted around in the background. Then part of my reasoning began to figure out just how much I needed to do in order to get through my “time” and reach a successful conclusion so that I could leave, just like everybody else. I knew, because they dangled this threat in front of you: If at the end of the standard one-month period you were not seen to be ready to be released back into society, because you were still in the grip of your addiction, whatever it might be, they would recommend that you be transferred to the psychiatric unit, called Jelonek, which