Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [85]
Once I got to know Clancy, I understood why the psychiatrists held this nonmedical recovery leader in such high regard. Clancy knew what it was like to be an alcoholic. In our conversations, I discovered that he genuinely empathized with what I had experienced; he understood how I felt. As he described his own inability to cope with alcohol, I thought I was listening to my own inner story. Certainly the details of Clancy’s story were different, but his frustration and exasperation at not being able to control his own desires resonated with me. Several decades earlier, he’d drunk so much that he was thrown out of the Los Angeles Midnight Mission, the city’s downtown shelter for homeless people, alcoholics, and drug addicts. He had lost his job, his home, and his family, and he had gotten his two front teeth kicked out in an altercation. He almost died, but he walked seven miles in the rain to Wilshire and Fairfax, where there was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and the people there saved his life. Years later, after remaining sober, Clancy left a secure job and took a position running that same Midnight Mission from which he had been ejected years earlier. Since then he had worked with all sorts of people, from multimillionaire business tycoons to Hollywood stars to street people. By the time I met him, he’d been sober for nearly twenty years.
One of the things I liked about Clancy was that he treated me just like anyone else. I was not Buzz Aldrin, astronaut; I was just Buzz, an alcoholic.
Clancy was able to get me to do things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do, especially since they were not intellectually defensible. For example, early on he invited a bunch of other alcoholics and me to come to his home on the outskirts of Venice for a cookout and an afternoon of volleyball in his backyard. Before we could play, however, Clancy passed out some shovels. He stabled a pony in his backyard, so we had to clean up the pony excrement first. The reason was not necessarily to make us nicer or better people, but to gradually change our relationships with the world around us, and our psychological perspectives on our inner worlds. Clancy was also big on humility as an important part of recovery, and few things were more humbling than Hollywood celebrity types—and former astronauts—shoveling pony poop.
I had sworn off drinking several times before meeting Clancy, and had stretched my abstinence to thirty days on at least ten separate occasions. But I’d always found my way back to another bar or another bottle of Scotch. I’d feel almost as though someone had inserted a wind-up spring in my mind while I was sleeping, and that each day the spring was getting tighter and tighter. Before long, I started thinking that a drink might make me feel better. After a while, another drink followed the first, then a second and a third.
With Clancy, I found an “outside” guy who was willing to shoot straight with me. He could see both the problem and me, and he offered advice based on a more objective perspective. When I talked with Clancy about what I was going through, it helped bring clarity to my problem.
Clancy visited me at my workplace at the Hillcrest Cadillac dealership in Beverly Hills. “Leave this job,” he told me straightforwardly. “Get out of here. You’re not doing anything. You’re just sitting in this office all day and people come by to look at the astronaut on display.”
Then one day Clancy came in and told the Browns that I should not be working there. “This is not the sort of job for Buzz Aldrin,” he told the owners. Clancy felt it was demeaning for a man like me, who was an American hero who had walked on the moon, to be making a living selling used and new cars.
I knew he was right, but I had nowhere to go. In Clancy’s opinion, the dealership was simply trading on my celebrity, and I couldn’t blame