Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [86]
I met with Clancy and his group three or four times each week for months, and little by little, my perception of the world and myself began to change. In the process, Clancy and I became good friends. When an opportunity came up for me to go to Lyon, France, to appear in a parade and convocation with a group of other astronauts and cosmonauts, I had no one else to go with me, so I invited Clancy to accompany me, which he did. Good thing, since the event turned out to be sponsored by a wine company!
Clancy was not merely a friend and an adviser to me, he once even negotiated a contract for me, when the New Orleans Symphony invited me to do a dramatic reading as the orchestra performed Gustav Holst’s The Planets. I gave Clancy a sizable commission for his services, and he relieved me of the burden of having to close a sale.
At Clancy’s meetings, I met various women who were also alcoholics. I struck up relationships with several of them, and their company met a variety of needs in my life, but provided no long-term satisfaction. One woman, however, captured my attention—at least for a season. Her name was Kathy and we met in Clancy’s group.
Kathy met more than a sexual need. She and I became close friends, but she kept slipping back to alcohol. I tried to help her again and again, finding in her a deeper addiction than my own. Kathy and I shared an off-and-on relationship, with no real commitment on either of our parts. But when she struck up a friendship with a carpenter with whom she had become codependent, I became concerned. He was not helping Kathy and I knew it.
How low does a person need to go before looking up? Where does an alcoholic need to be before hitting rock bottom? I don’t know. I’m sure it is different for every one of us, and the lines are often blurred. For me, I arrived at what I can now look back and see as a turning point, although at the time it was just another in a series of drunken disappointments.
Late one night during a relapse, I started drinking again. When I left the bar, I stopped by Kathy’s apartment, but she didn’t answer the door. I started pounding on the door in the middle of the night, completely oblivious to the possibility that she might not be home. When nobody answered the door, I broke it down. Before long, two police cruisers pulled up outside the apartment. Kathy’s neighbors had called them. The officers subdued me, cuffed me, and led me to their car, “helping” me in a not-so-gentle fashion into the backseat of the police cruiser.
They took me downtown to the police station, and prepared to book me for disorderly conduct. As I looked around the police station, I attempted to do what I always did—play on my celebrity. The officers recognized me, and I could tell that they really didn’t want to book me, but they couldn’t let me back on the streets in my inebriated condition. “Do you have any friends you can call?” an officer suggested. “Someone who would be willing to take responsibility for you and get you home?”
I called Clancy to come and pick me up, but he refused. “If you want to drink, you are an adult. Go ahead and drink,” he said, “but don’t bother me.” He wasn’t angry at me for waking him in the middle of the night, or for stepping off the path he was helping me to follow. Clancy knew alcoholics, and he knew that most of us had a rather sporadic record when it came to establishing a new direction in life. I could hear the disappointment in his voice, but in my semi-inebriated state, I didn’t really care.
I hung up the phone and called another good friend I had come to know in AA, Dick Boolootian, asking him to come down to the jail and pick me up. Dick was a brilliant educator, a doctor of science, and a good man. When he walked in and saw me in jail, I thought he might weep. He didn’t rebuke me, scold me, or say anything all that profound, but the look in his eyes seared into my soul. He signed me out