Mikes
Story
by
Jenna Orkin
Mike
left us an abundance of gifts, not least of which was his story. As
an investigative journalist, he loved a good story even more keenly
than the next man. And perhaps the one he loved most (as we all do,
or would like to) was his own.
It
was indeed a fascinating story, which goes some way to account for
his thousands of friends and followers around the world, both
"Facebook" and otherwise. Whether uncovering dirty
dealings between politics and Wall Street that even Matt Taibbi
wouldn't touch or enduring the flip side, "I'm done in; I'm
about to jump off the roof," the Mike Show was a production
which a certain kind of reader - a thinking man's action junkey -
yearned to be part of.
It
is left to us now to piece together that story and it's an obligation
which his friends and admirers are undertaking with a thoughtfulness
that would make him proud. Some of the insights on the net,
particularly at Rigorous Intuition,
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=38031&start=30
are as illuminating as Mike's detractors during his lifetime were
maddening. (Beyond a few snarky headlines about the "conspiracy
theorist's" suicide, the latter have been lying low this week,
no doubt biding their time.) By pooling recollection, we may come to
understand better how he could be such a hero to one group of people
while at the same time appearing to another as a lunatic. This in
turn may lead us to recognize how the whole concept of "hero"
is a dangerous drug, not only for the "Leader" who becomes
infused with his own importance and deaf to the insights of others
but also for his followers, who sell their birthright of independence
of thought.
In
fact, no one was better acquainted with his "lunacy" than
his inner circle. We got the hard-to-deal-with side of his
personality in our face as long as he stayed close. I believe this
is one reason he moved so often, living with no one person for much
longer than a year, a trait he and I shared, by the way. His
marriage, to a woman almost two decades younger, lasted eighteen
months; his sojourn in my apartment, fourteen. My marriage lasted
twelve years but shouldn't have.
He
had long since outstayed his welcome in my one bedroom, but he was
even more desperate to leave than I was to go about my business
without worrying about his disapproval (as I would with anybody.)
Not, I hasten to add, that we often argued. There were one or two
blow-up fights but mostly, in spite of profound differences of taste
- (he hated New York on principle; the machismo of the West, where he
felt most at home, left me cold,) - we got along smoothly, frequently
slipping into a George and Gracey domestic routine complete with New
York accents. Mike was a razor-sharp impersonator and I wish someone
had taped his Russian, French and German personas.
Re
Mike's story, reading Wesley Miller's account of how Mike came by the
gun with which he shot himself is one fascinating piece. Another is
Charlton Wilson Cht Ccht's description on Mike's Facebook page of
Lakota traditions of giving one's body "for the children"
as Mike said in his suicide note to his friend and landlord, Jack.
"[I]n Native ways, we don't have money or animals or whatever to
give. we have our flesh and our blood." If Mike is going to be
cremated as some recent reports said were his instructions, I don't
get how the earth will benefit and will be watching for
clarification. Anyway, Mother Earth receives our body no matter when
we die; in the modern society in which Mike lived, however
deploringly, hastening the process doesn't help anybody. But since
he was not Lakota by birth or upbringing, though he revered Native
American culture and became steeped in it once he moved out west, and
since, as shown at Collapsenet.com, he'd been suicidal for years, a
psychologist might opine that the Native American references were a
cover for a longstanding suicidal drive.
Here's
another piece of the Mike puzzle:
He
was born DOA, "dead" on arrival. The doctor who delivered
him told him when they met 25 years later, that the medical team had
done everything possible to revive him but to no avail. Mike's
mother had already had one stillbirth so a second was not much of a
surprise.
As
Mike was being carried to the morgue, he cried. The rest, as they
say, is history...
Part 2
One morning a few weeks
after he'd settled in to my apartment in Brooklyn, Mike said, "Honey?
I'm having a hard time this morning."
He was supposed to call
his therapist but the prospect was causing him such anxiety, he broke
down in tears. I comforted him until the storm abated - at which
point he said, "Would you make me breakfast?"
Is that what this was
about? An appeal for pity so I'd make him breakfast?
"Why?" I
asked suspiciously. I provided the first B of B&B since he was
otherwise homeless, and the ingredients for the second since he was
living on donations from his long-time followers. But why in God's
name should I have to make it? Was he seeing how much he could get
away with?
Mike's lifeline was
honesty. A legacy of AA, it was what had bought him his sobriety
from which flowed his connection to other people, their affection and
help, his sense of belonging, his credibility, his integrity.
"I want to feel
taken care of," he said, but it was not so much an explanation
as an admission. The question had brought him up short and he was
retreating with the grace that marked his many apologies, both public
and private.
We sat down with our
respective breakfasts, obtained by our respective selves.
"How does it feel
to be taken care of?" I continued, veteran analysand that I am.
"Loved. Indulged.
Worthy."
Indulged. Exactly.
"Those feelings
may come more readily to those of us whose birth was not met
ambivalently by our parents," I commented.
"My parents
weren't ambivalent about me; they wanted me. My father did, anyway.
My mother may have wanted me in order to please him."
On another occasion,
Mike had said that he believed his mother married his father in order
to escape her own father.
"They'd tried for
a long time to have a child," he went on now. "I was two
months premature. My mother spent the two months before that in bed.
'I was pronounced dead
at birth. I cried on the way to the morgue."
It was my turn to cry
now.
"Who are you
crying for?" Mike asked.
"Your mother... I
don't know." I believe that in addition to losing a baby before
Mike, she also lost one after him.
"I met the doctor
who delivered me when I was twenty-five.
'He remembered it. I
had no pulse. I was blue. They tried to get my heart going. Then
he handed me over to the nurse and I cried."
As he put his dishes in
the dishwasher he continued, "Some spiritual people have said
I'm a take-over, a soul waiting for a body to enter."
Perhaps it was this
entry into the world, or at least his awareness of it, that accounted
for his upset when we once happened upon a news article about
terminally ill newborns.
Part 3
"My
dad had a great life," Mike said one day. "War hero
in two wars. Fought in one; was a [I didn't catch the
term] in the other. Made money. Died taking a shit, which
he loved. So do I," he added, with a defiant smile.
"But what did he do to make the world better? Paid his
taxes; took care of [his second wife.] He just kept the system
going."
On
another occasion: "My dad was so in control, even after he had a
cerebral hemorrhage while taking a shit, he managed to get himself to
his favorite chair."
A
major reason Mike worked so fiendishly to finish Crossing the Rubicon
in 2004 was that he wanted to present it to his father
before he died. (The other reason was that he hoped to sway the
2004 election.)
He
succeeded with the first goal and got the satisfaction of watching
his father's entrenched Republican views transform into an
acceptance of Mike's. And he got to bask in the pride his
father felt about his achievement.
"He
did love me, though," he reflected.
"When I was five,
I had my first eye operation. When I woke up, I had a patch on
my eye. And next to me on the pillow was a teddy bear with a
patch on his eye. I think the doctor put the patch on.
'My
father did do some things when I was very young. We went to a
Baltimore Orioles game. He took the cub scouts to something.
'That lasted 'til I was
ten. He abandoned me to my mother. He was never there; he
couldn't stand it. He was always traveling. I thought if
I was just good enough, he might come and get me." His
father only showed up, he said, when Mike had won
something and Dad could preen.
One
night at a party, Dad gave Mike, who was in his teens at the
time, a drink. Under the influence, Mike told an anecdote
which ended, "And then Dad beat the shit out of me."
His
father was furious.
"He
gave me a drink, then got mad when I acted the way people act when
they've had a drink."
From
the diary I kept during the period Mike stayed in my
apartment:
January
21, 2007 This morning, he awoke with a start from a nightmare
that black-clad guys in jackboots were coming to get him. This
had followed two other dreams in which his father was beyond reach.
In
a fourth dream, Mike was going on a trip, leaving his wife, Lindsay,
with their two daughters, ages five and nine, who were in the bath.
He had chosen that moment to leave so the children wouldn't make a
fuss.
In
discussing the dream, he said that his father used to leave that way
when he went away on business, without saying good-bye, and leaving
defenseless ("naked") Mike in the hands of his mother.
Long time Ruppert
aficionados may remember Lindsay Gerken as the plaintiff
in a sexual harassment suit against Mike which she would
eventually win. However, she was never able to collect.
More on this (though it's not worth much time) later.
"He was a war
hero; he worked hard, made a lot of money. But he didn't do his
duty by me."
"Not
only that," I added. "He left you to do his
duty."
(In many ways, some of them unhealthy, Mike took over his father's
role in the household.)
"Son of
a bitch." He looked towards the ceiling. "Dad,
you're fired. That son of a bitch. I used to have a
shrine to him in my office in Ashland, with all his war medals.
It's time we execute my Dad."
Part 4; Friends
Mike's father's job
with the Air Force required the family to move so often
that Mike changed schools virtually every year. It's
notoriously hard to make friends under those circumstances and
it left him lonely and angry, especially after "Dad"
started staying away from home for longer periods. He took out
his frustration on the family dog, kicking and abusing it. When
Dad returned, he immediately got the lay of the land,
understanding he was the root cause of the problem. But he
also realized that for everyone's sake, the dog had to go.
I always felt that Mike's yearning for a "dawg" was partly
to make amends to that childhood pet. He needed to prove
to himself that he could care for a dog since, as no
one questions, he loved them so much.
One
day shortly after the family moved to Denver, a kid in Mike's
class said, "Hey, Mike! We're all down by the pool.
Love it if you could join us. Bring some cookies!"
Mike
got excited - Could it be he would finally have some friends?
"I
said, 'Ma, quick - get some cookies!'" he remembered.
"She
drove me down there. They just wanted free cookies. They
laughed at me..."
As
he relived this story, Mike looked like the miserable kid he had
been that day.
This
is the background to the pride that shone from him in
recent years when he would say with awe, "I have 5000 Facebook
friends!
Part
5
When
Mike first arrived in Brooklyn from Canada, he was
still shell-shocked by the death of Fromthewilderness and by his
failure to
obtain asylum in Venezuela.
He was physically unhealthy and, as he had been for several
months, obsessed with thoughts of suicide.
Sensing that he needed
a break from this endless cycle of horror but that he'd be unwilling
to venture too far from familiar territory, one day I asked
him about his childhood; specifically, what he'd wanted to be
when he grew up.
"'Til I was twelve
and found out how bad my eyes were," he said, "I wanted to
be an airline pilot." That was what Dad had been and what
accounted for his war-hero stature. "But I didn't have any
depth perception."
(Eyes were still a
source of some anxiety; he needed treatment for a cataract, which he
got and loved. He couldn't comprehend why I wore glasses of
lesser strength than the doctor prescribed [because I didn't want my
eyes to get lazy] and he couldn't stand it if they had smudges on
them.
"But
what if you have to drive?" he exclaimed.
"I
don't have to drive; I take the subway."
When
he couldn't take it anymore, my glasses
received a polish worthy of the Hubble
telescope.)
"After that, I
didn't know," he went on, "except that I didn't want to be
a businessman. Law? Nah.
'Then when I was
seventeen, a captain came to my high school and talked about police
science."
"You
mean fingerprints? Things like that?" I asked guilelessly.
"No. You're
being a girl. About being a cop. The badge and the gun.
The camaraderie. The humor. I knew that was what I wanted
to be."
Ah... Friends at
last; even a fraternity.
His
years at LAPD have been written about extensively but some events are
not so well known. He never killed anyone, he said, even when,
on one occasion, doing so would have earned him a commendation.
(The perpetrator turned out to be more crazy or high on PCP than
criminal.) But he did once break a prisoner's skull when the
guy, also high on PCP and being carried on a stretcher, bit Mike
on the testicle.
After leaving LAPD, he
had a series of low-level positions: Selling guns (he loved guns but
not the job;) putting together amplifiers; working a UPS route where
he met a man who became his hypno-therapist.
"I
don't like thinking about my past except for the years of FTW, LAPD.
The rest was just so much loneliness and poverty."
He
also acted as a security guard at the Oscars, escorting Vanessa
Redgrave the night she gave her controversial
acceptance speech for Julia.
When
he recounted that episode, I mentioned that she was doing a one-woman
show on Broadway, in Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical
Thinking." We bought tickets and Mike left a copy of
Rubicon for her at the stage door with an inscription saying how they
had met and how her speech that night had given him courage to write
the book.
Her
assistant called the next day to say that Ms. Redgrave thanked him
and would definitely like to meet. But we never heard further.
Part
6
I
didn't let Mike smoke in the apartment when I was home so he would go
downstairs in front of the building and talk to the doorman or
tenants walking their dogs. But when it was too cold for that
(he was a California kid after all,) he simply slipped into the
stairwell.
One
night, after returning from his last cigarette before retiring,
he said, "When I was out in the hall, all I could think about
was men in jackboots kicking the door down and taking away
everything. I think it has to do with Denver."
Of
all the moves Mike had had to go through as he was growing up, none
had hit him so hard as Denver. For the first time in his life,
he'd established roots. He was on the football team and he had
friends.
"When we left
Denver," he elaborated, "my dad didn't explain, didn't ask
how I felt. He just said, 'Get your stuff ready; we're leaving
for Los Angeles in two weeks."
"The
way you left Ashland," I observed.
From
conception to realization, that plan to close up shop after the
computers were smashed and flee the country for the terra incognita
of Venezuela where again, he knew nobody, had taken all of eighteen
days. And like the move from Denver, it involved divesting
himself of everything he held most dear; leaving family heirlooms,
which I will not describe, for his closest friends, with the
stipulation that in the unlikely event he should return, (see his
article, By
The Light of a Burning Bridge)
they would be restored to him. (For the most part, they were.)
One of the signs of suicidal intent is giving away one's possessions.
"That's true,"
Mike said in wonder. He was not accustomed to the insights of
psychotherapy. "But why would I want to repeat Denver?"
"That's one of the
weird things about the psyche. We repeat old behavior because
it's comfortable and fulfills predictions; we're not taken by
surprise. It may suck but it's a case of, 'The devil you know
is better than the one you don't.
Also, we may want to get it
right this time.'"
I'm
sure this was one reason Mike never stayed in one place very long:
After leaving his home of Los Angeles, he moved to Ashland followed
by Venezuela, Brooklyn, Los Angeles again, Sebastopol, Colorado,
(where he must have been thrilled to return,) Calistoga.
Like
anyone else who'd been close to Mike, I assumed the men in
jackboots taking away everything to be government thugs. It's
only in rereading this account that I see that they
also represent his father. But in the end, they
became Mike himself.
Part 7
The morning of July 12,
2006, Carolyn Baker called.
"Are you sitting
down?"
"Yes." Then I
did.
"Mike's in
Venezuela. He got there this morning.”
Email to Mike, August,
2006:
When carolyn told me
where you were, i was shocked but not surprised. you had left a trail
of breadcrumbs: the line, "there are few things that could make
me think of leaving this country but the loss of internet
independence is one of them." i knew from the very denial that
you were thinking of leaving this country. it was a snap to figure
out where you would go; you'd mentioned it at petrocollapse [the
first Peak Oil conference in New York City, which I'd moderated) in
october.
but there was no way i
could have known this was all happening at that moment.
i cried "no"
nine times. (a pesky sense of rhythm keeps track of such things.) i
thought that even if you survived (as you obviously had) you were
saying, "i'm making a new life, turning my attentions
elsewhere." [That was indeed what he was saying.]she described your
final days here. i was with you in your garden of gethsemane (on your
porch with michael and carolyn, complete with wine.) [Despite the
ironic turn, I now cringe to read the groupie-like idolatry of this.
And it gets worse...]
i cried for three days,
the chorus in this greek drama. the hero acts. the chorus moans,
"woe. oi weh." would your life be an orson wells movie in
which you play the joseph cotton role in a panama hat, pursued down
nightmare alleys?
would i see you again?
would you think of me in the past tense? [Yup. Sure would.]she said that you had
said, 'i want you to think of me as dead."
having passed thru the
valley of the shadow of death you have been reborn on a brave new
continent. the ultimate calvinian tumble down the hill, tada!
you will thrive there.
you will finally be appreciated by the powers that be and financially
secure.you may want a child.fantasy: in a few years
i come to venezuela. your wife refers to me as 'esa mujer.' i sing
the fishy song with your child. (boom boom diddun daddun wannum -
choo.) your wife and i bond.
The fourth day i threw
up all day on an empty stomach and thought, "so this is the
origin of the word 'wretched.'" i have never before thrown up
for emotional reasons, not even during the 17 months my father was
dying of a brain tumor.
the gods of vomit were
not appeased by my exertions; they wanted work product so i drank
some tea which helped...
I adjusted to Mike’s
being on another continent - one I’d never been to - particularly
after Carolyn, his liaison at the time to his past life, said that
once he got settled, he planned to make a place for his closest
circle.
I oriented myself to
moving there too, by brushing up my self-taught Spanish. Learning a
foreign language was a more familiar task than trying to build a
house out of grass (a pastiche of the sort of advice that was given
to people worried about Peak Oil.) I watched Spanish-language soap
operas and religious programs as well as a stream of Surreal movies
in the tradition of Don Quixote, El Greco and Dali.
Mike’s leap into the
unknown seemed an act of either the greatest courage or nuttiness. I
didn’t know him well enough to understand the impulse but trusted
that he knew what he was doing. It wasn't so crazy for him as it
would have been for anyone else to think the Chavez government would
welcome him. Within a couple of weeks, he had a radio interview with
Chavez advisor Eva Golinger.
However, there were more things in
Heaven and certainly earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy...
Part
8
As
mentioned above, before Mike left the US, he disbursed his worldly
affects among his loved ones, his FTW (Fromthewilderness) colleagues
who were the closest thing he had to family, with the stipulation
they be returned to him should he ever come home again; and that for
the most part, they were.
The exception was me.
My gift, which Mike never asked me to return, was, to all
appearances, a small envelope of the size to hold a key, with the
imprinted legend, "Thank you - It has been a pleasure serving
you;" then, in Mike's scrawl, "For Jenna. Two diamonds."
I smiled uncertainly when the gift arrived in the mail, thinking it
was an obscure joke. But with this envelope was another one from
Carolyn marked, "Please read first."
Carolyn explained that
the two diamonds enclosed, which, having no idea of their worth,
she'd insured for $1000, were from Mike's father's wedding ring.
It was a while before
it occurred to me to look at the diamonds but I knew what they meant:
Not real love; he didn't know me well enough for that. But when he
fled the US, he needed to feel he was leaving behind someone to whom
he was truly close. I fit that role at that moment. The gift was an
expression of what might have been.
Like everything else
he'd ever known, I had receded into his past while he set about to
remake himself as a hero of the Bolivarian Revolution.
If anyone could pull
that off, it would be Mike. But one day, I sensed, his past would
catch up with him.
Email
to Mike:
"what you leave
behind will not sink in 'til you've established new roots. a joke
will occur to you which no one around you will appreciate. or you'll
see a favorite American movie dubbed into Spanish and you will be
overcome. by the waters of the Orinoco, you will sit down and weep
as you remember us.
'but you are home. it
is we who are homesick."
That moment by the
waters of the Orinoco came sooner than I had anticipated. During the
radio program with Eva Golinger who acted as both interviewer and
translator for the show's two hour duration, Mike finally broke down
in tears when a call-in came from his Portland buddy, reknowned blues
singer and bass player, Lisa Mann.
Email
from Mike: 9 - 10 - 2006
I
couldn´t function for hours after that interview... I had a serious
crush on [Lisa] for a while and she is very, very special. She didn´t
even know that [[his fiancée] and I didn´t get married or why.
Months later, at my
apartment in New York, we were talking about the Venezuela episode.
"Why didn't
somebody stop me?" Mike asked, in wonder.
First of all, because
almost nobody knew. But of those who did, there was at least one
effort to take Mike through what such a move might mean, step by
step.
"Carolyn tried to
slow you down but you brushed her off," I said. "You
weren't in the mood to listen to anybody."
"Yeah," he
agreed. "I knew that as soon as I asked the question."
Part
9
Despite his growing
recognition of what he'd lost by burning his bridges, Mike's spirits
must have risen when a reporter from an influential US newspaper flew
down with the idea of doing a feature on him. But emotionally, the
conversation itself seems to have been a precursor of the movie,
Collapse:
"
[S]even hours with the [newspaper] reporter yesterday. I´m writing
a seperate [sic] email which you´ll get. It was in detail and he was
serious. [Mike had been burned by mainstream features before, as a
colleague was reminding him] but it went back through all the most
painful parts of my life. At the end it was like someone had stuck a
vacuum cleaner in my ear and all the tastes and smells got tasted and
smelled all over again.
Not only that, but he'd
gleaned that some of his colleagues weren't handling the press the
way he would have liked.
"Could people
please stop saying, 'Mike can be a real asshole but...?'" he
pleaded. "Because otherwise, that'll be the lead of the story."
On the political
asylum front, too, his needs were meeting with obstacles followed by
false hopes and setbacks. And then there was the barren solitude of
his living arrangement. Advised to keep a low profile while his case
was pending, (hard to do when, with his Germanic coloring, he stood
out in a Venezuelan crowd) he remained virtually confined to his
hotel room.
9-24-2006 ...Life is very
unhappy. Three days ago two drug dealers staying at the same hotel I
am were gunned down on the street a block away. I´m in an upscale
neighborhood where stuff like this never happens.Funny thing is, I
pìcked them out for drug dealers the moment I laid eyes on them
three days before that. I don´t have time to elaborate but I am
getting indications that [an American pundit] may be actually trying
to prevent me from getting asylum. That´s not for publication.
In a phonecall, he
named two other men (activists I'd met and had never taken seriously)
who, he said, should be investigated if anything dire happened to him
in Venezuela.
Every day I
long for death because I just don´t see how this current limbo is
ever going to end. I just keep waking up and going through motions. I
wrote a new article today and start another tomorrow. I do miss the
US and especially my loved ones but I know I can´t ever go home.
That would betray my moral decision and put my life at greater risk
than I feel it is here. I may wind up being the writer that no
country wants. Then what? Sigh. I´ve been doing the anger thing,
especially at those close to me who betrayed me so deeply. That´s
what´s really taken the heart out of me.
He signed off with a
forlorn, perfunctory, “Love you”
An email of 9-4-2006
reinforces this sense of alienation on both the cosmic and comic
levels:.
"This seemingly
endless limbo vis a vis the gov´t is a real drag and the tiny beds
in my little fleabag suck big time."
La
Hojilla, a popular TV show that is Chavez' favorite, invited Mike on
but when the appointed day arrived, the show was postponed.
The
next day on which he was scheduled to appear, he was pre-empted by a
baseball star. Or so he was told. Two friends who watched the show
said the baseball star didn't appear either.
Finally, he reached the
conclusion he'd never get in to see anyone who could arrange for
asylum. "I'm a bargaining chip," he sighed. At the end of
the day, Mike was a gringo from a CIA family whom Chavez would have
had a hard time justifying to his people, regardless of Mike's street
cred.
Part
10: Burundanga
Mike
had burned his bridges in haste; now he was repenting in sorrow. With
the exception of phone-calls to FTW colleagues, he was reduced to
approximately one conversation a week in English. To save money and
avoid explaining his status as asylum-seeker to inquiring strangers,
he cooked his meals on an electric burner in his hotel room. At
night, the car horns honked incessantly.
Not
only that, but he'd learned that Chavez had made statements implying
he wasn't sure that an actual plane had hit the Pentagon.
Mike
had tried to warn the government against adopting this widely-touted
but easily refuted conspiracy theory (as opposed to conspiracy fact.)
Over 130 eye-witnesses had confirmed that what they saw was a plane
rather than a missile. To focus on a debatable theory is to draw the
attention away from actual smoking guns.
He'd
had it; he was throwing in the towel. One night, with a "Fuck
it," attitude he went out for a drink.
And
then things started going sideways.
The
following excerpt is from a confidential email Mike wrote on
9-26-2006 to a few colleagues:
I
could not sit alone in the room one more night with Spanish TV.
I
went to a night club and had a few drinks. I was soon approached by
two women. What happened after that is both a blur and a mystery.
There’s no doubt I got intoxicated but I suspect that something was
put in my drink. At about 6 AM the next morning I came to in my hotel
room. All of my pocket cash was gone and there were a number of
credit card receipts strewn around. I have no idea how much was run
on the credit cards that night.
Remember
that current tensions between Venezuela and the US are very high. I
am obviously a “gringo” in a city where fleecing gringos is
something of a pastime. Because of the intense pain and other
symptoms I believe that something was put in my drink. Maybe a
“roofie”. They are here too I’m told.
I
don’t know if I got laid or not. For all that I certainly hope so.
There
are those in Ashland who know (as do all of the pre-Ashland FTW
staff) that I spent 21 years in AA and resumed normal drinking in
March of 2004. The uninformed backyard gossip, the ignorant, and
those who achieve superiority by taking other people’s inventory,
will quickly assert that I am just an alcoholic who went out, went
into a blackout and is now trying to make excuses.
But
Ken, Carolyn, Mike, Stan and Jamey have all seen me drink moderately,
without cravings or any aberrant behavior for more than two years.
There are people who leave AA and do resume normal alcoholic
consumption.
However,
it is largely because of what I learned in AA that I am writing this
10th Step. I have never stopped practicing AA’s steps or the deep
spiritual program I acquired through 21 years of intense work.”
We
later learned that Mike's symptoms were consistent with the ingestion
of burundanga, "an extract of the brugmansia plant containing
high levels of the psychoactive chemical scopolamine." While not
impairing some cognitive functions, (Mike retained a dim memory of
going to the ATM and withdrawing money, then doing it again until his
account was depleted,) the drug does seem to remove "free will,"
whatever that philosophical enigma might be.
The
lapse was to have what the British call "knock on" or
ripple effects.
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