Not Your Church Basement

Hank Azaria, a mother’s grief, and a sober club in Midtown that finally gets it.

The United Nations General Assembly was in town, which meant the East Side of Manhattan had become a hostage situation: motorcades, barricades and a cab driver who had made peace with never moving again. I walked the last several blocks to East 49th Street. I mention this so you understand my commitment to journalism.

Bigvision’s  is worth the schlep. It is bright, newly renovated and well appointed, miles from the musty church basement with horrible coffee that still serves as architectural shorthand for recovery. But the place exists because a kid is dead.

Twelve years ago, Eve Goldberg lost her 23-year-old son, Isaac, to an accidental overdose after several trips through rehab. We usually tell that story as Isaac failing recovery. Maybe treatment failed Isaac. He didn’t lack programs. Goldberg came to believe he lacked a culture: people, a place, a reason to show up sober on a Friday night.

That matters for anyone trying to change, but especially for young people, whose entire social lives may run directly through the thing they are being told to quit. Goldberg spent roughly a decade raising money and building the kind of community she wished had existed for her son. The result includes art, performances, activities and a speaker series hosted by executive director Sean Daniels.

Its first guest was Hank Azaria.

Azaria, six-time Emmy winner, voice of half the population of Springfield and 20 years sober, describes himself as a light-hitting, off-the-bench utility infielder of a drunk and an all-star codependent. He spent seven years in Al-Anon, in part because of his friendship with Matthew Perry, before eventually discovering that one of the things he really enjoyed doing for himself was drinking his brains out.

His was what recovery people call a high bottom. No DUI. No hospital. No public humiliation big enough to become an episode of Behind the Music. Perry eventually took him to his first AA meeting.

That part of the story struck me because addiction is one of the few areas of health where catching something early can still be treated with suspicion. Nobody finds a tumor at Stage 1 and says, “Come back when you’re really sick.” Nobody tells the guy with high blood pressure that he hasn’t had a stroke yet, so perhaps he is being dramatic. We say, thank God they caught it early.

With alcohol and drugs, people are still told some version of, “You’re not at a bottom yet,” as though a wrecked marriage, arrest, overdose or cirrhotic liver would make the diagnosis more legitimate.

Hank saw where the road was going and decided he didn’t need to drive all the way to the end.

One line he heard early in recovery was: if you want to find out why you drank, stop drinking. A clinical supervisor of mine used to put it another way: get rid of the drinking and you’ll see the disease.

Hank saw it in eight days.

He was at his regular poker game, took a bad beat and turned on the dealer: “What the fuck was that? What kind of river was that?” A friend told him to play worse. Hank picked up the guy’s vodka and threw it in his face.

It became his first amends, but the more important discovery was that he had always thought he simply didn’t get that angry at the poker table. He did. He just used to reach for the drink before his body had enough time to tell him.

That is a far more authentic description of recovery than the polished version sold in brochures. Alcohol and drugs are popular because they work. Walking across a high-school gym to ask the hot girl to dance is terrifying; a pregame keg party can work a miracle. Suddenly you are looser, funnier, less self-conscious. Alcohol can soften anxiety, mute anger, manufacture confidence and turn loneliness into fraternity for a few hours.

Then you take it away and discover what it had been doing for you.

Azaria described attending a star-packed political fundraiser early in sobriety and suddenly feeling panicked, almost adolescent. He kept telling himself, I’m 15. Fifteen was around the age he really started drinking.

That is the work. Recovery is not serenity descending from the heavens because you stopped pouring vodka into yourself. It is walking through life without your blankie and discovering whether you can tolerate fear, rejection, anger, embarrassment and boredom without immediately changing the channel.

For a while Hank’s version included gaining 15 pounds on Magnolia cupcakes while screaming at Japanese teenagers playing Mario Kart. Eventually he carried the console outside and smashed the fuck out of it on the concrete.

There are many forms of progress.

Months later, he reached another uncomfortable stage: nothing much was wrong, but nothing felt particularly great either. He was bored, boring and wondering what exactly the point was.

What changed was not a spiritual awakening. It was arithmetic.

Sobriety, he realized, was partly about all the damage he wasn’t doing.

That landed with me because it shows up constantly in my own work. Recovery is hard to measure when some of the most meaningful outcomes are absences. We didn’t have an arrest this month. Nobody overdosed. Nobody landed in the ER. He didn’t lose the job. She didn’t torch another relationship. The family didn’t get the 2 a.m. phone call.

Much of the success in recovery is what isn’t happening.

Matthew Perry, anonymity and the trouble with secrecy

Perry was central to Azaria’s early sobriety. Hank described arriving at a huge AA meeting and being appalled by the hugging, coffee and general enthusiasm while Perry looked completely at home.

Hank told him the meeting made him want a drink. Perry told him it made him want one too.

Perry’s explanation was that alcoholism is a bully. Alone, it can kick your ass. With enough people around you, maybe you can take it.

Azaria said everyone who sticks around recovery long enough eventually finds a Matthew Perry: somebody who understands your particular brand of insanity well enough that shame can become something you can laugh about.

Hank just happened to get the actual Matthew Perry.

After Perry died, Azaria heard the familiar argument that his public struggles demonstrated why people in AA should not talk openly about recovery.

Near as I can tell, that broader application of anonymity is antiquated.

I understand privacy. Privacy is a right. Secrecy is different.

The Traditions are the internal rules of one fellowship. They are not a gag order on a public-health conversation, and “recovery” is not governed by AA tradition. Somewhere along the way, anonymity has too often become secrecy, with the strange logic that people should stay quiet in case things go badly.

Trust me, something will go south.

That is life.

The LGBTQ community answered the AIDS crisis with “Silence = Death” because silence allowed fear, shame and misinformation to do their work. I think mental health and addiction deserve some of that same defiance.

If somebody receives multiple rounds of chemotherapy and ultimately dies of cancer, we don’t stand over the grave saying, “See? Chemo doesn’t work.” We understand that treatment may extend life, improve life, relieve suffering and still fail to defeat a complicated illness.

Perry struggled, recovered, relapsed, helped people, suffered and kept trying. His death does not erase what worked before it. If anything, his life showed the complexity of addiction more honestly than the tidy story where someone gets sober once, follows every instruction and is rewarded with a perfect life.

There is another problem with secrecy: it can become a way of shaming people whose recovery does not look the way an AA old-timer thinks it should. Maybe they relapsed. Maybe they take medication. Maybe their definition of improvement is not somebody else’s definition of sobriety. If they are taught to hide the imperfect parts, shame gets a private room and a locked door.

After decades around this work, I have noticed that people who can accept recovery warts and all tend to get better. They can say what is working, what is not, where they screwed up and what they are going to try next.

There is something to work with there.

Four trash cans, three lids

Daniels eventually asked Azaria about his teenage anorexia and bulimia, and the conversation widened.

His father once heard him purging behind a bathroom door. Hank was sent to a therapy session with his mother, who eventually left the room. The intervention went nowhere. His takeaway was essentially: don’t let people see how badly you are fucking with yourself.

He got better at hiding.

Azaria described his compulsions as a kind of round robin: food, alcohol, pot, relationships, work, exercise. I describe the same phenomenon as four trash cans and three lids. Put the lid on drinking and food starts spilling out. Get the food covered and suddenly it’s sex, gambling, work, exercise or a relationship.

Recovery can become whack-a-mole if all we do is suppress one behavior without asking what job it was doing.

The vodka story was never really about vodka. It was about anger.

At the end, Azaria offered a theory that nobody grows up in a nurturing, calm and loving home and then nearly destroys his life with drugs. I understand where he gets there from, and it may describe his experience, but the clinical picture is wider.

Plenty of loving parents raise children with addiction running through the family tree. Adverse childhood experiences do not all originate at the dinner table, either. Kids get bullied. They lose parents, siblings and friends. They get sick or injured. They are abused by somebody outside the home. They grow up where gunfire is background noise, or absorb racism or homophobia every day at school. A loving home matters enormously, but it cannot always stand between a child and the world.

Which brings us back to why a place like Bigvision matters.

Ultimately, recovery gives us a chance. A chance to catch something before catastrophe becomes the admission requirement. A chance to experience authentic emotions and learn that we can tolerate them. A chance to be bored without treating boredom as an emergency. A chance to tell the truth about the messy parts instead of hiding them until they metastasize.

And sometimes a chance to look back after a month and realize that nothing terrible happened.

That counts.

If you are stuck in the hallway, go see the place Eve Goldberg built.

Bring somebody with you.

It’s worth the walk, even during UNGA.