The Big Time

I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful for the gauzy pink and blue sky. I’m grateful for letting things be. I’m grateful for a super busy week and getting a lot done. I’m grateful for two fantastic children. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Mystery ?? Button

song of the week:

Hi There.1

This is me. Maybe not now. Aside from this just being a really groovy song, I think I’ve actually thought all of the thoughts in this song. “Big Time” got released in 1986, and I graduated from law school in 1987. This song pretty accurately tracks my career aims and progression:

I’m on my way, I’m making it, 
I’ve got to make it show, yeah! 
So much larger than life.

Yeah! is right. I used to listen to this song over and over while I drove to work. As you might expect, I was in the office pretty early, almost always well before 8 (I had a 40-minute commute) and this was my anthem. I was a very, very enthusiastic hard charger and it was because I was unbelievably excited at the opportunity to make the big time. I was burning to make the big time.

You see,

The place where I come from is a small town 
They think so small 
They use small words, 
But not me, I'm smarter than that

I had made it from Iowa City to a big law firm with a top-of -he-class Ivy League law school pedigree.

I’m on my way, I’m making it

I was 24 years old in the Fall of 1987. I was about 1/3 of the way through my first doomed marriage (and knew it), I worked absurd hours. I had talked my way onto a huge white collar criminal case and my job, as the lowly first year associate, was to go through boxes and boxes of documents of photocopies of financial records and bank statements—trying to track a few million dollars that went “missing.” My windowless office at the end of a long hall, was larger, which was good, because it was also used as the storage room for the boxes of documents connected to the case. This was also good, since there were the documents I had to spend most of my waking hours perusing.

My office looked a little like how a serial killer’s might—if a serial killer decided to put in a few soul-crushing years as an associate at a big law firm. There were about 20 different accounts involved in this criminal, money-laundering tangle—so I had started taping up copies of the statements and the relevant transactions on the wall of my office. My office was next door to the 85 year old “name” partner of the firm,2 who still came into the office most days, but now to plan tennis matches. He would often wander in and look at the wall and ask me to explain some of the newest branches on my deranged wall tree of financial transactions. Henry would whistle, say something along the lines of “go get ‘em, young man,” and then he was on the phone planning the day’s match and lunch.

I worked late most days, grabbing Sbarro pizza or worse McDonalds or Burger King from the horrific Metro-based “food court” across Connecticut Avenue. My office, though windowless, was in a new gleaming, swanky building, ensconced between the elegant Mayflower Hotel and Farragut Square.

I was so proud, so big, when I was strolling through that lobby at 7:45am. And even though I was tired and bleary-eyed when I left at 8pm, I felt even bigger. I was making my way, making my name. I was in a hurry, too. I knew I had seven years ahead of me until partnership, but I just put my head down and worked a lot of hours.

There are lots of things to love about law firms, if you’re a lawyer. When people ask about how my new gig is going, what it’s like to be back at a big firm, has it changed much? I always give the same answer:

They are very, very serious about the work.

But me, too. That’s why a big part of why I’m so ridiculously happy these days. I get the same thrill, the same sense of purpose, when I stroll through the cavernous lobby of our building across from Bryant Park. Even my secret missions to the coffee machine in the main reception area on 44 are pretty exciting.3

But things are very, very different now.

We still run the Anyone, Anywhere AA meeting (via Google Meet) on Tuesday evenings at 7:00pm.4 We are a pretty small group, but together we read the 164-pages of the Big Book, and then we tackled the stories in the back of the book (all 1,100 of them) and now we are reading from the pretty excellent Living Sober. We had just finished Chapter 17—”Looking Out for Over-Elation,” and I said, out loud, “Shall we just dive into the next one?” I barely waited for an answer and began reading:

Have you just this minute finished reading the previous section, and are you now rushing right into this one? Why? It may be that you need to put into practice the slogan “Easy Does It.”

hahaha. It’s funny how the Program can just whap you in the face sometimes and make you feel silly? I felt sheepish as I read that aloud to the laughter from the group. That impulsiveness, the impatience, the need for things to go fast, is a real hallmark of alcoholism and addiction. Lots of professions are founded on getting people to live like that: That’s why rates of alcoholism are so high among lawyers. Why Wall Street still runs on cocaine.

I don’t know if the professions create the issue or attract people who already have those traits, or a little of both, but the combination of hard work, recognition, material benefits and prestige are pretty impossible for the young alcoholic/addict to ignore. I drank nearly every day and was a regular at Duke’s the swanky restaurant in the lobby of the building, a place where you could get glimpses of what passed for DC celebrity back then.5 Jack Kent Cooke, then the owner of the Washington Redskins, parked the two Super Bowl trophies in Duke’s lobby.6

My crew of hard-drinking lawyers would convene at Duke’s most evenings for a few cocktails. My pals were at the end of their day, I would usually go back upstairs for another hour or so—very drunk and still very eager to work. I also needed to make the call home advising of my imminent departure from my office phone, not the pay phone in Duke’s lobby.7 There were appearances to be maintained.

I didn’t really have a vision or a plan or even much thought about how I wanted life to be, what I wanted out of life. I just wanted it to be big. I wanted to be important, “to make a big noise with all the big boys,” I wanted to make bank, ‘bro.

I knew where it would lead, I knew that I was chasing a life as empty as the office lobby at 6:45am. I didn’t care what the cost would be to me, and never considered the cost to others:

And my heaven will be a big hell And I will walk through the front door

I wanted to walk through the f***ing front door, I wanted to climb the mountain and kill the dragon. It was not some careful, calculated ascent of the mountain, it was a drunk in a clown car driving as fast and as loud as possible, with maddening, occasional flashes of brilliance that made people put up with me. Looking back, it was a crazy mix of really hard and sometimes inspired work, and then the self-destructive and self-defeating behavior of the classic alcoholic.

I was popular at the firm. Partners liked the “let’s win, baby” approach and the willingness to leave it all on the floor. Other associates appreciated the crazy drunken risks I took (they didn’t know I was drunk), the pranks I pulled. The jokes and insouciance. Everyone was waiting for everything to come crashing down, I think, or maybe that was just me. The thing was, there were plenty of consequences, affairs, divorces, recklessness and fecklessness—but none of that was enough to convince me that it was all enough.

After I got separated the first time, I spent a few weeks living with my friend Steve, on a mattress in his basement. My soon to be ex-wife was in the swanky Olde Towne condo, and I was listening to Steve and his lesbian sister argue upstairs while I tried to sleep on a mattress in a musty basement in Shirlington. Steve was a few years older than me, had served in the Army before going to law school. He taught me the appropriate usage of “AMF,”8 and a phrase I used on a very regular basis, to this day,

You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.

Steve and I would drive to work and I would still play this song. I still believed that was the road I was on. The whole time, I knew the day was coming when there would simply be no more road in front of me, no more runway, all of the options would be gone. I just didn’t know when that day was coming. To manage that very existential fear, the imminent (perhaps) loss of everything I valued, loved and held dear, I did what I knew how to do. I drank.

I believe now that the fear of imminent catastrophe is one of the many easily-observable hallmarks of alcoholics and addicts, and it certainly provides an excellent reason to drink or use. I actually do think it’s mechanical like that, that the thoughts we alcoholics generate help drive the need for the drinking. No, I’m not aware of any actual facts or science to back that up, it’s just how I think about how I think.

So, what’s different now? Well, I’m still drawn to fatalistic, catastrophic thinking, so I still do imagine how minor missteps will completely doom me eventually, but I realize that’s aberrant thinking. I recognize it now as crazy and not based on facts or science either, and I let it go. Do I want to make bank, ‘bro? I sure do. Some of the younger partners at the firm already love it when I say, “Let’s get paid, baby.”9

What’s really different? I approach every day with humility and gratitude. I’m a 62-year old recovering alcoholic and I get a chance to build a practice at a big law firm? I didn’t see that coming, for sure. But that’s the thing, I stopped trying to be big, to make my mark, to be so large as to be unavoidable, to make sure everyone knew exactly how big it was.10 I let things happen, let the game come to me.

I actually loved law school. It was maybe the happiest time of my life. I was so excited to be a young lawyer. I loved the reading and the writing, I loved being in courtrooms, I loved, loved, loved having an office. This is me, circa 1985, in my very first office, in a small law firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where I had landed a summer job after my first year.

I keep that on my desk at home. It reminds me of who I wanted to be, who I was, and who I was meant to be. I loved the work. I loved solving the problems. I loved helping people out of really difficult situations. I loved getting a chance to stand up in front of judges and juries and explain things on behalf of my clients. I’m also pretty good at it.

I think about being that person these days, that’s why things are different. I’m learning to take my time, to slow down and to let things take as long as they need to. I don’t feel the same frantic push to make it big, to build something for other people to see. “Easy Does It,” means exactly that, letting things happen, taking my grubby fingers off the scale, not pushing everything so hard all the time, not always trying to gain the extra yard. That, in turn, flows from self-acceptance. The sense that I am enough.

You see, a song like “Big Time,” can only be an anthem for someone who believes they aren’t enough. It’s a world where the only thing that matters is that others can see the gleaming beautiful thing you’re building and envy it from afar. That was an empty, lonely desolate world for me, and the only way I could trudge through it was with my trusty sidekick Kim Crawford.

I sit 45 stories up and watch the weather swirl over midtown. I love the way the lights gleam at night and the foggy days, when the tops of the nearby buildings disappear are my favorite. I feel safe, happy, getting to do something I love with free and pretty good coffee always available. The mistake I made all of those years was confusing the Big Time with My time. When I walk through that big empty lobby, I still get that burst of excitement about getting to play at this level. What’s really different? What I believe about myself. Here’s what this 62 year-old recovering alcoholic finally figured out:

It’s my time, baby.

Happy Friday.