One of the variables that correlates with the potential for addiction is how someone reacts to the effects of drugs. Research has shown that those who have negative reactions, such as nausea, dizziness, or confusion, are at lower risk for addiction. Those who have more positive reactions, like euphoria, anxiety reduction, or increased energy, are at higher risk.
Somewhere around this time, during a visit to my maternal grandparents in Pennsylvania, my grandmother gave me a laminated wallet-sized card, saying “I want you to have this.” On it in beautiful calligraphy the following words were inscribed: God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference—the Serenity Prayer. The very first time I read those words they had immediate heft and resonance, as well as an inchoate soothing effect. As I looked at the card and read the words again, my breathing became a little deeper and my pulse rate slowed slightly. I may not have been able to grasp the magnitude of their simple and elegant wisdom, but even then I knew the message they carried was important.
My maternal grandparents were steadfast in their support for me. They were the closest thing to unconditional love and acceptance I knew. They were always in my corner—even when I was a complete asshole to my grandmother, as I was on multiple occasions as a teenager. As the eldest grandson, “grandson number one” as he would say, I held a special place in my grandfather’s heart. The two of us were the only avid bowlers in the family. Although he hadn’t bowled in years due to a bad back, whenever I visited, he would take to the local lanes, watch me bowl, and give me pointers.
In ninth and tenth grades I played JV basketball and varsity lacrosse at Long Island Lutheran High School, which was close by and perennially had among the top high school basketball teams in the state. Their teams regularly included some of the most talented players from New York City, who lived with local families during the school year. The varsity coach’s favorite saying: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” The skill-development training in this program was cutting-edge—the drills we practiced and the techniques we honed through countless repetitions would not become mainstream until years later.
The JV and the varsity basketball teams often worked out together. The practices were brutal and the competition fierce. One of the best ways to get better—at anything—is to play with and against people who are better than you are. I was long used to being among the shortest players on the court (unfortunately you can’t “learn” height), but now I was going up against players who were not only much bigger, but whose athleticism was astonishing. Every day I had to play my ass off just to hold my own. I established a niche through hustle play that included sacrificing my body: diving on the court for loose balls and on defense, stepping directly in front of an oncoming opposing player and allowing him to effectively run me over, creating an offensive foul and giving my team the ball. I learned how to fall in ways that minimized the impacts to my body, but the long-term consequences of hundreds of collisions with other players and between my back and the hardwood would later exact its toll.
Sometimes I played with more balls than brains. Once in practice, the varsity center had the ball on a fast break. He was 6′8″, 235 pounds, first team All-New York State, and on this occasion, moving at high speed, focused on the rim, and getting ready to throw down a monster slam dunk, when I (over a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter) positioned myself directly in his path to take a charge. He was a close friend of mine, and off the court, a proverbial gentle giant. When he saw that I wasn’t going to move, his eyes filled with “Are you outta your motherfuckin’mind!!” alarm. In his split-second attempt to avoid colliding with—and possibly permanently damaging—me, he lost his balance and committed a traveling violation. It may have been an episode of situation-specific insanity where I put myself quite literally in harm’s way, but it turned a certain two points into a turnover and gave my team the ball. It was also just one of many instances where I would place myself in positions of high risk for momentary reward.
When I got to high school, I made a conscious decision to try “everything” in terms of mind- and mood-altering substances, and to try enough of each to make an informed decision as to what I liked and wanted to use more of. Though I didn’t get high on days I had practice or games (at least until after the practice or game), overall my drug use continued to progress. I returned to public school in eleventh grade after the new varsity basketball coach at Oyster Bay High School (who had been my lacrosse coach at Lutheran) encouraged me to come play for him. A season of great promise short-circuited when I tore a quadriceps muscle in my left thigh toward the end of an otherwise excellent first game. That injury sidelined me for most of the rest of the season while I went through physical therapy and wallowed in frustration and disappointment as I watched the team play from the far-off distance of the bench.
As much as I was in love with playing, as good as I was, as hard as I worked at it, the levels of physicality and ability I encountered while at Lutheran brought home the limitations of my “upside.” The realization that my participation in sports would never be more than an avocation was a huge and painful loss. As my childhood dream of getting paid to play hoops died, I lost the only real motivation I had for not using, and jumped the line that separates steady recreational substance use from full-on addiction.
I dove headlong into applied neurochemistry, that is, learning through intensive first-hand experiential study how the full spectrum of drugs—alone and in myriad combinations—affected me, as well as how adjustments in dosage modified those effects. I became adept in medicine cabinet archeology, a related discipline that involved exploring and excavating the contents of medicine cabinets wherever I went in order to unearth materials to further my neurochemical studies. Rather than treating my body as a temple, I increasingly used it as an amusement park.
I had started going to bars with older friends shortly after I turned fifteen. At the time, the drinking age was eighteen and it was easy to use other people’s identification as New York state driver’s licenses didn’t yet have pictures. Shit, they didn’t even indicate hair color—for a time I used the ID of a friend who had bright red hair. Pot was ever-present, like paint on the walls, and I remained under its influence as much as I could.
I contrasted the consciousness-expanding exhilaration of LSD with the consciousness-contracting confines of PCP. PCP outfitted me with a perceptual straitjacket, requiring a half-hour to crawl up a flight of stairs. Dozens of acid trips blew open the doors to new universes and let me borrow the keys to some of the mysteries of this one. By the way, taking LSD while at school is a really bad idea—that’s why I did it twice.
My way of identifying where the limits—both internal and external—were, was to exceed them, leaving them in the dust . . . repeatedly. As my father put it during one of my blood-shot mornings after another night of debauchery, “Moderation Dan, look it up!” I stole hundreds of pills from my mother. I took so many that I knew that she knew, but nothing was said. We engaged in an unacknowledged dance: she kept finding new hiding places for her meds, and I kept finding them. When we finally talked about it in shared sadness, I said, “I kept waiting for you to say something,” to which she replied, “I kept waiting for you to stop.”
Adding the self-centeredness of active addiction to the developmentally based narcissism of adolescence makes for a noxious combination. The relationship between my parents and me deteriorated, becoming more overtly conflicted as I increasingly disrespected them and their authority and ignored any limits they attempted to set. It got to the point where my father and I couldn’t be in the same room together for more than a few minutes before an argument would ignite and escalate until he would come after me physically, chasing me out of the room and out of the house. I would return hours later.
As this pattern continued, I began to stay away from home overnight, and then for several days at a time. The mounting tension finally exploded altogether when my father and I got in the one and only physical fight we’ve ever had. I had a furious argument with my mother and threw a football hard in her direction, hitting her in the foot. I didn’t think that I wanted to hit her,