CHAPTER III

Men and Machines

When the time came that it was clear to me that I could no longer continue to depend upon a concert career as a full livelihood, and that I didn't want to teach music, I decided to retrain in another business. Since my home was the Bay Area, the home of Silicon Valley, I decided to retrain as a computer person. There was much money to be made, and I wanted to make it. The knowledge was easily had, and I found that I was a natural with computers and computer software. Programming requires an ability to handle abstract thought constructs, much more than skill at mathematics. It is a translation skill, and I was good with abstract symbol translation. That is precisely what musical composition is--a language with which one expressed abstract thought concepts with aural symbols. Within a couple of years I stepped into a middle management position with a corporation near Palo Alto called Tymshare, Inc. I was to hold that position for five-and-one-half years.

Alcohol was as accepted a fact of life in my corporation as was marijuana. There were several restaurants within walking distance of corporate headquarters, and from twelve noon until two in the afternoon any one of them could be seen with their bars full of Tymshare people, both management and non-management alike. I made large sums of money--much more money than I had ever dreamed of making. Having carefully hidden from anyone the amount of money I was making made it easy for me to spend my money as I wished--on booze and, occasionally marijuana. I lived in a cottage which was very private and secluded, enabling me to continue to drink myself into oblivion each night. By this point I was playing pipe organ in church on Sunday morning, working in a "liquid" corporation during the days of the week, and at night giving myself to sleezy bath houses and anonymous sex. While I maintained a respectable, even a "Christian" demeanor to my public, my personal life was hidden, isolated, lonely, and booze-ridden. At this point alcoholic blackouts were regular occurrences. It was as though I would have amnesia for hours at a time. I first became concerned about these blackouts when people started calling me and reporting conversations we had had the previous night, and I did not even remember having had the conversation at all. Over this period of my late twenties I gradually and progressively lost the ability to concentrate, which seriously affected my ability to practice and to read. My two treasured roles, the Scholar and the Musical genius were severely impaired. Three years later I was "asked" by the church where I had served for over five years as organist and choirmaster, an old Swedish Lutheran church, to resign--because someone thought that I might be a gay man. There was no evidence, mind you, but someone thought that it might be true. And in that parish, all that was needed was for someone to get the idea into his or her head that a staff member might possibly be gay, and the handwriting was on the wall. At least they had the good graces to let me resign.

After I left that musical post, I vowed I would never play again. And, in fact, I did not play pipe organ again until over five years later. It was a real shock to lose my treasured role, my survival tool. However, I discovered a new role, a new survival persona--the Liturgical Scholar. My home church, an Episcopal church, gave me ample opportunity, for the role was highly respected by the good folk of the High Church tradition. I studied liturgical history, became fluent in Latin, and became an expert in Gregorian Chant and Liturgics. I was still drinking like a fish, you understand, but I could play the Liturgical Scholar role well enough to find some measure of self-respect, at least within the church.

God was an abstract idea by this time, and since He was so remote and unknowable, I stopped even thinking about it. I could play the role I had adopted without ever really dealing with God. I was far too busy to be distracted about such things as God or personal spirituality. That was for people who needed it, but I surely did not. While the mass prayers and liturgical texts talked about God a lot, I was more concerned with the form than the content. The liturgical action, the historical references, and the musical expression of the texts were far more important to me than the real meaning of the words. I was getting sicker and sicker, and healing was becoming more and more remote.

During my twenties I was almost always in the office of some therapist or shrink. I can't even remember them all. I tried anything and everything to stop the pain I felt and the growing depression which was omnipresent. I was Rolfed, Primal Screamed, Transactionally Analyzed, and therapeutically massaged. During that ten-year period I was hospitalized five times in psychiatric wards for everything from severe depression to suicide attempts. The suicide attempts were, I believe, really cries for help. I do not think I actually wanted to die. I wanted someone to make the pain go away, and taking a handful of pills was a way to scream for help. Little did I know how close I came to actually losing my life, for the combination of Reds with the alcohol I was drinking is a potentially highly lethal mixture. Fortunately, I survived the attempts and they at least got me a few days of rest on the "Flight Deck" in the local shrink ward, and easy access to more high-powered prescription drugs. After each episode I would feel a bit better for a while, and always believe that the improvement was the result of the drugs. I never stopped to consider that the lessening in my depression might have something to do with the fact that I had had no alcohol while I was hospitalized. The thought just never occurred to me.

At the end of my work in middle management with Tymshare I could see the writing on the wall. I was receiving reprimands for my lost work time--they never knew about the real reason for the hospitalizations. It was becoming harder and harder to function with the ever-present hangover, and missed work days were too common. I decided that I had to get out before my resume was damaged, and it was my church that provided the way for me to try the most dramatic geographical cure of my life. The Episcopal Church, unbeknownst to many people, has religious communities of monks and nuns of the Benedictine family of orders as well as communities of active Religious such as Franciscans. I applied to and was accepted to the novitiate of a Benedictine order, the Order of the Holy Cross, whose mother house and novitiate was in the Hudson River Valley of New York State. That was perfect. It was three thousand miles away from my family--a decidedly positive quality. It was a semi-enclosed environment which would, I thought, protect me from having to deal with the things from which I was running away--my progressively growing disease of alcoholism, my depression, my incest issues, and all the rest. I thought that life as a Benedictine Monk would protect me from all those things. Little did I know that life in community is like putting a magnifying glass on every personality flaw that exists in the individual. Little did I know that the community I was entering had a large group of recovering alcoholics who could spot the symptoms a mile away. I thought I was moving from The Valley of the Dolls into The Name of the Rose; instead I was moving from the frying pan into the fire.

I always had to do everything to the max--a life of extremes. I was in sleezy bars and bath houses on Saturday night and being holy on Sunday morning. If I did anything, I had to take it to the limits of credulity. I was either interested in something enough to become an expert on the subject, or I wanted to know nothing about it whatever. When I decided to solve my problems by trying a geographical cure, I had to do it dramatically. The move to the monastery in New York was just about the most dramatic way I could imaging to run away from home--almost to the point of desperation. If I could have jumped into a time machine and gone back to Monte Cassino in the fifth century and join Benedict's community, I would have strongly considered it. While the move was frightening, I was compelled to do it--to get away from my life and start all over again. Little did I know that I was carrying my problem within me in the jet from San Francisco to Kennedy airport. I gave away all my belongings in California, climbed aboard the jet, and casually got drunk on the flight to my new life of freedom from pain. By the time I arrived in New York State and was picked up by a monk from Holy Cross, I was hung over and numb. It was February, there was snow everywhere, I was freezing and I was one very, very sick man just embarking on the decade of his thirties.