You Can Get There From Here:
Part 11

Barry Buss

Editor's Note:

When we last saw Barry he had severed his final connection with UCLA tennis where he had once set record for winning consecutive matches. The next chapters in the book chronicle his horrifying, heartbreaking slide into more and more drugs, psychiatry, psychiatric drugs, and near death experiences—all too gruesome even for Tennisplayer. (Get the book if you want to know.) But as the title says You Can Get There From Here, so let's pick up his story with the tale of redemption and 10 years of sobriety that eventually followed.

It's March 9, 2022, late in the evening. My house is dark. I sit alone at my desk typing you these words. Tomorrow will be ten years since a fateful night when I attended a concert with Trey Anastasio and the LA Philharmonic. I was overcome with emotion that evening seeing my rock and roll idol performing clean and sober upon the stage, sparking a long-dormant flame within me that maybe I could try sobriety one more time. Sobriety and I, two ships who'd long since passed in the night. Yet, when I finish typing these final words and lay my head to bed to end this day, I will awaken tomorrow, March 10th, 2022, celebrating 10 years of consecutive sobriety.

Apparently, I had one more miracle in me...

How'd I do it? Certainly not the conventional way. I mean, why start now? After the concert, I checked in to a sober living house, beginning a challenging detox as I bounced from one grim low bottom house to another throughout the South Bay. And as bleak as those homes were, they were a step up in living conditions considering where I was with my life. I'd done some serious damage to myself, something you only find out when you finally try and stop. It was all hard, but so was trying to live as a functioning addict haplessly strung out on drugs. None of it was pretty, but I sucked it up, going through what I had to go through, knowing there are no style points awarded when getting clean.

I emerged from the withdrawals and detoxification phase about as well as could be expected, with no permanent lasting damage, giving me a sliver of a chance to move forward with my life taking only the babiest of steps. For as hard as getting sober was, living sober was where I struggled most. I had tried everything multiple times. What could I possibly do differently to give me the best chance this time?

So I concocted another plan. That's what addicts do. We plan. The old cycle of fuck up, sober up, clean up, speed up, fuck up even worse had to be broken. It was the story of my adult life. Rinse, repeat, always playing catch up, always trying to make up for lost time. But this time I vowed to try the polar opposite. I decided to rejoin the stream of life slowly. And I mean real slowly. I felt the need to control every moment of my recovery, so much so I moved out of the chaotic sober living carousel into an extended stay hotel. Just me, myself, and a dingy corner room at the Moonlite Inn on Pacific Coast Highway in the heart of my hometown of Redondo Beach.

And I made that hotel room my sanctuary. The hotel was two blocks from the Alta Vista tennis courts where I still taught my tennis, a perfect distance for me and my bike. And I settled into that little room, stay indeterminant, drawing the tightest of circles around my slowly resurgent life. I would only leave that room to teach my lessons, either picking up takeout on the way home or having my food delivered to the door. Afraid of my own shadow, this was the only way I could conceive of staying sober. I wasn't coming out until I knew was safe, an indefinite self-imposed draconian house arrest, length of incarceration yet to be determined.

Normally, an addict of my type alone in a hotel room was with the worst of company. The isolation and lack of accountability were perfect set-ups for my darkest impulses. But I tried a different approach to getting sober this time.

The year was 2012. Facebook and other social media platforms were just hitting their stride. And what I did was I told on myself again. I went very public with my struggles with alcoholism and addiction and more importantly, that I was trying to get sober again, sending the clear message to all in my orbit that under no circumstances was it ok for anybody to ever have a drink with me again.

A Hail Mary for sure. My friends all pretty much rolled their eyes; they'd heard me swear off everything a 1000 times only to relapse days later. Yet somehow, in its banal simplicity, it worked. I started putting a little time together. I got myself another sobriety date, vowing March 10th to be my last and final one. And though still riddled with anxiety within the cycles of my manic/depression, I was managing to stay sober.

I think back now on those early hotel days, coming home at the end of my day to that crappy little room. And after locking the door behind me, how there was no safer feeling in my new world, for I wasn't coming out again till morning, which meant I'd made it through another 24 hours clean and sober.

And though I didn't trust anything about myself or my newfound sobriety, little by little, day by day, I was starting to put some time together. At times I'd have to pinch myself, was I really staying sober? After 30 plus years of certifiable crazy, the incessant obsession to destroy myself was finally lifting. And a confidence in me began to emerge. I'd found my own successful formula for achieving sobriety, sensing if I could continue to do exactly what I was doing and nothing else, I might just be alright.

And the miraculous accomplishment of not doing something finally registered within me...

The goal of every person in recovery is to achieve long-term sobriety. Logically, one could lock themselves in a room forever, never coming out or drinking ever again. But at some point you need to live life, you need to come out of your room. My isolating ways were anathema to recovery's communal principles. But I didn't stop there. I swore off everything and everybody associated with my past struggles. That meant dating, competing at tennis, attending concerts, going to AA meetings, reading Nietzsche, and most of all engaging with my family. Been there, done all that, a couple of thousand times. But I needed something to help guide me every day. What would it be?

I ventured to the internet. During my scrolling, I came across a gentleman named Dr. Martin Seligmann. He was the lead researcher in the breaking new field of Positive Psychology. My experience with traditional psychology was it looked back toward the past and all its conflicts. The thought of spending one more moment wallowing in my past was harrowing. What Seligmann proposed was to put the past aside and focus on the present. Positive psychology entailed identifying and applying our 5-10 best qualities and practicing these principles all day every day, in all our affairs if I may.

For me, positive psychology was a perfect fit. Be a good friend, be a good listener, be positive, be generous, be inspiring, be appreciative. The formula was simple, practice these principles and try to win each day. In the process of winning day after day, I began building a reserve of positivity that if/when bad things happened (and of course, they would) they would only chip away at my copious reserves, built up day after day practicing Seligmann's principles.

Social Media became ideal for such implementation. How simple it was to share harmless vignettes of my life to a supportive growing ensemble of contacts, all the while supporting their endeavors, building an endless algorithm of positivity. Again, I'd tried and failed at everything else. What did I have to lose?

But what to do about my mood swings? I needed a place to focus my energy. So I started a blog, a platform to house my endless journaling. In September of 2012, at about 6 months of sobriety, still living in the hotel, I started writing random tennis stories from my youth, posting them on Facebook to a surprisingly robust response. After a week of furious daily production, the idea of writing a junior tennis memoir appeared. And I would write said memoir in a mere 30 days to an enthusiastic response, though the book's quality suffered editorially, as books do that are written in a month.

But in the process, I had finally found a healthy place to deposit my manic obsessive energy. Writing. And writing is something I've done nearly every morning since, creating a vast expansive oeuvre of work, high on quantity, wishing I'd spent more time on the quality, always too quickly off chasing the next idea before polishing the prior. But writing became my medicine, the instrument by which I could finally calm my mind. It's as important to my well-being as breathing. I cling to it so.

Then on January 29th, 2014, I got an email. It was from my Mom. The title said Sad News. Important. Call.

I got on the phone immediately. My Mom was upset and talking quickly. Within her spree of words, she said my father had passed, that he'd died two months ago, and that she was sorry she hadn't told me earlier but she'd been in a terrible way.

And a wave of confusion crashed upon me. My Dad had been dead for two months, but no one in my family, not my Mom or my two brothers felt it important enough to inform me. I knew our family was a mess but did we have to be this fucked up?

But of course, there would be nothing normal about my Dad's passing. I mean, why start now?

And I think back on that moment talking on the phone to my Mom and what if I wasn't sober, how would I have reacted? I'm certain I would have been indignant and dramatic in my feeling victimized again.

But I was sober. And the promises of the AA program came back to me. I intuitively knew how to handle a situation that in years past would have baffled me.

My connection to my family was terribly broken. We needed to make this our bottom and stop digging.

And my family's terms of endearment began that day with my father's passing...

After hanging up with my Mom, I drove the one mile to my parent's house, parents I hadn't seen or spoken to in years, and entered the house of my youth, greeting my mourning mother with a tentative hug. And we sat down at the dinner table together, the same table I'd sat my whole life in such varied states of disarray, and so began my first meaningful conversation with my mother at the ripe old age of 49.

It was a tough day, hearing the details of his passing. His last few years had been quite difficult. Acute arthritis, double hip replacement surgery only to be felled by cancer. He would pass away in the living room of our home with only my Mother present.

With the image of his final moments seared to my psyche, questions raced through my mind. What were his final words? And did he say anything about me?

And I thought of asking my Mom. Then I thought better of it... unsure if I could have handled the heartbreak of not hearing the answers I wanted to hear.

Over the past 8 years, I've finally got to know my Mom. And its turned out great; She's such a neat lady. Sweet, funny, witty, the light still very on. Where was this person through all my formative years?

Then the bad news continued. My mother got her first of two cancer diagnoses, with me eventually coming back home to live with her while she convalesced.

And over the next few years, my brothers and I would rally around my Mom as she recovered, with all of us convening in Torrance for the Christmas holiday, doing the best we could to rebuild the jagged remains of our once broken family. And we did well, putting past resentments aside if not to rest, united we became in our care for Mom.

On Christmas Day, we had a ritual. We would all pile into Mom's car to go to the Rose Hills Cemetary in Whittier to put a flower on my Dad's grave. We would drive the 45 minutes out in silence, mull around the cemetery for 15-20 minutes or so, take a family picture, then drive home in silence. And we did this several years running, yet in all the years of us doing this, we never talked about my Dad. Not once. No happy reminiscing, no funny stories about Dad and his ways. Four people, all deeply affected by this man in our own respective ways, he was the one thing we had in common, yet we never talked about him.

Uneasy with this, I decided to start talking about him, hopefully at our next Christmas together. But then tragedy struck again. My younger brother Jerry, a teacher in Kansas City for the past 25 years, died suddenly of a heart attack at 53. And so began a very somber stretch for our family. With Covid raging, my older brother and I took care of Jerry's affairs, but my Mom, unable to travel, suffered the loss of your youngest son all alone at her home.

In the writing of this book, I had many questions about my past I wanted to ask my Mom about. But I opted not to. My Mom's been through enough. I felt it was time to let the painful parts of our past be.