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Chapter P1 - I can see now that getting drunk kept me functioning as well as I did for as long as I did. Alcohol silenced the doubts and the derision rattling around inside my head, so I could get up and go to work in the morning ready to face another day. That wasn't always an easy thing for me to pull off, so I guess I was lucky I had booze to keep me going. Liquor worked like a local anesthetic for me; whenever my symptoms flared up, I would apply it liberally to the affected area and the pain would subside. Usually, this would happen at night. During the day, I could disappear into my work. My job provided me with the perfect escape route from my own head. That was lucky, too. Because I was an actor, I could spend most of the day in someone else's skin. I was in the business of bringing certain parts of myself to a character and leaving the rest behind. It was the nights that gave me the most trouble. The darker side of things always held a certain fascination for me. I probably wrote a lot more angst-ridden poetry than the average teenager. Even as a little kid, I remember taking my responsibilities as the oldest child very seriously. It wasn't that I didn't know how to have fun, but I always held back just the slightest bit from getting completely carried away. I wished I could have been blessed with a sunnier nature, and as an adult I continued to envy that in other people. When I got old enough for romance, I searched for a woman who could help me find that lightness within myself.
Of course, all that intensity was very useful to me in my work. I had a lot of material to call upon when I started studying the Method approach, and I continued to draw from thatwell throughout my career. It seems like a contradiction but, although I would have liked to be more easy-going and carefree in my real life, I did not particularly enjoy portraying that kind of character. I much preferred being the heavy and I found it easier to play those kinds of roles, probably because I had more in common with those characters temperamentally. I also believed those performances would be taken more seriously by people in the business who could help advance my career. I had definite ideas about what I wanted to do professionally, and my vision of the future did not include bouncing from one TV sitcom to another with time off for an occasional made-for-TV movie. Earnestness was pretty typical of those times, so while I admit that I had a tendency to take myself a little too seriously, I certainly was not alone in this. The war in Vietnam was going on, and people my age truly wanted to make the world a better place. There were all kinds of countercultural ways of looking at things and approaches to try out. It was not in my nature to do anything half way, and the feverishness of that socially conscious climate made my commitment to my particular cause, protecting the environment, even stronger. It also made me tougher on myself, because we all expected so much of ourselves back then. There was not a lot of room for compromise or shades of gray; things were very clearly right or wrong, good or bad, and so were people. It was easy to fall short of such an exacting yardstick. I drank because I didn't have the guts to face all the ways that I didn't measure up. But I wasn't proud of being such a coward, so all the time that I was numbing myself with booze, I was feeling bad about having to numb myself with it. The worse I felt about myself, the more I drank; the more I drank, the worse I felt. Then I would go to work and "act" like a normal person. At night, I had to face that weak failure in the mirror with the glass in his hand, whom no amount of recycling could redeem. Smoking pot never seemed like a character flaw to me the way drinking did because it wasn't something I did alone, in the dark, until I couldn't feel anything. Plus, pot was considered cool by my generation, while liquor was looked down upon as one of the older generation's hang-ups. So I saw myself as a sell-out as well as a failure. But I kept right on drinking anyway.
