It’s Too Heavy for Superman to Lift
Vol. 2, Issue 3
A couple years ago there was a guy who sat in the far right corner of one of my recovery meetings who was dressed like The Joker. His costume was a hybrid of the purple-jacketed Cesar Romero version and Heath Ledger's doom clown. It was close to Halloween so it wasn't that strange to see him dressed that way. I think I saw him before without the makeup and jacket, I just assumed he had a party to go to after AA. Halloween came and went, though, and November turned into December and he still showed up in The Joker costume.
At first it was unsettling, him sitting there glowering, away from the rest of the meeting, but I got used to it. When he shared he was gentle and awake, welcoming the newcomers, raising his hand to be someone's sponsor, even. He was just another guy in AA trying to be useful.
The Joker disappeared for a while, but then...Superman arrived. He wasn't wearing the Big S-suit, but I recognized the guy's face from the documentary "Confessions of a Super Hero," an illuminating day-in-the-life of the people who dressed as super heroes along Hollywood Boulevard.
Superman's real name was Chris, just like Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman in all the 80's movies. This Chris wasn't that famous, though, and had shown up in AA on a court card after he got busted for having an open container of booze.
He was a regular at my home group for a while, sometimes doing two, three meetings a day. He didn't share much; he mostly doodled in a sketch book and stepped outside often to smoke. He seemed disinterested in the whole process, but he did collect chips, though. I remember one time he boasted about how he did all 12 steps in one day and was pissed that his sponsor didn't think that was okay.
Then Chris started showing up in the Superman suit. It wasn't the tight-fitting polyester suit like something the real Superman would wear, but a weird latex one. I would go out and smoke cigarettes with him and try not to stare, but the suit was kind of dirty and it had a small rip in the right pectoral. It flapped around when the wind blew and revealed how much muscle really wasn't there. I thought about how funny it would be if The Joker showed up to one of these meetings and how that interaction would go.
Now, I knew Superman wasn't at his best at that point in his life, but the dude was still kind of striking in person, especially in that suit, despite all the erosion from his afflictions and spates of homelessness. He did resemble Christopher Reeve, albeit one who was paunchier and had smoker's teeth. During one meeting his cellphone rang and the ringtone was noisy and distracting. The secretary of the meeting asked if that was the Star Wars theme. Chris shot him a look and I thought he was gonna either walk out or smack the guy. Instead he just politely corrected him, allowing only a teensy bit of arrogance and annoyance to show through. "That's the Superman theme. Superman? Son of Jor-El..."
The secretary just nodded a silent eye-roll 'if you say so,' and knocked on the desk to begin the Serenity Prayer.
Then one day it happened–The Joker came in (as The Joker) while Chris was there in his dirty latex Superman costume. I was so delighted by the ridiculousness of it all I almost had to leave. It was a small meeting, too, less than 10 people, so together they were comically conspicuous. The meeting went on as usual though, neither one of them sharing or pretend-fighting, and we all stood in a circle at the end holding hands: me, The Joker, Superman and the rest of us. It works if you work it, the end.
Chris disappeared and I didn't see him until about a year later at another meeting, an early Thursday 8 a.m. one at a church where lots of homeless people attended because of the free coffee, donuts and kindness they offered. Chris didn't remember me from the other meeting and he didn't look like Superman at all anymore. He had a mangy beard and his street clothes were clearly not his own because he was wearing some giveaway t-shirt from a casino. He still had his sketchbook and he drew a picture of a woman. He flipped through the pages and I could see more drawings of women's faces, some of Superman in flight. Every time he spoke he seemed on the brink of sobbing. He shared at this meeting, too. He was brokenhearted, he said, his fiancee having left him, and he was all alone on the streets. The counselor who was running the meeting had to cut Chris off because he went over his time limit. That was the last I ever saw of him.
Last week, Chris was found dead inside a clothing donation bin in the Valley. He was 52. The cause has not yet been revealed, but I'm sure it wasn't a pleasant, peaceful end. There has been a massive amount of coverage about it–even a small nudge from the LA Times to get him a star on the Walk of Fame–and it's all been very positive despite how downtrodden he was.
I rewatched "Confessions of a Superhero" this weekend, both to help me write this and to rubber neck. All the grim irony and sad metaphors in the doc are exactly what I expected to find. I also just needed to remember that me, Superman, and The Joker all shared the same space at one time, held hands, and tried to be better people than we used to be.
– AJD
How to Suffer Better
By Clancy Martin
Recovering Person
I would prefer to believe that my alcoholism caused my second divorce. I had been more than a year sober when I started having the affair that ended my second marriage. Anyone who has been sober for a while will tell you not to make major changes in your relationships in the first few years of sobriety, and that’s good advice. But the same person will also tell you that a lot of relationships end when one or both people quit drinking. The nasty truth is, I would never have married my second wife if I hadn’t been drunk all the time, and after a year of sobriety (she kept on drinking at first, and then got sober several years later), we both realized that we hadn’t enjoyed each other’s company in a long time.
I remember one afternoon around this time, at a Starbuck’s in New York, my second wife and I were having a fight over the phone—she was back in Kansas City—and when I got off the phone an attractive woman with a heavy Swedish or Danish accent leaned over and asked me: “Are you alright? Would you like to talk about it?” I told her, “I’m great, thank you.” I was sad and angry but I was also enormously relieved. I walked up a side street in New York, I was on the Lower East Side, and shouted as loud as I could: “I’m free! I’m free!”
I was not free. That was eight years ago, and just a few weeks ago I was arguing with my ex-wife over the phone—this time, about our thirteen-year-old and a problem she’s having with school—and I don’t know how many times I have counted out the years until my daughters graduate from high school and start college, with the thought that, at last, their mother and I will have a little more distance and liberty. She must feel the same way.
I have since remarried, and my wife Amie pointed out the other day: “It’s funny, externally nothing changes when the girls have a problem. But a small thing goes wrong and everything gets out of whack.” And this leads me back to my alcoholism and second divorce (if you’re counting and feeling confused, I’ve been divorced twice and married three times), and the question of freedom. Not so very much changed in my life when I got sober: I had the same wife, the same children, the same job, the same schedule, the same work habits. Yes, I no longer spent the late afternoon and early evening hours secretly drinking; instead, at that time, I was in AA meetings or cooking or taking long walks with my youngest child in her baby sling. But even my secret drinking hours were mostly spent doing much the same things I’d done before. What did change was my attitude towards the hours of my day. Which gets me to thinking about what does it mean to talk about being free, or of the feeling of increasing liberty.
Now before I make it sound triumphant, which it was not—like many other alcoholics, during my first two years of sobriety I was depressed, often immobile with depression—I want to say that the weird thing was that my suffering turned out be not exactly a bad thing. Of course no one really wants to suffer, and given the choice between suffering and not suffering, I like any other feeling person would rather be pain-free. I also want to avoid causing suffering to others.
Schopenhauer writes: “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim…. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.”
So, if we’re all bound to suffer, should I simply give up? For Schopenhauer, I can do at least two things. The first is like what an alcoholic does: I can acknowledge the fact of my suffering. Because suffering multiplies when I’m in denial about suffering. I resent my suffering, and I lose the ability to discriminate between the causes of my suffering, which plunges me deeper into the abyss.
But why shouldn’t I be able to avoid the consciousness of my suffering throughout my life and just be blissful in my ignorance? For Schopenhauer (as for any addict—and Schopenhauer thinks we’re all addicts, hooked on desire itself), ignoring the situation aggravates the problem. With this view, life is like walking along an extremely brambly path. If I know what I’m doing, and I’m very, very careful, I am still going to be stuck with plenty of thorns. But if I pretend it’s not a brambly path and hope that bravado and stubbornness will carry me through, I am going to tear myself to shreds. I won’t eliminate suffering through recognizing it for what it is, but I can avoid unnecessary suffering. “Every beast is trained by blows,” as Heraclitus says: I can at least learn from my mistakes. If I know my desires will be frustrated, I might desire a little less.
A lot of my suffering is the pain of frustration or disappointment: I expect life to reward my efforts in ways that it won’t; I expect pleasure, at last, and then find pain once again; I expect tomorrow to be better than yesterday, and am confused and discouraged when it isn’t. These are unnecessary pains caused by uninformed, unnecessary beliefs about life. Like his fan Albert Camus, Schopenhauer thinks that part of Sisyphus’s pain of rolling his boulder up the mountain is caused by the belief that, this time, the boulder will actually stay at the summit. If he knows it’s going to roll back down again, that extra suffering created by expectation vanishes.
To be perfectly blunt: I drank to stop suffering. But if I’m no longer trying to fight suffering…well, that changes my perspective.
So the suffering of my divorce or of my failures as a father? I can try to be a better husband, but marriage is going to be hard. I can try to be the best dad I know how to be, but my kids are going to have problems. Of course I try to do better in whatever little ways I can find for practical improvement—and maybe I am slowly learning a few tricks. But I should also let myself accept that if life doesn’t kick me one way, it will find another.
As an addict this is a lot like letting go of the idea that I have control of my own life. As a person who has wrestled with depression, this is accepting that I will have another significant episode of depression in my life. The idea of “letting go”—Sisyphus letting go of his rock—is not a trivial liberation. If I am not in control of my suffering anymore, I can stop blaming myself for my suffering. If I no longer think that every time I suffer I am doing something wrong, then I am released from the idea that there is a right way, and with that, I can live more freely.
Clancy Martin is a contributing editor to The Small Bow. He has been in recovery a long time. He has a book on suicide forthcoming from Ecco in 2021.
Illustration by Edith Zimmerman
