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, but I could have made sure to avoid it. When my father came home and learned what happened, he understandably flew into a rage and came after me. This time I didn’t run. It only lasted a few minutes, no punches were thrown, and there were no physical injuries, but for me it was terrifying and traumatic. I left the house fighting back tears and totally freaked out, knowing that it would be a long time before I could return.
I was able to stay with a family I knew well, whose two daughters were among my close friends. To my relief and my parents’ surprise, they generously allowed me to live with them from August through December of 1976. During that time I was introduced to two new areas that would open my eyes in unexpected ways. Faye, the mother in the family with whom I stayed, was the first person to teach me about consciousness—how our mind determines to a great extent our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world; and how so much of our subjective experience is a function of our perception. For the first time, I began to get a sense of the spiritual as distinct from the religious, as well as understand drug-induced states of consciousness as part of a much larger continuum.
The physical separation from my parents gave us all room to breathe. The distance allowed us the space for a gradual rapprochement, and after about a month I started to have dinner with my family once a week. At my parents’ urging, we also began family therapy. I didn’t want to participate in family therapy and I was convinced that it would be a waste of time, but I also didn’t want to bear the weight of responsibility for not being willing to try since so many of the family’s problems seemed to track back to me. Moreover, I really did want to have a relationship with my family and had no idea how to get there from where we were.
Family therapy was both challenging and fascinating. Our therapist was an experienced and savvy MSW who used an explicitly family systems approach. Even though—as is so often the case with the Scapegoat—it was my acting out that brought the family into therapy, to my amazement I was not blamed. As much focus was placed on my parents and on my siblings as on me. As uncomfortable as I know it was for my parents, particularly for my father, to not be in charge, they were open and receptive. Family therapy changed how we related to one another, and for a time, communication within our family, and between my parents and me, improved dramatically.
All through this period, I continued to develop my capacity to live a double life, negotiating very different worlds—precariously balancing a “B”+ average with the roles of druggie, varsity athlete, pot dealer, and student council vice president. My group of close friends dubbed me “Citizen Dan” for my ability to shift gears and strap on a diplomatic persona whenever it served my purposes.
I moved back home in early January 1977, and having accumulated enough credits to graduate early, completed high school later that month. I graduated somewhere toward the bottom of the top 15 percent of my class. Some family context: my brother would become valedictorian, graduating first in his high school class; one of my sisters was salutatorian, graduating second in her class; and my other sister graduated somewhere between the top 5 and 10 percent of her class. When I said good-bye to high school, I was well versed in the three “R”s (well, not so much ’rithmetic—math and I never got along well) and intimately familiar with the four “S”s—smoking, swallowing, snorting, and shooting.
Two weeks later, at the age of seventeen, I left New York
