Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

896 Flying High Again

FLYING HIGH AGAIN

(Here it is folks. The first chapter of book twelve, the final book in this arc of Daron's Guitar Chronicles. -ctan)
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Which do you think was harder, facing my vocal coach after almost two months on the road wrecking my throat, or facing my friends and co-workers after having spent all night and part of a day out of my mind in a water tank on the roof of a Brazilian hotel? Sometimes the more I describe it, the more nuts that night seems. But I know it happened. I did that. No one else.

I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if Ziggy hadn't found me. Would I have eventually come to my senses? Or passed out from dehydration and drowned? It's one of those questions I don't like to think about, but which still crops up sometimes in dark moments.

But a moment is just a moment, not a whole night and a day. There's a kind of comfort in knowing how far down the bottom is. It's really far, actually.

Really far. Remember that.

Ziggy and I made it off the roof without running into anyone. We went down the access stairs, not the ladder to my window that I'd climbed up. In my room, he made a quick phone call, I drank four or five glasses of water, and then we slept for some number of hours... I'm really not sure how long. Long enough that when I woke up I was feeling more sane, I guess, which meant I felt deeply ashamed of having acted, well, crazy.

I wasn't actually sane, yet, but there are degrees of it, you know. Sort of like how there are degrees of drunkenness. The drunker you get the less able you are to tell how drunk you are, but the more you sober up the more you realize how drunk you previously were. I was enough back in my mind now to realize how out of my mind I had been, but not sane enough to realize how stupid it was to feel horrible about it.

Bart, Carynne, and Flip, on the other hand, didn't seem at all judgmental about me going off the deep end. They were just relieved I was okay. There was a lot of hugging. But them being okay with me being a nutcase didn't relieve the intense shame and discomfort curdling all through me.

That was what I expected every day at a rehab center like Betty Ford would feel like. It was worse than nausea. It was almost enough to make me break with reality again. By the way, that term, "break with reality," wasn't one I knew at the time. I'd learn it later, from a therapist.

Since my feelings were making me so uncomfortable that I wanted to crawl out of my skin, I decided the best way to deal with them was to concentrate on other people's feelings for a while. And that meant facing up to everyone else. Even though I'd been out of my mind when I said it, I was serious about what I'd told Ziggy: it was important to me to say goodbye to everyone. Sure, these are all professionals who are used to tours coming and going. But I never forgot that Louis was upset about the way the tour in 1989 had fallen apart. It costs nothing to try not to trample over people's emotions.

Well, nothing but my pride. But owning up to how messed up I had been was going to help me heal, right? I sure hoped so.

I did it on the long charter flight back to New York from Rio de Janeiro. I went around the various cliques and enclaves–the dancers, the musicians, the production crew–thanking people for their work and apologizing for being so out of it. Apologizing was painful and awkward as hell but I felt it was my penance or something.

For the most part people were really cool about it. A bit confused maybe, about why I was talking to them, but they mostly said encouraging things. The dancers were the most hostile, except for Josie, who kissed me on the cheek and said Ziggy and I should come out to his beach cottage on Fire Island some time.

Ziggy didn't go around with me, at my insistence. It was something I felt I had to do alone. But we had a big talk when I was done. He was waiting for me when I got back to the upper level of first class. He was sitting in one of the recliners, drinking a cup of tea from a pot on a small table between two of the chairs. I sat in the other chair and he offered me some of the tea.