Hallelujah

If an addict doesn't tell you he's sober, is he even sober?

Photo by John de Jong on Unsplash

Years ago when I lived in Seattle, I set up a sound system in my room: striped wires that I’d twisted into the backs of two plywood-framed speakers, a sub-woofer I’d crammed beneath my desk, all of which I connected a laptop, which I then connected to my TV (which was connected to its own, second, laptop.)

A real crack-head Rube Goldberg device.

But it worked. Night and day, I’d play music. Elliott Smith, Lou Reed, Alice in Chains. The hissing bass that came out from the woofer shook my desk. It rattled around all the used aluminium foil, broken pens, and pipes I kept hidden inside one of the drawers. Beside drugs, songs were all I had. And the musicians who made them (most of them also addicts, most of them long since passed) were the closest thing I had to friends.

One evening, amongst this playlist of “china-white noise,” amongst the traffic from the street outside, and the people stomping around in the apartment above mine, I blacked out. Nothing out of the ordinary. It had been a long day of kicking. I’d spent it sweating stink into my mattress with my phone next to my head, waiting for it to light up—all day waiting for my dealer to let me know he had arrived. The problem, of course, was the me going unconscious bit. It’s not like I was waiting on DoorDash. My dealer wasn’t going to leave anything on my doorstep, and certainly not without a great big tip.

Then came the miracle from on high: Jeff Buckley’s voice. The next song in my playlist had started. Despite the softness, despite it being a song that is more likely to put you to sleep rather than wake you up, wake me up it did.

Hallelujah.

Seriously, that was the song. Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” His voice awoke me like the rising of Lazarus. And no sooner after, did my phone buzz. My dealer had arrived. I’m not superstitious, I don’t believe in God, and I’m certainly not one to exaggerate (you know me,) but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Jeff Buckley saved my life that night.

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How is everyone? It’s been a while. Are you good? Any projects anyone is working on? For the last year and a half, I’ve been heads down in a new novel. A story about…well, I won’t spoil that just yet. What I will say is that for the book I’ve been spending some time researching the Chelsea Hotel. What a treasure. An American Delphi. If you aren’t familiar with the Chelsea, it’s a place where, for over the last 100 years, the biggest who’s who of artists have made pilgrimage. Bob Dylan, Jackson Pollock, Tom Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith.

Leonard Cohen.

You get the idea.

What struck me was why the Chelsea was ever built. A New Yorker named Philip Hubert designed it in 1884 with strict adherence to a set of Utopian ideals described by the French philosopher Charles Fourier. Here is a taste of that vision:

Such a system corrupted everyone, Fourier wrote, as the wealthy wasted their lives in forced indolence, and the poor in unending drudgery. What was needed was a cleaning of the decks of centuries of mindless custom, followed by a scientific approach towards answering these essential questions: What made for a fulfilling life? What did people really want…and how could a structure be created to fulfill the desires and needs of everyone?¹

Thus came the Chelsea; a structure, from its outset, designed to pose such lofty questions. A center where people from all different backgrounds, with all different skills and talents, could come together and try their collective hand at providing such answers.

What does it mean to live a fulfilling life?

When February 15th rolls around, I will have reached a decade of sobriety. That’s ten whole whopping years. It wasn’t sheer will-power that brought me here though. It takes a village. It takes the kind of power that only comes when a group of people gather around a singular purpose. Dare I say a higher power?

Hallelujah, indeed.

1. Inside the Dream Palace by Sherill Tippins (pg. 7 - 8)