What wants to be written?

The question put to the Pleroma and the answer comes

A couple eating breakfast at the Capitol Pancake House

Not THAT Capitol! Very well, we’ll go with it. I was there with my dear wife, Lynn, having breakfast the day after we came down to take my widowed mother out to Second Street Bistro in Williamsburg, VA. We were at the Capital Pancake House - I’m pretty sure it’s with an “a” and not an “o” but we’ve done both here. I was reading a post here on Substack from

Michael Chabon

regarding how the first sentence of Wonder Boys had arrived some time in 1994. That was the year that I arrived in Pittsburgh, hot on the heels of my first (and hopefully only) divorce. I’d moved into a house two doors down Neville Street from the intersection of Neville and Center Avenue. It wasn’t far from a Chinese place called “The Dragon Inn” - yes, that’s really what it was called. There was a Wine and Spirits shop nearby too.

One afternoon, I was coming back to the house where I rented a studio on the third floor. Rent was only $195 a month! I was stopped by a guy on the porch who was sipping on a “Big Gulp” iced tea and he regaled me with stories of everything that beer had done to him. He was being allowed to live in the basement by the land-lady. I listened attentively to be polite, in part because I felt a little like I didn’t know what he might do if I tried to give him the brush-off, he seemed so intent on taelling me his life story.

All the while, I listened, and a voice within me said, “Hal, if you go on drinking, you’ll end up just like him. He’s your future self delivering a forewarning!” While my drinking had gotten the better of me since tasting a glass while my then-wife was in the bath, I still had managed to successfully land a position as a teaching assistant with a full scholarship to complete my MA in German at Pitt. No one had attempted to get me to give up drink since I kept my sacred relationship with John Barleycorn a carefully guarded secret. It’s said that we are only as sick as our secrets.

I count this as one of the few effective 12th Step experiences — where someone carries the message to an alcoholic who is still suffering — that I have had. It didn’t take - then. It wouldn’t be for another 3 years until I would again go to darken the doors of a 12th step meeting. A fellow in a rumpled gray sweat suit brought up the discussion topic there in Room G16A of the Cathedral of Learning: “What do you do when you wake up paralyzed with fear, unable to get out of bed in the morning.” Everyone who wanted to say anything then had the opportunity to state what they did WHEN, not IF, they found themselves in that situation. Some was very practical. Stay in bed until nature calls, for example. I related. I had been there the previous Wednesday as had this fellow. I went up to him and said, “Sounds like we are in the same boat! Maybe we can help each other out?”

Now, considering that I had walked in that morning with about thirty hours between me and that bottle of Old Smuggler that I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, and that I had a firm plan to kill myself after the meeting by wading into the Ohio River at the Point State Park WHEN, not IF, these people didn’t have an answer for me; the fact that I was willing to postpone my suicide long enough to try to be helpful to this guy who looked worse than I felt (and remember, I was suicidal), says something.

Well, he admitted that we might be able to help each other out and I gave him my phone number. He gave me his and then, hesitatingly, as he spoke with a stutter, he suggested that I might like to join him and the chap who’d chaired the meeitng and shared largely about his shoes (and whom I suspected might not be all that “tightly wrapped”) for a coffee. I accepted. When we got to the cafe, this fellow ordered “A Shot In The Dark” - or a shot of espresso in a black coffee. I figured that’s exactly what I was and wasn’t taking simultaneously. I was going to give these guys a chance to tell me what they were doing and to try it with them.

That was November 14, 1997. I could go on from there and probably will. However, the point is, if point there be, that a single hour can be that transformative; taking a person ready to end it all and converting them into someone willing to try to help someone else.

My guru is “Nobody’s Fool” AKA Hugh Romney AKA Wavy Gravy. Now 89 as of May 15, Wavy is fond of saying, “When you get to the bottom of the human condition where the nit is slamming into the grit and your sinking, but you reach down to help someone who is sinking worse than you are….(!!!)….EVERBODY GETS HIGH (and you don’t even need LSD to do that). So it is.

If you haven’t already seen it, please take a minute or two to watch the trailer and then either rent or buy the Wavy Gravy Story: Saint Misbehavin’ -