Chapter 7: A Search for Truth and a Journey Through the Abyss to Redemption
Be mindful oh Mankind, of the painful secrets that we must keep, Through openness and honesty we may awaken, or by silence suffer and stay asleep —B.P.
As a society, we need to remember that those struggling with mental illness, including addiction and alcoholism, are like the “canaries in the coal mine” for our collective well-being. We’re all vulnerable to the damage caused by spiritual suffocation if we ignore the stories of our most fragile members. The marginalized, sensitive, and oppressed often stand at the forefront of our shared human journey, reflecting the state of our collective spirit.
As Jesus of Nazareth once said, “Whatever you have done to the least of these, you have done unto me”—a reminder that any culture turning away from the harm it causes, whether deliberate, accidental, or simply uncomfortable to face, stands indicted. A growing spiritual culture cares for all without limits, looks inward with honesty, and makes amends for its wrongs. Yet harm persists, and we all carry stories of wounds. The invisible scars left by social and family trauma are often the deepest, most dangerous, and easiest to deny, quietly shaping lives while the world overlooks the sacredness of human connection and the deep need for safety.
Addiction rarely emerges from society’s dark fringes or the inner shadows of a fractured mind. Instead, it originates in a profoundly human yearning—a quiet, unspoken desire to soothe a pain that refuses to be named, or to chase the allure of life’s unknown thrills. What begins as a fleeting escape can swiftly devolve into a consuming labyrinth, a force so relentless that it wrestles the soul into submission, snuffing out hope’s fragile flame. Addiction’s trajectory is rarely straightforward; it weaves an intricate web of triumph and despair, exhilaration and desolation. Its presence is pervasive yet often obscured, so intimate in its devastation that it eludes even the closest of observers.
Mental illness, too, is born from a complex confluence of forces. Cultural and familial narratives intertwine with genetics and early childhood experiences to shape its emergence. The emotions imprinted on an unborn child, the subtle energy of parental interactions, and the delicate moments in the first three years of life plant seeds that may not sprout until years later. Addiction and mental illness are often tethered—a dual storm of anguish, each feeding the other’s destructive power. Together, they form two sides of a coin that, when cast into the tumult of life, leaves in its wake not winners or losers but a deeply reverberating impact on individuals, families, and entire communities.
This chapter marks the unveiling of my deeply personal search for truth—a search shaped by addiction, unraveling mental health, and the pursuit of redemption. It is the story of shedding the suffocating cloaks of personal conditioning and donning the robes of universal spirit. It is a tale not of ultimate defeat but of the raw fortitude of the human spirit, a search for light entrenched in chaos. For family members, psychologists, sociologists, spiritual seekers, and anyone who dares to explore the depths of human suffering and resilience, this is an invitation—a call to walk the fractured, uneven road toward understanding and healing.
One of the ugly cloaks I wore is represented by the poem below, written while I was hospitalized in the Physician’s and Surgeon’s Care Unit for substance abuse recovery in 1984.
THE FOOLS
You know who we are, there is no need for our names.
We may be outwardly different, but inside are the same.
Vacationing on chemical trips, playing strange mind games.
Striving for our culture’s version of success, and its dubious fame.
We remain graceless souls blended into life’s darkest mass.
Affirming our uniqueness, though stuck in the same class.
Parading around like winners but appearing just like an ass.
Steering clear of self-awareness, Oh our transparency of glass!
Spewing words of wisdom, but with only another dog’s bark.
Seeking to make a good life, but on life’s script leaving a shit mark.
We may eventually see the light, but now life is always so dark.
Needing purifying inner flames, while snuffing every divine spark.
Hoping to someday blossom, yet we will never possess Love’s flower.
Swimming in intoxicating sweetness and then drowning in its sour.
Never realizing that, over life, we don’t hold any real lasting power.
We avoid the dark reality of our lives, by living in a chemical tower.
We bring up life’s rear, though we think that we should be first.
We want all of the best, somebody else deserves the worst!
Our life should be more blessed, why on earth do we feel cursed?
Our dependency creates toxic bubbles, just waiting to be burst!
This dark cloak clung so tight to me that I thought it was my flesh. Sometimes the road to clarity and healing winds through the darkest places, past a broken sense of self and a feeling of disconnection from the universe. My path toward healing was one of those. This is not a sanitized story; it is not here to soothe or smooth over jagged edges. By 1987, I carried the wounds of sixteen years of addiction and a near suicide, the lifelong echoes of trauma, and the failures and losses that shaped me. But I also carry the truth earned from those depths—and the redemption that followed.
I won’t retrace every step of that descent here; the full account of my near-death, the strange fellowship I found in Portland’s underworld, and the man who ultimately pulled me back from the edge deserves its own telling, and I return to it later in this book, in the chapter where I confront what it truly means to die. What matters here, at the start, is the moment the search itself began: standing in a pharmacy line in January of 1986 with prescriptions I intended to use to end my life, a sudden and unbidden thought cut through the noise—now I must begin the search for truth. That single sentence, arriving uninvited, became the axis my whole life would eventually turn on.
It wasn’t yet a noble quest. It wasn’t driven by insight, blinding light, or revelation. Those blessings were to come only after my emergence from the dark underworld. Perhaps similar to the hero’s journey acknowledged in ancient mythology and modern literature, I had to enter a completely unknown world and fight my demons there. I had to scrape and fall and crawl to find the hidden healing vein of my long-lost self. It was a last-gasp attempt to find something—anything—worth holding onto. And, against every likelihood, I found it: first in a stranger who saw a person worth saving where the world saw only wreckage, and later in the slow, unglamorous work of sobriety, family, and faith.
The Death of Dreams and the Rebirth of Meaning
If grief is the culmination of love, what then is the death of a dream? It isn’t loud like funerals or heartbreak; it’s a quiet decay that smothers the soul. When I lost my first wife to mental illness, and my dreams of becoming an Air Force pilot and later a NASA astronaut, I felt like I’d lost most of my identity. Dreams are the compass guiding us through life, and without them, I drifted into a debilitating fog of chronic self-doubt and cynicism.
Yet the darkness of losing those dreams became fertile ground for transformation. The ultimate lesson? Redemption doesn’t mean going back to what was. It means finding beauty in what remains—in the jagged, shattered pieces that refuse to align perfectly. There was beauty to be witnessed through the kaleidoscope of my broken parts, but I had to develop the discernment to see it. What I once saw as a barren wasteland became the birthplace of something greater. The death of those dreams stripped away illusions and made room for a purpose deeper than ambition, wider than a desire to just blend in and remain silent about what I have seen.
The New Normal of Addictive and Cultural Disease
Today, what concerns me is how deeply normalized addiction and self-destruction have become in our culture. We fragment our life force through adhering to patriarchal norms and toxicities, and build walls between each other through unchecked coping mechanisms, competitive burnout, and resistance to treating mental illness openly. This is not a story about me; it is about us—all of us who unwittingly perpetuate a culture that denies vulnerability and glorifies survival at the expense of thriving.
We need a paradigm shift. Addiction and mental health issues are not a moral failure; they are a public health crisis. Mental health care must become accessible, not stigmatized. Dream-smothering despair must be met not with judgment, but with possibilities.
My search for truth has evolved, not ended. I share this story not to wrap my experience in a neat narrative arc, but to connect with those who also walk along the edges. To those overwhelmed by grief, broken dreams, or addiction, I offer this knowledge hard-won through decades of survival and healing:
Love and loss are two sides of the same coin. The deeper the grief, the more meaningful the connection.
The death of a dream doesn’t mean the death of hope. It is often a clearing—a painful space where something new can grow.
Seek people, places, or practices that remind you of light.
My life’s purpose isn’t to pretend away the abyss but to show others that it’s possible to climb out of it and carry its truth forward. The search for truth that took me through the darkest regions of hell eventually gave me wings and enabled me to fly toward the sun, and beyond. I had a series of dramatic, healing experiences over the several years following my suicidal ideation that restored me to a physical, emotional, and spiritual sanity I had never before experienced. I began documenting this transformation in 2016.
I had been trapped most of my life by our culture’s conspiracy of silence. One of the keys holding that prison shut was my unhealed relationship with my father, and our sick patriarchal culture at large—a thread I pick up again later in this book. Overcoming a lifetime of oppression and control by others is no easy task, and it must be done clean and sober for the true depth of healing to permanently take hold. I also confronted toxic masculinity, toxic religion, and toxic capitalism—the three pillars of darkness upholding much of our culture. Much of that material is explored in other chapters of this book.
My journey through addiction was a profound challenge marked by despair, shattered dreams, and unexpected friendships. Yet within this darkness, I discovered a powerful spark of hope and the unwavering strength to move forward. My story embodies the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of connection.
One of the most painful realities I’ve faced is the tendency of people to turn away, not just from my struggles but from the struggles of many others. I’ve witnessed the stark lack of empathy and compassion that permeates our troubled culture. Adjusting to this sick, potentially terminally ill American society is not a hallmark of good mental health, but becoming part of its healing transformation is.
Addiction, suicide, and mental illness have become pervasive issues, and their growth shows no signs of slowing. We all can make a meaningful impact on each other’s lives. Our positive vibrations can resonate far beyond our immediate circles. However, on the darker side, each suicide typically affects around 140 people. If my suicide attempt had succeeded, it would have devastated my parents’ lives, though I might not have impacted many others, since I had few fulfilling relationships, and even fewer who cared about me.
My healing journey now holds immense value, not just for me but also for those who still find themselves in the depths of despair. I aim to reach out to those who are open to my message of healing and hope. Perhaps one day I will positively influence the lives of 140 people, contributing to their greater good. This is not an ending. It never is.
When Dreams Die: The Silent Grief of Our Guiding Light
Few human experiences carry the unbearable weight of tragedy as profoundly as the death of a child. It’s a wound so piercing, so absolute, that it leaves behind an emotional landscape devoid of light. Now imagine a different kind of death—one that is equally crushing, yet less visible to the world: the death of a dream.
This grief may not manifest through tears shed at a gravesite or the numb silence of mourners, but it lingers in the soul, darkening inner worlds. Dreams are guiding lights, the stars that illuminate paths across the vast terrain of existence. When these lights extinguish, the dreamer is often left wandering in the shadows of despair and confusion.
Dreams are far more than idle imaginings or lofty aspirations. They are the scaffolding of our identity, the force that propels us forward when nothing else will. A cherished dream infuses us with purpose, energizes our days, and fills our nights with visions of what could be. To dream is to affirm life itself, to declare that there is something more—a horizon worth reaching for.
Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described despair as “being unconscious of having a self”—a feeling eerily parallel to losing the essence of what once inspired us. Without dreams, we run the risk of losing the “self” that connects us to our inner voice, passions, and higher aspirations.
The death of a dream isn’t always abrupt. Sometimes it is a slow and agonizing dimming, as obstacles or doubts pile up until the horizon is no longer visible. Other times it is sudden, triggered by a life-altering failure, an irreversible event, or perhaps harsh words that puncture our confidence.
Consider the aspiring writer or artist who abandons their craft after repeated rejection. Or the entrepreneur whose startup crumbles after years of effort, leaving them financially and emotionally depleted. Or a young wife who suffers an irreversible medical condition, stifling all hopes for her emotional stability and joy in marriage. The grief, though rarely acknowledged by others, is no less real than mourning the loss of a loved one.
When external, tangible losses occur, such as death, a breakup, or financial ruin, the world often responds with condolences, rituals, or support systems. But when it comes to the death of dreams, the response is strikingly absent. The grieving dreamer is often met with dismissal (“Maybe it wasn’t meant to be”), platitudes (“You’ll bounce back”), or worse, silence.
Consciously or not, society pressures individuals to “move on” without fully processing their loss. This message fuels shame, leaving the individual with a lingering sense of failure. Such invalidation only deepens the isolation. The dreamer feels as though they cannot acknowledge their grief, rendering their loss invisible not just to others, but to themselves.
The death of a dream often mimics the stages of traditional grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It can leave individuals feeling untethered, destructive, or swallowed by apathy. Some signs of “dream grief” include:
Loss of identity: Who am I without this dream?
Chronic self-doubt: Was I foolish to believe in it at all?
Fear of trying again: What if I only fail again?
Cynicism: If my dream has died, what’s the point of having any?
This psychological fog traps the dreamer in a purgatory of longing and resignation, where the future feels impossibly distant, and the past remains an aching reminder of what might have been.
The road to healing begins with honesty. Acknowledge your loss—honor it as a profound chapter of your human experience rather than a failure to be forgotten. Acceptance doesn’t mean letting go of all hope. Instead, it frees you to reflect on the past, allowing space for new aspirations to emerge.
The death of a dream often clears the path for a greater, more authentic version of your life’s purpose. The artist, once paralyzed by rejection, may discover joy in collaborating with others instead of perfecting solitary masterpieces. The failed entrepreneur, stripped of their initial vision, may find success by pivoting or mentoring others in their path. The valedictorian student-athlete, felled by an injury and an addictive process, eventually finds recovery, and then shares their experience, strength, and hope with others still suffering.
This reframing begins by asking:
What has this experience taught me about myself?
If I could reimagine this dream, what would it look like now?
How can I repurpose my knowledge, skills, or resources to serve a new vision?
Transformation is not linear, but it invites us to move forward, not with blind optimism, but with compassionate realism. Sometimes it’s impossible to rekindle the inner light alone, especially when consumed by self-doubt. Seek connection. Trusted mentors, supportive communities, or even professional counselors can offer a clearer perspective, gently illuminating paths you might not yet see.
The human being who witnesses the death of a dream, and dares to dream again, is among the most courageous. This resilience shapes not only individuals but entire communities. Our collective stories of failure, perseverance, and triumph unite us in the shared complexity of life’s bittersweet beauty.
Walt Disney once famously said, “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.” But perhaps a truer realization is this: dreams may die, evolve, or retreat into the shadows. Yet it is the enduring hope, the belief in light itself, that ultimately keeps us alive.
If your guiding light has dimmed, know this: you are not alone. A single candle can reignite another. Surround yourself with those who uplift, inspire, and remind you of your inner worth. We are never meant to carry the weight of such loss in solitude.
We are the keeper of our inner light, challenged, perhaps, but never extinguished. The path ahead may be unclear, but by choosing to walk it with curiosity and faith, we honor both the dreams we’ve lost and those yet to come.
Never forget that dreams, both waking and sleeping, are manifestations of our sacred, creative nature. They are the vehicles for our hopes, ambitions, prayers, and best intentions. Being carried by them connects us all to our universe and gives us greater access to its unlimited bandwidth.
The search for truth through the abyss of addiction taught me what it costs to stay disconnected from those around us. It’s time now to examine that disconnection more closely, not as personal history, but as a universal architecture. If energy flows through circuits, so too does it flow, or fail to flow, between one human being and another.
Chapter 5: The Plow Horse and the Underworld: A Descent Into Living Death
The search for truth becomes the joy of living when one sees their position on the collective grid of life, and stops being just another of its marionettes.
This chapter picks up a thread first laid down earlier in this book: my search for truth, born the moment I stood in a pharmacy line with pills meant to end my life. What follows is the full account of what that search actually cost—and what it looked like from the inside, in a season when I lived closer to death than to life. It belongs here, in this section on dying, because I did not experience one death that year. I experienced two: the death my body nearly suffered, and the slower, more essential death of the self I had built my entire identity around.
I. The Origin of the Wound
I did not arrive at death’s doorstep in a single, dramatic stride.
I crawled there. Slowly. Over three decades of quiet erosion.
This is not a chapter about dying in the clinical sense—no hospital beds, no hospice corridors, no final whispered goodbyes. This is a chapter about a different kind of dying: the prolonged, self-administered variety. The kind that society does not eulogize, does not frame in a ceremony, does not acknowledge with flowers and casseroles left on a doorstep.
I am an electrician who once tried not just to dim my own light, but to switch it off for good. In that fading, in that journey into what I can only describe as my personal underworld, I learned that death doesn’t always crash in with thunder. Sometimes it’s a slow fade. A drop in voltage so gradual you barely notice, until the glow is almost gone and the room is nearly swallowed by darkness.
The first wound came before I had language for wounds. In November of 1955, I entered this world as a source of distress—a crying baby in a snowstorm in Portland, inconvenient to a father working two jobs and desperate for sleep before a 2:30 AM paper route. My earliest lesson was administered in a car in the home garage, in the dark, in silence, where my parents placed my blanketed body on work nights for several months: Your voice has no value. Love will not be available when you need it most. The people you trust will let you down precisely when you need them the most.
Trauma, as I have come to understand it, does not strike like lightning and vanish. It is more like a slow leak in a foundation, invisible until the walls begin to crack.
II. The Lineage of Pain
My father, Beryl Donald Paullin, was born in 1927, a man of immense intellectual curiosity who enrolled at the University of Portland after returning from the Navy in 1947, studying Theology, Psychology, Metaphysics, and the Philosophy of Mind. He sought to understand the human condition and was forced to abandon that pursuit for the grind of survival and family. The bitter irony that I would later pick up his dropped mantle, finishing what he started, was lost on me for most of my life. As a child, I did not know him as a philosopher. I knew him as a force of nature: often physically distant, always exuberant, and sometimes terrifying.
His discipline was swift. His belt was certain. And his own father, I would later learn, was far worse.
This is the architecture of inherited pain. We do not simply grieve the loss of those we love; we carry the unresolved grief of those who came before us, encoded in our nervous systems before we ever had a word for grief at all. My father was not simply the monster of my childhood. He was a broken child of broken parents, passing down the only coping strategies the previous generation had given him: dominance, control, and the suppression of anything that looked like weakness.
The canary does not choose the mine. It is placed there. Its suffering is not its failure—it is the signal that must be recognized, or all are in peril. The culture that shaped my family rewarded the suppression of pain and pathologized its honest expression. We were good at self-medication in this country. We still are. The rise of addiction, depression, loneliness, rage, and homelessness that now troubles our national landscape is not a mystery to those of us who have lived inside it. It is the predictable harvest of a civilization that has never learned to mend its wounded inner children. I was one such child.
III. The Shapes That Dying Takes Before Death
By January of 1986, I had become what I can only describe as a living ghost. Thirty years old. A mind fractured by years of alcohol, marijuana, and, recently, methamphetamine abuse. I had lost a marriage to Donelle Mae Flick, a beautiful and tragically wounded woman crushed by the weight of toxic masculinity and mental illness; a career with the US Postal Service that I had voluntarily abandoned in July of 1985; a full-ride Air Force scholarship; and the early promise of a man who had once dreamed of becoming a pilot and an astronaut. In September of 1985, I had walked away from a long-term relationship, severing yet another tether to a life that had once seemed possible. I was living out of Randy Olson’s apartment, having recently abandoned a relationship with a woman named Alcindia to whom I had been engaged.
The addicted mind builds its labyrinth slowly, brick by brick, long before you realize you are inside it. By the time you search for an exit, every corridor looks like a wall.
I had made a private pact with myself at age fifteen: if I could not shake my addiction by thirty, I would end my life. That deadline arrived on January 28, 1986, announced by Randy’s screams from his bedroom as I lay on his couch, recovering from yet another night of escape into the bottle: “Bruce, wake up! The Challenger just exploded!”
I watched the Space Shuttle disintegrate on the television screen, that plume of orange, white, and gray smoke, and understood, in the marrow of my bones, that I was watching the external manifestation of my own internal reality. My potential had been vast. My dreams had disintegrated in the same catastrophic way: a structural failure, long in the making, finally visible to anyone watching.
I went to the pharmacist with unfilled prescriptions for antidepressants and Xanax from Dr. Dan Beavers, intending to swallow them all. Standing in line, I ran into Mike, a casual acquaintance. I tried to share even the smallest fragment of my pain, but he shut me down flatly; he had no time for other people’s problems. It reaffirmed everything I believed about the indifference of the world and reminded me I would not be missed too much when I exited this life.
The pharmacist refused to fill the prescriptions. My psychiatrist would not fill them without another visit. He was grieving a patient—Scott—who had already succeeded where I was planning to succeed. He sensed the direction I was heading and extracted a promise that I would not harm myself. I did not intend to keep that promise.
But the universe, it seemed, had other plans. A new thought erupted into my mind, sudden, inexplicable, almost violent in its clarity: Now I must begin the search for truth. If I could not find a truth that would restore some sense of purpose and meaning, I would remove my flickering light from this life. I retrieved those prescriptions and stuffed them under the front seat of my car. If the search for truth failed, the pills would still be waiting.
IV. The Sacred Geography of the Underworld
What followed was not recovery. Not yet. What followed was a descent, a further plunge into Portland’s dark underbelly that, in retrospect, I can only understand as the soul’s last desperate attempt to locate truth in the only places it had not yet looked.
I called my best friend Sean, who had left for the US Air Force in 1977 and was stationed in Madrid, Spain. He offered me a place to stay with him and his wife Natty after I told him I was dying of a brain tumor. I accepted, got a passport, and applied for my US Postal Service retirement pay. I never made it back to him, because I wanted to die locally.
After a disastrous weekend at the beach with Di Di McCloud, during which I abandoned her to cocaine and repulsive company at a Seaside bar, drove home in a blackout, rear-ended a car at freeway speeds in North Plains, and ultimately abandoned my wrecked Dodge Dart at a repair shop, I made a decision: this descent would be a solo journey. I swore off all relationships, other than platonic, for its duration.
I filed for bankruptcy in March of 1986, a filing that became official, with a grim coincidence I did not miss, on my 31st birthday, November 20, 1986. I was severing financial ties just as I planned to sever my mortal ones. When Randy found a new girlfriend and could no longer house me, the Datsun 310 became my bedroom, my kitchen, my confessional. I occasionally squatted in unoccupied homes, distanced myself from my family, and let the current of addiction pull me deeper into its undertow.
I frequented two bars in Southeast Portland, and what became my favorite tavern on Foster Road, called the Punjab. It was there that I found a landscape populated by drug chemists and undercover officers, hitmen and prostitutes, runaways and Vietnam veterans still fighting wars that had officially ended a decade before.
These spaces were sacred geography of a particular kind. Not sacred in the way we typically use that word, not holy, not elevated, not gilded. Sacred in the way that any threshold is sacred: because people were dying there, honestly and without pretense. These were my teachers, in that season of living death.
Ralph. A man from Scappoose, Ralph became the central figure of my underworld education and, improbably, my protector. Through him I was introduced to a cast of characters pulled from a noir nightmare: drug chemists, undercover officers, hitmen, homeless men and women, and prostitutes. I was an anomaly in their world, too healthy, too educated. I was nearly beaten once for using the word “magnanimous.” A patron told me to use a nickel word whenever I was tempted to use a quarter word.
I grew to love Ralph. I became his primary driver for many of his “exchanges.” Once, all four tires of my car were slashed overnight at one of his parties. Ralph put the word out on the streets that this was unacceptable, and whoever had done it would answer to him personally. I felt strangely safe with Ralph, even as continued threats circled me, and it was a safety I had not felt in years.
One afternoon, while jacking up my car for tire replacements, I used my AA Big Book for extra elevation under the jack. Ralph told me to “ditch that evil book.” I kept it hidden from all sight from that point forward, though I have owned that very same book to this day. I had, I noted with a brief flicker of dark humor, finally found a constructive use for the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Sarah and Jake. Sarah was Ralph’s long-term girlfriend. They had an open arrangement, and Ralph offered his blessing for any platonic or otherwise connection. I kept our friendship strictly platonic; I had sworn off emotional entanglement for the duration of this descent.
We often visited friends in jail together. It was on one such visit, to see our friend Jake, that my reality fractured for the first time. After snorting designer meth, Sarah casually revealed that the “kind” man we were visiting through the jail’s glass partition was a hitman for a motorcycle gang. The cognitive dissonance of this revelation, compounded by the chemicals I had consumed, caused a stroke-like episode. Meeting Jake at the jail, I could produce only animalistic grunts and squawks. My voice had been literally stolen by the horror and the chemicals, a terrifying manifestation of the conspiracy of silence that had governed my entire life.
Steve. Steve was the big brother I never had. Well-dressed, intellectually sharp, a man of mystery who navigated the treacherous landscape of the underworld with a composure I would only later understand was professional. He often played the role of mentor, criticizing the rate of my drug abuse while occasionally using with me, always in far smaller quantities, always maintaining a composure I utterly lacked. He constantly “tested” my resolve by exposing me to desperate situations and broken people, perhaps to see if I would crumble, or find the truth he understood I was searching for.
Steve was the only person I ever told that I was on a search for truth. He told me I was in the wrong neighborhood for that. But he remained available for conversation whenever I wished. I had no idea he was a gatekeeper to my next step in life.
I would learn much later that Steve had been working undercover, investigating reported corruption within the Portland Police Department, specifically cocaine distribution by an unnamed officer, and monitoring the echoes of Steven Kessler, a notorious criminal who had killed a prison guard in 1982, escaped, and broken into the DEA Portland office to steal documents. Kessler had, unbeknownst to me at the time, several indirect ties to people from my past and present: I had been roommates with Tom Craven at the Care Unit in 1984, a co-conspirator in the 1966 Oregon State Prison riots. I had grown up in the same neighborhood as Wayne Harsh, a former Clackamas County officer who allegedly had supplied the getaway car to Kessler after his escape. Steve had been watching over me, not as a friend, exactly, but as something harder to name.
Hal. A lanky, chain-smoking intellectual, Hal served as my alternate driver when Ralph wasn’t around. Despite holding a bachelor’s degree in forestry and possessing a formidable work ethic, mental instability had reduced him to peddling speed at local strip bars to survive. We spent hours fueled by stimulants, dissecting religion and philosophy. He carried a deep-seated Catholic guilt, often insisting that heaven and hell were not afterlives, but states of existence right here on earth. He possessed a tragic cynicism, believing that the damage in the world precisely mirrored the damage in his own mind. Our conversations never ended on a hopeful note, a fact cemented when he was eventually arrested for drug distribution after being betrayed by an acquaintance, becoming yet another casualty of the game we were all playing.
Robert. One night at the Punjab, I met Robert, recently released from prison for a 1975 robbery in which he had killed a man. We talked amicably until his contact arrived. Robert went to the restroom and returned moments later, eyes dull. He slumped forward and fell from his barstool. “Bartender, should we call an ambulance?” I asked, panicked. Jack, the owner, shook his head without alarm. “No, Bruce. Some people are just waiting for a better day. Today is not that day for Robert. He is right where he wants to be.” The heroin had shut him down. It was a chilling lesson in the utility of oblivion, and in the strange mercy a community of the damned extends to its own.
Dorothy. A young mother and heroin user living in sustained fear of her incarcerated boyfriend, Jakob, whom she believed could astrally project from prison to torment her, Dorothy scraped resin from spoons for a fix while lecturing me on the non-existence of good people. “There is only darkness, Bruce,” she said. “Good people do not really exist, just fucked-up people who occasionally make helpful choices for themselves.” She offered me heroin. I declined and fled the tangible darkness of her home. I never saw her again.
Georgette. Steve introduced me to Georgette, fifteen years old, a runaway being groomed by a handler named Greg. Seeing her innocence broke something open in me. In a rare act of agency, I used some of my remaining money to take her to a youth shelter, pressing cash into her hands and telling her never to return to the streets. Days later, a cassette tape recording of my private conversation with Georgette appeared at the tavern. The underworld was watching. Paranoia seized me. I realized my “wild card” status, my refusal to be claimed by any faction, was becoming dangerous.
Greg and Martha. Greg, Georgette’s handler, tried to recruit me. He was intrigued by my vocabulary and my disinterest in women. He took me to a safe house on Duke Avenue, presided over by a woman named Martha. The basement was a department store of stolen goods, chainsaws, guns, appliances, and housed a meth lab behind a closed door. Martha offered me a joint to celebrate my arrival. I declined, opting for crystal to keep my edge. I stayed for a week of sleepless insanity before moving on. The house was a monument to theft and addiction, yet Martha tended it with a strange, domestic pride.
Barbara. Barbara entered my life in the late summer, emotionally unavailable, petite, outgoing, interested only in a running mate who carried no expectations. She treated me like an accessory for her escapades, discarding me whenever the night ended or her mood shifted. Yet I felt a strange, fleeting safety with her. Her loneliness and nihilism matched my own so perfectly that proximity to her felt, briefly, like being understood. Our relationship peaked on Halloween, when we roamed downtown Portland costumed as a pimp and his associates. For a few hours, the leather and velvet disguise covered my emaciated frame, and I received the only compliment on my appearance I had heard in years. But true to form, she abandoned me at 2:30 AM, leaving me to understand what we had actually been: two damaged souls crashing into each other in the dark.
V. The Moment the Circuit Broke
By March of 1987, Steve looked at me and said I looked like an AIDS poster boy. He was not wrong. I had lost seventy pounds. I weighed 136 pounds. My face had erupted in sores. I heard voices that did not feel like my own. Paranoia was my constant adviser. I had been injecting drugs intravenously for months, introduced to the needle by a man named Doctor Dave, as a hastened path to the end I still believed was coming. I had renamed myself “The Wild Card” and let the streets know I was aligned with no one and headed for death.
At a party organized by a dealer named Frank, who was mixing what he called a “witch’s brew” of speed and heroin, I made my final decision. I had nothing to lose. I nodded to Steve across the room and headed for the stairs.
Steve rushed over and grabbed my arm. “Bruce,” he said. “I can no longer keep you protected. Your search for truth has ended within my world. Now your real search for truth must begin. A great place to start would be with your father. You deserve a better life.” He walked me out of the party and drove me to my father’s house. When he later returned my car, the suicide pills I had kept under the front seat were gone.
What Steve did in that doorway, in that precise moment, was an act of pure human recognition. He saw a soul worth saving when I could only see the end of days. He was my Harry deLeyer.
Who was Harry deLeyer? In equestrian lore, deLeyer arrived late to an auction in 1956 and found only the rejects, horses destined for the glue factory. He paid eighty dollars for an old gray plow horse already loaded onto the slaughter truck, eyes dulled by labor and neglect. Something in the animal spoke to him. He saw a champion where others saw a corpse. Two years later, that horse, Snowman, won the Triple Crown of show jumping. Steve saw the champion in me when I was the plow horse on the truck. He unhitched me from the wagon of death just as the ramp to the slaughterhouse was lowering.
VI. The Descent Into the Father
When Steve dropped me at my father’s empty house—Beryl and my mother, Corinne, were still snow-birding in Arizona—I was a shell. My skin was erupting in sores. My body shook with tremors of withdrawal, neurological damage, and malnutrition. My mind was a cacophony of hallucinations and voices that felt like the thoughts of others intruding upon my own consciousness. I was in no condition to seek professional help; a psychiatrist would have committed me instantly, a fate I feared more than death itself.
I invited Randy Olson over. We drank until late into the night, consuming my father’s liquor with the desperation of men trying to extinguish a fire with gasoline. Randy left around 10:00 PM, and I slipped into the black void of unconsciousness.
It was in that blackout, a state where the soul disconnects from the controls, that I grabbed my father’s rifle. Driven by some autopilot of self-destruction, I drove drunk to the home of Brock, a drug chemist in Milwaukie. I have no memory of the drive. I awoke only when the gun in my lap discharged, blasting a hole through his front door. Inside that apartment were sleeping children and a wife. The bullet struck nothing but wood and silence.
Brock, unperturbed by the violence that was commonplace in our world, did not call the police. Instead, he pulled out a hypodermic needle and injected me with speed to sober me up. We talked for twenty-four hours. He injected me again. And then, in the haze of stimulants and exhaustion, a sudden and piercing clarity arrived. It was not a gentle dawn. It was a lightning strike. I looked at Brock, surrounded by the paraphernalia of our mutual demise, and I said it out loud for the first time: “We are nuts.”
I saw the loop. The cage. The self-imposed prison. I stood up, walked out of Brock’s front door, and sat in my car. I had exactly five dollars to my name. A binary choice, a final crossroads: beer and cigarettes to fuel the death spiral, or gasoline to drive to family. I bought the gas.
I drove to my grandparents’ house in North Portland, the lighthouse in the storm. They took me in without conditions. My grandmother nursed me through five days of hellish detox without asking me to name what I was detoxing from. They fed me. They watched over me. And for the first time in years, I was safe inside a human space.
A week later, a childhood friend called. Craig Salter had been court-ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous for a DUI, and he asked if I wanted to come. I said yes. My first official day of sobriety was March 21, 1987.
VII. The Long Goodbye Is Also a Long Hello
What I carried out of that underworld was not a certificate of survival. It was a curriculum. Every person I had encountered in those dark corridors—Ralph, Sarah, Jake, Hal, Robert, Dorothy, Georgette, Barbara, Steve—had been teaching me something I could not have learned in any classroom or church pew. They were teaching me what it looks like when the wound goes unhealed. What it costs. What it asks of everyone around the wounded person. What it demands of a culture that refuses to look directly at its own pain.
The fates of those teachers are worth recording, because they complete the lesson.
Randy Olson, my brother in chaos, the man who woke me to the news of the Challenger’s destruction, died on June 3, 2013, at the age of 58, of heart disease. We closed a chapter of brotherhood defined by mutual love and shared dysfunction.
Di Di McCloud, the woman I had loved briefly in 1984 and abandoned in Seaside, called me in 1988. She wanted the love poem I had written for her in 1984. I gave her the poem. We hugged and wept. She died later that year in a drunk driving accident.
Donelle Mae Flick, my first wife, struggled her entire life with multiple devastating nervous breakdowns. She passed away on my birthday, November 20, 2022. She was my canary. Her suffering was never her fault. It was a signal that the culture around her consistently refused to read.
Barbara, who had treated me like an accessory for her escapades, served me dinner as my waitress at a restaurant in 1990, at a table occupied by my present wife Sharon and her daughter Hayley. Barbara apologized for how she had treated me. I accepted and wished her well in her new sobriety.
They are all gone now, or mostly so. The underworld consumed many of them. Some it merely wounded and released, changed. The threshold, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed, by the dying, or by those who witnessed the crossing.
VIII. What the Wire Carried
I am an electrician. I understand circuits. Consciousness, I have come to believe, behaves like a current moving through a system. The physical body is the wire. Death, whether it arrives in a hospice bed, a car crash, a heroin nod at a tavern on Foster Road, or a slow erosion across three decades of addiction, is a conversion event. The wire fails. But the current, the energy, the field that surrounded the wire does not cease. It moves on and transforms.
What I experienced in that underworld was not simply addiction. It was a full-spectrum confrontation with the question this entire section is built upon: What does it mean to die, and what does surviving that dying demand of you?
My death was protracted and largely invisible, the kind of dying that happens in parked cars and tavern booths, that does not register on death certificates or earn obituaries. But it was as real as any dying I have since witnessed, and the curriculum it imposed was as rigorous as any grief. We are the energy moving through the wire. We are not the wire. The wire can be bent, corroded, overloaded, and broken. The current seeks another path, the path of least resistance to the Ground.
IX. The Plow Horse Soars
Harry deLeyer saved Snowman from death, fed him, and loved him. He saw value where the world saw waste. Two years later, Snowman cleared obstacles no one thought possible and became a legend, not because of his pedigree, but because one person refused to accept the world’s verdict on his worth.
Steve saw the truth in me when I was blind with darkness. He pointed toward truth without claiming to possess it. He walked into the mud with me instead of reaching for me from the safety of dry ground, and then, at the precise moment when the mud threatened to become a grave, he pulled me out.
This is what the living can do for each other. This is what presence demands. This is the practical instruction concealed inside every chapter of grief, every season of dying, every underworld that any of us survives or fails to survive: See the other person. Not their wound, not their worst decision, not the verdict the world has rendered on their worth. See the truth inside them, even when, especially when, they cannot see it themselves. Do not wait for the conditions to be clean or comfortable. The plow horse does not need a pristine stable. He needs someone willing to climb onto the slaughter truck. Be that person. Be that person while you still can.
The search for truth becomes the joy of living when we stop being marionettes of our own unexamined suffering and begin instead to see ourselves clearly, as both the wound and the one capable of healing it.
X. The Search for Truth and Father
Steve called me in April of 1988 to check on me. I thanked him profusely. I felt love and appreciation for him. I was awakening to a new, wonderful life.
To truly transcend the abyss, I had to become more than the passive recipient of rescue. I had to become my own Harry deLeyer. I needed to look past the accumulated grime of my own history, gaze into the mirror of my soul, and recognize the champion hidden beneath the scars. I had to finally see myself as worthy of investing love and life force, transforming from a broken plow horse into a being capable of its own salvation. I had a story to tell.
My whole life I had believed that I had nothing to say, and that became an essential part of my life story. In March of 2017, I begged my wife, Sharon, to please tell my story for me, since she had already written a great book and had that capacity. She compassionately, and authoritatively, reminded me that my story was my own to develop and to tell, and that it would die with me unless I found the courage and the willingness to share it.
I started revisiting my childhood experiences and piecing together the story of my life. I studied some of the family writings and started recalling family stories about the grandparents on my father’s side I never really knew. And while I was writing and thinking and making sense of it, I was struck with a profound realization. I saw, for the first time, the wounding process I shared with my father.
I felt an incredible compassion, love, and acceptance for my father, who had also suffered immensely under the spiritually destructive parenting of his own diseased parents. This can be particularly difficult for men. Men typically inflict their own wounding on everybody else, in subtle or not so subtle ways. Usually this manifests in poor collaborative intentions, and dominating, or being dominated by, others while engaging in passive-aggressive coping strategies. Philosophies of oppression and the monetization of reality often emerge from deep wounds. Women, children, and those with gentle or non-confrontational natures are frequently victimized.
We often downplay our inner stories, doubting there’s anything worth telling, or hiding them out of shame. But the truth is, our stories deserve to be told. Make peace with your story, develop your own timeline, develop your own personal story, and be the hero of your own journey. Do whatever it takes. Find and cherish your story no matter how difficult it is initially, because as you heal and grow, that story starts to take on significance until it becomes part of the grand story. It should no longer be “his story” or “her story,” but instead the unitive “our story.”
When I recently rewrote this section on my search for truth, I had to reenter the consciousness, and the emotional experience, of those most troubling times. I did not expect or anticipate this, and I re-experienced many of the dark emotions that characterized this most turbulent and disordered period of my life. I finished the work and felt sad and disconnected. I took my Miata for a long drive, which typically lifts my spirits no matter what may be going on in my life.
This time, however, it did not work. I drove for 65 minutes away from home and found no relief. When I began to slow down, to turn around and come home, a dove flew over my car and seemed to lead me for over twenty seconds to a place to park and turn around. I then remembered what the dove symbolized in my mind: the reassurance that my guiding spirit had not abandoned me and was continuing to lead me to my own promised land. Suddenly, a torrent of tears erupted from me, and a huge release of energy overwhelmed my being. I then felt an amazing forgiveness, love, and compassion for the past version of myself, a form of self-forgiveness I had never experienced before.
Can there be a greater gift to give oneself in this life?
Are you tired of your own suffering, or the needless suffering of others?
Are you tired of being the silent stick figure in the dreams of others who would control and manipulate you like a mindless puppet, and turn you into unholy versions of yourself?
Are you tired of your past wounds controlling your perceptions, and guiding you onto diseased and despairing paths of unconsciousness?
What is your story? Where is your story hidden? The world needs to hear it.
Let the healing begin in earnest. Start looking for the authentic you. This is the real, eternal search for Truth.
Welcome to your entry onto the Universe’s unlimited bandwidth of life, love, and death. We have been waiting for you.
