Shame Creep in One Man's Life

And the private mythology of agency

Another drink in some unknown location

It was mere fortune that Mother and I split ways at the Atlanta airport returning from Turks and Caicos. My connection was home to LA, hers to Minnesota. Fortune, because immigration said something startling.

“Damon!” He practically sang. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“Oh?” I replied, flipping through files in my head for a reason.

“Do you mind if I look through your bag?”

“Nope,” I replied without hesitation. I’d done a little cocaine on the island, but I didn’t imagine they’d be pulling a blood sample. As he nosed around, I asked, “Any reason you’re ‘expecting me’?”

“Didja have a little incident in San Ysidro recently?” he asked, grinning.

I stared at him like our dogs do when anyone opens a crunchy bag.

“The border of San Diego?” he added.

Months before this, I’d been detained for about six hours after walking over the border with steroid-filled syringes tucked in my motorcycle boots. I got away by paying a hefty fine.

The incident taught me a valuable lesson: don’t fuck around with border police.

This was my life in the early 2000s: work hard, fuck around harder. There was zero bandwidth for inner work. That would come much later, after the bough broke, in Costa Rica. You can read about it in this essay if you’re curious.

What I had achieved at the time was nothing short of a miracle. I moved to LA with a whole thousand dollars and everything I owned packed in my (2-seater) Honda DelSol.

After three years of partying on a poor man’s income in LA, a gym called 24 Hour Fitness hired me to be a trainer at their sparkling new Hollywood facility. I decided to fly straight for a couple of years to make sure I did well, just alcohol, but then something shifted.

They put me in management. Cue the big bucks. Cue me, on my 29th birthday, doing a bump of cocaine in the bathroom. Eventually, I was back in “the scene.”

This was all months before San Ysidro. The partying would ultimately continue until 2013. I got very good at partying responsibly, not perfectly, but I took far fewer uncalculated risks. For example, I’d take the subways or taxis to avoid drinking and driving. I only dealt with carefully vetted dealers, ones who were as careful as I.

At that time, shame wasn’t even on my radar. I was too in charge to bother.

Shame is a hard-working mile-marker on an otherwise unmarked road. It’s not even a crummy road. Sometimes it’s perfectly paved, ten lanes wide, with nobody else on it.

Change lanes without your turn signal. This road rules!

None of this was known to the version of me that sat on that cold-ass, concrete bench in San Ysidro. That version of me, same as the one in the Atlanta airport, felt that I just needed to fly a little straighter.

I believed all of this so powerfully that I nearly missed the call to wake up.

The story I tell myself

What we are is a complicated matter, but at the surface, one could argue that what we are is a story that we’re telling ourselves about who we are.

In the case of my sobriety—early days—I told myself that I maybe didn’t really have a problem because I didn’t have crazy stories like the ones I heard in AA. I even asked my first sponsor about this.

“Damon, you reached a point where your behavior was intolerable to you. That was enough.”

He was right, so this became the new story I told myself. Had he not been there, I don’t know what might’ve happened. Had I not been in that room to ask him, who knows what else might’ve happened.

In an alt universe, another me stumbled on the road to the meeting, ran home to bandage my foot, and then decided I didn’t really need to go in the first place.

I’m not as fucked up as those people. I don’t have a problem. I can go drink a beer right now and stop at one.

The problem with counterfactuals is that we can never know. Not really. So I tell myself a story today that I’m fortunate to have been there, to have had my sponsor there.

The arrival of shame

When I was a personal trainer, I had very deconditioned clients who’d complain during sessions that the work we were doing wasn’t targeting their muscles properly. Then, they’d come back and tell me how sore the muscle was two days later.

These were people out of touch with their bodies in so many ways that they couldn’t even perceive what was being felt at some deeper level.

This was me with shame. I turned alcoholism on its face by claiming proudly, “I’m a functional alcoholic,” and I was. I didn’t miss work or drop balls. Not yet, anyway.

In the last days of my work-hard, fuck around harder vocation, I called out sick one Monday morning. My body was trashed with severe dehydration from drinking. I couldn’t turn off the nausea.

This was mere weeks before leaving the US for Costa Rica in 2012, and the end of my last formal career. At that time, I felt no shame.

That wouldn’t show up until I started facing the music. For me, it wasn’t shame over what I’d done. Sure, there was plenty of that, but more impactful was the shame over what I’d gotten away with.

When my friend Tony went to jail a few years ago for manslaughter, the shame finally caught up to me. Tony had been in a head-on collision with a man who was a spouse and a father. The man flew through his windshield and died on the scene. Tony woke up in the ICU.

I’d driven drunk. Oh, and high. Not one DUI, even though I drove drunk through two checkpoints. Not one accident.

These days, I can barely talk about this without tearing up. Tony is serving my counterfactual time. It’s my fault he’s in prison. I’m part of the problem, or at least I was. I contributed, and he’s paying the price. It’s my bill.

Nobody can talk me out of this. Tony is serving my unaccounted-for jail time.

Getting out of jail

The only thing that could make this all go away for me is just one drink, and I ain’t going there. No, sir. Instead, I’ll live with my fortune, good and bad.

The story I try to tell myself these days is that I’m just lucky. Worse than serving time, I could be living with the permanent story of taking another’s life.

Speaking of what we can talk people out of, nobody can take that story from Tony, not even when he finally gets out. In fact, that might be its own kind of burden: a man is dead, and Tony gets to keep living his life. Me too.

What I am certain of is that Tony, like me, felt like he pretty much had everything in control before that incident. He was careful not to do anything that would harm someone else or himself. He had agency.

Whether he felt the shame, I don’t know for sure. Was he like me, ignoring it all until the soreness finally hit the shame muscle? Probably.

The most pernicious aspect of this feeling is that we can ignore it for the most part, especially in the cycle of abuse, where we can lose ourselves in distractions to not feel the hard shit.

Especially men. We’re telling ourselves a story about how we’re the masters of our world, pulling levers, breaking rules, working hard, and fucking around harder.

How long must one man carry on like this and still not know shame?

Thanks for being here.

~Damon