|
That same year, Slattery, who writes under the pen
name of Edward Bear, self-published "The Dark Night of Recovery: Conversations From the Bottom of
the Bottle." He didn't get around to releasing a sequel, "The Seven Deadly Needs," until a few
months ago. The second book is published by Health Communications, Inc., which also re-published
"Dark Night" last year.
Written in plain, accessible language with a price
tag of $10 each, the books are sheer, mere mortal.
"I'm not even talking to angels: I'm way down on
the chain of being," Slattery says with a laugh. "Somebody once said, 'If you're getting messages
from God, check the handwriting: It might be your own.'"
Slattery's books are written as dialogues
involving Tyler, a crusty yet gentle teacher who has tasted of life's dregs - largely through a
bottle - and tries to help fellow travelers as they, too, struggle along the long road to
recovery.
The tone is colloquial and often humorous; the
content speaks to spiritual crises broader than those precipitated by booze or drugs. In "Dark
Night," Tyler helps Bob, a discouraged lawyer with a troubled marriage, deepen his understanding of
the Twelve Steps popularized by Alcoholic Anonymous.
Although Bob has been sober for five years, he's
stuck between the active destructiveness of his drinking days and a truly meaningful life. He's
"hit bottom sober," in Tyler's words, and now must find his way up and out.
The alternative, the older man says, "is to stop
growing and join those who linger in that gray limbo of semi-recovery, not drinking or using or
feeding their other addictions, but not really living, either, dispensing Advice and Tough Love to
defenseless newcomers, glumly counting birthdays as if the sheer number might
guarantee a certain amount of happiness."
Limbo not always
apparent
Few people acknowledge that "gray limbo," which
can arrive long after achieving sobriety or some other milestone. Even in the recovery movement,
Slattery says, "the coin of the realm is, 'I'm doing OK."
Yet the plateau "is a normal part of the spiritual
journey, and it doesn't have to be (just) in recovery," Slattery says. "A lot of people get on a
spiritual path, and you get to a certain point and kind of hit the wall. You get to a part that's
really dark and you want to turn back. You've got to go to the next stage, which often includes
some awful, barren, dark times."
"The Seven Deadly Needs" continues the dialogue,
though this time Tyler dispenses his unique blend of philosophy, spirituality, mysticism, pop
culture and Winnie-the-Pooh - one of Slattery's spiritual heroes, hence the pen name - directly to
the narrator/author.
Although the books aren't widely known, they're
highly regarded by the small audience they've found to date. Reader-reviewers on Amazon.com
uniformly laud "Dark Night" as surprisingly helpful and realistic.
Early reviews of "The Seven Deadly Needs" are
equally positive. One Seattle reader praised its "subtle power," and declared that "once you have
read it, healthier ways of dealing with your life start to sneak in."
The books are born of tough experience. Slattery's
hard-drinking father died of cirrhosis of the liver when his son was in his early 20s - an experience, along with many others, the author
transposes onto Tyler.
Varied background
As a young man, Slattery played minor-league
baseball, fought in the Korean War and attended half a dozen colleges, studying philosophy but
never earning a degree. He worked briefly as a bartender - "until they found out I was drinking
more than I was selling" - but worked mostly in construction and day labor.
Much of his
wages went for booze and speed, but Slattery didn't consider ending his drinking and drugging until
his life bottomed out. He was scarcely 30.
"Hitting bottom is important," he says. "You have
to get to the point where you decide you're willing to do anything. Alcohol wasn't making life
better; it was making life possible."
As he was becoming sober, Slattery parlayed a
correspondence course in electronics engineering into a job at Hewlett-Packard; that was the
beginning of a 30-year-career from which he recently retired. Over the years, he also fathered six
children and mentored many more as a baseball coach, a position he continues today for
a Westminster youth league.
Tried hand at fiction
Slattery wrote, too, generating short fiction and,
in 1990, "Diamonds Are Trumps," a novel about a former minor-leaguer who tries to make a comeback
"when he's kind of trashed his life."
"I always wanted to write." Slattery says. "I
wrote three novels and a play when I was still drinking. When I got sober, I sat in front of a
fireplace and burned everything I'd ever written. It was a part of a past I wanted to
bury."
He concedes he occasionally regrets that decision,
but Slattery's not short on new ideas. He's mulling a book based on his longtime experience as a
volunteer at the Hospice of St. John in Lakewood, where he pushes "the cocktail cart" that delivers
pain medication to the dying.
And, he's hard at work on a third book in the
Tyler series, "The Seven Deadly Fears."
"I had no idea when I wrote the first one that
there would be a second book, or a third one," he says, "although I always thought I'd like to
teach. Maybe in some strange way, I've finally arrived at that spot."
Copyright 2000 The Denver Post. All rights
reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.
|
