The following is an excerpt from the book Broken
by William Cope Moyers with Katherine Ketcham
Published by Penguin Books; August 2007;$15.00US/$18.50CAN;
978-0-14-311245-7
Copyright C 2006 William Cope Moyers and Katherine Ketcham

Prologue

October 1994

There was a sharp rap on the door, followed by a muffled but unmistakable command from a voice outside in the hallway.

“We want the white guy, just the white guy. We know he’s in there. He comes out now and there’s no trouble for anyone later.”

I was the “white guy.” I knew in that instant that my family’s desperate search to track me down had ended at this decayed two-story apartment in a violent pocket of Atlanta’s inner city. Terrified, I rushed around the room, trying to warn the other crack heads to sit still and keep quiet.

“Don’t panic,” I whispered. “They’ll go away.” But nobody was listening because everybody was as high and as scared as I was. We bumped into one another as we tried to find a way out, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. We were like wild animals trapped by a wind-whipped forest fire.

Who was out there banging on the door? Was it my father? My mother? My wife? My mind flashed back to the morning four days earlier when I left my house
in suburban Atlanta. I remembered kissing four-month-old Thomas and two-year-old Henry good-bye. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I told Allison I needed to run some errands before dinner. I drove to the parking lot on the corner of Boulevard and Ponce de Leon, approached a drug dealer with a thick scar running from his left ear to the corner of his mouth, and paid him one hundred dollars for six marble-sized rocks of crack cocaine. I held them in my hand and thought, “These will keep me going for a day or two.” They were gone in four hours.

The knocking became a relentless pounding that shook the door frame. I thought about escaping out the back porch door to the vacant lot and just running, running, running. But where could I go? They would find me, just like they had in Harlem and St. Paul. I’d been running for five years. Now I had run out of options.

I sat down at the old wood table in the kitchen, the place where the deals were made, the pipe was fired up, and the crack was consumed. I couldn’t run anymore — my legs felt weak and shaky. I couldn’t hide — there was no place left. I couldn’t think, but I could still react, and with the instincts of the addict I did the only thing that was left to do. I reached into my sock and pulled out the cellophane cigarette wrapper with the rocks carefully stored inside like precious stones. My hands were shaking and I noticed for the first time that the tips of my fingers were scorched and blistered from lighter burns. I loaded the pipe, flicked the lighter, and inhaled deeply.

The sizzle of the crack and the euphoric rush exploding inside my head were suddenly all that mattered to me. The banging on the door was like thunder on the horizon. I heard the warning, but I didn’t feel threatened anymore because I was back in my element, that faraway place where nothing on this earth could touch me. The rush hijacked my brain, and the knocking, scurrying, and fear disappeared. The memories of wife and children were gone. I was gone.

I tried to grab on and hold tight to the high, and for a few moments time stood still. I was a Roman candle on the Fourth of July, bright colors and showers of sparks. This, I thought, is what it’s all about — stopping time, going higher and higher, explosions of light and heat, one after another after another. The rapture filled me for a minute or two, and then it began to fade, the sparks died down, the flame became a dying star far, far away.

I folded my arms over my chest, longing for comfort, for peace. I was so sick. So sick and tired of it all. In that moment I realized the hopelessness of my situation, and in a sudden, brief flash of clarity, I asked myself: Now what? I stared at the filthy wood floor littered with half-empty beer cans, cigarette butts, and used syringes. The answer wasn’t here in this room anymore. It was all over. I was done.

I stood up and made my way past BJ, the Old Man, and the other addicts with whom I was living and slowly dying for the last four days. My steps were deliberate but out of my control as I walked into the hallway and out the front door, flanked by the two armed off-duty policemen who were part of the intervention team hired to get me out of the crack house and back into treatment.

A hard, steady rain was falling as we approached the gray van parked on the curb. The sliding door opened, and I collapsed into the backseat.

My father was sitting in the front passenger seat. Turning around to look at me, he saw a thirty-five-year-old crack addict who hadn’t shaved, showered, or eaten in four days. A man who walked out on his wife and two young children and ditched his promising career at CNN. A broken shell of a man, a pale shadow of the human being he had raised to be honest, loving, responsible. His firstborn son.

Silence.

“You’re angry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

“That’s hardly the word for it.” His voice was harsh and cold, like the rain outside.

More silence.

“There’s nothing more I can do,” he said. “I’m finished.”

All these years later, he tells me that’s where the conversation ended. But
whether I imagined it or not, I heard him say something else.

“I hate you.”

And I remember looking in his eyes and speaking my deepest truth.

“I hate me, too.”

Copyright C 2006 William Cope Moyers and Katherine Ketcham

by Alan Alda

Actor and author of Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself

A friend who had seen me in a play came backstage and asked if I still get nervous before I go onstage. She imagined I feel a little fright, being in front of a live audience with no chance for a second take. She was surprised when I told her that I don?t feel nervous; just very alert. In fact, if I?m rehearsed and focused, the performance can be like stepping into a safe place where everything goes right. Even tiny mistakes are lucky grace notes that never happened before and will never happen again.

But there is a certain fear for me in acting, and it happens much earlier than opening night: it?s when I?m in a chair, reading the script for the first time and wondering how I could possibly play such a part. When I?m faced with a kind of character I?ve never tried before, the fear can rise to the level of terror. But, it?s a terror I look forward to, and I don?t like to take on a part unless it scares me a little.

I?ve found a tremendous value in this kind of fear, because if I don?t wonder how I?m going to accomplish something, I?m in danger of doing it the way I?ve done it before, or even worse, the way I?ve seen someone else do it. Being scared can be a sign that I?m not headed toward an easy stereotype.

But, here?s where it gets weird. I don?t just scare myself with playacting. I scare myself in the rest of my life, too. Somehow, it seems to make me feel more alive. Once my name became known to a number of people, I was asked speak before groups of people where I had no business showing up. They probably asked me because my name was a drawing card, and they didn?t expect much; it was supposed to be smooth sailing. But when that moment comes that I realize people will be spending their evening listening to what I have to say, the boat turns over and I feel the heaviness of an ocean that has just gone from being under me to resting on top of me.
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William Cope Moyers, son of famed journalist Bill Moyers, paints an intimate portrait of his decade-long addiction to alcohol, cocaine and crack cocaine, describing in harrowing detail his experiences in crack houses in Harlem, St. Paul, and Atlanta. His consequent decision to make sobriety the center of his life caused him to walk away from a journalism career at CNN and follow an inner-voice that ultimately led to a vocation to help people just like himself – alcoholics and other addicted people.

AUTHOR:

Moyers is the vice president for external affairs at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota. A former newspaper journalist and writer for CNN, he lives with his wife and three children in St. Paul, Minnesota. For more information, please visit http://www.williammoyers.com/.

by Peter Pagnamenta, co-author of Sword and Blossom: A British Officer’s Enduring Love for a Japanese Woman

In 1982 a retired Tokyo teacher was going through boxes in a storeroom, when she found a stash of old letters, still in their original thin white envelopes, with foreign stamps and sealing wax. They were bundled tightly together and there were over 800 of them. The letters inside were on rolled, thin, hand made “makigami” paper, and many of them contained pressed flowers which disintegrated, as they fell out. They were from a British officer who had been sent to Japan to learn English in 1904, written to his love, Masa Suzuki, and they spanned a period of nearly thirty years. The finder of the letters was a relative of Masa’s by marriage, and she had heard about the Englishman. But she had no idea of the full story.

Those letters are the principal source for our book, and we could only reconstruct the story by working through them, and finding the clues, and the chronology, which allowed the narrative of this relationship to emerge.

Momoko Williams and I were not the first to see this extraordinary cache — the Japanese writer Takako Inoue had looked at many of them and written a book published in Japan, but she had not been able to do any research in Britain, so her version was not complete. She helped set us on our way, but it was only when we got full access to the original letters that we realized what a daunting task we had taken on. They were difficult to decipher even for a Japanese, because the language and the ways of writing characters had changed so much, and Captain Hart Synnot’s language and syntax, specially at the start when he was learning, were not very good.

We spent nine months going through the letters, one by one, from 1905 to the 1930’s. We worked in real time, sitting at a table. Momoko would try and read them, and I would transcribe and type the contents in rough English as we went along, so we could pick up the references and ask each other questions. There were Japanese allusions that she could catch, or could ask others about, and there were English related references that I could understand. So there was a lot to do before we could get to what, for most books, would be regarded as square one.

One of the difficulties was that Arthur had helpfully (for Masa) rendered all the English names, of other officers, or places in Ireland, or family members, into phonetic Japanese. For example we were confronted with a cast of characters with strange sounding names — Blododo, Toku, Sarmondo, and had to check army lists and other sources until we found he meant General Broadwood, or Major Toke or Captain Salmon. He called her “Dare” and for a long time Momoko couldn’t work out what this meant, until she realized, from just one letter in which he used some English as well, that this was his Japanese spelling for “Dolly”. That was what he must always have called her.

As we went on we built up an index of names and places, and dates, and then started to do lateral research into army records, birth certificates, marriage certificates, wills, and land records in Japan, England and Ireland, to build up the picture. The newspapers of the time yielded vital information. We ploughed through yellowing copies of the small English language papers that had been published in Tokyo and Yokohama for the foreign community, and one of their staple ingredients were columns listing passengers arriving and departing by ship. In the “Japan Weekly Mail” for March 12th 1904 we were pleased to find: “per British steamer “Java” from London via the Chinese ports — Mr F.J. Abbott, Mrs F.J. Abbot, Miss Abbott and nurse, Mr H Fleming, Master Fleming, Mr G. Kingswell, Captain Hart Segnott” They had the name wrong, but it was good enough for our purposes. There were only three European style hotels that westerners used in Tokyo then, and the same papers published lists of guests who were staying. So we were able to place him at the Imperial in Tokyo on several occasions, or staying at Hakone, and for three or four years it was possible to track most of his comings and goings around the Far East, and check these dates against his own letters. The Japanese system for registering births and deaths was much more difficult to crack — the “Kosekki”.

Our greatest piece of luck was finding the diaries of two of the four other British language officers who were in Tokyo at the same time, because they described this world of foreign bachelors, the trips to the sumo wrestling, the tea houses, the picnics with the girlfriends at cherry blossom time, and Arthur and Masa flit in and out of them.

There was one major element we hoped to find, but never did — and that was the correspondence in the other direction, and Masa’s own letters to Arthur. We know where they were at various times, but they disappeared, probably during the Second World War.

© 2007 Peter Pagnamenta

Author
Peter Pagnamenta is a writer and television documentary maker, with a special interest in Japan. He conceived and wrote the eight-part BBC series Nippon, an archive and testimony history of Japan’s recovery after 1945, as well as Bubble Trouble, about Japan in the 1990’s. Other series for the BBC include the twentieth-century industrial history All Our Working Lives, for which he wrote the book with Richard Overy, and the twenty-six-part People’s Century. He is a former editor of the weekly current-affairs television program Panorama.