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I heard an old YouTube interview with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson about the art of “getting over” in pro wrestling. By “getting over,” he meant that he had won over the crowd to either love him or hate him—either one works in pro wrestling.
It made me laugh because when I first got sober, I was living in New York City, and that phrase, “getting over,” was mentioned constantly at meetings. But they weren’t using it in a pro wrestling context. In this case, they were talking about how addicts and alcoholics have to “get over” on people around them and keep their active addiction alive along with the lies that come along with it. In other words, getting over means you convince people to buy your b******t.
Man, the act of getting over really sucked. It didn’t suck back then, because it meant survival. If I could spin my wheels and confuse you and sucker you, then I could keep going. I can’t say I am proud to say this out loud, but early on, I found it pretty exciting. I wouldn’t say it was a fun, pleasurable kind of excitement. But it was not boring. It was like juggling knives, and eventually it just became so goddamn tiring and impossible to maintain.
I had a rude awakening once I got sober because I realized I didn’t even know who I was, or who I wanted to be. Everything about me had become a used car salesman. I had always clung to the idea that I was a decent human being who’d gotten run over by his addiction, which caused me to tell a lot of lies and b******t. I wasn’t a liar, I thought. I was just someone who told lies.
What a crock of s**t that was. If I tell lies every day, guess what? I’m a liar. And when I became a liar, I became very good at reading what people thought of me, so that I could tell who was onto the b******t and who wasn’t. I then had to either get over on them however I could, or cut bait and try to avoid them. Again, it was an exhausting lifestyle.
When I did stop using alcohol and drugs, I stopped telling lies. I literally had people who noticed the shift and would goof on me and ask me tough questions because they knew I wouldn’t lie.
But to go back to that liar thing, it wasn’t enough to just stop blatant lies. I found that there were so many layers to my version of “getting over.” Exaggeration. Fabulism. The truth… but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I’ll give you an example that turns my stomach a little bit when I think back on it. In my first six months sober, I was hurting for money. As in, tens of thousands of dollars in debt. And it was overwhelming. I was not paycheck to paycheck. Not even day to day, actually. It was hour to hour if I could pay bills. And I told my sponsor about it, and then told him that I was going to bring a chunk of my baseball card collection into the city and try to make a few bucks to pay the bills.
That was not exactly the truth. I did look up a baseball card shop in New York City and contemplated going over there. But the angle I was actually working was to get my sponsor to buy the cards from me, or just flat-out give me money. He seemed like he had money, and I hoped he might swoop in and hand me an envelope of cash.
And guess what? He did offer me money. He asked me what I thought I could get for the cards, and I said, “Hopefully like $1,000.” He said he would give me that money and would take the cards, but if I wanted them back later, I just had to pay him back. Looking back, I am pretty sure he was onto me.
Did I lie to him? No, I don’t think I flat-out said something untrue. But was I working him over? Yes. Was I holding back on some things, like that I wanted him to give me the money? Yes. Did I actually think I could get $1,000 from a card dealer for my cards? No… but I carefully had said, “Hopefully $1,000.” Uh, yeah, sure, hopefully I live to 200 years old, too. I was being very manipulative.
Luckily I had just enough sobriety under my belt to feel icky as he offered me the money outside my office building in New York City. Something came over me where I just said, “You know what? Let me hang onto these for now. Maybe I am being too panicky.”
I don’t know how I ended up paying whatever bill I had to pay that day. But I must have figured out something. And as I walked into my office that day, I realized that stopping the lying wasn’t enough. I had to stop trying to get over on people. Getting over wasn’t for me any more. I needed to leave it to the professionals—like The Rock!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
Asked by her third-grade teacher to spell the word “straight,” Susie, the daughter of an alcoholic, stood up proudly and said, “S-t-r-a-i-g-h-t.”
“Very good, Susie,” said her teacher. “Now, can you tell us what it means?”
“No ice,” Susie answered.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2001, Kevin O. from Hastings, Nebraska)
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