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I wanted to talk about Better Call Saul, which concluded last week. For those who are unfamiliar, it is a spinoff series from Breaking Bad. If you are unfamiliar with Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, well, you should stop reading now and go watch both shows.
I wanted to discuss Better Call Saul even though it doesn’t have much drug and alcohol use in it. It’s about a lawyer who helps drug cartels and drug makers. But it’s not about drug and alcohol addiction or recovery.
So why am I talking about it? Well, first of all, I love talking about great TV shows. And Better Call Saul is in my top five shows ever made, and it’s actually ahead of Breaking Bad. In case you really care about these things, my top 5 shows as of this writing are: 1. Succession; 2. Better Call Saul; 3. The Sopranos; 4. The Wire; 5. Breaking Bad.
The second reason—the real reason—I wanted to talk about Better Call Saul is because there is serious addiction on display, with serious consequences. It’s just not substances. It’s the hustle. Or, as we used to call it in the 12-step program I started out in, it’s “getting over.”
I won’t get too deep in the weeds with a synopsis of the show, but the lead character, Saul, is a scam artists. Flashbacks show him observing his dad running a small store decades ago, and he would sit there as a little boy and see local con men pull one over on his dad repeatedly, and he vowed to never let that happen to him. So he became Saul Goodman, which isn’t even his real name. It’s all part of the con.
The addiction part is that Saul runs scams, shows some remorse, tries to stop, can’t, runs scams again. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
I really identified with that part of things. I had a whole system of scams that I would run. I would manipulate doctors to write me prescriptions, then pay cash so that there was less of a paper trail with my health insurance company. But I also saw a pain management doctor for legitimate chronic pain issues involving my feet. So I had a steady stream of legal opiates that I was using, and everybody in my life knew about it. It’s similar to if a doctor told you it’d be a good idea to have a glass of wine every day, then you drink five bottles and cover up the aftermath as everybody in your life just assumes you had the one glass.
The scam was exhausting. I had to drive all over the place to go to urgent care clinics, doctors’ offices and hospitals, then get over on them, then find pharmacies that I hadn’t already gone to over and over again. I ended up being an expert on all the mom and pop pharmacies in the New York/New Jersey area. And I had to try to spin all those plates without anybody ever connecting any of the dots that were spread out all over the place.
As we saw on Better Call Saul, I knew everything was going to come crashing down somehow or some way. Saul did, too, at various points. He managed to keep it going way longer than you’d expect, constantly escaping either the cartels or police. Me, too.
But eventually I sought help and I got sober… then I ran into the “hole in the doughnut” problem. If you’re unfamiliar with that phrase, it pops up in recovery literature and at meetings sometimes, and it’s usually in reference to building a relationship with a higher power.
But in a general sense, it’s the idea of wrestling with giving up the old lifestyle—the drugs and alcohol, but also all the other bad behaviors that pop up, like lying, stealing, working people over, etc.—and replacing it with something more spiritual.
It was hard. I found myself with 30 days sober but still able to just blurt out lies without even having to think about it. I was still broke, so I’d use my corporate card sometimes for stuff I shouldn’t have been using my corporate card for. When collection agencies would call for overdue bills, I would b******t them on the phone about having mailed a check already, then I would hang up.
I ultimately realized that I had to change everything—not just abstinence from mood-altering substances—or else it wasn’t going to work. I quickly felt much more spiritual… but also a little bored. I was working hard in my professional life and busting my ass as a dad and husband, so it wasn’t that I didn’t have stuff to do. In fact, every minute of every day was accounted for.
But I didn’t feel the same juice without all the hustle. I know, that sounds terrible. But it’s the truth—the mayhem may have been, well, mayhem, and it might have been unmanageable and out of control and illegal… but it was never boring. My brain was constantly engaged and on fire trying to keep the whole thing from falling apart.
I saw that in Better Call Saul, too. He couldn’t resist. He just kept getting sucked into another con. It was bad for him—but he couldn’t not do it.
I won’t spoil the ending but I will say it isn’t a fairytale wrap-up to the show. There is real pain handed out as punishment, and rightly so. It was an oddly satisfying yet bitter way for the show to walkoff into the sunset, but I enjoyed it.
I’m so glad it didn’t end that way for me. There is a version of my sobriety where I stopped drinking and drugging but was still constantly trying to run game on the world. And if I had to guess, the ending to my story would have been closer to Better Call Saul than to what it has been for the past 13 years.
So my overall grade for Better Call Saul is an A. An all-time great show, with an all-time great scam artist/junkie at the center of it.
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:
HEARD AT MEETINGS: “We don’t seem to give up a life of failure without a fight.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2003, Ms. Sam H. from Jacksonville, Florida)
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