Bucky Sinister knew he had a problem when the young punk kid smoking speed from a broken lightbulb told him he should probably take it down a notch. It was, Sinister told the crowd at Powell’s on Hawthorne last night, like when Steven Adler got booted from Guns’n'Roses: If those dudes think you’re doing too many drugs, you must be really fucked up.
And so began Sinister’s journey to sobriety, which, as with many addicts, turned out to be a slow crawl through shattered glass. Not necessarily because the pull of addiction was so great—he never relapsed—but because the tenets of twelve-step recovery conflicted with his personal belief system, particularly the part about turning oneself over to God. As an avowed atheist, the notion of submitting to a higher power was a significant barrier to overcome. But Sinister soon figured out that getting clean doesn’t mean selling out. And that’s essentially what his new book, Get Up: A 12-Step Guide to Recovery for Misfits, Freaks & Weirdos, is about: sobriety without compromise.
Wearing a tight black T-shirt exposing one-and-a-half full arms worth of tattoos and tinted glasses that made him look uncannily like Walter from The Big Lebowski and sipping a glass of iced tea, Sinister—a pen name, methinks—read and discussed excerpts from Get Up for a decently-sized audience still small enough to recreate the intimacy of an AA meeting.
Indeed, several of his observations on addiction were met with knowing nods from some of the listeners. Although he is also a spoken word artist and stand-up comedian, here Sinister didn’t really perform, remaining glued to the podium and reciting his words in a voice made ragged by whiskey, but was nonetheless engaging, entertaining and, most of all, funny. Too many junkie memoirs—in print and on screen—forget there is an absurd comedic dimension to addiction. Sinister recognizes that humor in his writing, describing his misadventures in alcohol and drugs and the epiphanies that followed once he came out of the haze in a way his idol, Charles Bukowski, would certainly appreciate. He even offered a tip from his using days: Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality is the best album to cut lines on; the Beatles’ White Album, the worst.
In his three previous collections of poetry, Sinister doesn’t aim for poignancy, only a no-bullshit, occasionally surrealistic view of his plummet toward rock bottom—which is why he was initially reluctant to author a book about recovery in the first place. When a publisher approached him with the idea, he balked, saying he couldn’t stand self-help books. “That’s why you’d be perfect to write one,” the publisher replied. Sinister eventually agreed, with caveats: no fields of flowers on the cover, and no “recovery font” for the title. Based on the selections he read at Powell’s, though, what Sinister ended up writing doesn’t even seem like an “alternative” guide to rehab, but rather a continuation of the loose autobiography he has been amassing through his poems. Only now, instead of chronicling the fall, he documents how he caught himself.
Entering a 12-step program was a fearful proposition for him, Sinister said, and much of Get Up is filled with those fears. For example, before going to his first meeting, he thought AA was like Amway, where he’d have to then go out and recruit other drunks if he wanted to stay. He was afraid he’d lose his friends if he quit drinking. He was afraid he would lose his ability to write. Most of all, he was afraid he’d be forced to go to church. Raised in a strictly fundamentalist household by an evangelical preacher father in a neighborhood populated by ministers, Sinister rebelled against the concept of religion at a young age and framed much of his identity around his non-belief. When he read the 12 steps and saw the word “God” in there a few times, he assumed he would have to completely abandon the person he used to be and embrace Jesus if he wanted to keep from self-destructing.
Gradually, though, he chipped away at those reservations. He came to the realization that he didn’t even know the names of the drinking buddies he was afraid of losing. “They were just random jerks at a bar,” he said. He found that sobriety could co-exist with his creativity, and came to regard artists as “Hot Stove Touchers,” people who whom the threat of pain intrigues rather than repels, making them prime candidates for addiction but not brilliant because of their addictions. And he figured out that believing in “a Power greater than ourselves” doesn’t have to mean a deity. Instead, Sinister wrote out a list of characteristics he admires in people, essentially constructing his image of the perfect human being—someone with the temperament of Kane in Kung-Fu, among other things—and allowed that to be his higher power: an idealized version of himself to strive for. “It’s attaining a Christlike quality from an atheist perspective,” he said. It took him four years, but he got through all the steps, and ended up finding the meetings, which he still attends, “as fun as punk shows.”
Toward the end of the discussion, Sinister said that growing up, he idolized preachers, but after leaving the church, his adoration fell to the old poets who hung out at the bars in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhoods, the guys who made alcoholism seem so cool. If writers like Bukowski and Burroughs painted a quixotic portrait of addiction, Sinister has done the inverse: He has romanticized recovery.
