“I had a real bad alcohol problem. Very few people in the public—no one in the public—knew my problem. We could hide it from them. We could go out and put the bow tie on, and we could wave to the cameras and they’d say, ‘There he goes, good old Ringo.’ But we’d be maintaining at those moments. We’d be dashing home right after it.” [...]
Ringo’s alcohol addiction was so strong that he drank himself into oblivion on the flight to Arizona. “I landed drunk as a skunk at the clinic,” he said. “I drank all the way and got off the plane completely demented. I thought I was going to a lunatic asylum.
I thought I’d gone too far and they were going to put me away in a little cell and forget about me. Instead of that, they put their arms around me and loved me and told me it [would] get better. ‘Give us a chance,’ they said. With God’s help a day at a time it certainly has.”
The five-week course of treatment reportedly cost $35,000 per person. Upon their arrival at [The Sierra Tucson Rehab Center], Ringo and Barbara were put in separate rooms with no televisions or phones. “Eight days in, I decided, ‘I’m here to get help because I know I’m sick,’” Ringo said. “And I just did whatever they asked me and, thank God, it pulled me through.” [...]
Ringo and Barbara were given no preferential treatment. They worked at assigned menial jobs, did their laundry, cleaned ashtrays, and were in bed early. They also attended group therapy sessions and counselling sessions.
“Until I got to the clinic I didn’t realize I was from a dysfunctional family,” Ringo said later. “We had parties, everyone gets drunk and passed out, and that’s part of life. My mother always told me that when I was nine, I was on my knees crawling drunk. A friend of mine’s father had all the booze ready for Christmas, and we decided to try all of it. I don’t remember too much. That was my first blackout.
“You always think you’re witty on alcohol and cocaine,” he said. “You think you’re so witty that you decide to tell the same story over and over and over and over and over again. To the same person. I meet people now . . . and I think, ‘God, was I like that?’ And a little voice inside says, ‘Yes, you were.’”
Ringo: With a Little Help, by Michael Seth Starr
