Hugo Schwyzer

I’ve been living in Los Angeles (or the immediately surrounding area) for eighteen years now. I moved down here from the Bay Area right after graduating college in the spring of 1989, and have called this place home ever since.

Please forgive the huge amount of privilege that the following anecdote conveys. Many people I knew got lovely graduation presents from their parents. Most of my friends from Cal went on long trips the summer after they finished college; one backpacked New Zealand, another went to Czechoslovakia (remember, this was the summer before the Velvet Revolution), others went off to France or Ireland. Me? I moved down to Los Angeles at the end of May 1989, and within a week got my graduation present: admission to a 28-day residential treatment program for alcoholism.

The hospital program I was in has long since closed. It was in a dingy and depressing mid-century building in Van Nuys; the program was called ASAP: “Adult Substance Abuse Program”. We were kept on locked wards in a hospital setting, allowed outside only for “smoke breaks” (which were blessedly frequent) and for closely supervised trips to Twelve Step meetings. It was these outings to AA and NA and CA that I remember best.

We were packed into fifteen-passenger vans, and driven, as my mother would say “all over the hell and gone.” While in ASAP, we went to meetings from Chatsworth to Century City; from Studio City to Saugus, Pacoima to Palms. A newly arrived transplant from the Bay Area, readying myself for grad school at UCLA, I was almost completely ignorant of the sprawling geography of greater L.A. But I got a marvelous crash course in navigating the city as a result of traveling in our little white van, going from meeting to meeting to meeting.

Being a rebellious and troubled sort, I dropped out of the program, going out AMA (against medical advice) after a couple of weeks.

The day after leaving ASAP, I took what little graduation money I had left and made a down payment on a used 1983 Honda Accord. It was a stick shift, and I didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission. But the flirtatious young saleswoman made me a deal: if she could teach me to drive it in less than thirty minutes, I’d buy the car. I bought the car at Keyes, the huge conglomerate in the Valley. The saleswoman took the car onto a side street, and in twenty minutes, had me shifting without stalling. I bought the car, and drove it to my little apartment in Westwood that very day.

One of my first purchases after the Honda was a Thomas Bros. map to greater Los Angeles. I had a little AA meeting directory, and I was determined to continue to pursue recovery even after having bailed out of the treatment program. And over the next couple of years, as I moved in and out of sobriety, in and out of my first marriage, and through my first phase of grad school at UCLA, I learned my way around Los Angeles as I went to Twelve Step meetings. Indeed, I wouldn’t know L.A. half as well today as I do if I hadn’t gone to as many meetings as I did.

Traffic was lighter in the late 1980s and early 1990s than it is today, and so it was easy for me to leave Westwood and hit an evening meeting in, say, mid-Wilshire or Reseda or Torrance. Armed with my Thomas guide (no cell phone or GPS for me in those days), I made my way around this vast basin. Most meetings were in churches or synagogues or hospitals. Even now, my wife and I will find ourselves driving down a little street in, say, Culver City (somewhere I hardly ever have occasion to go) and I’ll cry “Look, honey, see that church on the corner? I went to a couple of great meetings there in 1990!” My wife is a patient soul, but she’s only mildly amused that most of my knowledge of how to get around this town came from the steps I took to treat my addictions.

It was traveling to Twelve Step meetings that made me love Los Angeles. Like most Northern Californians, I came down to L.A. with a host of vicious half-truths and prejudices. Had I stayed in one small enclave around the UCLA campus, I might well have continued to harbor those prejudices for years. As it was, going out to Twelve Step meetings across the city, usually traveling on surface streets, taught me to love this unwieldy metropolis. I learned where all the 7-11s were, where I could buy my diet Cokes and my Parliaments. I learned where I could get my junk food fixes. And I learned that Los Angeles was a lousy place to visit, but could be — at least for the young and childless addict with a car and a map — a great place to live.