He understands that, of course, far better than I do. Whenever I apologized to him for bringing so much heat onto his campaign, he responded by saying how sorry he was for putting me on the spot, for bringing so much heat onto me, especially at a time when I was so determined to get well.
That’s the biggest political debate my dad and I had for months: Who should apologize to whom?
My only misjudgment was not considering, back in 2014, that in three years Trump would sit in the White House, where he would employ every scorched-earth tactic at his disposal to remain there.
Knowing all of that now: No, I would not do it again. I wouldn’t take the seat on Burisma’s board. Trump would have to look elsewhere to find a suitable distraction for his impeachable behavior.
There was, however, a more unintentional consequence to my stint with Burisma. The fallout was far darker, in its way, than any of the nonsense Giuliani dreamed up.
Burisma turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction. While its robust compensation initially gave me more time and resources to look after my brother, it played to the worst aspects of my addictive impulses after his death. Burisma wasn’t my sole source of income during that period. I was a mostly functional addict until near the very end; I kept clients for longer than one might think possible, and I had money from investments made elsewhere over the years.
But by that mad, bad end, the board fee had morphed into a wicked sort of funny money. It hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively.
Humiliatingly.
So I did.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CRACKED
About four months after I got back from Esalen, I dove into the kind of next-level bingeing few addicts see coming.
I’d stayed sober since shortly after that drunken barricade in my apartment. I was a steadfast outpatient at a rehab clinic in Washington, where the staff tested me regularly for alcohol and drugs. I was getting my health back, ate well, and attended a yoga class every day, all while rejoining the real world by consulting for five or six major clients.
Then, over Memorial Day weekend 2016, I flew to Monte Carlo to attend a meeting of the Burisma board. I felt strong enough by then to bring along my oldest daughter, Naomi, presenting the trip to her as a gift for graduating earlier that month from Penn.
The weekend quickly turned contentious—then disastrous. The board meeting itself was unremarkable and mostly pro forma. However, I soon stepped on a stage to discuss global economics with a panel of esteemed, never-met-an-opposing-opinion-they-couldn’t-dismiss economists and former ministers of finance from across Europe.
My first mistake: saying what I meant. My second mistake: being right about it.
I posited an opinion that the referendum on Brexit, to be held in the United Kingdom in just a few weeks, had a damn good chance of passing. Conventional wisdom held that Brexit was a long shot. But conventional wisdom was dissolving with the rise of far-right populism around the world, including in Poland, Brazil, and France. In the U.S., Trump had become the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee. It didn’t take a psychic to see where things were headed. All you had to do was stick a finger in the air to gauge the winds of change.
I didn’t argue that Brexit was a wise choice for the UK. But as with similar movements elsewhere, that didn’t appear to matter. I put the odds at better than even that the Brits would cut off their nose to spite their face and vote to eject from the European Union, despite what seemed like the prevailing view to the contrary. Yet my fellow panelists, who’d invested their careers in establishing and preserving the EU, would have none of it. Basically, they called me crazy.
I could’ve just let it roll off my back and moved on. Or I could’ve responded more diplomatically. Instead, when the group of graybeard wise men dismissed my Brexit handicapping with what I took to be patronizing arrogance—What does an American know?—I pulled my finger out of the air and stuck it, metaphorically, in the esteemed panel’s collective eyeball.
The discussion quickly turned combative, then bordered on ugly. I spotted Naomi squirming in the audience.
I got through it but reached for a couple of drinks afterward. That night, while Naomi went off with Zlochevsky’s daughter, I wandered into the hotel nightclub and drank some more. Monte Carlo provides a temptation for any taste. When I went to the restroom, someone offered me cocaine.
I took it.
I regretted the slip immediately. When we returned to the States, I went straight to the clinic and confessed to my counselors what I’d done. I even discussed it at that day’s group session. I saw my relapse as a troubling but hardly irreversible setback. I was still committed to recovery.
Then a counselor told me he had to inform Kathleen of what had happened—that was the deal cut when I started there. He also said I needed to take a drug test, even though I’d just admitted what I’d done. Kathleen and I had been separated for close to a year and our divorce was imminent. The drug test was not covered by the privacy guidelines in HIPAA and could be used in court against me. I felt ambushed. I refused to take the drug test while continuing to own up to what I’d done. I didn’t want it on paper. I just wanted to get better.
The debate grew heated. A counselor at another clinic had already told my daughters months earlier that if they spoke with me they’d be complicit in my death—in my mind, an infuriating breach. So I was working with a short fuse anyway. That fuse was then lit by the clinic’s stubborn insistence on a drug test to prove something I’d openly conceded.
I
