People Who Hit Rock Bottom

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1:00Hello, everybody. I'm Oprah Winfrey. You know, we've all had times in our lives when we have been depressed, when we have been unhappy, when things have just not gone the way you would have wished. But how many of us have really, really hit rock bottom, been so desperate you didn't even know if you could face another day? Well, today you're going to hear some incredible stories of people who bounced back and triumphed over their problems. And you're going to meet a man who can help you later on cope with whatever difficult situations you may be facing in your life right now. But first let me tell you that on April 4th, 1977, my first guest was a flight attendant working Southern Airways flight number 242 when it crashed outside Atlanta, Georgia.

1:4363 people on that plane and nine people on the ground were killed. But surviving the crash was probably easier than surviving the agony of the two years that followed. Please welcome the author of Am I Alive? Sandy Pearl. Between 1969 and 1975, my next guest was a star running back with the Miami Dolphins. Seven years after leaving pro football, he was arrested. He was tried and convicted on charges of conspiracy and trafficking in cocaine. and he spent three and a half years in prison. Earlier this year, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that he had not been given a fair trial and that evidence which could have proved his innocence was not permitted.

2:21He was released from prison, free from drug abuse, and the charges against him were dropped. Please welcome Mercury Morris. And my last guest grew up in a family with a physically abusive father and a mother who at eight years old put a gun to her head saying, your dad hates your guts. One of these days he's going to kill you with this. As an adolescent, she turned to alcohol. She turned to vandalism and theft before she was abandoned by her parents at the age of 13. Here with her story, the author of Beyond Betrayal, Carolyn Coons. Welcome them all to the show. Sandy and Mercury and Carolyn. I'll start with you, Sandy.

2:58I think everyone who flies has this fear. And every time we hear the wheels going down or some adjustment in the plane, there is this, oh, my goodness, oh, is it happening feeling. When it started to happen, when you were on flight 242, when did you know it was going wrong? We had taken off out of Huntsville, Alabama, proceeding to Atlanta, Georgia. When at 14 ,000 feet, we were on a DC-9, the left engine shot off three times, a very loud pow, pow, pow. And the hail was so intense that it was like being in a trailer with boulders being thrown at it. So immediately we knew that something was wrong.

3:40Right at takeoff? Well, we were at about 14 ,000 feet, so this was about 10 minutes after takeoff. And the lights in the cabin flickered, and with this, of course, all the passengers in the airplane turned to the rear of the aircraft where I was sitting, and I was literally crucified in my seat against that back bulkhead, unable to react to what was going on because I was programmed as a flight attendant to take control of the situation. I was to be a survivor and produce survivors. So for me, the reaction was one of hitting the button on the computer. When you're under stress, you regress. And I just started reacting and doing what I had been hired to do.

4:16However, accepting that later, a couple of years later, and the responsibility for having been in this accident is when it turned around for me. But it was very hard to put this together in my life because I felt like something had happened out of control, and I had no control of my life. So you feel the plane going down? How long do you sense it going down? It wasn't like the airplane just dropped out of the sky. They did manage to hold the airplane up for 11 minutes. The ride engine quit shortly, so we were a DC-9 in the air with no engines, and the pilots were trying to find an airport to land.

4:51When you know this is happening and everyone else knows it's happening, are people screaming and yelling or are they praying or really? No, I have to say that my passengers were professional passengers. There were no children on board. Plus, there was a lot of criticism about this, that we had never really been told by the cockpit that this, in fact, was happening. So it's a situation where the other flight attendant and I reacted on instinct, and we thought we were landing on a runway at an airport. So it was not a reality to me until the airplane finally came down, stopped tumbling, and it finally came to a stop.

5:29So it's tumbling in the sky? Is it tumbling in the sky? They landed on the two-lane highway, and we hit a gas station, some cars, and I landed in a piece of aircraft by myself, and the airplane looked like toilet tissue in the trees. And finally, when the airplane stopped and I couldn't get out the back door and there was nothing but fire in front of my face and behind me, and you couldn't see in the smoke, and I felt the ceiling melting, that is when I realized this is really happening. This is real. I have to get out of here. But there's still something in your mind that says through the whole process that this isn't real and I'll go through this process because we had steps and procedures to do in the event of an emergency.

6:08So I just followed those and did everything I knew. But it was not a reality to me until the airplane stopped and I found myself choking on the smoke. And that's when I realized I was still waiting for word from the cockpit to say this is real. The five bells for evacuate, go out the chutes and the windows, you know. And it wasn't. What did three bells mean? Somebody told me they were on once and they heard three bells. It's different communication systems with each airline. So every time I hear two bells, I go, oh, boy. But it's a communication system between the cabin crew and the cockpit crew, so it has a different meaning with each airline.

6:43But if you hear five bells, you know you were in big trouble. It was at the time with Southern Airways. So when you suddenly realize that this is happening to you, Are you praying or are you just trying to get through the moment? As a flight attendant, once again, Oprah, I was in a position to where I was responsible for those people. So I did not have time to think about me. And do you think about other people? Do you think about the other people? Yes. Oh, yes. I felt, and for years this is something that crippled me, I felt responsible for those people. Because nobody came out chutes. Nobody went out in the emergency exit.

7:16And I did everything I had been trained for. but nothing set me up that one day I'd be in a situation where I had limitations and I had to let go. And there'd be something, a time when I could do nothing about the situation. And that's what I had to live with. It's interesting because, and it's certainly not to make light of this, but my friend Whoopi Goldberg on her first album did a whole routine on airline stewardesses and what happens in the plane and when they say, you know, the oxygen will drop and so forth. And she says, when the plane is crashing, you don't want oxygen, you want Demerol.

7:48You don't, you know, and who's going to take oxygen anyway? Who wants to know? So when you're feeling that, oh, my goodness, there wasn't the chutes, and it doesn't happen the way it happens when you're looking at the tape on the plane, and I'm sure in most cases it doesn't happen that way. There are not perfect plane crashes. Right. There are not any perfect plane crashes. And as a flight attendant, and we are the brunt of a lot of jokes and things like that, And the bottom line is that we are there for your safety to provide you the knowledge on how to get out in an emergency and to help you with that situation.

8:25So your problem came because you survived. Yes, I felt very guilty that I'd survived this. Death was mercy. To have to live with the memory of pieces of people, it was like a bomb went off in front of my face. And my life just totally catapulted on me. I felt guilty because I was alive. I was one of the youngest people on the airplane. I didn't have children. There were people killed that had families to support. And what was happening to me was I had an invisible injury. I could not find anybody that could identify with where I had been and relate to it because I did. I looked all right, but it was invisible.

9:02Nobody could read the inside, so I was in a situation where I had to project a healthy, happy person because for me to react to where I had been triggered reactions in other people. So once again, I took the role of... They say, what are you complaining? I've hurt somebody. Well, you're young. Go on with your life. You look so good. You're so lucky to be alive. And I thought, well, you're right. I should be happy, and I would try. But in the first year after the accident, I lived in six states, and I just ran. Anybody that knew what had happened to me, I just packed my car and go. I had been married for a year at the time of the accident and divorced within a year.

9:37The accident was in April, and in October, I learned that I was pregnant with an IUD, three and a half months, but the fetus was dead. And this was something I had to deal with. My airline at the time quit paying me. The first time I ever wanted to get on an airplane after the accident, I was reminded I was on a medical leave and did not have past privileges. So it was just the beginning of a sequence of everything that started falling apart. So it was easy for me to stay right where I was. If this had not happened to me, if only I could. And I was an emotional cripple.

10:15Mercury Morris, star running back for the Miami Dolphins, who just was this past June released from prison. I wonder if it is more difficult hitting the bottom when you've been on top. Well, in the first place, from an objective standpoint, people who view that place on top as a place, it's not a place. It's a state of mind, just as the bottom is a state of mind. And it took me to go to the bottom and to go to the top to realize that. Yeah. That's very philosophical. Yeah. It's also true. Very true. I appreciate that. But I'm one, you know, people say this to me all the time. Be careful who you mess with going up, honey, because you never know who you're going to see coming down.

10:59Because people, I think, always assume that if you are successful at some point in your life, you have to also fail, which isn't what I believe. No, I don't either. Yeah. Yeah. But having had a glimpse of the good life, guess what I'm trying to say, hitting the bad times, do the bad times seem even badder? Not really, because you try and get back. It's a constant fight. I was an athlete for 20 years, from 1956 to 1976. Every fall I donned a football uniform from the time I was eight years old until I finally quit when I was 29. So being in that perspective, it's a win-loss thing with me, and it always has been.

11:41And I viewed this once I saw how the criminal justice system was, and that's those two words who are, they don't fit together, but that's what I got when I was in Miami. Criminal justice. In Miami, exactly, criminal justice. So tell us what started you with drugs. I think it was the same thing that starts everyone, just the acceptance factor, that what we feel that is a groove, we don't see that that could turn into a rut. Yeah. And I continued on in a path of involvement until I became really married to that kind of lifestyle. Drugs? Exactly. Yeah. Were you doing drugs when you were playing? Oh, God, no.

12:18Yeah. No, you have to look at whatever's happening in society. That's what's going to happen in sports because for some strange reason, we don't want to realize that athletes for six days a week, they live in the same place that the spectators live. And that one day a week for maybe three or four hours that you see a person in an arena, you tend to project that person into that lifestyle permanently right there, which is one reason why we have people picking role models as athletes when the criteria would be whether he scores a lot of touchdowns or hits a lot of home runs or makes a lot of baskets, which is really not the criteria for a role model.

12:53So, you know, now today there's all this emphasis on, you know, athletes who are taking drugs and seemingly a lot of players who do take drugs and play and perform at the same time. But you're saying when you were playing that that was not the norm. Right, because you know what's happened? Once again, you have to look at society. You have to look at where these athletes live. Now, whatever is prevalent in society is going to be prevalent in sports because those people from sport make society also. So they go to the arena and they do what they have to do. And then when they returned, they returned back to society where the drug problems supposedly are.

13:31Okay, so you started because it was acceptable and it was... Oh, sure. I mean, if you see it on Hill Street Blues, then you know it's okay to do. Yeah. When you were doing it, though, you'd already left pro football. Oh, yeah. Yeah. How bad did it get? It got so bad that me being a fairly aggressive person insofar as personality is concerned, I found myself very weak, very weak-minded. How much cocaine were you doing? Enough to go on binges of three, four, five, six days. It was real ridiculous as I look at it now. Were you snorting it, shooting it, smoking it? I started snorting it, and then I started smoking it.

14:12And see, the difference of snorting cocaine and smoking freebase is like night and day. And the casual social aspect of people who inhale cocaine through their nose and the ridiculous paranoia that's created by people who now in this epidemic proportion of this crack business who smoke it, they find an isolation and a singularity about themselves and they find their greed factors are enhanced by the fact that they're... Were you doing what we now know as crack? Mm-hmm. That's what you were doing? Let me tell you what crack is. The sound that produces that crackling noise comes from that little rock that they sell.

14:50There's water that's trapped in there because oil and water don't mix. When they make that solution and they extract it from the water, it immediately dries. But inside of there are these little pockets of air with water in them. And when it hits that flame, the heat to create the vapor, the water boils and it makes a crackling sound. So henceforth you have the name crack. But it's free base is what it is. But there's nothing free about it. It should be home-based because that's what you lose, your home and everything else. Yeah. So you, let's call it home-based. So when you were home-basing, you were home-basing for three or four days at a time?

15:23Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's real ridiculous. I wish that I could explain to America so that they would understand that the symptoms that these people have, those psychological handcuffs that that feeling puts on you, because you don't get addicted to the drug. You get addicted to the feeling that the drug produces. And if M &Ms did that same thing, they'd be doing it with that. So it's just a matter of what you want to try and do to recreate that feeling. So how far down did you, if you had not been arrested and convicted, do you think you still would be doing it? Once again, I can't predict what I would have been doing, but I know one thing, I would not be in the way I am right now in terms of myself.

16:05It took me a long time to realize that the problem was not in the drug, but that the problem was with me. and that the drug was not capable of having a problem, but I foresaw it as a drug problem. Did you, though, Mercury, did you think, like everybody else who thinks, who does drugs, apparently, that it wouldn't happen to you because you're cool and you're smart, you're intelligent, you know, and you weren't going to let some drug control you? Did you think that? Unfortunately, when you're involved with the aspect of freebases, as I said before, you lose that control. Yeah. You lose it completely.

16:37And you go into such a paranoiac state that you try and hide. I used to put tin foil and paper on my windows at night so that when the day came, I wouldn't know it was daytime. So I would still be in the darkness because the dark represents a certain time where you're free of responsibility and the daytime represents commitment and responsibility and obligation. So you block out that light so you can stay in that atmosphere that you've created. You lost what? How much did you lose? Oh, I lost a piece of property worth over$3 million. I lost a house in the Keys. I lost my wife's car that I bought for her.

17:15The material things aren't really important what you lost. It's important what you salvage. And I was able to salvage... In terms of yourself, though, what did you lose? We're going to get to what you salvaged. Nothing. Nothing, because I don't count any of those material things now that I look at it now. But that seems to be the criteria from those people who look from an objective standpoint at you and say, my God, you had it all. Well, it's obvious you don't have it all. things, but in terms of your personal self, your manhood, your personhood. I didn't lose. Yeah. It was a constant fight. You see, Oprah, when you're involved in competition, which is what I found out that the court system was, I mean, I was like a peeled banana when I sat in that courtroom and usually get six, eight, nine months to go to trial, maybe sometimes a year on a case like I had.

17:56I was arrested, tried, and convicted in 79 days. Okay. It takes six or eight weeks to go to the big house, as you say. I was a first offender. They sent me to Rayford where I saw the burn marks where the electric chair used to be. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Is it at that time then that you start to say, whoa, I guess I better turn my life around? Or is it prior to that? I mean, because you were, when you had the tinfoil over the windows and you realize and you're sitting there and you're freebasing and freebasing and freebasing, don't you realize then that you're down, that you're in trouble, that you need help?

18:30I'm glad you asked me that because that too is a question that I love to answer because, number one, people assume that in the middle of this binge that you can somehow come up with some rational common sense, which is impossible to do. You are on what I call the ADS, which is the automatic downward spiral. You think you're going like this, but in actuality, you're deteriorating. And it produces a kind of a psychosis where you think, you know, a person who suffers from neurosis says that two and two is four and I can't stand it. That means they can't deal with reality that's around them. And by the person who was involved with drugs, it produces a psychosis.

19:04It says two and two is 22, and everything is fine. When I was arrested on August the 18th, 1982, now you would think that that would be such a trauma that would cause you to turn around. But during the course of the time that I bonded out the next day, I hear the pastor from my church came, and my wife came, and the camera's following you down the street, and she started crying, and my pastor started crying, and I started crying. But when I got home, I remembered that one of the guys I got busted with, that he hid in my guest room a vial with about three grams of coke in it. When I came home and I waited until my wife went next door, then I went over and I made a pipe, just like you see these people doing on TV right now.

19:45I made an apparatus. I went in and I cooked that stuff up and I sat there and I smoked it out the window. Now, instead of looking for the police, I was looking for my wife because I didn't want her to know. Oh, my goodness. Yes. Weren't you humiliated though when you're walking down the street? I remember seeing that that day. To all of us who were so proud and held you in such esteem, it's like someone shot us with a small caliber bullet and there's mercury and oh my God. And first you want to say, oh, he didn't do it. It's not true at all. When you were crying with your pastor and crying with your wife and the cameras were following you, were you humiliated or were you?

20:19No. No. I wasn't even thinking about that part. You know, if you fumble on TV before 80 million people, It makes it kind of tough to be embarrassed over a camera following you down the street when you're getting out of jail. Yeah. Amazing. Carolyn, when you were eight years old, I understand, your mother held a gun to your head. That's right. Why? Well, I'll never forget that morning as I found this loaded gun in my bedroom and my mother caught me with it, grabbed it out of my hand, and put her finger on the trigger and held it right to my face, just inches from my face and screaming, you know, your dad hates your guts.

20:56He hates you. One of these days he's going to kill you. And I could see the bullets in the chamber and her finger was on the trigger. I thought she was going to slip and blow my brains out. And I, I was raised with this, this, our family was very violent. And my dad was alcoholic. He was the kind of person that was either passing out or he was beating you or he was grabbing guns or he was pushing people around. and I became very much the object of his attention. I didn't find out until years later, but I discovered that I was illegitimate. And what I was, I was that object that reminded him continually of this.

21:32And if he wasn't lashing out at someone, he really seemed to concentrate his attention on me and everyone in the family knew that. When you were 13, you were driving down a road and... Yeah, we were driving through Minnesota. We lived a lifestyle that was pretty low. We were on railroad construction living in trailer courts on the outside of towns, moved seven to eight times a year. And I just remember, I mean, we were the kind of kids that no one was allowed to play with. I wasn't allowed to date because the kids in the school weren't allowed to associate with those railroad kids. And as we were driving through a couple of states onto our next construction job, I just remember looking at farmhouses.

22:12And I just, you know, as a little kid, I lived so many years in a trailer and all of the terrible things. And moving, moving, moving. And I just said, I just made a comment. I just said, couldn't we just live in a house like everybody else? And my mom looked at me and she says, Carolina, why don't you just get out? She said, you've been the problem in our marriage ever since the day you've been born. Every argument we've ever had has been over you. She said, your dad hates your guts. she said why don't you just get out then I'll never forget because she made a comment that really showed where she was coming from she said she says Carolyn you've got your whole life ahead of you I don't have anything get out and they literally dropped me off in the middle of Minnesota and drove on I was only 13 years old and I'm telling you I did you know you you kind of sense your whole life you feel just desperate and lonely and and just so what do you do you're 13 years old in the middle of Minnesota, you don't know a soul.

23:15I asked, there was a farm there, and I met these people. I asked them if I could stay there, and they said I could. They had just an old run-down farm, and I could get back in there. They said that I could stay, so I did. What I began to realize, though, that it was actually worse than what I had come from. I found out that not only was my dad alcoholic and my mother alcoholic, I moved into this farm, and the husband was alcoholic. It was like I felt I had moved from one hell to the other. And I'll never forget, I used to lay awake at night just saying, how can I get out of here? I literally became their slave.

23:50I took care of their animals. I did all their chores. I got up at 4 or 5 o 'clock in the morning. It was my job. This was a house that you just wandered into because you were left on the road. It was just terrible. I just felt that, was everybody's life like this? I literally thought that most everyone must live like this, and this is all there was to life, and the rest of my life was going to be like this. you know, have you ever felt that such a desperation? You wanted to, you wanted to run away, but you didn't even know where to run. You had no place to go. And I would lay awake at night. Just, I was, I was so desperate.

24:21I didn't even know how to cry. I lived up in their attic and I, I just, I wanted to cry, but I began to realize that I had become so stoical myself over the years because of the anger that I had and because of what my parents had put me through. Um, and I I started drinking too. I mean, you know, from the gun on, I became that vandal. I was the kid that could literally, through elementary school and junior high school, I was the kid that never stayed home. I ran the streets. I hung out at Park and Recreation. I could find a local school. And for some reason, for no reason at all, I could break into that elementary school.