From Rock Bottom to Rewrite: An Author's Second Act

Crime fiction author David E. Feldman joins me for a candid conversation about his battle with addiction from an early age and serious health challenges later in life. He reflects on how life shapes art, and the significance of gratitude.

Have you faced something that nearly broke you, only to come out stronger?

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Transcript

Intro

Speaker 1 0:14

This is Shamron, and you're listening to Open Hearts, Hidden Truths. David E. Feldman is the author of numerous books, including seventeen crime fiction novels. His life story may be even more gripping than that of his characters. From battling addiction and depression to multiple health conditions, including cancer, he's turned struggles into resilience. How did you first get started as a writer?

Speaker 2 0:45

Well, I got started as a writer by getting started as a reader first. Uh books became really important to me when I was, I don't know, eight, maybe. I d I'm just throwing an age out there. Finding another reality in a way became really important to me. When I was a child, I was around a certain amount of violence uh in my neighborhood and around me. And I was on the receiving end of some of it.

Bullying and Booze

Speaker 1 1:16

About what age were you when you when you started? Because you didn't start off in writing at all. You you weren't in a creative field, were you?

Speaker 2 1:24

I worked uh for a production house, a bunch of different production houses that produced ads for ad agencies. The creative people would come up with the ads during the day, and we would produce the ads physically at night. I was a typesetter and a proofreader, and I was part of the physical compilation of the ads. Um and but I already wanted to become a writer. You know, I wanted, I I gravitated towards stories as a child. So I was born in Brooklyn, but I didn't stay there very long. I moved to Valley Stream, which is a suburb of New York City and is pretty close to the city when I was a year old. And that's really where I grew up. Uh I lived there until I was about 16. And what I saw around me were and continue to see around me in different forms. Uh, and what has influenced all of my all of my writing has been a bunch of different kinds and incarnations and genres of bullying. Uh, when I was a kid, it was the bigger, stronger kids picking on the smaller, weaker kids, or anyone who is different. Mean girls is the same kind of thing, you know, these girls who, you know, group together. And, you know, my wife and I frequently say, we're so glad we have boys, because we've heard that girls can be really, really challenging, uh, particularly when they're teenagers and can be really cruel. Uh guys can be cruel, but it's more physical. At least, you know, I I know that I'm kind of generalizing, but I think there's something to that. So, so I I when I was six years old, I lived next to I lived next to a school, and I was in the schoolyard when I was six, and a bunch of 16-year-olds who were playing stickball came over to me, and one of them bent down next to me and said, What's your name? And I said, David. And he said, Are you Jewish? And I said, Yes. And he said, That's terrible. That's very, very, very bad. I want you to go back into your house and stay there and don't come out until you're not Jewish anymore. And that scared the hell out of me. And I didn't want to go to school, I didn't want to come out of my house. Uh, and and that sort of thing, uh, and violence and you know, anti-Semitism and racism that I've seen, and just pure bullying, has influenced pretty much everything that I've written. Uh, I fell in love for that reason with Jack Reacher because he wouldn't stand for that kind of crap. You know, people who are on the receiving end of bullying, particularly misogyny, you know, women who are abused, they get what's coming to them.

Speaker 1 4:24

So during your advertising days, it's like a I I I'm imagining like a madman kind of scenario in New York. Is that accurate? Is there anything else?

Speaker 2 4:33

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. So so let me back up a little bit. When I was, oh, I don't know, 12, 13 years old, I found my parents' liquor cabinet and I liked it. I knew what was in there was what I needed. And I I also found my mother's medicine chest, and there was a little of mommy's little helper, although it was not the up kind, it was the down kind. Uh she didn't my mother didn't do a lot of drugs, but she did have a little Valium around for to calm herself down or to help herself sleep, I guess. Uh and I got together with my friends who were like me, guys and girls, who cut out of school, who were in trouble, who got into fights, who were drinking, and we would pool the alcohol that we stole from our parents' houses and pool the pills that we found in the medicine cabinets and share and have parties and hang out under the train tracks. Or uh there was a train trestle, there still is actually in Valley Stream with it where two branches, uh two uh branches of trains go in different directions. And there's a trestle, and we would hang out under the trestle in the rain, in the sunshine, whatever the weather. It was an all-weather hangout, and get people to buy us alcohol or bring our own alcohol and do drugs and go shoot pool and cut out of school and get all in all kinds of trouble. So, so that was, and that's how I lived, and I loved it. Uh, I loved getting as inebriated as I could, as often as I could, and that's how I lived for a long time. Uh, and I was in trouble at home. I caused a lot of conflict in my family, and my family didn't deal with it very well, and uh so I was often not home. Uh somehow, well, not somehow, I ran away from home when I was 16, and I stayed at a guy named Billy's house on his couch for a while, and when I came home, my father said, What are you doing here? You can't be here. And I was sent away to a private school, and it was a Christian private school, boarding school, where you had to wear a suit and tie and go to chapel and sing to Jesus, uh, which was not my speed being Jewish, and they certainly let me know that I was different being Jewish.

Speaker 1 6:59

Why did they send you to a Christian school, though, if you were Jewish and if they were Jewish?

Speaker 2 7:03

Well, there my family's Jewishness was sort of a cultural by they were not religious in at all. They were very, very secular Jews, and they sent me to a Christian private school because that's what there was. There were not the the I they took me to visit two or three schools, and uh, there was one that was very artsy and very kind of hippie oriented, and I really wanted to go there. And someone I knew, I went to a creative arts camp when I was in my teens that I loved. It was sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and I just loved it. Uh, and one of the people I knew from there, and someone I still know, uh, was there at this private school that they took me to visit that was very hippie oriented, and I wanted to go there. And my parents said, no way, you need structure and you need strict. And so they sent me to what there was, which were schools that had kind of a Christian backbone, um, a Methodist, I guess, kind of backbone. And the fact, and I hated it, it was terrible. It was very strict. I guess it wasn't terrible for some people, but there were 50 people in my graduating class, and they threw out 12 of them before graduation for various pranks. And I was not one of the ones who was thrown out. I was in a lot of trouble there. I did, you know, when you're a teenager and you you're drinking and you're using drugs, you can find other kids. You can gravitate very well, uh, kind of instinctually, to other kids who were doing the same thing. And that's what I did. And I found other kids who were more or less like me. And we got together and we partied. And I did graduate. I didn't have to take math. I didn't, it was a private school, so it didn't have to follow a lot of the uh curricula that public schools have to follow. So I took only history, which I always liked history. It was like a story, history, uh, and English, where I read Kurt Vonnegut books, which I liked, and art. And we drew nude models. And um, I do have an affinity for art. I I paint now, and uh drawing new nude models was just fine with me as a 16-year-old. It was fun. I I did found some things that I could deal with at this school, though it was very strict, and again, I I found it very oppressive. Uh and uh some other people did too, but there were people my brother went to the same school and he liked it.

Speaker 1 9:37

Were you drinking and drugging all throughout your college years as well?

Speaker 2 9:41

Yeah, I I hung out with the rugby club. I played about this much rugby, uh, really wasn't my thing, but I liked the rugby club, and they had what they called the third half after every game, which was drinking and singing really raunchy songs, and uh I'm still friends with some of those guys. Uh, and I did a lot of drugs. I found what I needed, and I was high all the time. I spent a lot of time with a young woman whose two roommates worked at a local drugstore, and they used to bring home uh speed, dexodrin and benzodrin, and I would be given them. Uh, you know, I had free access to speed and I liked it. It probably would have been my drug of choice if I could if I could have gotten enough of it. And it helped me in school. I it kept me awake, it kept me uh writing papers and reading history books, uh, and I began to write short stories at that time. And you you originally you had asked me about when I graduated and was involved in the ad agency universe, and it was very much like Mad Men, and it was a continuation of my college career. I was drinking and drugging and partying and doing whatever I felt like doing when I was in college. And after college, when I found myself working for these uh production companies for ad agencies, it was the same thing. You could be at the bar at two in the morning. I worked nights for a long time, for about 12 years. Uh I worked nights, sometimes days, but mostly nights, and and I'd be at the bar at two in the morning, which would be my lunch hour, and there'd be a tap on my shoulder, and I'd look, and it would be the owner of the company, and he'd be buying the next round, and they didn't care. You could you could drink, you could drug, you could do whatever you wanted to do as long as the work got done. As long as the work got done. And the work got done. And I was able to work when I was high. I would say most of the people at these companies were not high and were not drinking and were not using drugs. Some were, and the people that I hung around with were. And there were, you know, there was a guy who at the time was a famous playwright. He happened to have been gay, and he did get AIDS, and he did die of AIDS, and he was we talked about literature, we talked about art, and and uh he was from, I think, New Zealand. His name was Robert Lord, he was a well-known guy, and he was very cool. And we had a lot of fun, actually, at the at these companies. We we had to pass the time producing quickly and producing well and producing, working very hard to produce ads for major, you know, Fortune 100 companies, you know, Revlon, Estee Lauder, Gray Advertising, BMW ads. We did BMW ads for quite a while for a company called Amarati Impuris. And that's what we did, and we worked hard. And the pressure, I think, drove some of us to drink a fair amount. Not to say people were noticeably drunk, although I suppose if you sat them down and looked in their eyes and talked to them, you might figure some something was going on. But there was a fair amount of drinking and and drug usage born of pressure. I would say it was born of the pressure to do the work and to work hard.

Speaker 1 13:09

What were you trying to escape from?

Root Causes

Speaker 2 13:11

Reality, daily life. Uh, the pain of having to take what felt like bullying type abuse all around me. You know, I wasn't happy at home, I wasn't happy at school, I was I felt like I was in conflict with just about everything. Everything felt very overwhelming and traumatic. And look, I I learned when I was in my 40s that I have clinical depression and anxiety, and it could be the early symptoms of that led me to self-medicate. Very much could be that. That I found everything traumatic. And other people who are in the same circumstances, there are people that I went to school with who found school just fine. And my brother and sister found our home life just fine. So I suspect that quite a lot of it was me, that I found things overwhelming. But I I find it very helpful as an author to be able to access feelings like that and to put it into writing. And I think people like to read about people who are traumatized and deal with their trauma in interesting ways. Uh, I also put the circumstances around the characters I write about who are traumatized. I make I put those circumstances on steroids. You know, I write about uh serial killers and murderers, and I have not spent a lot of time around serial killers and murderers, murderers as a child or as a student, as a teenager, or at the ad agencies. I wasn't around that sort of thing. So I wrote about I put the feelings I had into circumstances that I invented, I guess. I never I you know, I've never said it that way, but I guess that's what I've done.

Life Meets Art

Speaker 1 15:08

So you took a lot of pain and trauma and depression, it sounds like, and you sort of funneled that into dark creative writing.

Speaker 2 15:17

That's right. That's right.

Speaker 1 15:20

How did you apply what was going on in your life? How did you take those instances and that that pain and trauma and apply that and work it out in your writing? How did it come through?

Speaker 2 15:33

Well, I I'll give you an I'll give you an example. With Dora, I think that it was alchemy. It was so some kind of unseen magic that went on in my subconscious because it just came out. You know, I wrote this story years ago. I live in the town of Long Beach, New York, and years ago I had heard about someone who was supposedly running the town, and this is before this is many, many years ago, maybe 40 years ago, and was not in any official position. Now, I don't know anything about this person, I don't know if such a person existed, but I had heard this, and he was someone who was not the mayor, he was not on the city council, he had some other job, and he was really running the town. Let me give you a more specific example. I have two sons. When my younger son, who was now 32, was four years old, he took tennis lessons. He also took karate. I don't know that what he did, his tennis lessons because he was four, but uh anyway, one day I went to pick him up at his tennis lesson, and the woman behind the counter said, Oh, your wife came and got him already. And I said, What? She said, Your wife picked him up. And I said, Hang on. And I took out my cell phone and I called my wife and I said, You're at work, right? They're telling me that Dan was picked up, that you picked up Dan at his tennis lesson. And she said, What? I'm at work. I don't know what you're talking about. So I hung up the phone and I said, Nobody picked my son up at tennis. Where is he? And and she just went, humana, humming, humana, I don't know. And it was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me. I I tore out of there and I drove all around the neighborhood in a in a blind combination of rage and terror. And that moment, that it was about 15 minutes. The whole thing took 15 minutes. I found him uh about five blocks away. He had been confused and walked out of the place. I don't know why, what happened, but in his little mind, he thought he was supposed to leave. And he left. And he tried to walk home. And he didn't know how to walk home. He didn't know he wasn't allowed to cross the street. He was four. Uh, and he was crying. And I found him sobbing on a street corner. And it was very upsetting and it was very traumatic, and it was over. That encapsulated 15 minutes of rage and terror is the backbone of book one of my Hammer and Sharp noir mystery thriller series called Let Thy Children Come. It's about a boy, a seven-year-old boy, who doesn't come home from school. And the backbone of the book is his mother's terror and drive and obsession with getting her son home, finding out what happened to him, and so forth. So that was a direct channel, whereas Dora uh is a more indirect channel. And and the Hammer and Sharp books are about two people who are also extensions in different ways of aspects of me. One is a private eye who is a heroin addict, which is an extension to me because I have um I got clean. I didn't mention that. I got clean from drugs when I was 36, which was 30 something years ago. And I've been clean for 32 years. So I know the process. I know what it's like to be addicted. I know what it's like to be in recovery. And when you get into recovery, you kind of have to have the awareness. Not all addicts know they're addicts. You know, a lot of addicts just think the world is all effed up, and the hell with that, you know, the hell with the world. And I came to realize I want to stop doing what I'm doing, and I can't. And so I I knew I was an addict, and I went to uh went into recovery and got clean, which took a while, and but here I am, clean and living very differently now. Uh so Sam Sharp, who's a private eye, is a heroin addict and he struggles with that. And when he gets, he's addicted to solving murders. But when he starts to get on the case to solve a murder, he's driven. And when he's driven, the beast, which is his addiction in his kind of subconscious, forces its way into his consciousness and he is driven to use drugs. He's driven to shoot heroin.

Speaker 1 20:13

Did you? Did you shoot heroin?

Speaker 2 20:14

No, I did try heroin and I didn't like it. It was not my cup of tea. In 1979, I went to England. I went to school in England for a semester, and the reason I went was to get away from the drugs. I thought if I get far away, it'll be like a scenic detox, and I'll get clean. It didn't go, didn't go that way. And that's where I tried heroin, was at a party somewhere in England, I think in Oxford actually. And I lived in England, uh, in London for a little while. Uh, but I found drugs there because that's what you do. I went to Amsterdam, and I'm sure there were people who got clean in Amsterdam, but I wasn't one of them. Uh so that's where Sam Sharp, the private eye, who is an addict, came from. And he goes back and forth with getting clean and being pulled into cases and being pulled back into drugs, and there's this tension in the books. The other character in the Hammer and Sharp mystery series is Judah Hammer. And like Dora Ellison, Judah Hammer is Jewish, and I deal with anti-Semitism to a degree. In one sense, I push back against anti-Semitism because I really like to have both Dora and Judah Hammer are very, very tough Jews, and I like that. I like having tough Jewish characters. Of course, in America, there were uh Jewish crime bosses, Bugsy Siegel. Uh there are a few others too, I think.

Speaker 1 21:43

Meyer Lansky.

Speaker 2 21:44

Yeah, Meyer Lansky . That's right.

Speaker 1 21:45

Yeah, Meyer Lansky. I like all that crime, true crime, mafioso stuff.

Body Blows

Speaker 2 21:52

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 21:52 Speaker 1 21:53

You've had a lot of serious health conditions, haven't you?

Speaker 2 21:57

I have. I have. So I so As I said, I'm a recovering addict, which is something that's always with me. I had depression. I had a serious bout of depression 25 years ago. It's something that runs, maybe gallops in my family. We've had some suicides in my family. I have some relatives with pretty serious depression, although it's been very well managed. And in more recent years, I've had, gee, uh, I've been giving my Medicare a workout, I like to say. I've had two hip replacements. Uh, I was heading towards paralysis with uh really wicked spinal issues and had to have spinal fusion um in 2020. I had COVID at that time, which got me very, very sick. And then a couple of days after the spinal fusion, I needed a uh I they found air in my intestines, and I you can't have air in your intestines, and I needed a resection and had to wear a colostomy bag for three months. And that was not, that was the worst because your body is mutilated. You know, you're going to the bathroom at your stomach. So yeah, and then I found out soon after that, before my second hip, uh, that I had cancer, that I had prostate cancer, and that was not fun either. I and it it all of these things though have been well managed. I live in New York, I have very good doctors. I've gone to the major, you know, I went to the hospital for special surgery, one of the best, if not the best, osteopathic hospitals in the country. I went right to Sloan Kettering when I was diagnosed with my cancer. I said, leave the diagnosis there, I'm going to Sloan Kettering. And they redid my diagnosis, and they said, You're actually better off than you were originally told. So all of this is being managed. But you know what? All of it is trauma. All of it is trauma, and all of it finds its way into my stories. My characters live very dangerous lives because they've got to deal with the stuff that happens to me, that happens in my life, you know. But also, all my stories have love because it's all about love. I think life is all about love. Um, I did not have the happiest of love lives growing up. I mean, I did, I guess, but I was a guy who was after feeling good and having fun, and that's what my love life was about. You know, it was like about hooking up, really. But when I and I didn't know what was best for me. I had no interest in getting married, I had no interest in having kids. These things never really occurred to me. And if they did, I just dismissed them because, hey, I got to get high. You know, that's that was how I lived for a long

The Beginning of Something Beautiful

Speaker 2 24:41

time. But when I was, I don't know, I was 27. Yeah, I was 27. I was invited to a wedding. Now, the crowd I hung around with in college kind of it was the rugby crowd, but there were offshoots, and there was a crowd of about 30, 25, 30 people, guys and girls, who were all friends on some level. A lot of it had to do with partying. A lot of it had to do with, you know, getting high and drinking with them. Anyway, I was invited to a wedding. This woman, Judy, was marrying this guy, Bob. And I was friends, but not real close friends with Judy. I knew her and I knew Bob, uh, but they had a big wedding, and it was big enough that I was invited. I think, you know, it was a 300-person wedding, and I was maybe 295 on the guest list. Well, at the cocktail hour of this wedding, I see this bridesmaid. And I had seen her before. Judy had had some parties at her, she had a country place at a lake, and I had seen this young woman, although I never met her. So I see this bridesmaid who's someone I had was sort of vaguely familiar with, but had never been introduced to. And I think she just is the most gorgeous thing. And I went over to her at this cocktail party and I said, Later on, would you dance with me? And she said, sure. And I promptly forgot all about it and went out to the parking lot with the boys, and we did what we did in parking lots, which was various drugs. And that was that. I forgot all about it. And came back in, and I probably ate some of the meal and had dessert, and the people were dancing, and there was the band and all that stuff. And out of the blue or out of the haze at this wedding party comes this young woman marching up to me, left some guy on the dance floor, and says, You promised me a dance. And I just kind of left. I said, Okay. And so I danced with her. And I like to dance, especially if I had been drinking. I still, and I don't drink or use any drugs, and I still love to dance. I love it. I love music. I love music. So we danced. And we were dancing, and she said, she asked me my name, and I said, Dave, Dave Feldman. And she said, hmm, do you have a nickname? We all had nicknames, and most of them originated with rugby. And I said, I do. She said, What's your nickname? I said, face. She said, Oh, face. Yeah, I've heard about face, sure. And so we're dancing and dancing, and I see she's wearing a locket, a gold heart-shaped locket. I said, What a pretty locket. Where'd you get it? And she said, My grandmother. Well, my grandmother was the love of my life. I adored my grandmother. She was a shining light of my childhood. One of the few, my sister also. Uh and I launched into talking about my grandmother. And this young woman whose name was Ellen really, she liked that. And at the end of the evening, this is when I was working for ad agencies, I said, So I see that you live in South Jersey. I work in Manhattan. Do you ever get into the city? She said, No, but I would if I had a reason. And that went right over my head. Right over my head. I didn't ask her out. Uh, but eventually it took a while for that whatever few brain cells I had functioning at the time to realize that she was saying, hey, ask me out. So I did. I asked her out, and I took her to the Museum of Modern Art. I think it was the Museum of Modern Art, might have been the Met, uh, where they had Van Gogh, and I knew she loved Van Gogh, and I bought the tickets in advance, and there was a line around the block, and she showed up and she looked at the line and she said, We got to get on that line. I said, Oh no, and walked her right up to the front. And I had introduced myself to the doorman, and he said, Hi to me. And he we walked right in and we went right to the Van Gogh, and it was the beginning of um, it was the beginning of a wonderful friendship and romance. And that was a little over 40 years ago, and we celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary yesterday.

Speaker 1 29:08

Congratulations.

Speaker 2 29:09

Yeah, I am really in love with my wife. It was like God knew, God knew what I needed. She's she's really something. That's the way my my grandmother used to say, Isn't that something? And she would say, she would say, Isn't Ellen something? And she really is. She's wonderful.

Speaker 1 29:28

She's your wife has been with you then for lots of ups and downs.

Speaker 2 29:32

She's yeah, and that's a good point. She's with me seven years before I got clean. So I was using drugs uh when I met her. Uh in fact, you know, they have this thing in recovery where you make amends to people you've hurt. And when it came time for me to do that, she said, I understand you're doing this amends thing. I said, uh, yeah. And she said, Where am I on that list? And I had I said nothing. Um and she told me that I really hurt her early in our early in our marriage. And I started crying and I made amends. And I changed. And I never spoke to spoke like that to her again. You know, sometimes with me, trauma and overwhelm comes out as irritation and something probably nastier than irritation. And I have to I have had to learn to be accountable. Part of being in recovery from drug addiction is you learn to be accountable for be your behavior, and you learn to change your behavior. And I have. I am far from perfect, but we're a pretty happy couple. We're a pretty happy couple. We have two kids.

The Moment that Changed Everything

Speaker 2 30:46

Uh, and by the way, what got me into recovery, the moment that got me into recovery, was when my first son was maybe a year old, and I was so proud to be a father. I, you know, I always said that if I'm ever a father, which I really hadn't thought much about, but if I ever am, I'm gonna be really good to my kids because I felt my father was pretty strict uh and a bit overbearing with me. And so, which he probably needed to be because he had a son who was out of control, but I vowed that if I'm ever a father, I will be kind and understanding to my child. And I had this son in 1990, and I was so proud to be a father, and yet I was using drugs. And so one day, when he was about a year and a half old, I was taking care of him, and I was high, and he got hurt, and it was over, and I became ready at that moment because I knew I I was so proud to be a father, and yet I wasn't a very good one. He got hurt, and and I became absolutely willing at that moment to do absolutely anything to change, and that's recovery likes that. You know, willingness is a big part of getting clean. And I had the absolute they call it the gift of desperation. G-O-D. Gift of desperation. Uh and that's what I had, and I became willing to change, and I it was a big part of it. It's a big part of it. I think that God or the universe, or who however you see that, uh knew that Dave's uh drive to be a good father could be useful, and it was put to very good use, and it it was a motivation for me to get clean ultimately.

Speaker 1 32:34

So that was the moment, that was your rock bottom, and you never looked back?

Speaker 2 32:38

Have I ever well, I've probably looked back, but I never I never quit. It took me four years, no, it took me two and a half years to get clean. So I started that process and it didn't work for quite a while. And for a lot of people, it doesn't work right away because it's a process. It doesn't have you don't like come into recovery and say, oh, I'm gonna get clean today, and that's it, and you're done, and you're fine, and you're not using drugs anymore. I mean, some people, maybe that does happen, uh, or maybe it's relatively quick, but it took me a few years, and I remember people saying, I don't know why this isn't working for you, Dave, but eventually it did work for me, and I've gone through all the stuff you go through to get clean, and here I am clean, and I get to be a little help to other people because that's a big part of it. You gotta you gotta give it away to keep it, and I did. It's important.

Speaker 1 33:32

What's the biggest lesson that you've learned throughout all your trials and and your obstacles?

Speaker 2 33:40

Oh boy. There's really a few. I think being kind and at least courteous and decent is really important. I think there's a lot, there's a real lack of kindness that we see. You know, I don't want to just generalize, but you see a lot of it, especially in the news, people being unkind to one another, and there's a lot of scorn also. Scorn seems to be sort of a national pastime, and and I guess I'm kind of scornful of scorn. Uh but I I think also having something to believe in. I I was not raised with any religion. You know, my family was Jewish, but they were very secular. Uh my parents didn't go to synagogue, my grandparents did, but I think they went culturally. They just went because their parents went and it was part of what you did. Uh, like a lot of kids go to church today, some of them understand what they're reading and saying and and do believe it. Uh, but I think a lot of people do some of these things by road. And I guess that's just fine for them. But in my family, there was no nobody believed in God in my family. But in recovery, there is, I want to say you're you're not really pressured to believe in God, but it's part of the deal. You you are it's suggested that you come to believe in something greater than you. And I did. And eventually it was God. And uh the guy that helped me at the beginning, when I got to that point, I said, What do I do with this? You know, how do I come to believe in God, which was just such a foreign idea. He said, Well, act like you act like you have a God in your life. And I said, What how? What? Hmm? It was that was like Swahili to me. And he said, Well, start talking to him. Say a prayer. And I did. I started talking to this thing that I wasn't sure was there. And he I said, What do you say? He said, say whatever you want. And so I did. I started saying, Well, if you're there, could you show me what to do? Show me how to live. Could you give me a sign? And there would be a sign. There would, you know, I have it in one of my books. I have one of the characters is driving along and he says, Could you show me a sign? And he drives past a church, and there's a marquee on the church that says something in bright white lights. That's just what he needs to hear. And I've had a lot of those moments. There used to be a company called Guaranteed Overnight Delivery. I don't know if they're still around. They have these enormous green tractor trailers with bright yellow uh letters that say guaranteed overnight delivery. G-O-D. And I would see them at moments that I needed some help. I would say, God, could you just give me some help? You know, and a lot of what I asked for was just help me cope. What I was asking for was comfort and guidance, you know, and I would see one of those trucks right then, and it was the coolest thing. You know, the other, the other part of what I so I'm saying what I pray for is comfort and guidance. I need comfort because I'm a stressed-out guy. I was born with automatic stress and anxiety and stuff, uh, but I do channel it into creativity. The other thing that I pray for uh is I pray not for, but I have a lot of gratitude and I practice gratitude. And someone who really helped me once said, it's not about having what you want, it's about wanting what you have. And his name was Billy, and he died three days ago. Uh and uh I wasn't with him a long time, but he was an important guy in my life, and he said that. So I have learned how to be grateful for what I have. And when I first was introduced to the idea, I thought, what a gratitude. It's not Christmas. What kind of what is what is this gratitude thing? And I heard someone near me respond by saying, Well, I can walk, I can see, I can hear, I have food in my refrigerator, I have a a roof over my head, I have clothes to wear, I have people I love. Not bad, not bad. And I started to see things through a bit of a prism of gratitude. Not always. There are moments that I'm like, oh, the hell with everything, but it's there, and I, you know, I gravitate toward gratitude.

Speaker 1 38:11

Do you see yourself as a survivor?

Lend a Helping Hand

Speaker 2 38:14

Yeah, I see us all as survivors if we're still around. I think the world's going inside. Well, I hate to generalize because the you know, newspapers have to sell advertising, and so they print the most sensationalist stuff. So I want to say the world's going into in crazy directions, but then I meet people and they're terrific. You know, I meet people all over the place through whatever I'm doing, and they're nice and they're cool, and they're survivors too, and their lives are very different from mine, and they're interesting. I meet other authors, you know, I meet people through my family, I have a daughter-in-law, I have my son's, my other son's partner. Uh these are people who have come into my life, and they're they're just terrific. So, yeah, well, look, I'm 69 years old, I've had all these health issues, I've had all this trauma. So I guess I'm a survivor, but I don't I I guess I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself. I think that's a big key to success, is not thinking about yourself. When you're struggling, here's something to think about, and it's what one of the things that was hammered into me as part of my drug recovery. When you're in pain, you're overwhelmed, go help someone. Go help someone. And I have some people in my life who were getting clean from drugs, and I'm in a position where I can be of a little help. And they, you know, I'm someone that they call now and then for help. And that, I gotta tell you, that is probably and being a dad and being a husband and and my dog are the most important things in my life. And I have to always remind myself that I don't know the outcome. I don't know if this person is really helped because of me. And then again, I could have a conflict with someone, and I don't know that, you know, I had this yet a few days ago with someone who was approaching women in a recovery setting and telling them they were beautiful. And I was hosting this thing, and I said to the guy, yeah, you really can't be doing that. You can't just go around to women telling them they're beautiful. And he got very angry. And you know, I I was in a position to, this was using technology, using, you know, online means, and I was the person who was running the thing, and I was I kind of said, sorry, man, you can't be here and doing that. Uh so I I don't know what the result of that was. I don't know what that guy did with his life after that. Did he go and get high? Did he ruminate and say, you know what? You know, maybe these women are frightened when when I come when I when I talk about how they look. My my wife told me many years ago, you have no idea what women put up with from men.

Speaker 1 41:04

It's true.

Speaker 2 41:04

I'm sure it's true. I'm sure it's true, and I'm sorry as a man. And you know what? I'm a guy who doesn't do stuff like that. But this guy didn't get it. He said, Come on, what's wrong with that? She's beautiful. I'm telling her, she's beautiful. What's wrong with that? And I told him what was wrong with that, and he didn't get it. So hopefully he will learn his lesson, and at least hopefully he won't hurt too many people.

Speaker 1 41:26

Your latest book is Ice Blue Murder. Where can I purchase it?

Speaker 2 41:30

It can be purchased any pretty much anywhere books are sold. Uh, my website is David e Feldman Author.com, and I do sell my books each series as a bundle. So you can buy all six Dora books and all five, and counting Hammer and Sharp books and some prequels and stories along with them uh at pretty significant discounts there if you want.

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Speaker 1 41:57

David's story is a testament to the human spirit. Every battle, every obstacle has the ability to reshape our path. Often in the most surprising of ways. What are you feeling? Talk to me. If you're enjoying this podcast, click the subscribe button. If you have a similar experience you'd like to share, drop me an email or a DM at Open Hearts Hidden Truths.