In Conversation: Geoff Rickly

His debut novel is a moving, if not disorienting story of an addict who takes an extraordinary risk for recovery. If the real Geoff Rickly feels for his fictional self, it's because he's been there.

Geoff Rickly with Thursday. The Shrine Auditorium, 2019. Photo by Mark Beemer.

It seems necessary to tell you that there is a minor character in Geoff Rickly’s recently published novel, Someone Who Isn’t Me, named Norman. He works with the main character, also named Geoff, and he bears witness to his coworker’s heroin addiction, among other things. From my interpretation of the character, Norman cares about Geoff a great deal.

Someone Who Isn’t Me is a work of auto-fiction—a hybrid novel of truth and fiction—but all of the points I just described, at least, are true. The reality is that I’ve been friends with the real Geoff Rickly for 20 years this October, and in that time, I have watched him both climb the peaks and plumb the depths. (To be fair, he also bore witness to my own peaks and valleys over the years, and there were many.) Despite a part in this interview where Geoff talks about having reached a point in his addiction where he didn’t know if anybody really thought that he had it in him to get better, I truly never lost hope. Even at my most frustrated, I always wanted Geoff to feel like he had someone who was rooting for him, because I was. The real Norman is a lot like the book Norman in that way.

Geoff eventually did get sober, almost six years ago—after flying to Mexico to undergo an experimental Ibogaine treatment, the story of which carries a significant arc in his book—and writing Someone Who Isn’t Me was a part of his overall recovery strategy when he got home. Which is to say that I always saw him working on this novel as something that was deeply entwined with the work he had been doing on himself. As a friend and a fan, I see triumph in both.

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This may be a little weird, but I wanted to start with a story. I actually published this in one of the columns I wrote for Punk Planet in the late ‘90s.

GEOFF: OK!

The story is this:

“Every great neighborhood has a long history of folklore not too far behind it. One longtime resident told me about a Lower East Side murderer from the early ‘80s that they called “Pigman.” Latin drug rings had basically taken over the neighborhood, and Pigman was their insurance and protection against rival gangs. Neighborhood kids feared the sight of his car. Everyone knew who he was. They called him Pigman because whenever he went out on a hit, he donned a full-headed pig mask to disguise himself. The guy I was talking to told me that when he was still a teenager, Pigman went after him. He stayed indoors unless there was a seriously good reason to go out. Once, while walking home from a show, he heard a car slow down and a voice call out his name. He didn't turn around because he was afraid of giving himself away. Unfortunately, a kid across the street did. I'm not sure if he was hit, but shots were fired. The guy I talked to left town until Pigman became a neighborhood memory some years later.”

GEOFF: Dude, that’s sick [laughs].

The reason I bring him up is because there’s something about a character in your book—“the Mayor”—that reminds me of Pigman, in the sense that he provides this anchor to a geographical place, but also to a psychological place.

GEOFF: Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s like certain neighborhood characters are like half-myth—like, are they even real? But they are real.

But also, you could be a real person and still have a myth attached to you in the neighborhood.

GEOFF: Totally. Even in the hardcore scene, you’d hear these stories like, “Yo, I heard Ratbones beat this guy up!” You'd hear these names like “Ratbones”—that’s an intense name, you know? So it’s definitely like that. There are layers. There’s the person himself, there’s the story of what he did, and then there’s the story of what else is behind it. Because you hear these names in hushed reverence. The character you’re talking about in the book, the Mayor, he’s like this certain kind of junkie that almost seems to be embalmed by the stuff. Like, he can continue to do heroin and live and seemingly flourish…

… Or at least that’s how it might have seemed to you when you were in your addiction.

GEOFF: Yeah, exactly. That's what I’m saying. I think there's a certain ambivalence at play where the right person sees the Mayor and is like, “Damn, that's sad. That old guy is stuck in this little rut of a tiny little world where all he does is use drugs. That’s tough.” But the wrong person sees that—he sees that life—and he’s like, “Oh, that looks good, baby! [laughs]”

In the myth of Pigman, he acts as a signifier for a lot of things. He’s a signifier for the neighborhood, for one, letting you know that this is the type of neighborhood that's got a hit man. He’s a signifier for that era—that old New York City, the Welcome to Fear City era that we like to see on TV.

GEOFF: Warriors, come out and play…

Right! But he also plays a role in signifying something about the narrator of the story, the person who told me the story. Because that person wanted me to know that he was important enough to be targeted by Pigman. That he was enough of a player in that neighborhood that Pigman would even know who the fuck he is. So what does the Mayor signify for Geoff’s character?

GEOFF: In the beginning when he meets the Mayor, there’s a feeling there that I’m the rookie draft pick of the young drug users, you know what I mean? He’s like, “I think you could do this! You could probably survive this. Like, you're gonna be good at this! You're gonna excel at taking heroin.” The Mayor is kind of like a coach to Geoff in the beginning. But I also tried to do this contrast where in the beginning, it’s the Mayor who shows up, but at the end, it’s the drug dealer’s brother who shows up—and he’s just a person who needs help, too. I like the idea of the neighborhood going from this mythical place to an actual place that’s not populated by symbols but rather by actual human beings. At the end I talk about how the drug dealer’s got a Goofy the Dog t-shirt on because he just took his daughter to Disneyland. He's just a human trying to look out for his daughter, you know what I mean? He's also selling drugs, but he's a human being. He's selling drugs because he’s got a daughter.

Which I'm sure a lot of people do.

GEOFF: Yeah. And I mean, I get that it sounds a little rote at this point. We've all seen Breaking Bad or whatever. We know that drug dealers are people too [laughs].

Geoff outside of McNally Jackson Booksellers. South Street Seaport, NYC. July 2023. Photo by Noel McGrath.

This book started as a memoir and then, after some time, a novelization process began. So when you started the novelization process, what was the point to you in keeping your name for this story?

GEOFF: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting how it went from being a memoir to fictional. It's something that I've been thinking about a lot. Basically, I had begun to think of myself fictionally. I had begun to think of this persona of Geoff, who uses drugs and is always in trouble. That doesn't sound real. And a drug that he went to Mexico to take—like, none of that sounds real to me. That sounds like somebody else. I just started thinking of that life as being fictional. And I started thinking that maybe if I wrote the fictional version of that—where everything was the way I saw the fictional version of me—would that doubling of the fiction, would that bring it all the way back around to being the truest version of the story?

So I thought changing the names would cheapen everything. Because this is the thing: I have a little bit of a public-facing persona. If I was like, “Oh yeah, the band is called Friday!” or whatever—like, it's clearly Thursday [laughs]. And the tall, lanky guitar player with the stringy hair, that's obviously Tom [Keeley]. So I just started to feel that it would only cheapen the characters by adding some sort of a faux mystique to them. I don't need that layer. That layer is not as interesting as the layer of apparent truth that I could lay upon these characters—who are still characters. They’re very flattened.

But what about the character of Geoff? Did you think about how you were essentially mythologizing yourself? 

GEOFF: I think I tried to flatten myself in a way where I became more of like an archetypal character in the beginning. Like, before he gets any help, Geoff is meant to be a Don Quixote-type, where he thinks he’s on this holy quest, but the rest of the world kind of thinks he’s a fool. I thought that would be a really good characteristic for this Geoff. A lot of the challenge of the first section of the book was having the main character, who's also the narrator of the story, not understand the situation that he's clearly in, while all the other people—through their dialogue and reactions—are showing that they understand what's really going on. Like, this motherfucker doesn't know what the fuck is going on, and he's narrating the story! That was the thing I kept on bringing back in: Geoff doesn't know shit. He's oblivious. He's lost. He doesn't know anything.

Thursday has always been seen as sort of a literary band; your lyrics have always been looked at in the storytelling vein. At the same time, anybody who's ever tried to play rock music with storytelling lyrics knows that everybody thinks the lyrics are all about you anyway [laughs]. So with that in mind, was there a self-consciousness in constructing this story where you felt like you could either personally benefit from or personally be hurt by what you were writing?

GEOFF: There were times when I had an awareness that I was probably dangling myself over the edge of a cliff and that somebody could shoot me down pretty easily. But I just kept coming back to this thing of: this is maybe my one chance. I've always wanted to write a book. I've always wanted to write a novel. I've always been such an admirer of that form. And the one piece of advice that I kept seeing from every writer I admire was like, just don't lie. You know what I mean? You can fictionalize, but just don't lie. So I knew I couldn't try to benefit from the way I was writing about myself. I couldn't have an agenda to tell one side of the story or make myself look a certain way that would benefit me. I knew that would be the toxic part of the book that would make it not work as art. It would ruin the book. And as somebody who's known me a long time, I think you know that if I am given the choice between saving my art and saving myself, I often choose saving my art [laughs]. I just can't help it. It's the way that I think, for better or for worse.

The other thing is that I was also going through recovery work [while I was writing the book], and doing what we call, “making a searching and fearless moral inventory of our faults.” It was like, OK, I have to be fearless and searching. I can't hold on to my notions about myself while I write this book. I have to let them go and just have a portrait of something that I think is interesting. And the most real parts of this book, the most true parts to who I am as a person, are my observations about the world inside that book—like the ice tinkling in a glass of lemonade or whatever. I just love the world, you know what I mean? The world is a place that I feel so close to. The tactile dimensions of every day are just so beautiful to me, and I just really wanted to write about that stuff.

I've talked about that John Mulaney recovery special with you. Specifically there’s this one part where he says, "I've told you a lot about my addiction, and I'm sure you're all thinking, ‘Man, this guy's got it bad.’ But I just want you to remember that this is only what I'm willing to tell you.” [Both laugh] When I heard that, I immediately went back to that one story in the book that took place at Crif Dogs.

GEOFF: That’s dark.

It’s maybe one of the darkest things I've ever read in a story about addiction. So without asking whether or not that story is true, false, or in-between, are there stories from your addiction that you would never tell anyone? I mean, you obviously knew people would think that particular story was true, whether it is or not.

GEOFF: Yeah, I mean, there are a few things that I would probably never tell a reader or a Thursday fan or my friends or family, things that I've only ever shared with my sponsor or maybe a sponsee when we're doing the fifth step—which is where you read out that “searching and fearless moral inventory” to another human being, and I have to make that person feel safe, to let them know that I'm there and I got their back. I have to tell them something that's so horrible that they'll not be afraid to tell me anything, you know what I mean? They have to feel like, "OK, if you did that, then I'm good. I can just go for it [laughs].” So yeah, there are a few stories that are not in the book. There are a couple of details that I would never tell anybody.

But you know, that John Mulaney thing is so funny because I think that's so true. It's so true. There are times when you hear somebody bare their soul at an AA meeting and you just think, “I wonder about the stuff they won’t tell me about." And every so often I’ve been in meetings where everybody’s joking around and then somebody says something that’s so real and so horrible that you’re like, “Damn. Not only would you be canceled in the real world, you might go to jail for what you just told me. And you think, damn, that’s harsh for me to hear. But imagine how corrosive it is for that person’s soul to hold on to that and not tell a single other fucking living person. That stuff is just really bad for us—to hold on to that kind of secret.

That’s sort of the life of an addict though, right? It’s like you're constantly hiding, constantly not disclosing certain things.

GEOFF: A true double life, yeah.

Thursday at Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY. September 10, 2022. Photo by Michael Dubin.

You were in and out in terms of your recovery for several years…

GEOFF: You know! You know for sure! [laughs]

When you would get those moments of freedom, when you weren’t using, and then you’d relapse—what kind of effect does that have in your mind to switch back into that place?

GEOFF: Even in the times where I would seemingly “get free,” I don’t think I was ever free. I was just chained up. That's the thing. It’s like when people use the phrase, “He was white-knuckling it.” That’s when there is no psychic change; you're just living without it, and it feels like the only thing in life that matters is just gone. You're just living without the thing you need. And that's really hard. I remember even on my first anniversary sober I was like, “Damn, this thing ain't going away, huh?” It felt like I'm going to feel like there's a missing piece for the rest of my life. When I finally got it, I think it was ten days after my first year sober, and I was like, “Wait. I didn't think about drugs at all yesterday.” I went through a whole day without thinking about drugs and it was the freest I had felt in so long. It was the first time that I felt like, not only can I be sober, I can also not be thinking about it 24-7—thinking about how I’m miserable and how I don't have the thing I need. And I thought if I can do that for a day, I can do that for more than a day.

I've been on tour since April, basically. And I’ve had a couple of really rough days, like really rough. Underslept, and bad news after bad news after bad news. In the middle of it, there was one moment where I thought, “I could literally go cop [drugs] right now.” And when I thought that, I just felt this overwhelming sadness. Like, wow, there is a world in which I could end up back there. It was the worst feeling I could imagine. And that’s such a 180 for me—to where thinking about it caused me a lot of pain and I felt really sad for myself, you know what I mean? I was like, “Wow, buddy, that was so bad. How did you survive that? Poor guy.” Instead of feeling shame and feeling like I didn't want people to know that I always thought about it and I always missed it and I always wanted it, it was more, “It’s OK, man. That's really tough. I can't believe you went through that.”

It’s interesting because the way you position that response is by essentially being compassionate towards yourself. Because you’d think the response would be beating yourself up.

GEOFF: It used to be. I remember how if anybody talked about shame at a [recovery] meeting in my first year, I would just start crying. Just hearing somebody else say it… because I felt ashamed all the time, and that would break me to hear it. But now I don't. It's weird. The times when I can really hear myself and deal with myself, it's like I see myself in the mirror and I can talk to myself as if I'm somebody else. I can understand the kind of compassion that I would grant to somebody else, and that’s not the way I'm used to treating myself—which was being very hard on myself, very down on myself.

I was talking to Youngmi, who used to be married to [chef and restaurateur] Danny Bowien. She's a stand-up comedian now, she has a podcast. But I was talking to her about how I almost had to see myself as my own pet and be sweet to myself, like, “You're gonna be OK. You've been good to me, buddy. You know I love you and I'm gonna try and be better to you.” And she was like, “That’s only because you don't have a kid.” She said that when she starts to think of what an inner child needs, she asks herself, What if I treated my kid how I treat myself? It fucked me up to realize that if anybody ever did to him what I do to myself every day, I would kill that person. You know what I mean? [Laughs] Why am I not treating myself better?

I think one of the most successful parts of the book for me is that the Ibogaine trip put me in this constant state of not knowing—meaning that I was in this total flux of asking, "Is this real? Is this the trip? Is this a flashback? What is this?" I was trying to figure out the internal logic of the trip. So, obviously I've never been on Ibogaine…

GEOFF: Oh, you should try it, it's so fun [laughs].

…but in my brain, I'm imagining that all of these questions and this feeling of flux, that’s all part of the trip’s process? Or do you always feel like you’re in a state of unreality that you just have to get through?

GEOFF: It's a complicated question because there's the fictional version [of an Ibogaine trip] and there's the real version, and in the fictional version, I wanted there to be stakes involved. And some of the stakes were: What is real? Am I gonna survive? Can I find my way out of the trip? I wanted those to be some of the anxieties that the reader was given. In the real Ibogaine trip, there weren't that many times where I didn't know, like, “Yeah, I'm tripping right now and I'm seeing into my brain and this is pretty fucked up.” My Ibogaine trip was much more chaotic. It didn't have a beautiful order I could follow and that progressively got me closer to where I wanted to be.

As far as functioning inside of Ibogaine, for the most part it's just, “Close your eyes and see. Open your eyes and you can avoid it all.” [When I started the treatment], one of the orderlies said, “Look, you're scared. But I think you should close your eyes because now is the time. You've been running from the truth about yourself. That is what you've been doing as an addict. Stop running. This is your chance.” And that's not my jam! Confronting problems head-on is not my jam [laughs]! But I heard him say, “This may be your last chance.” So I thought, I'm here. I'm in Mexico with an IV in my arm. I'm on heart monitors. If I'm not going to stop here and face it, where am I going to do it? So I did.

Geoff smiles and I make a cameo. Thursday at White Eagle Hall. Jersey City, NJ. July 11, 2022. Photo by Michael Dubin.

Before you left for Mexico, I remember you called me to tell me this was happening. And we had talked about Ibogaine before, so I’d already Googled it, and I remember there was this huge part of me that was like, “Fucking Geoff, why do you gotta this experimental shit?” [Laughs] But that day on the phone, I remember saying to you, “Dude, there is a not-zero percent scenario that you can die from taking this drug.” And your response was the most clear statement I’d heard from you in years. You said, “There is a 100-percent chance that I will die if I don’t.” It was the very first time that I’d ever heard a real sense of desperation in your voice. I’d never felt that. And I remember hearing you, and absorbing that, and being like, “OK, you have my support. Let’s get you whatever you need.” So what do you think put you in that place? What changed for you?

GEOFF: I was so desperate. There was a bunch of things and one of them was what I would call a bottom that came before that—where I was back at my parents’ house, and [my girlfriend] Liza wasn't really talking to me, and I had let people down to the number of times where it was sort of like, I don't even know if anybody really thinks that I have it in me to get better. I was just so low and I had seen how ineffective rehab had been for everybody in the meetings. Because I was going to the meetings. I was going to the meetings high, or I was going through withdrawal at meetings. I was going and I was hearing so many stories of people being like, “Well, rehab didn't work. I drank or used the day I got out. That was $20,000 down the drain. And the only thing that worked was like, I found God or whatever”—you know what I mean? So I was like, fuck, man. You’re telling me rehab doesn't work, and then you tell me, I just gotta find God. Like, that's the least helpful thing! If I'm not going to get better until I find God, then I'm in real trouble.

But I remember being home alone at my parents’ house, and I was using, and I was just thinking, this isn’t even doing anything for me anymore. There's no sense of relief from using anymore. There's just nothing left for me here. I'm just sad all the time, and I'm only hurting people, and I'm hurting myself, and there's not even a moment of relief left for me anymore. So it was like, I guess this is it. I don't even have money for any more drugs. I just thought, I have some credit left on one card. I guess I could fly to a beach in Mexico or somewhere and get lost, kill myself in peace, nobody will ever know where I went, and that’s it. And as I was thinking that, I remember there was just a little voice in the back of my head that asked, “What if it didn't have to be like this anymore? What if it didn't have to be like this anymore? What if you could actually get out?” And it was the first time that I thought, well, if I could get help, I'd do anything. I'd do anything.

So I thought, what's the most extreme commitment that I could make for this? What's the thing where there’s no getting out of it? That's just where my head went. And I'm not saying that should be the answer that other people land on, but I was in a place where I just needed to throw everything at it. Like, this is the last of the credit that I have to get down there. This is something that's so unpleasant that it would be facing my greatest fears to do it. This is something that, after it's done, will be so unpleasant that I don't ever want to go back there again. I needed it to be like that, and that was the way that I treated it even after the treatment. It was so horrible that I needed to go straight into twelve-step programs. I need to make sure that from now on there is just going to be layer upon layer of security on top of it. I don't ever want to go back.

It took a minute, you know, even when I got back from Mexico. I don’t know what it was, but there were times where I was like, "I could probably drink a beer." Or, “I could probably do cocaine! I never had a cocaine problem!” These things that I thought were maybe get-out-of-jail-free cards. But then there would be something taking hold inside of me where I'd be like, "Nah, nah, nah. You can't do that, man. That time is gone for you.” There is literally one path left and you’d better fucking get on it.

Besides myself, I'd say that you're probably the one person that I know with the most twists and turns in your life journey [laughs].

GEOFF: Yeah, true.

And I don't wish my life on anyone. You probably don't wish yours on me either, on some level. But sometimes I get self-conscious about it. Like, I talk to people and they say, “Oh my God, so much has happened to you in your life!” And it makes me self-conscious because I feel like, “Is everybody else just chilling?” [Laughs] So do you ever feel like that Taylor Swift lyric? Like, “It’s me. Hi. I'm the problem, it’s me”?

GEOFF: [Laughs] I mean, how do I put this? I think I'm the luckiest person on earth sometimes? Like, I have this life that I love so much, and I've been through so much, and it's changed me in this profound way where I feel like I've experienced a heightened version of life that's so intense, and I've used those heightened experiences to try and relate to other people and to make things they can enjoy and heighten their own experience of life with. I love my life.

I do sometimes wonder, “Did I pick this life? Was I given a choice of which path to go down in some pre-life world?” Because this is the life I’d pick. This is my Goldilocks. I even think about it with Thursday. Like, I see my friends in My Chemical Romance and I think, “I can't do that. I can't be so famous that I need a bodyguard.” That would be a nightmare for me, you know? And then I look at my other friends who are so brilliant and they do whatever they want and nobody listens to it? That would kill me, too, because I'm so sensitive. We’re in the right spot.

I feel that. I feel what you’re saying pretty deeply there.

GEOFF: My mom always used to say to me, “You have all the luck, both of it. Good, bad, up, down. How does all this shit happen to you?” [laughs] And I love it. For real. It makes me so happy to have this life.

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