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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
He dropped out of high school and hit the streets of Santa Cruz to live the life of a full-time skate punk. He was arrested for numerous infractions -- drugs, alcohol, hitting someone over the head with his skateboard -- until the local authorities locked him up for serious time when he was 17. His folks had tried to warn him about the choices he was making, "But when I try to remember what they were saying, I have this impression of the adults in 'Peanuts': 'Wah, wah, wah.' Even though I probably knew they were telling the truth, I didn't believe 'em."
Noah spent his last year as a teenager locked down. "They said, 'You get arrested too much, we're taking you off the streets.'" And while any parent would freak to see their kid behind bars, the experience had a particular resonance for Stephen Levine. "It must have been very difficult for him but interesting," says Noah, "because he had also been in prison. He did time for pot in the '60s on Rikers Island." As Noah began a three-month stretch at Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall (he served another three months in a halfway house), his father began to call him with personalized instructions.
"My father said, 'Meditation is the only thing that ever worked for me.' And that's when I started practicing. The relationship was such that when I was vulnerable and in enough pain and ready to change and take responsibility, I was able to hear it from him." Noah also was ready to deal with the addictions he had picked up over the years.
"Pretty much everything" is how Levine defines his drug consumption then. "My drug of choice, what really brought me to the bottom, was my addiction to crack cocaine. But I was using heroin and PCP and any kind of pills and booze I could get my hands on." He began a 12-step recovery program, brought to him and the other juvies by young punks who worked with teen addicts. "They weren't just adult wino recovering folks," he says. In fact there was the whole clean-and-sober punk movement called Straight Edge brewing at the time, and Levine took to it like a convert, drawing X's (the sign of Straight Edge) on his hands. "That was my real refuge," he says. "Once I got sober, that was all I had -- the punk scene."
It was not enough. Though he attended college (studying psychology and, later, emergency medical technician training) and had a few jobs, he found new ways of misbehaving. At age 19 he was arrested in Santa Cruz for vandalizing property with graffiti. Mike Haber, leader of the United Rockers, a biker gang that favored British Triumphs and Nortons, recalls seeing graffiti all over Santa Cruz that Levine had left: "Noah Core," "Just Say Noah."
"A lot of his friends, the punks and the skins, just wanted to kick his butt about that," says Haber. "They just wanted to give him the beat down."
The "Noah Core" tags led to his arrest, not surprisingly. Though he avoided jail time, Levine could not avoid a spiritual lesson: "What I was looking for was not really going to be found in anything outside of myself; it was an inside job, or at least a spiritual job.
"I had been using meditation in those first couple of years the way people often use prayer," he says: "'Oh God, get me out of this one and I'll never do it again!'" Combining more extended periods of reflection with a greater dedication to 12-step principles he found himself face to face with one of those ugly facts familiar to recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.
"I began to see that all of my actions are very selfish, very self-centered," he recalls. "I was still causing a lot of pain to myself and other people. As I began to see that in my meditation practice and my recovery practice, I began to start changing." He was working then, making fairly good money at a hospital in Santa Cruz, and he put his salary to a new use.
"I started taking responsibility for all of my past actions and making amends, repaying tens of thousands of dollars, not only for the graffiti stuff but all the people I had stolen from, and really actively started seeking forgiveness."
Levine was still a biker wannabe then and though Haber and the United Rockers tolerated him, they wouldn't give him a patch because he wouldn't drink with them. He talked to them about meditation then, but "everyone thought he was crazy," says Haber.
