“What It Was Like”
I've heard other recovering alcoholics say they weren't immediately aware of passing the point of no return.
That was when wanting to drink changed to having no choice. It was the same with me, although I think it might have happened in my late 20s.
Then the compulsion to drink went with me everywhere I would go: parties, weddings, family reunions, cookouts and work assignments, to name just a few.
Not to mention being at home.
I was once employed by a newspaper that sent me to cover a political function where the governor of that particular state was supposed to address the crowd.
By the time he arrived, I had already had five or six drinks. About half an hour later, when he started to speak, I staggered in front of him.
Then I dropped my camera and notebook on the ground, and just stood there while all eyes were on me. I finally managed to pick up everything except my dignity and walked unsteadily to my car.
Instead of going back to the paper, I somehow managed to drive home where I passed out on the bed. I was awakened what must have been several hours later by an angry phone call from the managing editor who had already heard what had happened.
Bad news rarely travels slowly.
I was told that I would be fired immediately if I ever took a drink on any future assignment. For the rest of the time I was at that newspaper - which really wasn't that long - I stayed away from the free liquor and the cash bars at ceremonies and other public events.
It felt like there were hundreds of them, and that I was being punished.
Another time, I had an appointment for a job interview at 3 p.m. at a large newspaper where a good friend of mine worked. We met at 1 p.m. at a bar several blocks away, We parted ways 1 1/2 hours later.
Instead of dressing up, I had chosen to wear corduroy pants and a sports shirt. I made no effort to hide what I had been doing with breath mints or anything else.
Although I hadn't gotten wasted, I probably would have hit 6.5 or 7 on a drunk scale numbered 1 to 10.
People participating in the interview included the city editor, metro editor, managing editor and publisher. They nearly surrounded me. Their questions were very civilized. My answers were not.
At one point, I was asked about the welfare of an editor who worked for the same company I did. Without engaging my brain, I replied: “He has his good days and his bad days.”
That was certainly true, but it wasn't what they wanted to hear. Before I was shown out less than 30 minutes later, I was told I didn't get the position.
Misery does indeed like company, which is why some practicing alcoholics hang out together, while others, like me and my father, usually preferred to drink alone.
For several years before I got married to my first wife in the mid-'60s, a good friend of mine and I used to practice conspiratorial consumption of alcohol in restaurants and grills where we would sometimes even eat.
My friend was best man at the wedding. Years later - shortly after I joined Alcoholics Anonymous in the early 1980s - I went to a regional meeting that was held in a hotel in Greensboro. I had been there a day when I noticed a familiar figure coming toward me in a hallway.
My friend and I were probably more than 200 feet from each other when we simultaneously reached into our pants pockets, pulled out our plastic newcomers' chips and held them up in the air.
“I always knew you were an alcoholic,” were the first words he said to me in more than a decade.
We met again at the hotel when a similar conference was held there six months later.
I also went to the next one there, but my friend didn't show up. I never saw him again.
When I applied for a job at an area newspaper in the early 1990s, an editor who had worked with both of us elsewhere in the ‘60s told me that my friend had committed suicide two years earlier.
It caused me to remember some of my first sponsor's words: “Not everybody can get this thing.”
Another saying I often heard from my first sponsor was: “You have to admit you have a problem before you can work on it.”
I don't think my father ever did, when it came to his alcoholism. Like father, like son. He was a closet drinker throughout much of his life and mine. So was I.
I can count on both hands, and have several fingers left over, the number of times we ever did anything together during my childhood. I can count on one finger the times we had meaningful talks and shared our thoughts.
We were familiar strangers.
There were only half a dozen or so subjects that had unspoken approval for conversation in all of the years I lived with my parents.
To my knowledge, the only person my father ever expressed his anger at - anytime, any place, anywhere - was me.
I remember two scary things that happened to me in the early ‘70s that seem funny now.
One night, I went over a friend's place which wasn't far from where my first wife and I were living. He and I and a mutual friend all got drunk on canned beer. Then we had hashish for dessert.
I recall saying goodbye, getting in my car and driving away. All of a sudden, I couldn't remember where I had been or where I was going. All of the streets and houses looked completely unfamiliar.
The red lens on a hanging traffic light got my attention, so I stopped in the middle of the intersection. Moments later, I realized I was turning into an acorn, which created two huge problems.
Not only can acorns not drive, they can't sit up because they have no arms or legs. Acknowledging that, I promptly fell over on the seat. I don't know how long I lay there. When I came to, vehicles that had been behind my car were zooming around it.
Somehow, I managed to shift into drive and make my escape in slow motion before somebody called the police. It was hours later before I pulled up in front of my house. I have no recollection of going inside or getting into bed.
After my first wife and I separated in 1975, I stayed for awhile in a large house with two friends from work. Since I had never cooked before, I figured it was time to start by baking marijuana brownies.
I discovered I had a knack for it, especially when I was stoned. One summer night, I took a batch out of the oven and set them on the sill of an open window in the kitchen to cool. The clock said 11.
Less than a minute must have gone by when I heard a terrible “THPPPP, THPPPP, THPPPP, THPPPP” sound coming from the back yard.
When I looked out the window, two helmeted figures were staring at my brownies while sitting behind the windshield of a police helicopter that hovered about 20 feet away.
Red and blue and green lights were blinking all over the craft as it remained less than five feet off the ground. I could even make out the registration numbers and “POLICE” written above the nose.
Springing into action, I grabbed the baking pan off the sill and ran into the living room where I hid the brownies under a chair. Then I sat on the couch and waited for the vice squad to break down the front door.
I remained vigilant for what seemed like several hours. Then I fell asleep. I woke up about 8 a.m. and carefully walked outside, just in case the gendarmes were waiting to pounce on me.
The only people around were two elderly ladies who were passing by on the sidewalk. They asked me if I had seen a police helicopter searching the neighborhood after a woman was sexually assaulted the night before.
As a matter of fact, I had, but I didn't tell them that.
My brownie production came to a screeching halt.
In 1977, which was only a couple of years after I moved to the Triangle, I was having therapy sessions with a psychiatrist who was manic-depressive.
The politically correct term, “bi-polar”, didn't exist back then. I was so mentally ill that I couldn't recognize his mental illness. When he was fired from the mental health organization he was working for, he quickly did two things.
The shrink persuaded several of his patients, including me, to follow him to the private practice he was starting.
He then went out and bought a Mercedes Benz that cost $11,000. Because they were reduced to one income, his wife made him take it back to the dealer before the ink was dry on the contract papers.
The psychiatrist and I were once arrested together by security guards at a credit union where I had gone with him so he could cash a check.
They were concerned about his strange behavior and interactions with the tellers at a time when a “sniper” had terrorized the city's entire population.
The security-types also took me along to an interrogation room because it was apparent that I was his associate.
The guards and the bank's employees thought my shrink might have been the mysterious figure who had killed or wounded several people for no apparent reason.
It took both of us more than an hour to convince them that he was mentally deranged, but not harmful to others.
On one occasion, my shrink arranged for me to buy marijuana from another patient that he treated. The deal went down in his office.
Not long after that, there was a knock on my apartment door. It was my psychiatrist, who lived more than 15 miles away in another town. He asked me to keep a rifle that he had bought with the intention of killing himself.
So I put it in a closet.
A couple of months later, he knocked again and demanded that I give back the gun. Which I did. He didn't say why, and I didn't ask.
During one of our sessions, the psychiatrist suggested that I ask my parents to travel more than 180 miles so we could discuss our problems with each other. He promised to control the discussion.
On the appointed day, they had only been in the room a few minutes when I accused my parents of never helping me learn to cope with the world.
My father didn't get mad, though, until I used the “S” word after my mother was critical of the length of time it had taken me to repay a personal loan from her sister.
Both my parents promptly got up and left the office. Moments later, I told my shrink that my father would be dead in six weeks.
The psychiatrist discounted the prediction, saying everything would be smoothed over if I telephoned them a few days later.
My father died in five weeks. It happened in a hospital where he had been admitted to an intensive coronary care unit.
After I arrived at their house for the funeral, my mother asked me to go with her to the funeral home and help pick out a casket.
Less than 20 minutes after the choice was made, we were shown into a room where my father had just been placed in his new coffin.
We were standing in front of him when my mother accused me of killing my father: “He died of a broken heart. He thought he had lost his only son.”
For years after that, I would use those words as another excuse to drink. I wouldn't get relief until my first sponsor told me I had nothing to do with my father's death, and that I had no control over his physical problems. But that was a long time away.
After leaving the funeral home, my mother and I went back to the house. Then she asked me to accompany her to my father's shop in the basement while she retrieved something.
The door opened, and I saw at least 40 or 50 empty liquor bottles of different sizes and brands that were sitting on the floor, the counters, the chairs and the shelves.
They were the ones that he hadn't managed to get rid of before he became ill at home and was taken away in an ambulance. At the hospital, the doctors weren't told that my father was a practicing alcoholic.
My mother mentioned, years later, that he kept seeing imaginary people standing by his bed and looking at him from behind a curtain.
No one figured it out when he went into DTs, also known as delerium tremens.
I remembered all the times I would look out their livingroom window when I was living there and watch my father carry large trash bags from the basement to his car. That was how he always got rid of the empties over the years.
Before we left the shop, I stared at my mother as she carefully walked between the bottles on the floor and picked up something on my father's desk. Then she turned around and came back towards me without disturbing any of the pints, fifths or quarts.
I follwed my mother back up the basement stairs and into the kitchen. Neither of us ever mentioned anything about what we had just seen.
I stayed around for the funeral, and then drove back to North Carolina. When I returned to visit my mother two weeks later, all of the bottles had been removed from the shop. Nothing was said about that, either.
God works in mysterious ways and sometimes does for us that which we cannot do for ourselves.
After a few months went by, my psychiatrist announced that he was moving to a faraway state where he had somehow landed a high-paying position in a hospital.
I never saw him again.
On New Year's Eve of 1982, I was visiting some friends in Virginia and had nearly single-handedly finished off the bottle of cognac I had brought them when I had an anxiety attack that landed me in a nearby hospital for two weeks.
One of the two doctors who treated me said he didn't find much wrong from my tests, but the other physician informed me I had an enlarged liver and was headed for trouble if I didn't get help for my alcoholism.
Guess which one I believed.
After being discharged from the hospital in Virginia, I sent back home and continued to drink for two more weeks. It was during that time that I had blackouts nearly every night, and they were scary.
On one occasion, I woke up on the livingroom couch and got up to go fix dinner. It was then that I discovered I had already cooked and eaten it. I had also washed the dishes.
Each morning, I would wake up early and almost hold my breath while I inspected my car to make sure I hadn't had hit another vehicle or a pedestrian the night before during a blackout.
The Daily Dispatch
