One woman's wild ride from Alcoholism to Sobriety!

This very personal and highly adventurous tale of alcohol addiction and eventual recovery takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride from beginning to end. From an unbelievably violent occurrence, a young teen emerges a tough young woman whose sense of adventure leads her from one remarkable experience to another. The truths that she arrives at along the way are a blueprint to the sober human being she eventually discovers within herself.

How convenient if humans could be born with their own personal set of memories. And somewhere in my head I seem to recall this was a popular notion amongst certain primitive tribes. How helpful this would be, with the occurrence of each new experience, to be able to draw on these memories for guidance as the wailing winds of time toss us through life with no roadmap of where to plant our steps or how to react, especially to traumatic events.

I would have found it exceedingly helpful in dealing with a terminally ill brother at age nine. (He recovered from then-fatal Hodgkins disease several years later; a fact that Mayo clinic found hard to accept. My Mother received yearly inquiring letters from them until Johnny was well into his 20’s.) But when I was a mindless and carefree nine, to Johnny’s eleven, it was tough to understand why he was getting all the attention and visitors and special privileges, and I was told to be a good girl and not pester him; a feat I never understood nor accomplished. But when you’re nine and lay in bed at night and listen to your brother’s painful cries, or watch the steady parade of parents, nurses, doctors into his room, a kid’s going to be confused. A memory of his recovery would have been particularly comforting at this time. Instead, there were suddenly hushed voices whenever I entered a room where my parents were talking with the miscellaneous medical personnel that seemed more and more to have become a regular part of our daily lives. It was increasingly difficult to "Go out and play," while seeing my Mother’s tear-streaked face and my Father’s knotted brow. I never knew until years later that this period was the beginning of my Father’s decline into the alcoholism that was to doom him. Nor could I know it was to become my own fate. Do you suppose I could have avoided that path to the agony of self-destruction had I had memories to call on? Or if I had paid more attention could I have shared his pain then, and avoided my own later?

But I’m getting ahead of myself, which is a compelling habit born of the necessity to avoid uncomfortable terrain in this journey. There is a tendency to do this quickly. To run through it as fast as I can, somehow lessening the chance of feeling again the pain endured before. But as I promised myself when I set out upon this dubious endeavor, I would courageously face down all demons encountered along the way. So let me back up, into the kitchen - that warm, comfortable enameled womb with all its sugar spicy smells and the old red Formica top table where we five gathered at least once a day, as it was my Mother’s belief that the family that dined together stayed together, as long, if not longer, than the family that prayed together. She tried that too, but after a few attempts I think she knew she had a better shot at success with supper. This was, of course, before high school and basketball practice and band rehearsals and late after-schools at the library, (better known as the drive-in on highway 90 out of town where we practiced inhaling filched Kools and watched the older kids making out in the back seats of their family Packards).

Let’s see: the kitchen. It was large, with room for a table and 6 chairs. The floor was rather creatively designed in hand cut linoleum, in an original design by a very large black man who owed my Dad some money. Carmichael was a frustrated musician and a frustrated artist, but he was a master at cutting and laying linoleum. Incidently, he also had a passion for strawberry schnapps, which he sipped constantly after spiking it with what we suspected was white rum. And if his taste in drinks sounds colorful and unusual, (and nauseous), so too were his floor designs, which grew increasingly abstract as the day wore on.

What is most prominent in my head about our particular kitchen floor design is that there were lots of stars. Big stars, little stars, mostly red and white stars with a border of blue stripes. I loved it, but years later I am told it was the big giggle of the neighborhood.

Along one long wall lived the washing machine and dryer, both of which, I discovered at a young age, had a very pleasant vibration to lean up against. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen on wash day 'helping' my Mother with the laundry, a practice my big sister caught on to and ratted on me to Mom about her suspicions. Mother promptly ended this pleasant activity, primarily I believe, not because she wanted to deprive me of this questionable but pleasing sensation, but because of my propensity for spreading any good news or activity around to all the kids in the neighborhood.

My Father figures prominently in my kitchen memories, for it was here that I became aware of his drinking and of the habits that accompanied it. I have never figured out if he thought I was too young to notice his peculiar actions, or at this point in his decline he didn't or couldn’t care what I thought. After dinner he would begin what would become his parade of trips to the cabinet wherein lived his faithful bottle of Jim Beam. He would open the door wide and hide behind it while he tossed back whatever quantity he felt would suffice him until his next trip. When I questioned him about this bottle, and why he didn’t keep it in the refrigerator along with all the other drinks, he said it was his joy juice and would spoil in the refrigerator. Now this really confused me, as I had seen absolutely no joy anywhere in this man after Johnny got sick.

When I prompted him one hot summer evening if he had all the joy juice in the world, would it make him laugh and sing and tell jokes like he used to? He slowly and deliberately closed the cabinet door and came over to stand behind me where I was coloring at the table. He bent down and put his head on my small shoulder and sobbed. And while his hot tears fell silently on my back I tasted a metallic fear I was to experience for many years to come. It was the bitter taste of the unknown future and the acrid taste of an uncertain present.

How often I have wished that I had been older then, and could have understood this stranger's pain. For that’s what he had become to me, and was to remain to me for the rest of his life. A stranger who removed himself from the family that loved him. From the wife who’s bed he had abandoned; from the older daughter who needed his guidance; from me who missed him more than I was to know for many years. And in an odd, twisted way, he had even abandoned Johnny, for such was his grief and such was his disappearance into his joy juice, there was little room for any of us.

I’ve no idea how he reconciled the fact that Johnny survived and lived for 40 more years. He himself lived until age 76. He had quit drinking a few years prior to his death, but his joy juice had done its damage. He remained a nice man; a man who continued with his business, and made money and supported us well. But there was no communication with him but the ordinary politeness extended to the familiar stranger he had become. I wonder constantly about his pain and his self-imposed loneliness. I have felt a grieving for him my entire life. Like I have missed something important, and will never know what. I hear my friends talking about their relationships with their fathers and I feel an appalling sadness, an emptiness, not unlike the fear that came over me years ago when I felt his tears on my back; like somehow, in some way, I could have helped him. I could have made a difference. I could have saved him from his joy juice. And how foolish was I? How could I possibly have made the same mistakes? Hurt people who cared? Pushed them all out of my life? But again, that’s later.

It wasn’t always thus in our house. There were times of great joy; times of calm normality when what was seen on the surface was really all there was, and not tunnels and subterranean levels of painful emotions bubbling right under the surface.

There were the drives and walks down dusty and rutted country roads, painted in wide swaths of red, yellow and orange maple trees, one hand pulling a bushel basket, the other tugging at our Father’s hand, looking for walnuts, and filling our bushel baskets with more nuts than we could carry. And then home with our treasure where we would spend the next few cool days out in the driveway beating the nuts with croquet mallets to rid them of their thick green jackets, and infuriating our Mother with coal black hands from the stain of the hard shells covering the nuts. But she always relented when presented with enough nuts to make her famous fudge and divinity for everyone on the Christmas list.

And there were fishing trips to the Minnesota woods where we kept a cabin deep in the pine smelling depths of the woods, alongside a wonderfully clear, cold lake. It was here we headed each summer for the three weeks my Father allowed himself from his medical practice and his clinic. Here, where Dad first turned the controls of the motor boat over to us, and Johnny damn near killed us on the second day of this trust by running the boat head first into the side of a boathouse. Thank God for water-rotted wood and tough 10 and 12 year old heads. It was that same summer we immerged from our late afternoon swim covered from head to toe with leeches, and Dad calmed our hysterics and patiently pulled them off us one by one. He taught us to fish, and how to sit quietly in a boat for hours not speaking above a whisper for fear of disturbing the giant bullheads that swam lazily beneath us. I learned how to bait a hook, and how to take a fish off the hook without tearing the tender flesh. I learned how to clean and dress the fish once we carried them onto the bank, eventually to be rolled in corn meal and into the bacon grease in Mom’s frying pan in the cabin, where they were accompanied by fried potatoes and onions - no doubt the most delicious meal ever eaten anywhere, including 4-star restaurants all over the globe.

After supper while Mom cleaned up, (and you guessed it, none of this was much vacation for her), and after we had doused ourselves with ST37 for the mosquitoes and chiggers, Dad and Johnny and I would sit on the bank of the lake and Dad would locate and name the planets. He would smoke his Herbert Tareytons and drink the cold beers he and Mom always had in the ice chest, and Johnny and I would have our Nehi Colas peering in utter wonderment at the sky our Dad knew so well. We were absolutely certain that summer that our Dad was the most brilliant of all Dads. Little did we know that the joy juice he had turned to a few summers ago already had him in its dreaded grip.

The summer of leeches and motorboat crashes was to be our last Minnesota summer. I had no way of knowing, as I dozed and fidgeted our way back home that summer, that I had seen the last of clear water lakes and navy blue night-time skies full of fireflies and unnamed planets. I was never again to taste the sweetness of fresh, pan-fried catfish or swing out over the bank on rotted vines that broke and dropped me into deep cool lake water, or scratch my legs bloody from chigger bites. Johnny and I would never again know the forbidden pleasures of stealing out of the cabin in the night to watch the muskrats at play in the roots on the bank. Or throw stones at the water moccasins as they slithered through the water. Or see the glow of Dad's cigarette in the boat 100 yards out as he tried his hand at night fishing, we thought. I know now that his nightime boating was an escape -just him and Jim Beam. I wonder what terrors gripped him as he rocked alone on that cold nighttime Minnesota lake. Did he have any idea how he was altering his fate, and ours? Was he already so totally helpless in the clutches of the bottle?

I wonder what the final occurrence was that severed my Mother's patience, and turned her heart to stone against him? After all they had been through together, after surviving the near death of their beloved son, how could they become two separate entities so quickly, so entirely, so painfully? I have always thought that Mother must have handed down some kind of ultimatum that summer - forced some foolish choice to be made between her and Jim Beam. But I never knew for certain. And I never asked, for some strange reason - not wanting to entertain the possibility that he had chosen the joy juice over the joys that life with us had to offer him. And not wanting to admit to myself the depths of pain he had caused by ripping us apart as a family.

Life as we knew it didn’t change much. Or if it did, our adolescence prevented our full comprehension. Dad was still there physically, but Mom let us know that if we wanted anything we were to come to her and not 'bother' Dad. She spread herself pretty thin, but she was always there for us. She came to my basketball and softball games, and taxied us hundreds of miles to hundreds of school functions. She made sure I was at all my swimming and diving meets on time, and stayed to watch me carry home many trophies through the years, which she dutifully displayed in our home. She was cheering on the sidelines of countless track meets, and nursed me through broken bones, broken hearts and broken dreams. And if I missed my Father, it didn’t show. Outwardly. He was always home - a pale, shadowy, haunted figure that made no demands on any of us. And we cruelly and ignorantly ignored him and lived our lives on a dimension that excluded him. What must he have thought all those years when we were growing up and moving on to other lives, other dimensions? The utter sadness and despair of his loneliness - just thinking of it now - that jungle of swirling chaos that dragged him along the bottom of his emptiness. Did he hate us? Did he wish he had the spine to just leave us? Or did it take an enormous act of courage to stay; to care for us, to pay the bills, to buy us clothes and to give us all that he could give except the one thing we wanted and needed most? The gift of himself. The gift of his wisdom to calm our youthful fears, and dry our tears. To throw us atop piles of Fall leaves, and tickle our ribs till our sides ached from laughing. To let us lean over him to steer the big Hudson. To hold cold compresses to fevered heads, and make faces behind Mom’s back when she fussed over us.

Those gifts he could no longer give. Even had he wanted to do so, I think he was too overcome with guilt. Guilt that he could no longer give of himself. He had given it all to Jim Beam and all that remained was a dry husk of a man so lost, so frail and shattered he was never to be found again. And to my undying shame, I looked for him too late.

My last visual memory of him is of a withered grey being in a wheelchair in the hallway of a nursing home, my sister kneeling by his side helping him to remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer. At that moment I knew what I was to recall for the rest of my life with a deep and never-ending gnawing inside me "I failed this man" this Father that I never knew. The only Father I would ever have. I failed miserably because I didn’t have the intelligence to try to reach him. I didn’t have the strength to keep him from the edge. I was too consumed with myself to feel the pain of my Father.

Johnny lived two years after Dad’s death. Mother always said she was so thankful Dad hadn’t been alive to see him die. To bury him; the son for whom he gave up his soul.

Johnny was sick his entire life. But he managed to find happiness. First with a young wife who’s infant son he adopted. And then with a second wife whom I suspect truly made him a man. They were terribly mismatched, but very happy when he wasn’t ill with one or another of the serious and rare infections he endured his whole adult life. Perhaps it was some sort of offshoot from the Hodgkins, or more likely a rare blood condition, but he was always sick; always on the brink of disaster. His wife stuck to him through it all. My mom thought she was low class and a golddigger. I thought she was fun, and brave, and I knew that she loved Johnny with every breath in her body. So I liked her. But again, to my shame, I never saw or made any effort to reach her after Johnny died. I thought it would be a crazy sort of disloyalty to my Mother to have stayed in touch with her. Johnny suffered the final indignity on his body at age 49, and succumbed to a rare vascular infection, after a debilitating stroke and testicular cancer surgery. His death came on December 28th.

I flew to Kansas City and drove down to Joplin with my Mother, where Johnny and his wife had a big old, draughty, barn of a house. My sister had flown in from Saudi Arabia where she and her husband were living and where he worked as project engineer on a government construction site. It was bitter cold, with a freezing rain, as we set out from the airport in the late afternoon. It remains one of the most miserable nights of my entire life - driving those country highways at night, with the rain freezing solid on the windshield, and my Mother alternating between hysterical sobbing and a sort of keening sound that was totally unlike any noise I’d ever heard from a human. The memorial service is a blur of non-memories - I remember only how cold his house was. I searched the house all night for more blankets, and laid wide awake in the bed fully clothed trying to get warm. All night his wife sat in front of the TV and played the Nintendo games that Johnny was so addicted to. My Mother and sister had chosen to drive back home after the service, but Johnny’s ashes wouldn’t be available until morning. So I elected to stay with his wife and drive back to my Mother’s in the morning with his ashes, for burial beside my Father.

During the night there was a snowstorm that dumped another 10 inches of snow on top of the freezing rain. When we got ready to leave in the morning, the car doors were frozen tight with 3-4 inches of solid ice. I ran a long extension cord out to the street and melted the ice with a hair dryer so we could get in the car. It was almost as dreadful a trip as the night before, as his wife had a terrible cold and the flu, and I knew sure as I was sitting there that it was only a matter of a few days before I too would be sick. But I was already about as miserable as a human could be.

The funeral was awful, and the scene at home after the service was almost surreal. Johnny’s wife was so sick I had to take her to the emergency room at the hospital where they pumped her full of antibiotics and said she ought to be admitted, but she wouldn’t allow it. My sister and I stayed with Mom for 5-6 days, and between us we killed almost half a gallon of scotch a day. This was nothing new for me. I had started drinking heavily and steadily right out of high school - my whole college years are a fuzzy recollection of binges and misadventures and eventually blackouts. How I managed to stay in school is a mystery, and a dreadful waste. I hurt a lot of good people with my drinking and irresponsible behavior. But most of all I hurt myself.

To go backward in time through a myriad of painful memories is an agonizing struggle, made severely difficult when alcoholism is added to the mix. But I’ll do my best with the chronology, and in the long run the when is not as meaningful as the what and why.

My first taste of alcohol came around age 8-9, and it was of home brew. My Dad was rather famous in our immediate neighborhood at least, for the beer that he brewed and bottled himself in our basement was the envy of all who had tasted it. I remember the enormous ceramic crocks perking away and smelling up the entire house at times. At bottling time there were always bottles exploding in our basement, usually in the middle of the night, prompting more than one visit from the police or some unknowing nosey neighbors who were convinced we were satanists doing the devil’s work. Dad saved the large quart tin malt cans for drinking the stuff, and I was always allowed the small remainder in the bottom of these cans after he had had his fill. It was nasty stuff, but I developed a keen taste for the brew and could never get enough of it. Beer remained my favorite drink of choice. Even after I discovered Scotch and was able to afford the Dewars I adored, it was beer that I craved the most. And it was beer that I returned to on my inevitable headlong slide to the bottom of the cesspool of alcoholism.