Читать книгу Forming True Partnerships - Группа авторов - Страница 11

March 2005

Friends of my parents had a pool and they’d throw wild parties. My sisters, the other kids, and I would swim while the parents drank. We knew they were all drunk when the singing started. My mother would get out her accordion and wake up my father, who was usually passed out, and they would do their famous duet of the Titanic song, a cheerful little ditty about disaster. “Husband and wives, little children lost their lives…” with everyone joining in on the chorus of, “It was sad …” The song kind of summed up our family life. We were sinking fast.

When I was 12, I threw a little New Year’s party up in my room while my parents had a party in our basement. My buddies and I drank vodka, scotch, and rum I’d smuggled up in baby jars. We were having a great time until I decided I needed more. (The phenomenon of craving had set in, even then.) My father was actually relatively sober that night and he knew instantly that I wasn’t. He flew into a rage. “What are our neighbors going to think when their kids come home from our house drunk?” I wanted to tell him the neighbors knew all about us. He was always coming home from work falling-down drunk and I’d have to stop playing with my friends to help him inside.

My father felt that as long as he was making a good living, no one could say anything about his drinking. But when I was 15, his company gave him an ultimatum: Quit drinking or be fired. After a month in a rehab he felt he knew all he needed to know and that he would quit drinking on his own. He made it a couple of months. After the second rehab, he got a sponsor and started going to meetings.

The palms of my father’s hands used to turn red when he was tense and they were red most of the time in those first months. Sundays were particularly hard; he didn’t know what to do with himself. Friends of his from AA would drop by and that seemed to help. They were a strange bunch, often revealing degrading things about themselves and then laughing uproariously about them. And these people wouldn’t disappear when there was trouble, like his old drinking pals did. Instead, they came by more often. Sometimes his sponsor and this old guy Walter (who everyone treated with reverence) would come for dinner on Sundays. Walter had been sober since 1942 and told good stories about the early days of AA. Then they’d all head off to the Sunday night meeting at the rehab and I’d head to my room to smoke dope.

For several years, I’d been smoking pot every day, using amphetamines to keep up with school work, and experimenting with LSD. However, it was nothing like my father’s drinking. I wasn’t trying to get stupefied. I was altering my consciousness. I practiced Transcendental Meditation and read books about Zen. I was on a quest for enlightenment.

The summer before college, I got a job at a nice restaurant where they taught me about fine wines. This was definitely different from my father’s drinking: he was a shot-and-a-beer guy, I was a connoisseur. My first weekend at college, I introduced my new dormmates to sophisticated drinking—and promptly threw up all over the hall.

Adopting my father’s former attitude, I thought that as long as I performed well in school, no one could hassle me about my drinking. My first semester I was an honor student and won a writing award. By junior year I was on academic probation. The blackouts got more frequent. But this was still not my father’s drinking. I was studying writing, and drinking was a necessary part of the creative process. I drank what my favorite writers drank, but it didn’t help me write like they wrote.

My father bought me a car so I could visit home on weekends. I racked up parking tickets and expected my father to pay them. The little things he went out of his way to do for me, I took for granted. Only occasionally would I stop and consider that he had completely changed his character. I remember being in his room one day and seeing the word “Communicate” posted on his mirror. My father? Wanting to communicate?

It started to become clear that I had a drinking problem. One Sunday morning, he got a call from the state police. My car was smashed up on the side of the highway. He ran downstairs to find me passed out in my bed with several cuts on my arms and head. Oh yeah, I’d hit a tree. I talked my way out of trouble with the police and minimized the whole thing. When he actually saw the wrecked car, it took his breath away. It was amazing that I had survived. I heard years later that he’d cried that night at the Sunday night meeting. By then I was already drunk again, and joking about it with my friends.

I told my parents not to come to my college graduation—I was too bohemian to bother with rituals like that. The truth was, I had several incompletes thanks to drinking. I moved in with my parents, telling myself that without the pressure of rent to pay, I could finish up my incompletes, graduate, and get on with my life. After a month I hadn’t finished any papers, just lots of bottles. My father invited me to a restaurant for lunch and I steeled myself for the “get a job” speech. Instead, he told me his story. I remember that what sliced right through my denial was when he said that he hadn’t gotten into trouble every time he drank, but every time he got into trouble, the bottle was behind it. He offered to send me to the same rehab he had gone to. I was too confused and beleaguered to say no. And I was curious. What if this was my problem? What if I wasn’t an awful human being, just one who was sick with alcoholism?

Everyone at the rehab knew my father and was looking out for me. At the daily lectures, I learned about the disease concept, and in group I started to see how grandiose and self-centered I was. I went to the Sunday night meeting that my father had chaired off and on for years and when I moved back with my parents, my father and I went to meetings together. However, it was still “my father’s AA,” not mine, and I didn’t try to make it mine by finding a sponsor or a home group where I fit in. Instead, I tried smoking pot, and days later I was drunk, too drunk to drive. I called home hoping to get my sister to come and pick me up. My father answered. I tried to disguise my voice, but it was clearly me, clearly drunk. He drove me home, not saying a word. Several days before he’d written, “Meeting Makers Make It” on a chalkboard. I ripped it off the wall, then took a swing at him. Fortunately, I was so drunk that I was easily subdued.

I decided to move back to my college town and figure out this drinking thing on my own. My father knew it was a geographic, but he paid for my plane ticket and wished me luck. I had to get obliterated to stop the voice in my head that told me I had no business drinking. As bad as things got, I refused to go back to AA, but I did decide to try counseling. It was a study in half measures and it availed me nothing. I managed to put together three months of not drinking and told my father about it (leaving out the part about smoking pot every day). He sent me a three-month chip taped to the responsibility statement: “I am responsible. When anyone, anywhere reaches out, I want the hand of AA always to be there. And for that: I am responsible.” His disclaimer: This isn’t your father sending you this, it’s a fellow AA member. Three months later, I got another chip.

Shortly after this, I learned that my father had liver cancer. I decided it was time to get my act together and forced myself to go to a meeting. Standing awkwardly by the coffee pot, I heard my name. I was sure it was someone from the rehab who’d been sober the last two years while I’d been getting wasted. It turned out to be my creative writing teacher from college. I was shocked to see him there. He wasn’t at all surprised to see me. I would never have found the right sponsor, so the right sponsor found me. Here was a guy I couldn’t snow with all my literary reasons for needing to drink. Here was a guy I knew was smarter than I, so when he said there was no mental defense against the first drink, I listened. He helped open my closed mind enough so I could at least try to pray.

That year, we all came home for the holidays. My mother sent us a photo beforehand so we wouldn’t be shocked when we saw my father. His thick black hair was gone, his face had aged 20 years, and his arms and legs were like twigs. He and I went to meetings every day he felt up to it; we brought along a cushion so he’d feel more comfortable. It was a difficult Christmas. I still get choked up every year when I hear Judy Garland sing those lyrics about being together, “if the fates allow.”

A month later I came for another visit. While I’d only been clean for four months, it’d been a year since I’d had a drink. My sponsor told me that if my father wanted to celebrate, then I should do what made him happy. We went to his home group and he presented me with a one-year coin, the very one he’d gotten after his first year. He said it had a good track record.

On the drive home, he asked me to pull over. He opened the door and vomited. I figured he was still getting chemo, that sort of thing happens. Then I saw that he’d vomited blood. I was overwhelmed, but he kept a cool head and soon we were at the emergency room. It was very busy, and I couldn’t get them to pay attention to us, but then he threw up more blood, and they quickly took him inside. I didn’t know what to do or think so I just repeated the Serenity Prayer over and over. An hour later they told us that they didn’t know why, but the bleeding had stopped, and we could come back and see him. He was propped up on a gurney, pale, but smoking a cigarette and smiling.

A day before I left, I asked if I could talk with him. I wasn’t up to the Ninth Step yet, but I spoke to him about regretting the things I’d done that had hurt him. He told me not to worry about it—all was forgiven. I wanted to say more, but I got the feeling he couldn’t handle any more emotion just then, any more sorrow or regret. Maybe we both could have had a good cry together. As it was, I did my crying staring out the window of the airplane, knowing I would never see him again.

At his memorial service, his AA friends were there, as they’d been for the last eight years. More than any other accomplishments in his life, his service to the Sunday night meeting and the hand he extended to the still-suffering alcoholic defined his life.

In the back of my mind I felt like I deserved to drink again. “Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink.” If I’d talked about it to anyone, I might not have acted on it. But I kept quiet, went on a road trip with some work friends, drank again, and blacked out again. The next morning we passed within a mile of where he’s buried. I thought to myself, The one thing he wanted for you was that you stay sober. Instead, you used your feelings about him to justify drinking, and within 24 hours you were as bad as ever. What is that if not powerless? After one more “convincer” I finally became willing to do whatever it took. I actually did some of the things my sponsor suggested, and started telling him when something was bothering me instead of storing it away for the next time I needed an excuse to drink. I began doing service and worked the Steps.

On my first real anniversary, I dug out the coin he’d given me and said a prayer of thanks. For my next eight anniversaries, my mother would send me another one of his coins, and I’d feel a deep sense of connection with him. I went to the AA Archives in New York and looked at a photo from the 1980 International Convention in New Orleans. He was there, somewhere in the crowd. I’ve been to the last few and I feel like he’s there with me.

Last year, I was helping my mother go through some old boxes and I ran across a cassette tape that said, “Walter’s Talk.” A chance to hear more of Walter’s stories about the early days. I decided to play it on my upcoming anniversary. That night, after a joyous celebration at my home group, I put the tape into a player, relaxed into my favorite chair, and prepared to hear Walter. But the first voice on the tape wasn’t Walter’s, it was my father’s. He was chairing the meeting. As I listened to him recite the Preamble, tears welled up in my eyes. My 12-year-old came in. “Is that …your father?” I nodded and he sat down next to me. We listened as my dad told the crowd at the Sunday night meeting they were in for a treat. I felt the hand of AA and the hand of my father reach across the years. It was there for me, just the way he always wanted it to be.

J.W.

Maplewood, New Jersey