by Barb Rogers
I pause to think what number husband I'm on. “Right before I graduated, I got married again. Number four whisked me and my son off to Florida. It didn't last a month. My kid, his dog, myself, and two suitcases ended up in Sullivan, Illinois. I borrowed a truck, went back to Florida with a friend to get my stuff … such as it was. Sitting in a nice seafood restaurant, my friend said she might have a glass of wine. Why not, I thought, and that was the beginning of the end for me. Not the end of my marriages, not the end of my tragedies, but a fast road back to where I'd been when I hit bottom before.”
Bracing myself, wishing I could stand behind the podium to have something to hold on to, I say, “Throughout my self-centered life, I dragged my poor son with me, in and out of drunken escapades, different men coming and going, moving here and there, always being on the run, with no affiliation to family or lasting friends. Even during those years of not drinking, I was so wrapped up in myself I couldn't see past my own nose to the fact that Jon was having problems. When it became so obvious that I had to recognize it, in my arrogance, I believed I could handle things. I was educated, you know. I made a real mess of things.”
Focusing on a young, blond-headed boy sitting close to the front of the room, pushing past the pain welling up from deep inside, I continue. “He started asking about his father. I'd lied to him all his life, telling him his dad didn't want him. The real reason his dad wasn't in his life was because when I divorced him, I told him as long as he didn't bother me or Jon, I would never ask him for a penny. He agreed. It wasn't Jon he didn't want, it was me, and I used my son to punish him. I kept the lie going. But Jon, like most kids of a certain age, wanted to find him, to see him for himself. At age 15, already addicted to marijuana and booze, Jon stole a car. He was going to Arizona and search for his father. He got caught.”
God, I hate talking about this part of my life, about what a miserable failure I was as a parent. “The next time I saw him was in a jail. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, scared and desperate, he begged me to help him. I knew the sheriff and one of the local judges. After meeting with them and Jon's appointed attorney, a deal was made. If he'd agree to go to a treatment center approved by the judge, they would give him probation.”
Assuring myself I can get through it this time without crying, I say, “He ran away from the treatment center less than two months after I took him there. He wouldn't have stayed that long, but he broke his leg. As soon as the cast was off, so was he. He hitched to Florida, where he had a friend, and then he called me. I did everything I could to talk him into returning to the treatment center, but he wasn't having it. He'd broken probation and would have to spend some time in jail. The plan, he said, was to hitch to Arizona. I begged him not to do it—told him to wait a few days until I could contact my brother in Phoenix and round up some cash for a bus ticket.
“I remember that phone call like it was yesterday. Jon told me he loved me, that he wasn't running away from me, but that he couldn't come back. My brother picked him up. He called, wanting me to join him in Arizona. I don't know how many times I've wondered what would have happened if I'd gone there to be with him—but I didn't. Instead, that day when I hung up the phone, I said a prayer. I hadn't prayed in years, since the kids and Mom died, and even then, I had no idea who or what I was praying to. But I looked into the air, and said, ‘God, I can’t take care of him anymore. Please look after him.'”
The tears come. I take a moment before I continue. “A few days later, there was a knock on the door. Jon was dead.”
25
The Basement
YEARS HAVE PASSED, but still when I say those words out loud, I feel like I've been gut punched. For a moment, there's not enough air in the room. I catch my breath. “I heard a speaker say that if you are an alcoholic that has hit bottom, and you drink again, be assured you'll find the basement. I found the basement that day. There were no steps leading downward. The door opened, I fell in, and I landed on a concrete floor. I spent the next year lying in my own mess, drunk, filled with self-pity, believing I wanted to die.”
I can barely recall that entire year. “The following summer, I met Cheryl. Actually, she followed me home from the liquor store, and I kept her.” Good, they're laughing again. It brings me out of those dark thoughts. “What I mean is she helped me come back to life, such as it was. She became my best drinking buddy, and through her I met my next husband.” I look at my watch and decide I can't afford to go into details about husband number five. “What a nice guy. He certainly deserved better than he got with me. By then, I had the drama queen martyr persona down to an art form. I'd played it so long, I believed in it myself. I truly felt that my life had been cursed, that none of it was my fault, and that someone should throw me a parade or give me an award for all I'd endured.
“My new husband didn't live up to my expectations. All I wanted him to do was put up with my bad habits, fill the loneliness that I'd lived with all my life, and help me get over Tom, the guy I'd been in love with for fifteen years. I don't know what his problem was. I drank every day and excused myself by blaming him. At times, I picked fights with him so I'd have a reason to go out, get blitzed, and do unthinkable things.
“After one of those nights, which ended in a blackout, I came to when I heard someone pounding on the door. It was Cheryl. She was upset. She started in on me as soon as I opened the door. Since I couldn't remember anything from the night before, I had no idea what she was yelling about. She said I had a drinking problem. I was stunned. I went into a rage, called her names, and threw her out. I thought she had a lot of nerve. After she left, I began to wonder. I couldn't get her words out of my mind. I tried drinking them away. By afternoon, I was sitting in the middle of my living room floor, rocking back and forth, knowing I was teetering on the edge of insanity.
“I used to say that I was more afraid of insanity than death, but that wasn't true. Thoughts of suicide had been with me since childhood. I fantasized about it. It had to be dramatic, creative, memorable—something people would talk about. My big problem was that there was no one left who would really give a damn, except for Tom, and maybe Cheryl. When Mom did it, people noticed, but they moved on with their lives pretty quickly, including me. And, as much as I tried to convince myself that in death I'd be united with those I'd lost, it was too much of a crapshoot.”
My eyes rest on a young woman near the front of the room whom I've worked with off and on over the past few years. We've recently had the “I wish I could just lay down and die” conversation—a few weeks ago. We laughed together when I told her we alcoholics were always looking for an easier, softer way. “I'd failed at everything I ever did. What if I screwed suicide up, too? I could end up paralyzed, or crippled, sucking my food through a straw in some state institution. No … too chancy.”
I see her shoot me a knowing smile, and understand she's thinking about our last talk. A therapist once told me that the most profound thing I could say to someone who was suicidal was that I would miss them. I understood that. It's important to believe that if we fall off the face of the Earth, someone will care, someone will miss us. “Since apparently death wasn't an option—it was way too permanent—I chose what I considered to be just above death: jail and the nuthouse. I made the call.
“Jack answered it. He asked me if I could stay sober that day. There was a meeting that evening. No problem. I had a drink in my hand as soon as I hung up.” I share the story of how I met Jack at the Amish catastrophe, then say, “Yes, I'd been speaking with a group of people about addiction and then going out and getting drunk. How crazy was that?” That story nearly brings the house down. I see people wiping at their eyes.
“I'll probably never forget my first encounter with the twelve steps. The word ‘God’ in some of the steps might as well have been written in florescent orange. That's all I could see. I didn't care if it was a God of your understanding, my understanding, or some church. I didn't want anything to do with it. If there was a God, he'd done nothi
ng but crap on my life from the beginning. Except for a brief time in my life when my mother found out she had an incurable disease and decided to get religion (which consisted of going to church and switching to pills and vodka because someone told her no one could smell it), I'd pretty much been a heathen. No, this AA stuff wouldn't work for me. I don't think I'd ever needed a drink any worse than I did after that meeting. I got stinking drunk.
“There is nothing worse than a belly full of booze and a head full of AA. Those doubts, the ones that creep in under your denial radar, haunted me. By morning, facing the woman in the mirror, I knew I'd go to another meeting. I'm not sure why I made that choice. The one thing I remembered from the meeting was an old guy saying, ‘You never have to be alone again.’ Maybe that was enough. I'd never been alone in the sense that I had Jon, many husbands, live-ins, boyfriends, even Johns, to keep me from it, but I'd lived with an overwhelming feeling of loneliness all my life. Besides, I'd run out of anyplace else to go—at least anyplace I would be welcome. Even my best friend had abandoned me.”
——
After all these years, that moment of truth lives in my mind like it was yesterday. “I grabbed a hold of that first step for dear life, and hung on by my fingernails. I left my husband, telling myself it was because I knew I couldn't live with him and stay sober, but the fact was that I'd been looking for an excuse to leave the marriage. I went to a meeting every night.” I laugh out loud. “I asked one of the guys at the meeting how many meetings a week I should attend. He asked me how many days a week I drank. That settled that. It's funny, I didn't like the people, thought I was so much smarter than most of them, hated what they talked about in the meetings, resented the fact that so many meetings took place in churches, but I felt drawn to return night after night.
“I didn't understand the Higher Power business. The only Higher Power I'd ever known came in one bottle or another, or in a pair of tight blue jeans. Since I'd decided not to have a God of anyone's choosing, no matter what they called it, and was determined not to work any of the steps that mentioned God, I started out stuck on the first step. You can stay sober a long time on the first step. Sometimes I think I got the program through osmosis. As resistant as I was, I suited up and showed up, as they say, and apparently some of it seeped into my closed mind.
I had nothing. I always wondered why other people had so much and I had so little. They probably didn't live the way I did, moving fast and often, many times just ahead of the law and the landlord. I thought that if you couldn't get it in your car, you probably didn't need it. Not conducive to acquiring much. Anyway, I moved into a half-garage with my meager belongings and my son's dog, Angel. I didn't have a television, a radio, telephone, or an air conditioner. One good thing about that was that for the first time in my life, I had no distractions, and getting out of that place, even to attend meetings, was a treat.”
It's funny, but when a girlfriend called recently to tell me they'd torn down the old garage, I felt sad. “Unlike many of you who have been given the opportunity to live in a treatment center … where they have drugs, I might add, I went through the DT's alone, except for those people in AA … you know, the ones I didn't like, who were kind enough to help me out. I shook. I suffered through the alcoholic itch, which was like having crabs all over my body. The AA people called me ‘the pacer’ because I couldn't sit down during the meetings. For over a year, I had insomnia, except when I was at work and I had trouble keeping my eyes open. It felt like I had the flu every day. My energy level was zip. I tried to substitute sugar for the loss of alcohol, but I think my body noticed.
In the mental hospital, where they didn't advocate a 12-step program, they gave me sugar, sugar, sugar. I developed such a sugar habit, I gained over thirty pounds. I was a sigh: fat, my hair falling out, and what little I had left turning kind of orange-colored. Once, after my release, I ran into an old acquaintance from my drinking days. He didn't recognize me, and when he did he asked why my face was so swelled up. I would have dyed my hair brown, but I would have had to spray paint the bald spots. Although I couldn't do much about the hair except hope it would grow back in, I knew the solution to my weight. I smoked cigarettes one after the other, took diet pills, and ate one meal a day. That's how we alcoholics roll,” I say, and can't keep from laughing along with the crowd.
“I always looked for the quick fix; the easier, softer way. It never worked for long, but I kept trying, moving from one disaster to the next, doing the same things and expecting different results. The question was: could I change that pattern? Was I willing to stop and make a real commitment?”
26
Limbo
“I BALANCED ON A TIGHTROPE between the sober world and the oblivion I craved through alcohol and drugs, knowing that at any moment I could fall. I brought my body to the meetings, but my mind continued to live in the bars. Hell, I didn't think they could run those places without me.” I see some heads nodding in agreement.
“I'd been a con artist all my life, and that person still lived within. It remained in control of my brain, trying to fool me. I decided I was smart enough to figure out my way around this step stuff, you know, and just pretend to work the steps to keep up appearances. Like a zombie, I stared into the faces of those who were trying to help me, nodded, and thought, ‘not me, baby. I don’t have to actually work any of those steps—I just have to appear to do so.' Like all the other cons in my life, doing this made me feel smarter, more in control. But the only person duped in that particular con was me.
“When they say half measures avail you nothing, they aren't shitting you. I staged my apartment to fool those AA people who stopped by occasionally.” In my mind, I picture the stupid things I did in an effort to make it look like I was working a program. “I taped three prayers to my bathroom mirror, made little signs that mimicked those sayings on the meeting room walls, and tacked them here and there. There was a partial list of people to whom I owed amends taped to the front of the refrigerator. When anyone mentioned God or a Higher Power, I told them I used the group as my Higher Power. I'd heard someone say that at a meeting. That worked for a while. What I didn't realize then was that was exactly what I had been doing.”
Before I start the next part of my story, I'm on the verge of tears. I've never been able to talk about Helen without blubbering all over myself. Maybe this time I can do it. “My job as a day-care worker for Helen, who had Parkinson's, hadn't turned out quite like I figured. As much as I'd told myself I'd never allow myself to really care that much for another person again, I loved her dearly. She helped me as much as the people in the program. There she was, crippled up, in pain, confined to a bed, but she had faith in some God that I could not understand. And she knew peace. She was the beginning of my wondering.”
A sad laugh escapes to cover the sobs I've experienced before. “Her family paid me to look after her, but I needed her more than she needed me. Because of her, I started actually reading those prayers on the bathroom mirror. Because of her, I started thinking about those hurtful things I'd done to others. And because of her, my perception of God, of what faith was, began to slowly change. But Helen was going to die. I told myself I could deal with it, but my mind worked furiously, telling me I knew how to smother the pain.
“A priest in recovery once told me that anything that causes you that much pain, that you hang on to that hard, you're getting something out of it. For me, my sadness over Helen's condition was an excuse to return to the bottle, to my self-destructive behavior, and justify it. As Helen deteriorated physically, I deteriorated emotionally. Although I'd begun playing with the steps, even making some half-assed efforts, I'd never stopped thinking about drinking as an option. Another great loss in my life would be the perfect excuse to start up again.
“For over two and a half years I'd lived in limbo—or so I thought. My life consisted of working, going to meetings, hanging out with AA people, fighting the urge to see Tom and the urge to drink and drug on a daily basis. When
Helen ended up in the hospital, my world turned upside down. Forced to accept the reality of her inevitable demise, a plan formed in my mind. One morning, I got out of bed and knew that that was the day I would drink again. I went to work and took care of Helen, knowing all day that as soon as I got home and cleaned up, I'd go uptown and hit the bars.
“The plan worked pretty good until I stepped into the doorway on my way out of the garage. A voice came into my mind. Oh, it wasn't some big booming voice of God, but the words of a man—a man who I didn't like, because I felt he could see right through my bullshit. He'd looked straight into my face one day at a meeting and told me that the day would come when I would either get on my knees or get drunk. I had a two-word thought for him, I can tell you. But that day, I dropped to my knees. I begged for help. I didn't see a burning bush, or a white light, or even an angel, but such a feeling came over me—a feeling like nothing I'd ever known. It was as if someone wrapped me in a warm embrace and whispered in my ear, ‘everything will be okay.’”
That familiar bubble of happiness fills me as it does every time I think of that day. “It was that one moment in time, that single action, that allowed me to enjoy the life I have today. I'd been told that if I do something today that works for me, it will work tomorrow. I know some of you won't believe this, but from that day to this, I still get on my knees each morning. That way, I get to have a spiritual awakening every day.
“I didn't know what God's will for me was, but I sure knew what it wasn't. Finally able to work the steps, I began the process of building the steps that led me out of the basement, one at a time. I discovered there is a reason the steps are numbered and set up the way they are. It's because each step prepares you for the next. This business of using the group as my Higher Power worked for me in the beginning, but what would I do when it was just me and the bottle, and there was no one else around? How would I have the courage to take responsibility for my past—and put it out there—without truly believing that there is a plan, and I'm part of it? For me, and I'm only speaking from my personal experience, there was no way to go forward without working steps 2 and 3, without a God of my understanding to lean upon when things got tough.