“Can I help you?”
“I’m here to check in.”
“What’s your name?”
“Edmund Metatawabin.”
“Can you spell the last name?”
I spelled it.
“Have you ever been here before?”
“No.”
She gave me a form. “Just answer what you can. If you can’t answer any questions, don’t worry, the doctor will go through it with you later.”
I filled in part of the form. I left blank the part about how much I drank per day. It depended on the day. And many days, I wasn’t sure.
Then a man in a white coat came in. He looked barely older than me.
“Is he next?” he said to the woman in the green coat, pointing toward me. She nodded.
“Come through,” he said.
I followed him into a big lounge that looked like a student den with lots of chairs and pillows, and a handful of people milling about watching TV. The doctor opened a door to his left that led into a smaller room with an examining table and some cupboards, and beckoned me inside.
“Edmund. How do I say the last name?”
“Meta-TAH-wabin.”
“I see you’ve filled in most of your questionnaire. That’s good.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you mind if we get some vitals?”
“Some what?”
“Blood pressure, heart rate, that sort of thing.”
“No. Go ahead.”
The doctor took out a cuff and fastened it around my arm.
I looked at him. He was focused on the cuff. I remembered back to the examinations with Brother Jutras. Every year, same thing. And all those boys that he’d bought off with a piece of bread. My face felt hot as the anger rose. I looked down at the floor. When the feeling had passed, I looked up.
“Alcohol addiction, is it?” The doctor began to pump a tiny rubber balloon. The cuff tightened.
“Yes, sir.” He let the balloon fall and the cuff loosened around my arm. He made some notes on my questionnaire.
“You can call me Dr. Wozechowski.”
“Yes, Dr. Wozechowski.”
“When did you last have a drink?”
“This morning.”
“What was it?”
“Cree Helper.”
“Sorry?”
“That’s just what I call it. Vodka.”
He took out a stethoscope. “How much?”
“Just a few shots.”
“How many?”
“Five.” He wrote it down.
“How much do you normally drink?”
“A bottle during the day. More when I get home.”
“How much more?”
“Depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“On how much money I have.”
“Do you know the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal?”
“No.”
“Mood swings, sweats, nausea, depression, fatigue, the shakes. Some people hallucinate. If you get in trouble, go and see the nurse. She can provide medication to calm things down.”
“Thank you, Dr. Wozechowski.”
He picked up the phone and dialed. “He’s done,” he said. A lady in a white coat came into the room. She led me through the lounge and down a lobby to my bedroom. It had two narrow beds and two bedside tables with lights and some shelves. Someone else had already checked in. A man, from the look of the clothes.
“You can unpack here. Most people like to hang out in the lounge. We went through it on the way here. There’s also a pool room but we’ve temporarily misplaced the key. Should find it soon. Dinner is at seven.”
I unpacked and walked into the lounge. There were a wemistikoshiw and a black guy watching hockey, and another native guy sitting by himself on a plaid couch, smoking. “I’m Maurice,” said the smoker, and put out a hand. I walked over and shook it. “Wanna smoke?” He offered me the packet. I took one.
“I’m from Wahta Mohawk First Nation. You?” I told him. “What are you here for?”
“Alcohol.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“How long you been here?”
“Oh, just a few days. You?”
“Just got here.”
“You’re in for a treat.”
“Anything I should look out for?”
“Stay away from the heroin and crack users. They are something else. When they arrive, man are they crazy. They get mad. Throw things. Shout. Shit like that.”
“Huh.” I couldn’t believe anyone had it worse than me.
After dinner, I really wanted to hear Joan’s voice. I looked at my watch. Eight p.m. She usually went out on Monday evenings to Svetlana’s place. If I called and she wasn’t home, I could hear her on the answering machine without disturbing or hurting her. I went back to the waiting room.
“Can I use your phone?” I asked the woman in the green coat.
“No phone privileges until after the first week.”
“I just want to call my wife,” I said.
“Was it the phone or privilege part that you didn’t understand?”
“Can you just tell me why?”
“It’s about figuring out your own identity before you bring in other people.”
I looked at her. I didn’t understand the wemistikoshiw concept of identity. It was like the world was full of lonely people, living in their tiny bubbles, and only reaching out when they had a need. My Cree identity began with Joan, Albalina, Shannin and Jassen and then widened to Ma and Pa, my brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. It stretched back to my gookums and my moshoms through to the ancestors, who guided us in times of trouble. And beyond them it encompassed the Four-Leggeds and the Standing Ones and the Earth itself and the River of Life. All my relations. Ni chi shannock.
“My identity is other people,” I said.
“Listen, mister. I don’t make the rules.”
“Please,” I said.
“You’ll learn more about boundaries and identity as you go along. For now, just go and make friends. I’m sure your wife is fine.”
By the time I returned to my room, my roommate was there. He introduced himself as an alcoholic opera singer and then told me he was very famous and made me promise I would never reveal his name. (It’s Daniel, in case you are interested.) Then he got into bed and immediately fell asleep. He began to snore loudly like a leopard frog, a slow clicking sound that opened into a reeaahhh-uh-uh-uh. I tried to sleep through his snoring. His barrel chest eased the air out very slowly, and I wondered if I’d have to listen to this every night.
After an hour or two, I went to the bathroom and got some toilet paper and stuffed it into my ears. I lay down on the bed. I had a bad headache. I was sweating and shaking. I thought about the other withdrawal symptoms that had been explained to me. There was a thin bar of light under the window that faded and then later there were lots of shadows but I couldn’t tell if the lights were from some cars outside the centre or if my eyes were playing tricks on me. I felt locked in, just like at St. Anne’s. I got up and walked around the room. I lay back down. I got up and rinsed my face. I lay back down. I lay on the floor, just like I had done with my parents in the bush. I got up, and got into bed. When the first sun seeped into the room, I started to count all the pieces of dust floating above my head. At some point, I must have fallen asleep.
By morning, I was a wreck. I vomited up bits of mushroom and steak from dinner the night before and then I retched and retched but nothing came up. I cleaned the toilet, then went to the dining hall.
At breakfast, all I wanted was coffee. I looked around the hall, and Maurice waved. I slid in next to him. Steve, who was sitting next to him, reached over and put out his hand. I shook it. He told me that his drug dealer was an Indian.
“Not to be racist or anything,” he said.
“Didn’t take it like that.”
“Good. You ever smoked?” he asked.
“Once or twice,” I said. “Not really my thin
g.”
“You’re a good man,” he said. “Best not to start. Started on the weed, went to coke, went to crack, lost my house and wife and came here. You?”
“I had a drinking problem. Have,” I corrected myself.
He nodded and waited for me to go on.
“I thought I was doing well. But everyone wanted too much. I couldn’t deliver. I kept fucking up.” I stared into the distance. In my mind’s eye I saw Joan. She was sitting on Albalina’s bed, reading to her. “I let everyone down,” I muttered. “Cheated on my wife.”
“She stick around?”
“No,” I said, in a voice near a whisper. “She’s smarter than that.”
In the afternoon we had a presentation. A counsellor named Bill stood at the front of the lounge. He looked like he was in his late thirties. He said we were lucky because this was one of the best drug and alcohol programs in the country. It emphasized a healthy body and mind so there were daily aerobics classes before breakfast. It offered behaviour therapy, group work, and Alcoholics Anonymous. For the natives, there would be some traditional healers delivering presentations in a few days.
Then Bill held up a book called Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism. He called it the Big Book. He had several copies and he passed them around the class.
It was about the same size as the Bible. Inside were a lot of stories about finding God. One chapter was called “Crossing the River of Denial.” Another was “The Keys of the Kingdom,” another about some doctor who had lost his way until he realized that God, not he, was the Great Healer.
I remembered Father Gagnon’s prayer. “Oh merciful God: have mercy on all Jews, Turks, infidels and heretics and also upon all those heathen nations, on whom the light of Thy glorious Gospel hath not yet shone: especially the Indians of this continent.”
I shut the Big Book and took a deep breath.
A few days later, after the aerobics class, there was a morning lecture by a guest speaker named Julian. A medium-sized man, he was a counsellor and an expert in alcohol and psychic trauma.
“How does alcohol work?” He turned around and pointed to the blackboard on which he’d taped a poster of a brain. “It’s a sedative. It affects the brain’s neurotransmitters, which are the chemical messengers that transmit signals that control thought processes, behaviour and emotion. It causes us to lose inhibitions, and increases our levels of dopamine, causing us to feel good. So why is this a problem? Why should a chemically induced high become an issue?”
“ ’Cause you start to need it,” Maurice said. “Every moment is spent craving the next drink.”
“Excellent,” Julian said. “Alcohol numbs psychic pain. In small doses, it can make you feel good. When it is used as a crutch, it causes serious problems. It affects our decision-making and our ability to assess risk.”
I thought back to when I had started drinking socially. Nicholas, Erick and I had gone out and bought some cheap wine when we were sixteen. They had been grounded, so we didn’t try again that year. The following year, I had come home from Montreal, and I knew that there was something wrong with me. I was marked. Damaged goods. Who was going to go for that? No girl. Drinking made things a bit easier. Gave me some confidence. Not much. But enough to take a few girls to the movies. I figured out how to kiss, but even with alcohol, it was hard for me to go further. Too much shame.
When I got back to Fort Albany after high school, I wondered if it would ever happen to me. The years had ticked by, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—they were supposed to be the time of your life. I saw my life accelerate, and me turning old before I had become a man. Then Joan had arrived in Fort Albany from down south. I was twenty. Alcohol made everything easy. I flirted with Joan. Opened up. She liked me.
I’d been without it now for a total of seven days, and every day stretched out like a treacherous icy river. I was deep in it, and I felt unable to swim or walk, weighed down—by my past, by my mistakes and by those I had hurt. Every day there were more questions, from the counsellors, psychologists, addicts and experts. Why why WHY? I started to explain, and then I tumbled into memory, images spinning ever faster until the words didn’t matter, there was only thirst. I would say anything for a moment’s relief. Give everything for a drink.
Things got better midway through when a Cree healer named Terry came in for the presentations that were aimed at natives. We sat in a circle—Terry, Maurice, me and Geraldine, a Stoney woman from Nakoda Nation, who was just here for a couple of days.
“You know, I used to be in your shoes,” Terry said. “Managing my mood swings with alcohol. Always running from my past. Then I came here for some healing a few years ago, and never looked back. I started asking some hard questions about my life here. Had someone come in and give a presentation, just like I’m giving to you. That’s when I realized I had to start figuring out my culture. That I was a little lost.
“Anyway. Enough of me. Let’s talk about you. You’ve come here because you’re probably drinkers. The other people at the addiction centre might have other substance abuse problems, but for us, it’s probably booze. When the white man first brought alcohol, they knew what they were giving us. The beginnings of broken families.
“To start, let’s go around the room. Loosen things up a bit. Natives have a lot of names for booze. Anyone know a few?”
I put up my hand. “Firewater,” I said.
“Yes,” Terry said. “The old people called it firewater because they used to make homebrew out of anything they could find. Real booze was banned for Indians. When you make booze in your backyard, it usually burns. Water that sets your throat on fire. Anything else?”
“We call it crazy water,” Geraldine said. “Gahtonejabee meenee. Because it makes you crazy.”
“You already were,” Maurice said. She smiled at him. He had the hots for Geraldine. We weren’t supposed to get together romantically at the centre, although I didn’t think Maurice cared much for the rules.
“What else?” Terry said.
“In Mohawk we say deganigohadaynyohs,” Maurice said. “The mind changer. Because whatever mood you’re in before, it makes you happy.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of that. Of all the names, I think that’s the worst of all. Because people do use it to change their minds. They try to change their minds instead of changing their circumstances.”
I wondered whether I’d used alcohol to change my mind instead of my circumstances. I was sure I had. But what had been that wrong with my circumstances? Hadn’t I already got all I wanted? After high school, I’d wanted to become a teacher, and I’d managed, and I’d loved my job. I’d wanted to marry Joan, and she took me even though I wasn’t much to look at and she could have chosen anyone. I’d wanted to go to university, get my degree, and it had been hard, but I’d succeeded. Hell, I even had three amazing kids. Why had I screwed everything up?
It was evening, near the end of the program, when a middle-aged counsellor with red hair named Barb gave us Self-Monitoring Logs. She asked us to write down when we felt the urge to use drugs or drink. Everyone had to fill out that part except for the newbies because Barb said every newbie had urges so bad they might as well be teenage boys. She kept laughing long after the rest of the room had fallen silent.
The next part of the form dealt with the causes of our addiction.
What were the triggers for you wanting to drink alcohol/use drugs?
I thought about all the things that made me want to drink. Why did they give us such a tiny box? I needed a filing cabinet. I felt embarrassed about my brown body. It felt small and weak. Unlovable. Every failure compounded my growing shame. I felt lost and out of control when I let my students down. My overwhelming remorse when I came home drunk and saw Joan looking tired and broken. The better question was when I didn’t want to drink—that would be easier to answer.
When had I first tried alcohol? I thought back. I remembered finding Pa’s bucket of homebrew
when I was about five. I stuck my finger in and tried it. It set my mouth on fire, burning through my cheeks and throat. Ma got mad when Pa drank too much, and I didn’t want her finding out.
After that, the memories took hold in Technicolor. I was seven, walking to the school with my dad, having my hair cut, playing soccer in the rain and seeing Mike fiddling with his umbrella. The memories sped up and I could smell the old meat and cologne and I just needed it to stop and for there to be space.
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. So were my legs. I left that part of the form blank and excused myself.
When I came out of the bathroom, everyone had been paired off. We would be doing breathing exercises that were supposed to help take our mind off our cravings. A plump woman with messy, curly brown hair named Trish didn’t have a partner so I became hers.
“Can you believe this shit?” she said, and pointed around the room.
“What shit?” I said.
She started to laugh. “You got the shits too?”
“No,” I whispered.
“Come on, every addict gets them. Either it’s stuck all the way up or it’s flowing like the River Ganges.”
“River what?”
“Brown river in India,” she said. “Flowing like the floods of the monsoons.”
“Can you keep it down?” said the woman who was sitting in a chair in front of us. “I’m trying to breathe properly.”
“The problem is you are uptight,” Trish said to her.
The women in front turned around again. “Be quiet,” she said.
“Breathe on my shit, baby,” Trish said. “ ’Cause it’s coming at ya like roses about to burst.”
“Hey, Trish,” I whispered. “Let’s not start.”
“I ain’t starting, I’m finishing!” She got up and began singing. It sounded a little like the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” but with poop lyrics. As soon as Trish belted her first note, Barb got up and left the room. Once she left, more people began laughing. A few moments later Bill came in and led Trish away.
Up Ghost River Page 18