by David M
WE ARE NOT SAINTS
A story of wreckage, surrender and early recovery
By David M
© 2013, David M
All materials on these pages are copyrighted by the author. All rights reserved. No part of these pages, either text or image may be used for any purpose other than personal use without consent. Feel free to contact the author at [email protected]
ISBN-13: 978-1492830986
This book is dedicated to the woman who made looking at the past bearable, and who makes looking at the future remarkable. I love you Rachel.
Prologue
The sun wouldn’t crest the horizon for at least three hours yet, and by my best estimation I was already fucked.
It was about three o’clock in the morning on a dark back-road in central Pennsylvania. I was sitting on what was left of the hood of my car drinking a beer. I could hear the sirens approaching in the distance, and I knew it was all over. My life would never be the same.
The friend I had nearly killed was telling me to get rid of the beer. Why? I had been drinking all day. Did he think that was going to escape the police officer’s attention? He was trying to get me to agree on a story; a deer ran into the road, black ice, another car swerved into my lane. All bullshit; I was drunk.
I knew after tonight I would be in jail or rehab. I hoped for the latter. This had gone far enough. I wasn’t going to last much longer without some type of intervention. Rather than dreading what was coming, I can clearly remember feeling relieved.
I hadn’t come to this point overnight. It took years of practice. I was a well-trained alcoholic. In the months prior to the accident though, something changed. I was no longer drinking because it was what I wanted to do. It was a vicious cycle; I couldn’t function without a drink, I couldn’t stop drinking once I started, so I was completely dysfunctional because I was drunk all the time. I tried to quit several times on my own but I couldn’t.
My behavior had also taken a very drastic and very dark turn. I began doing things I would have never before considered. I knew I needed help before it was too late, and everyone knows Alcoholics Anonymous is the place to go for those with a drinking problem. After one particularly heinous event, I realized I couldn’t handle this problem alone. It had grown much larger than I was.
I had been to AA before, but never of my own free will. I had gone once as a teenager because my mother said she would put me out if I didn’t. I went a few years later because a girlfriend said she would put me out if I didn’t go. Later, I went when the Army threatened to put me out. This time I went because I knew that soon God was going to put me out, and this time it would be for good.
Unfortunately, AA didn’t seem to be working. I would show up to meetings, sit in the back, drink coffee and keep to myself. I did this several nights a week but the odds were about fifty-fifty that when everyone joined hands at the end of the meeting to say the Lord’s Prayer I was already on my way to the bar.
I remember walking into the bar one night and admitting that I had just come from an AA meeting. A friend asked, “How’d that work out for ya”? We all laughed and drank until the bar closed. As always, I had a smile on my face, but I was falling apart.
Let’s get back to the night of the crash, and the car. Damn, I loved that car. This was the car that I truly believed was going to change everything. It was a 1994 Ford Mustang Cobra. Some poor guy had dumped a lot of money into this car before I wrapped it around a telephone pole.
Let me give you a glimpse into the interworking’s of a well-developed alcoholic mind. As I said, this car was going to change everything. I was sitting in Iraq when a brilliant thought came to me. The heavy drinking which had plagued me for months prior to this latest deployment was not my fault. It was my old, beat-up truck’s fault. I simply didn’t care enough about that truck to keep me from drinking and driving.
I had been involved in several accidents in the months prior to my most recent trip to the sandbox. None of them involved other cars or were very serious, but the old truck spent a lot of time in the shop. In most cases I hit a ditch, or a guardrail that had wandered into the road. I even hit a cornfield; how the hell do you not see a cornfield?
One night I stayed at the bar long after someone passing through reported that the roads were like a fucking ice skating rink. On the way home I was involved in, or I should say I was the sole participant in, the world’s most drawn-out, one-car fender bender. I lost control of the car on a very long stretch of desolate, down-hill road, with guardrails in all the right places.
I put my beer in the cup holder and began searching for my seatbelt after noticing that the bed of the truck was passing the driver-side window. I finally got the seatbelt on when I saw the first guardrail coming at me. I quickly snatched my beer from the cup holder so the impact wouldn’t send it flying.
The truck bounced off of the first guardrail like the rail of a pool table. It was then that I noticed my beer was empty, so I chucked it into the back of the truck and grabbed another. About that time I saw the second guardrail coming up. It hit the front bumper this time and sent the truck spinning off down the road.
I pulled out a cigarette and lit it when I noticed that my next point of contact could be very bad. There were breaks in the guardrail and it was too dark to see what filled the gaps. At the very least it was a ditch, trees or both. My mind told me there was probably a steep hill, or even a cliff.
I found myself, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, leaning over the steering wheel, (with no hands on it) and cheering for the guardrail. The truck chose the guardrail, and for the third time I spun off across two lanes toward yet another guardrail.
This time I hit broadside and skid another hundred feet or so along the guardrail like a small airplane coming in for a bad landing. The road truly was like a skating rink, and I felt like I had just taken a ride on a hockey puck.
I decided this accident was also the truck’s fault. Had my truck been a beautiful mustang rather than a broken down old mule; I would have left it at the bar and walked to a motel rather than risk driving on treacherous roads, or so I thought. Unfortunately, and to my surprise, the benders continued despite my love for the Mustang.
It was now a year later. The old truck had been passed on to a new owner and I had the car of my dreams, but it was only a few weeks into our short affair that I noticed the first scrape on the passenger side where I vaguely recall hitting a street sign.
It seemed that the harder I tried to avoid drinking and driving, the more devious my particular brand of alcoholism became. My blackouts went from a few hours the night prior, to several days at a time. Some nights I could remember everything, whether I wanted to or not, and other nights the blackout would start before I even entered a liquor store.
It was almost as though my brain knew when I was making a conscious effort to avoid drinking, at which point it would simply shut down and go on autopilot. For whatever reason, I remember nearly every detail of the night I wrecked the Mustang.
I had followed my normal morning routine. I got up around 6am and started the process of drinking myself back to sleep. I told myself that alcoholics drank in the morning because they had to; I drank in the morning so I could get a good nap. Never mind the fact that every morning I awoke with the shakes and a volcano in my stomach.
By 9am I was passed out. I woke up around noon feeling pretty good, or in other words still drunk, so I talked my friend into going out to shoot some pool. It took a little prodding because my buddy knew how days like this would end, and sure enough; he was right.
My regular bar closed early, around midnight, so I talked him into finding another bar, which didn’t take near as much prodding this time. We found a place t
hat I recalled as a local hangout where an outsider could always find a little trouble. This was my kind of place.
As I walked through the door though, I noticed everything was different. The place had gone semi-upscale since the last time I’d been there. This pissed me off and I was more determined than ever to find someone to scrap with. I was well on my way when something strange happened, or in my case, not so strange at all.
The locals identified me as the troublemaker and began to circle the wagons. Here I was in a room full of drinkers, my people, and I was being singled out. Even my own kind didn’t want me anymore.
At this point, my brain seems to have imputed images of pitchforks and torches. Though I know they weren’t there, they certainly wouldn’t have been out of place. Meanwhile, my friend had been trying to get a girl’s phone number and was oblivious to the whole scene. I drug him from the bar just ahead of the angry mob.
My mind was in turmoil as I drove home that fateful night. Why didn’t these people recognize me as one of their own? If my own people no longer wanted me, what was I left with? Why did my nights always end up this way? How the hell do you not see a cornfield?
I had lost my lighter so I dug around until I found a pack of matches. After several unsuccessful attempts to light my cigarette, I simply stopped the car in the middle of the road. Finally, my silent friend in the passenger seat spoke up.
“What the hell are you doing in the middle of the road, you’re going to get us killed,” he said.
I think my response was along the lines of, “Fuck off; I’m trying to light a cigarette.”
This didn’t seem to satisfy him and he continued to urge me to get going. Normal people would take this as good advice following a bad personal choice. For me, it was like a record spinning out of control. What was with these people? Did no one get me anymore? et tu, brute.
I put the car in gear and dropped the hammer. I clearly remember flat shifting through second and third. I had lost control by second. And that brings us right back to where we started, sitting on what was left of the hood of a destroyed dream.
Life had become nothing more than background noise to my drinking. I didn’t know where my life was heading from here, but from the look of the shiny new handcuffs I was wearing; it was going to be interesting.
PART ONE
The Road to Ruin
Chapter One:
I really couldn’t say when I had my first drink, because I’m just not sure. I do recall my first bender though. I was at a relative’s house. All of the children were asleep and the adults were having a cocktail. I was hiding in a room next to the kitchen watching my uncle mix these fascinating drinks. I had no Idea what they were, but they looked good and I knew they were off limits to kids. I wanted one.
I waited for my uncle to carry the tray of drinks into the living room before I made my move. I slipped into the kitchen and went to work. I had seen him make several of the drinks; it wasn’t rocket science. I put a few ice cubes in a glass, added some clear stuff, some white stuff, a slice of pineapple and a cherry. I stirred it up with my finger and took my first drink. I had found heaven.
This drink, which I later learned was called a pina colada, had all sorts of things in it that I liked. It also had a strange bite to it, like holding a nine-volt battery to your tongue. I thought this must be the forbidden fruit everyone talked about. I liked it.
I’m not sure how many times I went back to the well that night; I’m sure it wasn’t more than a few times. What I do recall is later that night I was downstairs in the family room shooting pool. My mother and uncle walked down the steps to see what all the noise was about. They stopped in their tracks when they saw me leaned over the pool table.
Though I don’t remember his exact words, my uncle turned to my mother with a sly look and said she would have her hands full with this one. To this day I don’t know if they saw the drink sitting on the toy box a few feet away. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old.
So, was this the magic moment when I caught the disease of alcoholism? I doubt it. I think I was born with the disease. Both my father and grandfather were alcoholics. I’d love to fill you in on their lives but I never met my grandfather and didn’t know my father very well. I’d have interviewed them for this book but they both died of their disease at a young age. I guess, for that reason, you could say you’ve just read the shortest life stories in the history of biographies.
Whether I developed this disease or was born with it, my upbringing gave me the opportunity to get an early start on my destruction. Don’t misunderstand me; my upbringing had nothing to do with me becoming an alcoholic, it just gave me access to something alcoholics love…beer.
My grandparents owned a beer distributer. Since my father was never in the picture, the distributer became my playground at an early age. It was across the street from my school and often served as a babysitter until my mother got home from work.
This was no ordinary beer distributor. My grandparents sold wholesale to nearly every bar and restaurant in the county. This was the mother of all beer distributers.
There was one room that would have been large enough to play baseball in, had it not been for the pallets of beer stacked from floor to ceiling. As a very young child, I would climb the stacks of beer and build forts at the top out of cases of beer.
My grandparents even had a room in their house called, “the beer room”. This was the room where they kept all of the tchotchkes they got from the breweries. It was also the room where the grandchildren would play on Sundays; out of sight, out of mind.
Before the age of ten, I would take six-packs of beer from the refrigerator in the beer room and put them in the dryer in the downstairs bathroom/laundry room on Sundays at my grandparent’s house. Then every half-hour or so I would sneak in, drink a beer and throw the empty can into the ceiling tiles.
It wasn’t long before I was stashing beer in my basement at home. For whatever reason, the basement seemed to be my domain. I knew it was pointless to drink one or two beers, and sneaking six-packs or cases from my grandparent’s house or the distributer was out of the question, so I would snatch one or two beers at a time. When I had eight or ten beers I would have a little party for myself in the basement.
By now you may be thinking it’s no wonder I grew up to be an alcoholic, but remember, I said my upbringing gave me the opportunity to get an early start. It didn’t make me an alcoholic. My genes did that.
Keep in mind also; I have a sister and a slew of cousins who shared the same upbringing, or at the very least similar, yet I seem to be the only alcoholic in the family.
The effects of my disease are apparent, in retrospect, from a very young age. Many people who are not familiar with alcoholism assume that overconsumption and drunkenness are the only real pitfalls of the disease. This couldn’t be any further from the truth.
The fact is that alcoholism affects every aspect of a person’s life, and when every decision a person makes is approached with an alcoholic mind, things go very wrong whether one has a drink in their hand or not.
This couldn’t be clearer to me now as I look back at a child who only drank when the opportunity presented itself, but consistently made wrong choices. I was never a malicious child and I genuinely wanted to do the right thing; I just didn’t know how.
Now, I know to most people it sounds as though I’m trying to explain away bad behavior by using alcoholism as an excuse. I’ve always believed there are excuses and there are explanations, and anyone who believes these two things are one-in-the-same is terribly misinformed.
Here is a prime example of the root cause and effect of alcoholic behavior. I come from a long line of poor fathers. My father was never around and I wasn’t much better. This is something I am working very hard to change in my recovery.
Neither my father nor I ever made a conscious decision to be bad parents. I’m sure my father loved me as much as I love my own children. So why will neither of us
ever be awarded father of the year. Well, in my father’s case it’s obvious; he’s dead.
In my case, it was every decision I made leading up to the creation of my children, and the lasting repercussions of those decisions. In addition, every bad decision brings on feelings of guilt, inadequacy and fear that drive wedges into relationships.
Many alcoholics, me included, attempt to relieve our guilt, inadequacy and fear with alcohol. This leads to more bad decisions which results in more guilt, inadequacy and fear…you see where this is going.
All of this forces the wedge in deeper. This is the disease’s defense mechanism. This is what alcoholism needs to survive in a human being...the wedge. Friends and family intervene when there is a problem with a loved one. Interventions disrupt alcoholic progression. The wedge disrupts interventions.
There is a reason alcoholism is referred to as cunning, baffling and powerful. No other disease defends itself against treatment in this way. It is my belief that my disease has been defending its turf (me) since before I picked up my first drink.
Chapter Two :
By the time I was fifteen I was drinking every day. I had learned a few tricks in the past several years that made this possible.
The first trick was that hard liquor took up a lot less room than beer. With beer, I would have to sneak it into the house, drink it warm or find a way to keep it cold, and then I would have a mess to clean up when the beer was gone. In case you didn’t know this; drunks hate cleaning up their messes.
Liquor was a lot easier. I could pour it in my coffee in the morning or a soda in the afternoon. On many nights I would simply go to bed early, turn off the lights and sit in the dark with a pint.
I was thirteen when I started drinking regularly. It’s no coincidence that around the same time I started to get arrested regularly. By the time I was fifteen there were very few weeks that my mother did not get a call to come pick me up at the police station.