My increasingly dysfunctional urinary system began to give me agonizing headaches. One night I found myself in an ambulance speeding north the sixty miles to Portland for an ileal loop operation. At Good Samaritan Hospital, after about fifty preparatory enemas, surgeons constructed a new bladder from part of my intestine and attached a tube that runs from an orifice just to the right of and a little below my belly button directly into a urine bag. No more leaking catheters.
Pain knocked me flat for a few days, but as soon as I was able, I decided to test the new apparatus under field conditions. Right across the street from the recovery unit was a Portland landmark, the Lovejoy Tavern. A small bribe to the attendant cleared the way for me to sit in the Lovejoy all day knocking back double tequilas. I was now routinely drinking to blackout.
Back at Mount Angel, Toby and I continued to fight for sanity in the land of the dying. We weren’t winning. At the end of one night’s drinking we were crossing the railroad on our way home when Toby’s manual wheelchair got stuck in the tracks. Struggling to get loose, he fell out of the chair. He lay across the tracks like the heroine in a Dudley Do-Right cartoon and moaned, “Go away, man. Leave me here. It’s better this way.” He wasn’t kidding.
Somehow I talked him into holding on to my powered chair while I dragged him out of the right of way, and after a long struggle I freed up his wheels before the Midnight Special could flatten them.
Incidents like this led Sister Allison to tip off Alcoholics Anonymous, who sent a delegation to talk to us. They were a couple of older men in shapeless synthetic suits who looked like extras from Night of the Living Dead. I didn’t relate to them. Besides, I didn’t think I was an alcoholic. I did attend one AA meeting in Salem, the nearest sizable town; but that was just to keep the sisters happy so I could stay at Mount Angel.
Every day I would wheel my way down the hall to my grandmother’s room. She’d had a stroke and barely recognized me, but I held her hand and talked to her and tried to comfort her. Somehow her dying made me feel that my life was over too. I remembered a speech by Norman Bates, the crazed killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho:
Put her someplace? Have you seen the inside of one of those places? The laughter and the tears and the cruel eyes studying you?
The drinking got worse. The nuns on the night shift were furious when I showed up at the door at midnight, stinking, and had to be cleaned up and put into bed. Once, my foot fell off the pedal of my chair and dragged on the pavement all the way up the hill from Tiny’s. Nobody noticed as the toe of my shoe wore through. Of course I couldn’t feel it. By the time we reached the nursing home, all my toenails had been dragged off and I was gushing blood. This incident cost me a month in bed during which people smuggled booze in to me.
Finally at Oktoberfest, the town’s beeriest celebration, the mother superior had me sign a secret agreement that I would not drink. Three days passed before I broke it, and was expelled.
I had been born to the nuns, schooled and nursed by them. Their peace, order and standards of excellence would always have a powerful attraction for me. “You fuckin’ Catholics!” I yelled to Toby as they loaded me into the van. “I’m going to sign up with the Rastafarians!” But in truth I bitterly regretted my expulsion from the medieval calm of Mount Angel.
I MOVED TO the New Birth Nursing Home in Clackamas, a suburb of Portland. I had my Mount Angel credits transferred to Portland State University. New Birth, which cost me $1,300 a month, was not up to nun standards. Typically there were ten girls on shift for a patient population of four hundred dying old people stuck in an ugly, five-story brick eyesore. The staffers were all eighteen-year-old three-hundred-pound chain-smokers named Cheryl who had never finished kindergarten and spent most of their time gossiping in the staff lounge.
A new one of these would appear each morning. “Hi, Mr. Callahan! I’m Cheryl. I’m here to get you up and off to school. You need a bowel program this morning? Now tell me what to do. We have fifteen minutes.” God, I thought, no wonder I’m an alcoholic.
My roommates were nearly always in the last throes. More than once I woke up in the morning and had to ring for the Cheryl on duty.
“What do you want, Mr. Callahan,” she’d ask, obviously put out.
“Well, my roommate here seems to be history. . . .” And sure enough, the guy would be facedown in his breakfast tray when she entered the room. “Must have been the powdered eggs,” I’d grin. They’d clean him up, and the undertakers would come and take him away, making me even later for school.
Sometimes I’d sit staring out my window with a beer smuggled between my twenty-four-year-old knees feeling nauseous with despair. My friends were all at college making something of themselves. And here I sat, rotting. Was I being punished for some bad thing I did? Was it my rebellion against the Church? My doping? The trouble I had caused my parents? Or was it the Ball Walk back at The Dalles drive-in?
I attended Portland State under the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, but I quickly muddied the water by letting myself be seduced by one of the school’s handicapped services counselors. This might have been construed as a conflict of interest, but I was already conflicted and she, just separated from her husband, was very interested. It was fun, especially when we brought disabled-sex films to her apartment after work. We’d play them on the wall of her bedroom, have a good laugh, say, “No, no!” and then do whatever it was they were trying to demonstrate the correct way. When, finally, she told me I was “cut off,” I had to ask, “From sex or from my funding?”
Although academically unchallenging, PSU was nerve-racking. In almost every class, we sat around in seminar-style circles, so everybody had a clear view when my leg spasmed and my shoe began to tap, tap taptapTAPTAPTAP on the pedal of my chair. I lived in dread fear of shitting in my pants due to the inadequate bowel programs I was getting or overflowing my pee bag because my drinking was totally out of control.
I sat in class feeling ragtag, unshaven, dirty, and sick from the previous night’s cheap wine. Why the hell was I here with all these shiny little sophomores, all four or five years younger than me, with my urine bag exposed on the side of my wheelchair? By the time class was dismissed at 3:30 I felt drained, exhausted, eager to start the afternoon’s drinking.
Not to worry, in a little while the Portland State lift bus would take me back across the river to the world of the dying, the restrained, the pissing-on-themselves. I studied—when I studied—with old people falling all over me. I loathed having some 112-year-old hag wander zombielike into my room, pick up my watch, and wander back out again while I watched helplessly from my bed.
On days when I didn’t have to go to class, I would simply wheel myself down to the corner 7-Eleven and shell out a buck for a quart of white port. I would roll myself to a local park and sit there behind some trees, hoping no one could see me trying to twist open the screwtop with my shaking teeth. Then I would lift it to my mouth with both hands. I needed most of that first bottle just to get some relief.
Gradually other winos would drift into the park. I bought for them so that they would fetch my next quart. After a while I’d think, Hey, this is not so bad, even if I was sitting in my own shit, which was not unusual.
I spent eight months like that. Once, loaded, I fell forward out of my chair and broke my shoulder. Now I could mix pain pills with the booze. Almost daily I’d wake up out of a doze to find my arms spasming. I’d smell flesh burning and realize it was mine, that once again I had nodded out with a cigarette in my hand. I still have the scars.
Even the Cheryls started complaining. They didn’t like being called “fucking cows” by a shitty cripple at 11:00 P.M. Every morning I climbed into my chair and set out on my Apology Route, begging forgiveness of anyone I thought I might have insulted in the previous night’s blackout.
Somehow I continued to function in this condition. To get my coursework done, I rolled down to the lounge when all the old people were asleep. Always seeking the attention of
women, I clowned, charmed, and tin-cupped my way to an average of three new dates a week on campus. Quite a few liked to hitch a ride from class to class on my lap. There was always some little girl willing to bring me a home-cooked meal or sneak in through a window after-hours. And every two months or so, my family visited.
But these seemed like the last favors accorded a condemned prisoner. I sensed that if I stayed at New Birth I’d be cold meat before long. So in the summer of 1976 I put an ad in the newsletter of the Spinal Cord Injury Association and began interviewing prospective attendants.
One day, a bisexual named Arnie came into the nursing home looking for the job. At first he reminded me of Brother Mark. We seemed to hit it off, so I gave Arnie a couple of thousand dollars and told him to go find us an apartment and fix it up.
Arnie rented us a two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment on a cul-de-sac in a pleasant section of southwest Portland, right against a wooded park. He packed my bags and loaded them and me into the van I’d purchased with settlement money but, up to now, rarely used since it wasn’t equipped with quad controls. I hadn’t had a place of my own since leaving The Dalles five years earlier, so this was a moment worth celebrating.
We stopped at the liquor store. For me, a fifth of Seagram’s 7. For Arnie, a fifth of 100-proof Southern Comfort, the syrupy hooch that polished off Janis Joplin.
Most of our furniture hadn’t yet been delivered, so we sat in the bare living room and emptied both bottles, joking and laughing hilariously. Presently Arnie excused himself.
Strange noises then came from the bathroom. “WUFF. WUFFF. HONK. HONK. HOOOONK!” Arnie returned, his eyes watering.
“For Chrissake, Arnie, that sounded like a goose being raped by a lesbian Hell’s Angel. What gives?”
“It’s none of your business, but I have a small sinus problem. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t refer to it again.”
As it turned out, Arnie consumed more nose medicine than Felix in The Odd Couple. Also like Felix, he was a neat freak. When he wasn’t in the bathroom mixing up strange brews of Sinex, Coricidin and Anahist, or primping, he cleaned. I would wake up in the morning and hear, Pssssss. Pssssss. Pssssss. Pssssss. Arnie would be in the hall outside the apartment spraying the walls and baseboards with Lysol and Glade. He would have vacuumed the sidewalk, only being in public made him self-conscious. His mother must have given him a wastebasket on his third birthday.
Arnie’s anal compulsions were exaggerated by the fact that he was a failure sexually. He was a sociopath. On his night off he would go out to the bars and fail to meet anybody male or female. This was in 1976, long before AIDS, when gay men were setting records for casual sex that will probably stand forever. But Arnie was missing it all.
As a result he was insanely jealous of my social life, even though I was only a straight. If I had somebody over, he made the worst of it. I remember one evening when I had a date with Stephanie, a teacher for the deaf. We were watching TV and eating Chee-tos in the front room. Arnie got the vacuum cleaner out and started vacuuming between Stephanie’s feet, just to let her know that there was no invading his kingdom.
I had begun to enjoy a small circle of friends, some from school, some old pals from The Dalles who had moved to Portland. They felt uncomfortable at my apartment. I began to feel uncomfortable when they were there. After a while I stopped inviting family and friends over. I lived in dread fear of offending Arnie. I thought I would end up back in the nursing home.
I tried to cope with him in various ways. I introduced him to a gay friend of mine who also had sinus trouble. But Arnie rejected kinship. “I have sinus problems. I wouldn’t say I have sinus trouble.”
Once I suggested, “Arnie, why don’t you just go straight and get a girlfriend?” He said, “You know, I like making love to a girl. But it’s so messy.”
Trapped with each other, we often ended the evening with a drunken fight. He had a pronounced mean streak. One night I was lying naked in bed, we were halfway through my pre-bedtime program. In a rage Arnie picked up the half-gallon urinal into which he had just emptied my bag and poured piss all over my face. Then he stomped out.
I spent the night lying in my own piss without any covers, freezing.
Arnie frequently ended our fights by leaving me high and dry for hours at a stretch. I would be set up with a pitcher full of booze and 7-Up, a tube taped to it so that I could drink while he was gone all day. He used to leave a burning candle at my bedside so that I could light cigarettes. Needless to say a quadriplegic should not smoke or have an open flame around when alone. Once I dropped a burning cigarette behind me on the bed. Fortunately Arnie came home minutes later and saved the day.
Installment payments were coming in from my settlement, so I gave Arnie another thousand dollars and had him buy two color TVs. Now he could drink in front of his TV in the front room and I could stay in bed all day and all night with mine. I hated Arnie’s guts at that time, but in fact I was isolating myself, Arnie or no Arnie. I got up only to go to my seventy-dollars-once-a-week psychiatrist, where I learned that I regarded my attendants as jailers.
In the psychiatrist’s office I did battle with the circular reasoning that kept me prisoner in my own alcoholic mind. I had horrible panic attacks as I felt him penetrate my defenses, which, of course, was what I was paying him to do. After each session I had to hide in my bed, shades drawn. I had Arnie unplug the phone and stand guard against visitors while I healed.
Arnie, to give the devil his due, was a terrific cook, who never made beef stew when boeuf bourguignon would do. Once he spent all day laboring over a huge pot of navy beans and ham hocks and ended by dropping the tray, spilling everything. He sat down next to the mess, in such anguish that he couldn’t even clean, and wept like Judas.
Nevertheless it was a great relief when I found someone else who met my minimum employment requirements: you had to be a fellow alcoholic willing to work terrible hours at unsavory tasks for almost nothing. Alex was my age and usually drunk and stoned. With him he brought several cats—and an epidemic of fleas. For some reason I was immune; but my mental picture of Alex in those days is of a slim, tall, mustachioed young man with a joint in one hand, a beer in the other, jumping from the bites of the fleas that swarmed in his chest hair. He was also a manic depressive on a maintenance diet of lithium, and a great killer of possums.
Portland, Oregon, is situated at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers. Much of it sits on what used to be a marshy floodplain before the great dams were built, starting in the 1930s. There are still dozens of channels and canals and thousands of drainage ditches. This urban wetland breeds uncounted possums, huge gray rodents with red eyes who scurry about at night in search of garbage. They furnish great sport for the citizenry. Even though it’s illegal to discharge firearms within the city limits, many are taken each year with shotguns and .22s. But the classic way to hunt possums in Portland is with an automobile.
Alex was a master possum driver. The secret of his success was that he was absolutely relentless. I rode in the back of the van with my chair strapped down while Alex drove. We helled all over town, went to the coast, hosted van parties. One night we picked up an attractive young woman hitchhiker. We were driving through the northwest industrial district, an especially wet zone, when suddenly Alex spied a big one crossing the road up ahead. A three-footer! Instantly he downshifted and put the pedal to the metal, but the possum dove into a ditch.
Alex didn’t hesitate: he followed the possum into the ditch at fifty miles per hour. The girl screamed and my head bounced off the ceiling. Alex swerved up out of the ditch, screeched to a halt, and looked back. In the dim red glow of the taillights we could just make out the badly injured animal limping back across the road. Alex slammed into reverse and nearly blew up the engine getting back to that possum to hit it again and put it out of its misery. He was a true sportsman. The girl, on the other hand, asked to be let out at the next light. She must have been sure she had wandere
d into a Truman Capote novel.
All that winter and into the spring I lost ground to booze. I was now drinking a maintenance fifth, usually of tequila, plus “social” drinks amounting to another fifth. Gradually I stopped going out and just drank my two fifths at home. I avoided situations where being drunk would seem inappropriate and I avoided people who weren’t also drunks—99 percent of the real world, as it was. Isolating myself made it much easier to deny that I had a drinking problem.
But now I began to have withdrawal symptoms. I woke up each morning in a cold sweat. A terrible paranoia swept over me as dawn broke. I felt myself on the verge of hallucinations that never quite came. I felt terrified that I might be going insane.
So, I would try to ride through the day without a drink. I drew the shades, but it was still too light. I made Alex cover the windows with blankets. Light made the fear so much worse. I had to be in the dark.
“Move the TV in a little closer,” I told him. I stared and stared at the tube, trying to focus my mind so that it wouldn’t think about going crazy. But it would immediately start drifting off into, “I’m scared, I’m scared.”
That ambulance! Was it taking away someone who’d gone crazy, like me? I knew I was going to end up chained in a nuthouse.
I hated any noise. I hated Alex coming close to talk to me because he might see that I was going crazy. I couldn’t stand the itching that spread over my whole body in waves, and I couldn’t satisfy it by scratching.
I’d make it to three o’clock. To ten. If I made it to midnight or one o’clock, I’d begin to feel better, to feel sleepy, to fall into a couple of hours of light sleep, then a period of waking, then a couple more before I was fully awake in the predawn, waiting for the sunrise.
I didn’t think I had a drinking problem. I attributed my symptoms to the effects of alcohol on quadriplegia. That let me off the hook.
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot Page 9