Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

by John Callahan

  I’d last up to three days before having that one little innocent drink.

  It was always for a good reason, never because I was addicted to the stuff.

  Once, I stayed drunk for an entire week; there was no paranoia that way. But when I came off it, I had the fear so bad that I stayed in the bathtub for three hours, shaking and crying and gulping Valium after Valium. At the end of it I didn’t dare drink more than one day at a time, so the pattern became a dry day, followed by a drunk, followed by another nervous dry day, and so on.

  Finally, on June 22, 1978, Alex woke me and left to do some errands. He put a bottle within reach, but I forgot to ask him to open it.

  The damn thing had a tight cork. I clamped the bottle as tightly as I could between my hands and tore at the cork with my teeth, which were permanently chipped from having opened hundreds of screwtops and corks in the six years since my hands had last been able to perform such tasks. I twisted and chewed at it for an hour, the sweat streaming down my face and blurring my eyes.

  When I dropped the bottle, watching it roll away across the rug, something snapped. Alex would be gone all day. There was nothing I could do. For what must have been hours I stared at the bottle on the floor, rage building inside me.

  I began to scream. I screamed at God. “You son of a bitch! You got me into this! You’re responsible for my life! You put me in this situation! Bastard! Shithead!” and on and on until my voice was gone and my energy completely drained.

  I exhausted myself. I began to break down. I began to cry like a kid. It was as if something was crying through me rather than me doing it. All my life, my childhood, my lost mother, the old people dying, Kurt, my useless body flowed through the tears. I cried for an hour straight.

  And then I felt—and it was not a mental image but an actual physical sensation—a hand begin to pat me on my back. A real hand, comforting me; but I knew as I looked to find it that it wouldn’t be there.

  Something was changing in me. Something had said, “This guy’s had enough suffering, I’m gonna take it away from him.”

  When I rolled my chair over to the phone and dialed the number I had long known I would someday call, it was not a decisive act but merely the consequence of something that had already happened. I knew with utter certainty that my problem was not quadriplegia, it was alcoholism; that I was powerless to do anything about it by myself; and that I would never drink again.

  Chapter 6

  When Alex came back from shopping, my face was still tight with dried tears. “Hey, Alex, something really profound happened to me here. I don’t think I’m gonna drink anymore.”

  “Yeah? Great. Uh, can I have some of these cookies?”

  Oblivious, Alex proceeded to deal with a pot smoker’s blood-sugar crisis. There was really no reason why he should have believed what I had just told him. In the past, whenever I’d had a particularly good session with my psychiatrist, we had celebrated by going out for a drink.

  On the other hand, the psychiatrist, who had been working toward this goal for some time, was delighted. Only a week or so before, he had suddenly remarked, “You know, John, we have to make a decision here: whether you are going to be an inpatient or an outpatient.”

  He was talking about treatment for alcoholism. Whatever had given him the idea that I was an alcoholic?

  Now he signed me up for a federally supported outpatient program. I was to attend two private sessions plus one group session each week. Later, when he felt I was up to it, I would start attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. And, if I wanted to survive, he suggested I remain a member of that fellowship for the rest of my life. Despite the TV ads for private clinics, alcoholism isn’t something that could be cured in “just ten days and a couple of follow-ups.”

  I took my first drink when I was thirteen. Thereafter, every time I encountered emotional stress, I took another, and I continued literally “feeling no pain” for much of the next fourteen years. Feeling no pain meant never having to learn to cope with it. All the normal “growing pains” of adolescence and young manhood passed me by. I was now twenty-seven, but emotionally I was still a child.

  What I had learned, and learned thoroughly, was how to lie with a straight face, how to please people in order to manipulate them, how to deny responsibility, how to pass guilt along to others, and to be a law unto myself. Success at these things was constantly reinforced: if I did them well, I got to go on drinking. And so long as I was drunk, I didn’t have to pass judgment on myself or notice the damage I was doing to the people around me.

  The federal counselor turned out to be a leather-skinned ex-factory worker, sober maybe two years, who had taken a short course in counseling. A nuts-and-bolts kind of guy, he was still compulsive: he chain-smoked and drank coffee continuously. He gave me a primer on the disease, which I read and reread, and he gave me plenty of helpful hints: what foods to eat, how many glasses of water to drink, how an occasional tablespoonful of honey helped the body to withdraw from a booze diet that might as well have consisted of twenty-two Mars bars a day, so far as blood sugar was concerned.

  In the federal program’s group sessions, everybody was a beginner, and all nerves were on edge. “John doesn’t seem to be talking much in this group. Maybe he thinks he’s better than the rest of us.”

  I thought, I sure do, you retarded white-trash buttfucker.

  My irritability, when I stopped drinking—and smoking, too, at the same time—began to alternate with an acute nervous sensitivity.

  For weeks I felt exhausted. I longed for sleep. But somebody always seemed to be watching TV in the living room. The refrigerator never stopped humming away in the kitchen. There was a jackhammer outside, a baby crying across the hall, a fly buzzing around my head. I couldn’t find a way to turn down the noise. Even lights were irritating to me.

  This state of mind was with me twenty-four hours a day. It even seemed to pursue me into my dreams. Awake, I often felt as if I’d had an entire layer of skin removed. The Flayed Man.

  I had always been a worrywart and had gotten much worse after the accident. But now I developed a positive need to worry. That Alex wouldn’t pick me up on time. That my pee bag would leak. That I smelled bad. That the store would be out of orange juice. That if they had it, it would be laced with cyanide. That the sun wouldn’t come up. That I wasn’t really paralyzed.

  In the car I was sure we were going to have an accident (not really a neurotic worry, since Alex habitually drove with a joint in his hand and an open can of beer clamped between his thighs). I began to avoid the group meetings with their unpleasant encounters that triggered my anger. I committed small acts of rebellion against my counselor. “How can I help you when you won’t even fill out the goddamn forms!” he roared at me.

  “You know, John,” he remarked one day, “I regard your friend there as wearing the black hat in this situation.” From his office he had a view of Alex, waiting in the parking lot with joint in hand and beer on lap.

  It was true that our relationship was becoming strained, but it was not just Alex’s doping and drinking. Sober, I had to come to terms with my paralysis all over again. I had never really faced my helplessness. It drove me crazy to see Alex exercising my legs, which I couldn’t feel, or getting my pants on crooked, as usual:

  “Uh, do you suppose you could scoot them down a little? I’m having trouble speaking through the fly.”

  “If I feel like it, fuckface,” he’d offer, nursing his daily hangover.

  I soon couldn’t bear to have him touch me. I refused to be touched on that unfeeling skin.

  I felt raw fear, the fear of not getting my needs met. It was rooted in my abandonment by my real mother at birth and exacerbated tenfold by the paralysis. For three hours every day my body was penetrated, pumped out, squeezed dry, scrubbed down, hoisted up and down and dressed to the standards of a baggy-pants comedian. Every day, as it would be forever. Most of the time I was having my very pimples popped by guys I couldn’t r
eally relate to, misfits and oddballs who were all I could afford. Even the occasional friendship was soured by dependence. Sometimes all I wanted to say to Alex was, “Straighten my pants out, you stupid fucking lackey! Straighten them, you bastard!” Of course I couldn’t. Alex was not just my attendant, he was my buddy.

  When something did snap and I screamed at Alex, he would stomp out and leave me high and dry for an hour. After such a confrontation I felt hung over from the adrenaline and emotional turmoil. When I arrived at school, I’d sometimes sit alone and try to pull myself together, feeling horribly guilty about losing my control with Alex. But he stayed with me. I think he understood.

  Sometimes, in the warmth of the summer sun, I’d sit in the blackberry patch behind our apartment and close my eyes. All would be still for a moment. I felt relieved, and able to derive some pleasure from the same acute sensitivity that had been driving me insane. I felt I was being healed by an outside power, a sensation I’d heard reported by other newly sober people.

  But in bed alone at night I knew that I had no control whatever. I was sure that my life was going to accelerate downward into chaos and misery. It always had.

  In my eagerness to clean myself out, I decided to stop taking a mild mood-elevating drug prescribed by my psychiatrist. The federal counselor found out and flew into a rage. He made me agree to take the pills again; but I gave myself half-doses and rapidly tapered off. After that the closest thing to a drug I used was herbal tea.

  I began to read the Big Book—the bible of Alcoholics Anonymous. From the moment I opened it, I knew instinctively that the program it described was for me. I went along with Alex to his work as a gardener, and while he tended shrubs, I sat in the sun with my book. At home I kept it on my lap while I rolled constantly from room to room to build up my strength; in the end I virtually memorized it. My first act after I hit bottom had been to call the AA hotline, but the federal counselor had discouraged me from going to a meeting. He felt I wasn’t ready yet for that much reality.

  After nine years of continuous sobriety, it’s my considered opinion that any alcoholic who expresses the slightest desire to go to a meeting of this fellowship should be put into a Life Flight helicopter, or whatever vehicle is fastest, and taken there at once.

  In my raw state I was terrified of facing one of these meetings. But I couldn’t endure many more of these nights either.

  I tried my best to exhaust myself before putting out the light, knowing what I was in for, but sleep never came in time to save me. Instead my mind began to search itself, and I would start to feel the cold, a cold all the way down to my very soul. This awful ache. This horrible, hollow, lonely, gnawing, freezing emptiness inside. My whole being seemed to stretch out into the universe in this frozen ache.

  A friend had given me a subscription to a nonsectarian pamphlet of meditations, The Daily Word. Once I would have regarded such a thing as ludicrously irrelevant to my life, but not now. From it I learned an exercise called “Flight of the Pelican,” in which I imagined myself as the huge bird, reaching for the sky, gathering more and more momentum with each thrust of my powerful wings. That was one alternative to a scream of despair.

  I used to rock myself, as much as a paralytic can rock himself. I would pull the sheets up over my eyes and shake my head back and forth, back and forth, to warm and comfort myself. I wanted to cry out for help, but to whom, or to what? If I felt like this, there could be no God.

  My counselor tried to reassure me. “You’re right on schedule,” he’d say. But I felt I was turning into some morbidly hypersensitive lunatic out of a tale by Edgar Allan Poe.

  Often I felt that nothing was working. Even today there are periods when I feel fallen apart, emotionally and physically. This happens generally in the wintertime, on a weekend, around the holidays. The cushion on my chair will be wrong. The foot pedals will be wrong. I’ll be sitting crookedly. My pants will be twisted and too low and digging into my stomach. But I can’t stop some stranger on the street and say, “Would you undo my pants and straighten them up around my waist?”

  Some days when I ventured out alone in my chair, I’d see my self mirrored in the window of some store and I’d look really bad. I’d be dressed in all the wrong clothes. But there was no whipping on home and doing a quick change. Sometimes I did go home . . . but only to hide for the rest of the day in my apartment.

  Sometimes, when trying to get in, I’d drop my keys. Then I would sit in the 32-degree cold, waiting for some tenant to wander by and let me in.

  I fantasized making a pact with the Devil for a day off. I’d jump into my jeans, fly to San Francisco and be anonymous for the day, finish up with dinner at the Blue Fox with an expensive call girl. Hopefully nobody would spot me. “Hey, you’re supposed to be a quad! What the hell is going on?” Then I’d fly back to Portland, jump into bed and lose the feeling in my legs.

  After a month of sobriety I finally decided to go to an AA meeting, ready or not. Alex lowered me down the steps of a church basement, the first of many. The crowd was from an affluent part of town; stockbrokers and well-dressed wives gathered around a huge coffeepot like votives at a shrine.

  I didn’t exactly blend in. Everybody in the room turned to look at this neon cripple from outer space. I fought an urge to have Alex haul me back up the steps. I felt sure somebody would come over and say, “Sorry. We can’t have anyone this grotesque in here.”

  The meeting began with a moment of silence followed by Saint Francis of Asissi’s famous prayer:

  God, grant me the serenity

  To accept the things I cannot change;

  The courage to change the things I can

  And the wisdom to know the difference.

  Tradition required that the leader ask if anybody present was at his first meeting of the fellowship or in his first thirty days of continuous sobriety. My response was supposed to be, “My name is John, and I’m an alcoholic.” Everyone then would look at me and chant in unison, “Hi, John! Welcome!” After a couple of times this began to drive me nuts. It’s one good reason not to drink; if you fall off the wagon, you have to endure thirty more days of this greeting.

  At the time, ignorant of the ritual and exploding with tension, I didn’t wait to be introduced. I blurted out, “I was paralyzed in a car accident in 1972.” I still cringe when I recall this moment.

  The first part of the meeting could have been the sabbath of some minor sect. The Twelve Steps of the AA program and its traditions were read aloud by some of the members, followed by a passage from a book of daily meditations. Then the chairperson, an old-timer, read a quote from the Big Book, put it down, and began to talk.

  “When I got into this program, I had two pairs of pants. One with shit in them and one without. And I didn’t much care which of them I was wearing. . . .”

  Suddenly he had my total attention. Was this old character reading my diary?

  For most of the next hour anyone who felt like “sharing” could take the floor. Some of the statements were merely testimonials to the effectiveness of the program, but many others offered the most intimate sort of revelations. People vented their anger, whined and complained, boasted, told how scared they were, reported victories in their lives, recounted failures, and in general offered help and support to one another. At the end everybody joined hands, recited the Lord’s Prayer, and then shouted, “Keep coming back! It works!”

  Beginners were supposed to try to attend at least one meeting every day for ninety days. Terminally self-conscious, I was terrified in each and every one of mine. My palms, though I couldn’t feel them, were sweating. I was scared that a bowel or bladder accident would force me to need to leave the room. I dreaded the passing of the collection basket because people would be able to see how little strength I had in my hands. I cringed at the condescension I sometimes had to endure:

  “Christ, I thought I had it bad! There’s some poor bastard back there in a goddamn wheelchair! I’ll bet he has a story. . . .”
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  Most of all I was afraid I was going to be asked to speak in a meeting. The mere thought of doing so gave me a panic attack. “If you’re so fucking nervous in those meetings,” Alex would snap, “just don’t go to them.” But I no longer had a choice. The fellowship and its program were my last hope.

  Every meeting was different, but there were certain constants. Signs pinned up on the walls: “Easy Does It”; “Live and Let Live”; “I Am Responsible”; “One Day at a Time”; “Exit”. A blue haze of cigarette smoke and the omnipresent big institutional coffee urn. Once I got over my initial distrust of the members, I began to notice their honesty. People were either telling the truth or trying to. I was told that if I continued to go to meetings, I would sooner or later hear some stranger tell my story. One night I went to a candlelight meeting with my new buddy Heavy Metal Mike, who is still my closest AA friend. The crowd was young, and there in the darkness I heard a girl tell part of mine:

  “I was down on my hands and knees in the bathroom. I had to take my pills but I was nauseous. I vomited them back up. But I felt I had to take them so I ate them with the vomit from my hand. I looked up at the ceiling, and I said, ‘God, why do I have to do this?’”

  When she got done, the roomful of drunks was sniffling.

  Old-timers in the program urged me to waste no time in finding a sponsor, an experienced recovering alcoholic who would serve as my guide through the Twelve Steps, designed not just to free me from the need to drink but to repair my character defects and to give me a set of tools with which to live my life. After a few weeks of meetings I heard a speaker say, “I haven’t had a drink, now, for seven years. But tomorrow morning I’m going to start the day with a beer!” This remark set the room abuzz. It was a shocking and effective way to make the point that an alcoholic is never cured and must always live “one day at a time.” I liked this guy’s approach and decided to get to know him better. So, after the meeting, I rolled up to him. “Hi, I’m John. I really liked what you had to say. Have you got a few minutes?”