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

by John Callahan

  When I started this step, I first went to my parents’ house in The Dalles, on a weekend, making sure the whole family was there. I took them into my father’s bedroom, one at a time, and I made amends to each of them. And to them all I made amends for the times I’d come home raging drunk and terrorized them, even forcing my father to call the police once—I could remember the terror on the faces of my little brothers and sisters, the fear in my mother’s eyes, and the shock in my father’s. Yet all these years I’d been justifying myself as “the black sheep of the family.”

  I didn’t concern myself with wrongs that might have been done to me. The AA program calls it “sweeping up your side of the street.” I also wasn’t to concern myself with whether the people I made amends to responded or not. It was not my business to collect brownie points. A few were hostile, but many more were astonished and delighted.

  I can remember going to one of the shopping malls in Portland, where, in 1968, I’d stolen a shirt. It was a beautiful shirt, the best you could buy. I went to the store’s business office and asked the manager, “What can I do, can I repay you?” He said, “It’ll screw up our books. Just give five dollars to charity.”

  That was an easy one. One of the hardest was having to go down to Mount Angel and apologize to Sister Mary, whom I’d hated all these years for kicking me out of the nursing home and sending me to Portland, where I’d rapidly sunk into late-stage alcoholism. I thanked her for her firmness and for not being one of the “enablers” who helped me continue my addiction.

  Then I made a mistake and went fishing for a compliment. I said I felt I was clearing things up, spiritually, that I was finally growing, and on and on. She laughed. “Yes, you’re finally growing up at age twenty-eight.”

  She died of leukemia two years later, undoubtedly brought on by that smart-ass remark.

  Though I am sober, my basic personality has not changed.

  When I finished making amends, I had a sense of enormously increased emotional strength. It was as if the whole base of my life had broadened out on the earth. And, finally, I felt the psychic din in my life quieting, the voice of my intuition growing stronger.

  Housecleaning as defined by the fellowship, like housecleaning in real life, never ends. The Tenth Step demands that if I wrong somebody, I go straight out and rectify the wrong. This enforces a rigorous, habitual honesty, and that’s necessary, because if a lie works, it leads to another. Soon, the liar is back to deceiving, not just others, but himself. As the pain levels increase, that person, if he is an alcoholic, will think about reaching for a bottle; in my own case, probably a fatal move.

  The Eleventh and Twelfth Steps of the program ask for a lifetime of spiritual effort and service to other alcoholics. I finally understood that I must talk about my life in meetings, however it hurt. When an attractive young woman, a senior secretary at IBM, got up and admitted that she’d worked as a whore, her honesty and strength were a gift to me. These were desperate people, bent on saving their lives. So was I. And I owed them.

  I learned to control my panic and, after two years, chaired meetings. I also served on the AA hotline several nights a week. The line was routed directly to my apartment, and I took calls from some very disturbed people. Sometimes I was able to find help for them and tasted the enormous satisfaction of being on the giving end for a change.

  Every aspect of my life was changing. In 1979 I had a bout of the kidney infections to which quads are susceptible, that produced blood-pressure headaches, as painful as migraines. They felt like someone was sandpapering the backs of my eyes, but there was nothing the doctors at Good Samaritan, the hospital in my neighborhood, could do about them but give me painkillers. I knew that drugs, for a guy with as little sobriety as I had, could open the door to all my old behavior patterns. I decided to do without and to concentrate on the program instead. The pain became unbearable. Finally I rang for the nurse and told her to bring the needle. As she walked back to her station to get it, I made a last-ditch mental effort, reciting the Serenity Prayer with all the concentration I had. The nurse came back with the hypo on a tray, but in the five minutes she’d been gone, the pain had vanished.

  No sooner had I made some gains in strength and independence than I found myself with a new attendant. Martin was a total mom. He became devoted to me to the point of driving me crazy. He loved to drive me to school, hand over my allowance for the day, pick me up on time, make sure I ate twenty-five vegetables at each meal, all while boring my friends into grease spots. His mouth never stopped.

  I got a little bit of insight into his image of me one day when I overheard him on the phone. He was selling vacuum cleaners, one of about a dozen businesses he conducted out of my apartment on the side. He was using me for a hook. “Why, yes, ma’am! I can get you that model. Of course, it may take a couple of days. You see, I also take care of a poor young man who is paralyzed from the neck down. . . .”

  Martin was not happy to see me signing up for more rehab classes, learning to cook, change my own bag, even put my pants on and off (which took forty-five minutes), and agreeing to deliver a speech at the Hilton Hotel. I relearned skills—like driving and transferring myself—that I had abandoned since Rancho. I lost a lot of weight, began to dress more carefully, and, since I felt better about myself, became a little bit of a hit again with women.

  One day I was lying naked in bed. Martin must have just given me a bath because my heels were wet, giving them a little more purchase on the sheets. I had raised the bed, an electric model, into the sitting position; it occurred to me that I might be able to bring my knees up to my chest. Maybe I could assume the old sitting fetal position, the classic relaxed pose of American guys and girls around the beach bonfire or in dorm rap sessions, a posture I hadn’t been able to assume for seven years.

  I hung on to the overheard straps with one arm and reached down under my knees with the other to hike them closer. The wet heels kept my legs from sliding back. It worked! Eventually there I was, with my arms around my knees, very pleased with myself.

  Then I noticed that something had changed in my attitude toward my body. Just at the moment it didn’t seem repellent. In fact, it occurred to me that I wasn’t at all bad-looking. Sitting there with my thighs against my stomach and chest for the first time in seven years, I felt a warm flood of acceptance surge through me.

  I tightened my arms around my knees and gave myself a big hug.

  Chapter 7

  For years, whenever the subject of my natural mother was raised in therapy, it was a fiasco. “Look,” the psychiatrist would point out, “whenever I ask about it, you suddenly change the subject and get angry.”

  “Well, she was probably some little tart. . . .”

  In fact I had no idea who she was. I had never known, really, who I was. All I knew for certain was that I had been abandoned. And as a result I was phobic and neurotic, very insecure, and above all, distrustful of women. A male adoptee is quoted in a recent study as saying, “I will never trust a woman until I am lowered down into my grave.” So far, I’m the same. I try and try to trust women. I need tremendous attention from women, I can never get enough. Yet at a certain level I feel hostile toward them. I just know any woman I get close to is setting me up for what I fear most: abandonment.

  If I were ever to have a chance at resolving such feelings, I would have to find out who my real mother was, or at least try. I had always felt that need. But all during my growing up, I was made to feel guilty about it. “You have parents,” the argument ran. “Parents who chose you freely. That should satisfy you. That’s enough.” And there was the implication that my real parents, by contrast, wore the black hats because they gave me up.

  My experience as a member of AA had taught me how dangerous it can be to have unfinished business in one’s life. I knew it was time to face the issue of my heritage. Yet I spent some four years in recovery before I felt strong enough to confront the issue of my parentage. I knew I’d be risking everything, emot
ionally. I sensed I should go slowly, that I could be mentally shattered by whatever reality I might discover.

  In the spring of 1981, when I was thirty years old (and still a student at Portland State University), my curiosity, coupled with a sense of being somehow incomplete, overcame my fear. My mother was exasperated: “We’ve told you all we know. She was a schoolteacher. She was Irish. She had red hair.” My father, stoic as always, just looked saddened: “Why are you pursuing this?” So I got in touch with an adoptive-rights group and got instruction in how to conduct the search. One key suggestion was “work your caseworker down.”

  Oregon law forbade adoption agencies to make any but the most vague and general disclosures to adoptees. But experience had shown that with persistence, hints would be dropped, from which connections could be made. The crucial thing was to be polite but obnoxious.

  That was something I felt I could do. I have always been extremely tenacious when I really wanted something, from Paula Sobaczech onward.

  My agency was a branch of Catholic Charities, located on the top floor of a seedy office building in an old section of downtown Portland. My caseworker, Morton, was tall, stooped, with slicked-back gray hair and a permanent smile, as if Basil Rathbone had been cast as Uriah Heep. He sounded like Heep, too. There was little he could do; his hands were tied; he was sorry.

  I visited Morton a second time a few weeks later. His hands were still tied. He said he would like to help but the most he could manage without risking his job was this statement . . . he handed over a sheet and a half of computer printout.

  The printout was a general description of my parents and their background, summarized partly from details provided by my mother and partly from notes kept by nurses at the old Saint Vincent’s Hospital, where I was born. It described my mother as a “pretty woman in her early thirties with bright red hair,” a single person, from the Midwest. She was the youngest of eight children, and her father had died at age eighty-four of liver cancer. My father was said to be a “ruddy, good-looking man in his early thirties,” a career officer in the army who “loved ballroom dancing.” Two of his sisters had diabetes. Great, I thought, I could go out and order some insulin. Another noted stated that at my birth my mother was thirty-six years old, my father thirty-three. One nurse had described my mother as “refined and articulate with a keen sense of humor.” Another said she was “very refined, well educated, and somewhat aloof.”

  Morton was beaming. Clearly he thought that this was enough to satisfy any sensible adoptee for the rest of his life. Me sensible? I was just getting used to my senses.

  I began to call for appointments with Morton every week. “It’s my heredity! It’s my background! I’m afraid I’m going to go insane! I’ve got to know!” I did everything I could to ensure that he would wince at the mere mention of my name, that bending the rules a little to get rid of me would seem like an easy bargain.

  On about my fourth visit toward mid-September he said, “I’ll give you a hint.”

  “Yes! What?”

  “Your mother came from a corn-growing state.”

  “Nebraska? Iowa?”

  “I’m gonna break the law and I’ll lose my job. You’ll really have to go now. I’m busy.” I wanted to ram a tall Iowa or Nebraska cornstalk up his ass.

  It was a sadistic game, petty power at its worst. Morton would sit at his desk with my mother’s file in hand. Sometimes he’d tilt it coyly toward me as if he were giving me a chance to read it over his shoulder. I strained to make out the print but never could. He was perfectly aware that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, which was vault out of my chair, break his arm off at the elbow, and read the dossier carefully while he bled to death.

  Alex suggested that we just break into Morton’s office and copy the file, which, he figured, was morally mine anyway. I assured him that as a last resort . . .

  Instead, I went on currying favor with Morton. For some reason he was interested in my disability. I entertained him with all the gory details. All became clear when I got to my ileal conduit, the arrangement that allows me to urinate through my side into a bag.

  “Really? I’ve got the same thing!” he said gesturing toward a bulge in his midrift, which I had heretofore chalked up to Burger King. “Only mine is a bowel diversion.”

  He was thrilled. We were nearly next-of-kin now. He wanted to compare notes about how often we emptied our bags, and so on. He was a member of a club called the Ostomaics, which I pretended never to have heard of. In fact I had. Somebody had asked me to join back at the time of my operation, but I’d had a difficult time imagining myself joining in the chitchat at the meetings:

  “Boy, did my bag leak last month! What a trouble it was!”

  “Really? I had a bad seal at school the other day and my shirt got soaked. . . .”

  Nothing bonds like shared experience, however, and in his rush of fellow-feeling, Morton let slip my mother’s date of birth.

  Now my parents, dogged down by my tenacity, produced a certificate of relinquishment bearing my birth mother’s signature. It was “Maggie Lynch.”

  My father described how Oregon law required that I be presented, formally, to my natural mother on two separate occasions, before she was allowed to sign this document. I found it nearly unbearable to imagine such a cruel scene.

  I chose not to tell Morton that I had seen this document or that I knew my mother’s name. My current attendant, Lou, was a Mormon and, as such, intensely interested in genealogy; Mormons expect to be one family in eternity. Lou had almost professional skills at tracing lineage, knew how to extract credit ratings, charge-card files, entries in city and country records, Social Security information. He became my ally as we conducted bogus telephone “surveys” in search of Maggie Lynch of Kansas, born July 6, 1915. At night we’d spread our notes out on the dining room table and speculate about the unknown woman we were hunting down.

  I had to go slowly, to integrate each new fact into my consciousness. Even the most predictable detail—that she was Catholic or red-haired—was reality-shaking and took days to absorb. I felt silly and timid; but in fact a fantasy I’d lived with all my life was dying slowly as the real person took on shape and substance.

  Lou would drive me around town to do my chores and every time we passed a boardinghouse, I’d think, Is that where my mother holed up while she was waiting to have me? Had she eaten in that restaurant, sunned herself in that park? We were convinced we had discovered what boardinghouse she had stayed in, but the register that might have given a home address—unless she used a phony—had long since disappeared.

  I became increasingly preoccupied with the search. I was on an emotional roller coaster, skidding from elation to hope, frustration to discouragement. The detective part of it was fun, but always present was a subcurrent of fear. Maybe I’d never solve the puzzle. Maybe I’d never find Maggie.

  At night I’d lie in bed with her specter before me in the darkness. I felt her draw closer and closer to me physically. She seemed to wear a wedding veil, through which I couldn’t quite see. I awoke one night, tossing and turning, her image before me. Suddenly I felt myself being transported through the blackness. I felt myself rushing deeper and deeper, further and further, back and back until I was actually a tiny baby, just born. I felt darkness around me and I realized that I had no eyesight; but I had a sense of what was around me, such as only an infant has. There was a warm, protecting presence near me. Then, suddenly, it was gone. It vanished as abruptly as a boat disappearing over a waterfall.

  I felt instead the familiar, aching, deep cold I had carried with me for thirty years. It was the icy chill of rejection, the slap on the face that meant, “You’re no good.” I broke down, my whole body was wracked with sobs. I cried as an infant cries, without any restraint. The infant I now was knew nothing of the social fears and conventions that might justify such an ordeal. He knew only its agony.

  Later I realized that this was the moment psychoanalysts call into bei
ng with years on the couch, or therapists with exotic drugs. Somehow I had reached a catharsis, a tremendous release of grief that caused my whole body to spasm. This happened once again during the months of my search, and then I seemed to be free of it.

  The hunt for Maggie Lynch had become my whole life. I talked of nothing else to my friends, the girls I dated, and, of course, Lou. Nearly every day I had him drop me off at the cathedral. I wanted to do my thinking in a place to which my real mother must have often come.

  Lou and I turned up a real candidate, a Margaret Lynch of Kimball, Nebraska, who was the right age. She was Swedish, but so might I be. I took days, studying her from afar via utility-company records, credit bureaus, and so on. I compiled a dossier that would have passed FBI muster. Finally I picked up the telephone, introduced myself, and explained the circumstances of my birth. Could she be my mother?

  Her laughter was kind, she was sorry to disappoint me.

  I was totally deflated. I was a fool. I knew I would never find Maggie. Why was I wasting my emotional energy trying to find a woman with an ordinary name and about whom I knew almost nothing in a nation of 250 million?

  I WAS STILL completing my degree in English at Portland State, a slow process since I couldn’t make it to morning classes. In Chaucer, I became very aware of a sensuous brunette in the back row. I wasn’t flirting with her—just checking her legs out. She never made eye contact with anybody, never looked up. But her answers to questions were articulate, even eloquent, in an old-world, very feminine way.

  One day, waiting for the room to clear so that I wouldn’t have to wheel my chair out in front of everybody, I made eye contact and she rewarded me with a great big smile.