All those lovely bottles tinkling, clinking and shining at me, winking at me. I can still see them in the grocery store aisles like hookers looking for a john to trick.
A ray of light broke through the clouds, shooting through the skylight of my local grocery megastore; rebounding off of the ordered bundles of glass and sparkle, individual waves of color danced off the backs of my eyes. Like a child on Christmas morning, I was drawn to these bottles not just because they are pretty and lined up in the perfectly stacked rows and columns of an enormous crystal, but because they always contained a variety of liquid adventures. People loved and lost, battles fought, laughter enjoyed and sadnesses that cut deeply into the soul of a human being. I could have chosen any other section to traverse on my way to get the eggs for my family’s breakfast this morning, but my route started with produce, the smells of citrus and the chill of wet refrigeration. I really had no choice if I wanted to save time and steps to my ultimate destination. That’s always been my story and it’s one I’ll pull out of my memories to jest with myself.
Coming up to March, 2021, and a full year of being unable to trust my immune system to harmonize with the fact that we are all here (perhaps because I am not all there), I am feeling the advent of a time of reflection this morning over the three decades since alcohol cut me deeply, nearly stopping my heart’s ability to pump, much less giving a damn.
March and Saint Patrick’s Day are what I celebrate not because I am all about the Irish genes that course through my veins, but as an unintended consequence of that blood. Another jest? Perhaps. But that blood or that jest led me to a dead end not once but twice in a single decade, the second time being purely of my own misdirection; the first being of my own misfortune. Unlike my Ukrainian cousins, I was driven to give up fighting twice as hard over failure as for righteousness. The data had been slapping me in the face for some time that I was destined to die cold, alone and thought a fool; I wanted none of these things and yet there I was fighting in war I did not start and could never win without first losing. I railed and wailed at my self-mocking victimization amidst a sea of apparent winners. That all these winners seemed to be heralding the arrival of a new President, a man whose record and policies I deplored, only increased my bitter disdain for any concept of surrender. I was always out of step with my fellows, a fact that I took pride in until pride, itself, became my enemy.
I had no idea what was coming at my windshield at age 18, and driving like a maniac only guaranteed I would never make any sense of what would continue to stick, bounce or rebound off of my one ocular defense as I drove forward through the tule fog that was the life my mother had given me. Because of her and the madness she dropped squarely in the laps of her five children, I was more driven to understand than to be understood in the chaos that seemed to be flying at me from out of nowhere. But unlike Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, the only stigmata from which I suffered were those my beloved “Geppetto” granted me at birth. The lies to myself and to the women who practically begged me to lie and be honest according to their preferred rhythm, these were the consequences of awakening to an adult life where my guide strings suddenly disappeared without ceremony or sacrament. I did what all little boys do when given their first vehicle and a long downhill run to learn from: I floored it and came to a sudden, crashing halt on March 17th, 1991 at the age of 29.
Now I’ve opened up a little not-for-profit side business at the bottom of that “hill” and have watched men and women crash into that same abutment, as I did myself, thirty years ago. Some come in too fast and don’t survive, some find another way to hit bottom owing to their superior “skill” at driving themselves insane with worry and control. Pretending that they’re freely choosing to pistol whip themselves with liquor and sadness, the alienation of a culture that seeks for novelty at the expense of connecting with other human beings eats them alive from the inside to the out. Then they either surrender and join Team Recovery, or they end up confined in some manner: jails, institutions or death.
I’ve thought about simply removing the abutment, as everyone does, but people seem to find other ways to complicate what really is a simple matter. The simple matter is this: I cannot ask for one reality, and then its opposite, to come to pass at the same time. I can hold the universe’s child at gun point all I care to, but that which is impossible to coexist does not budge. I can have one reality, and then another, but I cannot have the opposing state of mind or being in the same instant. No matter how hard I try, I get this third reality that takes bastardized versions of the first two diametrically opposing states, places them in a blender and I end up with this daiquiri of organ damage and foul smelling intemperance that sends even regular, “moviegoers,” to the exits.
But I did my part because, “Science.” Occam’s Razor suggested it was better to keep matters simple. One problem against a backdrop of an apparent multitude of solutions. Occam’s approach seemed impossibly simple-minded. I posited, instead, that absolutely every other fool on the planet was conspiring against my happiness, and then my job was to come up with a moral and philosophical system which, if only they could choose to live according to its precepts, my problems might never have appeared in the first place. And then I would take a drink and call it a day.
Alot of time was spent on my imaginary constructions and their necessary thought experiments. I would become quite irritated by what I saw in operation about me compared to the idyllic possibilities of my hopes and dreams. She would bring home a stranger in hopes that I would run away from her and end her problem with a better set of problems. And then I would take two drinks and call it a weekend.
My devotion to this project of bending space and time to my indomitable will would continue in spite of my hatred over her lack of loyalty to what I saw as a worthwhile effort. And then my two drinks would take two more and the arguments steeped in righteous sanctimony fumed for weeks at a time.
Then my ire became about their lack of loyalty to my worthwhile pursuit of the ecstasy and euphoria of the near-death experience, whilst seeking to live life to its fullest expression of agony. My drinking had then become a fuel that powered self-deception even as deceivers crowded in for a front row seat at a human train wreck. Even Science had somehow abandoned me at some prior Wye switch in my naked pursuit of a tumbler of frozen gin with the perfect twist of lime.
My needs had become incredibly simple as the walls that were defining the thoroughfares of my existence were becoming increasingly narrow. I was waiting for the evenings to take out two large trash bags full of empty beer, gin and port wine bottles that I might conceal the tell-tale clinking that had become like the goodbye kisses of my many liquid lovers. One bag a month had made me a playboy; one bag a week was turning me into a wretch resembling my dead relatives before they had finally passed. The many problems of my ancestors were theirs to solve no more: it was now my one big problem that was looking for a seam to burst into a drama of filthy blood and Emergency Room nurses taking notes about where they never wanted their drinking and substance addictions to take them.
All those lovely bottles tinkling, clinking and shining at me, winking at me. I can still see them in the grocery store aisles like hookers looking for a john to trick. My heart aches for them, wants to reach out and console them even while they plant a numbing stinger of sweet pain into my liver, into my gut, and I slowly lose my ability to care about where any of this is going.
“You talk about alcohol like it’s your lover, or something, Greg,” my baby sister said to me, her usual look of naive disdain punctuated by the childhood memory of an index finger under her chin, emphasizing my utter lack of subtlety.
“But she,” “but they,” “but when,” completely evaporated in that moment of timeless stillness. A line had been crossed that I had installed long before my brother died of his dying embrace of liquor. “I will not go there,” I said as an adolescent.
And yet, in that instant of uncanny awareness, I was on the opposite side of yet another line in the sand, and as naked as the day she pulled my pants down and laughed at my shriveled genitalia. I was horrified, terrified, mortified, frozen and adrenalized all at the same time. It was as if a bomb had gone off inside my brain and I was being driven with the fury and determination of a drowning man to get to shore. I became a flurry of activity. I entered a degree program to finish my Bachelor of Science in IT; I made pledges to reform to the deaf ears of those who did not know how determined and willful I could become. And I did become willful. Not even an aspirin would I take for an entire year. My god, my universe, had dropped a gauntlet of challenge at my feet, and insulted me in the process by making my ability to love out to be someone else’s emotional bottom of misfortune. These angels and agents of the apocalypse had no idea whom they were dealing with. I did not have time to contemplate terror, bewilderment, frustration or despair any longer. They were in my face and I needed to run as far and as fast as I could.
Meanwhile, my own father had no idea I even had a problem. Nor did my estranged mother. Nor did either of them care. The stories they had told themselves in order to survive were stuck in the early 1960’s where two drunks struggled not to kill each other, or their children, and one of them was going into asylums on a fairly regular basis and coming out looking and sounding like a talking mannequin. Ever been five years old and watched your own mother barely acknowledge you or her own existence as she mindlessly prepared a breakfast no one wanted to eat? A few of us have, but not so many that our economy would think to produce an insurance policy for the children of mentally ill parents. We would just use our pay-outs to try and fix our parents, anyway, and that, as I learned much too late in the game to make a difference, would have been pouring money down the drain. So I created my own little nest egg and used it to drink myself into oblivion.
I finished the most challenging parts of my undergraduate degree program on time, for a change, and had pulled my grade point average up from the abysmal depths of B-level mediocrity to solid A-level arrogance. The lot of my accusers could kiss my ass and do so right now. In one year I had worked all thirteen of Bill and Bob’s Twelve Steps, more than once, and was now ready to present my shiny-bright countenance of achievement to the woman whom I had sworn allegiance, devotion and more than a few drops of precious bodily fluids. How could she not be crazy about me? I had done everything perfectly right! I was ready! Fire! Aim!
She was having none of my new life. My shiny, bright countenance was just another far-too-young backside to her now. So I disassembled the four poster bed of her youth she had installed in my bedroom, put it in my bought and paid for Mustang GT and dropped it off at her four-chimneyed ranch house (where only two of them were actually real), along with a number of Christmas gifts I had purchased for the two boys I was going to help her raise. Then the real disassembly and dissembling began. I had six legs creeping all over her life and mine, but only had brains for two of them. Some people need to hit bottom before they make major life changes, I preferred to have multiple bottoms during my first attempts at recovering what should have been at my feet all along. How dare her not stick to my plan for our lives! Who did she think she was, an adult trying to end an 18 year marriage to someone who saw her like she saw me…or something? Inquiring cockroaches needed to know. Wanting was not enough.
The pain of my first Christmas alone, abandoned and betrayed was both terrifying and strange. I could not let us go, she was pretending, really convincingly, that she could let me go, and a veil of coastal fog was slowly rising over a landscape where she would be nothing like the non-cohabitating partner I believed she had been before. Before a Thanksgiving road trip to Colorado, before my Rocky Mountain High experience of being a complete, drunken, strutting ass in front of her, her sister and all their little children who had never met a bug about to strike a windshield at high speed. John Denver would have been so proud; I was just like him: a daredevil with only a captive audience to both terrify and bore in equal measure.
It took two years to get my undergraduate degree and two more after that for the fog to completely lift around my coastal home. I was beginning to see great beauty all around me that didn’t require my story of “Her” to intrude, but those I tried to replace her with ended up feeling like they were just extras in a movie about me trying to forget about her. Perhaps that was because that was how I had treated them, a bear wiping my sore ass with soft, furry wildlife while dodging bullets from hunters who had long since had enough of me imposing my drama on their ability to make a dime from my nickel. Times were getting tough in the business of applied Information Technology; they now needed two dimes and a nickel which could be found just about anywhere anyone could look. I was coming to the conclusion that my herculean efforts at getting sober, cleaning up the wreckage of my past and moving on were going unappreciated. I was learning how to use languages from a number of vendors to do statewide and nationwide statistical chores that could then be boxed and delivered by people earning a minimum wage. I was conferring with important people, gathering facts, helping them decide what could and could not be done in the time allotted; so no one was going to treat me like common trash! That was a job I was dead-set on reserving for myself.
And so, in my fourth year of sober recovery, my fifth without any high-performance “cigarettes,” I set out to tear myself apart looking for what was staring me in the mirror every morning. Who was I, really, and what was my story? Perhaps someone from the past, a hero from the 1960’s, could help. A former Civil Rights leader had a father, Fred, who was among the first Caucasians to recognize that legally barring interracial marriage between black and white was the real crime resident outside our nation’s capitol. Perhaps he could help, but I wanted to be absolutely certain the old version of myself was d-e-a-d. So I coupled with a military woman and moved to Texas to be married and try forcing myself to accept the Conservatism and religion I had abandoned at age 19 to be my personal lord and savior.
It was a brief exercise in self-loathing. If great failure produces great learning, I must have gained a knowledge windfall: within two years of crash landing in Texas, I had become financially bankrupt, discovered that we always attract where we are at internally and that I had been spiritually bankrupt for some time. But none of these facts could I accept until many years after their occurrence. I was simply too ashamed to see what would have been obvious to even the most casual observer: if a person gets close to someone who is suicidal and then tries to save them, that someone will likely try to murder you. To underscore that point, the news of the day in March, 1995, blared out from every radio in San Antonio that Selena — the Tejano/pop music phenomenon of the city and soon the country — had been killed by the president of her fan club. But I simply could not allow the meaning of that information into my conscious mind. The shame at the sheer size and volume of my mistake was too great. My own father had taken me, briefly, out of his will for fear that I was too irresponsible to be trusted with whatever money he would leave behind him at his death. Of course I did not know this at the time, but I did find that out later. I was adrift and a heaving chest wound of shame and guilt over all the hard work I had done for over ten years, by this time, five years in and five years out of sobriety. Just what, precisely, was the point of all this suffering? Isn’t ten years enough for any field of study?
Apparently not. I was told by psychologists that I was mentally gifted. I believed them; however, the ability to build a better mousetrap with which to imprison one’s self is not a particularly worthy use of one’s time. The “shit in your head” always gets the last say when you cannot accept that you are truly powerless over no-thing, and everything causing problems in your life are not things, but thoughts and mistaken beliefs.
I was at the tail end of another rebound relationship that had lasted 90 days longer than was reasonable and customary for me when I was introduced to another more anonymous hero of the 1960’s, a Viet Nam War veteran who had recently received his Masters Degree in counseling. Alan was a bear of a man with a big smile and a penchant for annoying me by being late to our appointments. I quickly learned that whatever shortcomings Alan might have had, the importance he had in my recovery and in my life was impossible to understate, and I nearly lost all that by being concerned about my recently acquired fixation with conservative “rules.”
Alan died at the end of 2020 of CoVid. Thank you to all the dirty-handed, non-mask wearing troglodytes whom Alan treated with the equanimity and care you did not deserve. His spirit was of God, but his body reflected decades of unreachable and untreated PTSD, a victim of survivor’s guilt after every last broken body of the hundreds he loaded into choppers trying to keep them whole; of every last rape and child abuse victim poured their souls before him to reflect only the best he could muster. Alan was second only to Fred Rogers and Bob Keeshan on my personal heroes list.
Thank goodness for the strength to survive my ego’s countless attempts at making what should have been simple, complicated, and what should have been challenging, withering. Where that strength came from only the universe knows, but I do know that I can survive anything one day at a time when I believe my alternative to be on the path to further devastation and destruction. If you want to make this about, “God as you understand God,” you are welcome to. I certainly did. But it could just as easily have been about, “us,” and what we can do together when we believe in and are guided by principles that are larger than just our own self-centered, survival-focused interests.
If there is any one, most tragic consequence of being an adult alcoholic survivor of childhood traumas it would be the lingering feeling that I do not deserve to be happy, no matter how hard I push back against my own circumstances. Excellence does not matter when one’s own best efforts at untangling the mess of the lives of one’s parents, siblings, ancestors and one’s own self still result in the loss of those one holds precious and dear by the nature of being human. But by this time in my journey, about 1997-99, I was willing to tear everything up for the sake of a simple, peaceful breath of fresh air.
I loved my mother dearly and held out hope for so very long, but the last time I saw her we slowly spun and unwound the panorama atop the Embarcadero of San Francisco. I could see the fatigue in her eyes. I could feel her leaving me, leaving us. So I did what I always did growing up, I became the clown. I wanted to show her the school from which I graduated before we went South to Hugo’s Market in Palo Alto for our favorite meal of prime rib.
Anyone who knows how to get to the top of Fulton Street from the Embarcadero in San Francisco knows that it is a long haul around town. I felt time was of the essence.
“What are you doing, Greg?”
“Hold on, Mom. We are going to save some time here.”
“You’re so crazy, Greg!” She giggled with glee as I pointed my rental car up Lombard Street the wrong way. The city fathers advised 5 to 10 mph for this most treacherous descent, but that’s when you’re using the road as it was intended. 40 to 45 mph is necessary when the threat of oncoming traffic haunts your every turn travelling up their “Crookedest Road in the World.”
We saved 15 or 20 minutes travel time with my 30 second detour, just enough to see the city skyline from atop one of its seven hills before the fog rolled in and made July feel like January. She had her smoke break looking down on St. Ignatius Cathedral and behind us at the Golden Gate Bridge. I became a college graduate at this place, accidently pissing off at least one valedictorian as I lunged out towards the altar of the church, crossed myself and went to pick up my diploma. My GPA was only 3.8, overall, but it was 4.0 at this institution, so, I thought it better to ask for forgiveness than permission. I guess. I don’t know. I was so embarrassed. I put on a brave face like I always used to when I’d done something stupid or thoughtless, and I did it again on this day after two years recovery and now six years watching my mother fade into the fog and cigarette smoke that had consumed much of, and finally all of, her life. I could have cried then, but I chose denial. I guess it aided my digestion since prime rib was on the menu.
I finished that trip back home and gave the insurance company what it needed to close out the workman’s compensation case with me. They claimed 20% disability, swore they’d never pay for the back surgery I might one day require, so I took the money and banked it. It turns out that I would need it for “other” issues.
Walking past a hedgerow of reds and greens as I did on many days heading into work, I was startled by a sudden burst of iridescent black swallowtails who had been resting there, perhaps overnight, on an August morning. They frittered away into the air and my heart reminded me of a painting my mother had tried to execute of a single swallowtail perched on some lantana. It was a beginning. This particular morning was not that, but it had never happened before, nor since.
I got the call that my mother had fallen in September, 1999. I got the call that she was in surgery in October and that they had simply opened her up, saw what was there and then closed her. I got in my car and drove to a meeting and promptly got into an accident when a non-English-speaking Hispanic man signaled left, turned in that direction and then promptly turned right making a mess of the left side of my car as I attempted to pass him on the right. I got to my 5:30PM AA meeting late and frazzled, but I got there. I must have shared something, but I don’t remember specifics, which was and is not unusual for me. Yet everything else was feeling strange and cold. Distant. Even other people’s voices directed at me were more like the trombonesque mutterings of a Charlie Brown cartoon.
I had been working with Alan Albert for about two years by this time and we were just beginning to execute phase I of TRT — Trauma Resolution Therapy — a program developed by Craig Carson working with military veterans out of Houston, Texas. It was pioneering work in the field at that time, but my mother had done “pioneering” work of her own for the fields of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), Thorazine and the use of Lithium Carbonate to control her mood swings. None of these modalities worked and towards the end of her life her mood swings drove her to do incredibly irresponsible and traumatizing things to herself and others, especially her children. Her mania was “controlled” by medications that left her with massively debilitating Tardive Dyskinesia, but it was either live with these side effects or burn her house to the ground.
She did both.
Whatever “pioneering” work the Nazis had done during the 1940’s in the Death Camps needed alot of tuning, and who better than poor immigrants from Oklahoma, like my mother, to do the dirty work of “modern” psychiatry. As far as Medicine was concerned, my mother was a lost cause; a chronic, terminal alcoholic with many sad stories to tell and a penchant for creating more through the simple act of breathing air into her lungs. Whether she was a borderline personality, a narcissist, a sociopath or a psychopath, no one would say. It was just so tragically bad no one discussed it openly around children and I never found out the pathetic nature of my mother’s condition until I was 30, newly sober, and my older sister figured it was as good a time as any to let me in on a “little” secret. But it was hardly a secret by this time as not a single woman I had been involved with up to and including my current partner in crime was what anyone would call, “normal.” Suicidal, despondent, victimized, viciously antagonistic and vindictive were the women I had my pick of. The only ones I could be seen in public with were the narcissists because they could at least fake emotional health to keep apace with my personal sideshow. So whatever secret my sisters had been keeping from me was out, conclusion-first, and I had the domestic violence and stalking incidents, and their markers, all over the history I was repeating, incident by incident, with Alan. He looked on all of it and made his emotional feedback as clear and consistent as daylight: “I’m feeling fear, anger, regret, resentment, vulnerable, violated, discounted, misunderstood, ashamed, excited and overwhelmed. Deep shame.” It was a limited palette to be sure, but not a one had I ever associated with my own history. Feelings had been plucked clean from my vocabulary and nervous system to be stored in my subconscious where the damage it had done and was doing was incalculable. But soon this history became my history. I could own it. I could begin to understand the information that Ben Jealous’ father Fred was trying to communicate to me and through me years before: “you have been wounded and have been attempting to limp through a human life as a fresh daisy when you are more like a burn victim attempting to outshine a misshapen, outward appearance with razzle-dazzle and a social aplomb you do not have, nor should you.” Apparently I had been recording and storing a complete alternative history of my life, waiting for a moment when it might come in handy. An emergency or something.
Perhaps this was it.
There were flowers and folding chairs placed in three neat rows of seven. We had wheeled my mother’s casket out from the attached funeral home and placed it over her gravesite under the cover of temporary shelter. A magnolia tree under which she would rest was promised, but not present, and her mother, the grandmother whose name I had shouted out in my gestalt psychodrama with the men in Fred Jealous’ men’s group, was making a scene of being late, overweight, and overburdened by misfortune. I instantly felt resentment. “This isn’t about you, Leota. This is about my mother who ran to you, my baby sister and I in tow, countless times over the usual, and divorce-worthy, offenses my father had committed against us. Your response was always the same: hit him in the pocketbook, men are pigs and let me tell you a story.” But I was beginning to see a different history pop out in front of me with every mutter, every groan and every “help me, Butch,” that was delaying the start of my mother’s funeral. I was startled by my new feelings. I was startled by any feelings that weren’t rage or sadness, actually, I just never expected or anticipated that I would feel this annoyance and antipathy towards my maternal grandmother. My mother’s funeral would be the last place I would have guessed these feelings could come out. How in the hell could I have seen this coming five years ago? Holy shit!
My mentors in AA had told me that more would be revealed, but how many other lies had I been telling myself just to square my family’s story with my own? How much alcohol did it take until I could adopt the victimization and misfortune of their histories as my own, and keep from vomiting it all back up?
What was coming into focus, as each trauma was reconciled with Alan, was that I had been throwing up all over my new friends in Texas all along, friends who dutifully told me to keep coming back and to focus on the feelings of others. “Blah, blah, blah,” I thought. “If you only understood my story,” I would counter inside my head, and then quickly chide myself to hush.
Also new was that I was beginning to lose dear friends with whom I had felt the comfort of connection. I was feeling disloyal, but I had to be true to myself now, too. Their behavior was either inappropriate, abusive or insensitive and I wasn’t going to be shouted down or accommodating towards behavior that I was feeling injured by, or that I could see was injuring to others. I wasn’t just listening and reacting any longer, I was listening, hearing and responding. I was feeling like a whole person and, frankly, I was liking it. I could choose the time and place for any and all confrontations.
“They,” however, were not liking it, not one bit. Mostly at work, I was finding myself acting passive aggressively towards authority figures and getting upset when they would retaliate. My moods were becoming increasingly depressed and disconnected. Those feelings of peaceful assurance, comfort and posthumous connection at my paternal grandmother’s funeral years before were vacant at my own mother’s “celebration” of life. I had no idea whom she really was, I only knew bits and pieces of her story, in spite of feeling deeply connected to her and her life. I knew she was a sick person who could never seem to get well, but I would be damned if I would allow anyone else to tell me her story in their own words. They had no right to generalize or smear her memory, making it into something sullen or unworthy. How dare you!
The pastor who presided over the post-funeral memorial was not amused. Should I be surprised that a fundamentalist evangelical pastor steeped in the unerring Word of God would annoy me to the point of exasperation? Give me that damn microphone, stooge! I was done being quick to see where religious people were right. This monologue of horror was not going to be a part of my mother’s memorial unchallenged.
The Shelby Fight that dates back to the Revolutionary and Civil Wars had rendered me powerless and void of any other options.
This was a very strange emotional response regarding the memories of my mother whom I had spent a great deal of energy during this time resenting the hell out of. Resenting her for setting my father up to fail, manipulating all of us into feeling sorry for her lot in life. Meanwhile, no one else in the family could get any attention for being as ill, or sicker, than she was. The self centeredness of her condition had been sickening, indeed. Up until this time, I had blamed my father for all of this dysfunction, in concert with my mother, as if he could have brought salvation to a table that even medical science had abandoned to a proverbial junk pile of complaints thought to be the mutterings of the mentally ill. I could finally feel compassion for my father whom I had left for dead, for some reason, for as long as I could remember. I was never a good enough son, and yet I still labored for him, and was beginning to feel like he might actually be proud of me, like I might actually be bringing something important to the altar of his life. While I had treated him so harshly out of loyalty to my mother, the only “gift” this loyalty had ever afforded me was an unconscious drive to jump down the throats of the women in my life whomsoever dared to utter a discouraging word towards me or at my behavior. Given my epigenetic or genetic predilection, this had amounted to a great deal of conflict, agitation and suffering. But this is my story, now, and all aspects and people who operate within it are sacred to me. Tread lightly and gently or face the wrath of the almighty “What’s Left of Greg.” Whoever that was, is or will be.
Phase I of TRT took me the longest of the five years I spent vomiting all over Alan. There were laughter and tears, but Alan was also prescribed a sulfa drug by the Veterans Administration the reaction to which rendered his pancreas null and void. Or maybe it was Stage II Diabetes all along, I do not know. What I do know is the man absorbed much of the toxic content of my miserable existence, digested it and fed it back to me in a form that helped me make sense of it all. At some point in the process and the unfolding of my own health issues, I no longer felt like Jesus, himself, had flicked a booger that stuck to my forehead most of my life. I felt many, if not all, of my missing emotions. As a result, thoughts and insights were coming to me that were long dormant. More was being revealed just as my AA friends had promised.
The first was an absolute disgust with the narcissism of authority figures. That I was working for one was not lost on me and my direct confrontation of his behavior against a former, less narcissistic, boss had inflamed my misdirected passion. Now that narcissist was coming after me. We had won the Texas Quality Award, as a company, and the Malcolm Baldrige Award, too, but it was no thanks to this self-satisfied sower of derision and division. Or so I thought.
The thing about hypothyroidism and a concomitant mood disorder is everything is steeped in this dark and foreboding background. Whether it truly is so or not, the normal response is to get into the light as quickly as possible, not turn around and fight a buzzsaw much larger than one’s self.
But that was not the lesson my mother had taught me over the years, nor was it a lesson in keeping with my Ukrainian DNA. We simply fight, especially if we are outgunned, because we are in the right. What is right and just must be the good whether it is for the best, or not. The war, and the battle, is to make what is the good become what is best. Bringing this mentality into absolutely every battle, no matter how petty and small, should logically force the good to come to pass. But even if this was the case, I was not seeing this conclusion bear any fruit. And yet I persevered. Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
When one earnestly believes that they can make substitute with perseverance what they lack in skill, there is absolutely no end to what they cannot do. Life lesson numero uno.
And so it was that I quit this job in the banking services industry after two years and went back into educational testing, albeit under a substantially disadvantaged condition…my ego was back in charge. In its way of seeing spiritual matters, its deft construction and sturdy constitution had proven sturdy enough to finish TRT, instill a conscious, palpable fear of death over a job well done and now it was given a chance to manage other human beings. Seven senior programmer analysts in a field in which my ego had had a not-inconsequential thirteen years of battle-hardened expertise; in getting the job done, not making believe that I was getting the job done. That this ego of mine still wanted the pelts of backward, Theory X managers on its own wall dripping dry of blood and oil was just a minor detail and not something to deter further ambition.
For me, when ambition is not deterred, it winds up being detoured and within a year of being promoted to one of several new managers with a number of successes under my belt, I, and the manager who was thoughtful enough to hire me, were asked to leave the premises. With or without security’s assistance, the choice was mine. “How kind of you,” I thought.
I wanted blood, I wanted death to my enemies, I wanted everything but to accept that what I was enduring was some pale, neutral form of justice. My friends took my firearms from my home and kept me close to their thoughts as I fell completely apart at, yep, you guessed it, thirteen years of sobriety.
Actually the fall — the deadman’s drop, really — began at 11 years, but it took two more years before my bottom was complete and my neck had begun its final snap. I was selling cable, television and phone for a criminal organization whose name rhymed with “Crimewarner,” and found myself nearly losing my mind with zero adjusted gross income for this most auspicious of years. I was learning much that my college diploma was supposed to have defended me from, but I had gone deaf in the three years from trap door to final destination. The battering and the choking over the tragedies of 9/11/2001, and the conclusions I had to reach about those events, left much for me to uncoil. While all the war profiteers were making money hand over fist, I was left losing my ass, as were many others. At one point on the south side of San Antonio near dusk, the following conversation took place.
“Would you like me to show you how you can save money with cable and phone?”
“Are jew chure jew should be on dis sida town afta dark, heuro?”
Undeterred, I pressed forward. “We have a 59 dollar special going on for one more day.”
“I knows some peepul who would chute chew for feefty-eight dollahs.”
“Do you have their address?”
Obviously I hadn’t heard a damn word people were saying to me, much less processed it for actual meaning. My unconscious was crying out for death by any means necessary. I could not believe what my eyes were telling me was happening. On that note, I was in luck as no one else’s eyes were telling them anything believable, either. Study the nightly newscast videotapes, if they still exist, from about 1998 through 2005 or 6. Listen carefully and you will understand what I heard and it was nothing about what everyone could plainly see with their lying eyes.
I do not know what other people do when they are left twisting at the end of a rope, but I decided my friends were probably right, after all, and I should invest in myself. Start that graduate studies program in Communication and the Interwebs because, hell, I’m just hanging out here, anyway, twisting in the breeze.
The ill wind just kept blowing for what seemed to be months, but it was actually weeks. And right at the moment where all hope was gone and economic death seemed imminent, a miracle took place. Something I did not deserve, something I was not entitled to claim, something I did not, and could not have, earned of myself and all my ego’s hard work. It just appeared because one other person believed in me as much, if not more, than I had believed in myself.
My AA sponsor, Jim Wiley, called me up to his one bedroom flat at the local home for seniors who preferred the freedom to die, and the possibility of dying, from having one last orgasm. It was a well appointed nine story building with three distinct wings wrapped inside of what would have passed for a Disney “Tomorrowland” sort of building, circa 1957. The downstairs entryway was always a polished black marble, with several marble and brass appointments that I never paid close attention to because I was entering the building either in a hurry to pick Jim up for a meeting, or my ass was on fire and I was looking for some help putting it out. This day it was the latter, but most importantly, Jim had initiated the abatement.
The elevator smelled of rust and mold like all big buildings do after 20 years of placing a non-profit, non-religious organization in charge of its upkeep. Apparently it takes the fear or love of God to do more than the perfunctory dusting, vacuuming and sanitization that is required in most states of the US. Inevitably, the ventilation ducts carry the secrets of decline and collective grief of a gift wrapped senior living “warehouse.”
“Hi, Jim,” I recall uttering as I opened the door at his behest. He sat on the far side of the room by the window with a magnificent view of both the parking lot and the skyline of the north side of San Antonio, just inside of Loop 410.
“Come here and sit down across from me,” he said, touching the sofa across from his red upholstered barcalounger. This of course forced me to view the photograph of his getting blessed by John Paul II on my way to the red love seat. “How are you feeling today,” he asked, somewhat rhetorically.
“Well, Jim, I’m about to get fired for not making enough sales in my job selling door to door. Last night they were calling on top of my route with their telephone sales reps to limit my on-the-ground productivity. They have me shadowed by my manager, further adding pressure. But on a positive note, UTSA accepted my application for Graduate School in Communication. I just don’t know how I’ll pay for it since I can’t collect unemployment and grants aren’t structured to pay living expenses.”
“Sounds like you need a miracle,” Jim added, forlornly, noting the time on his wristwatch he almost never wore.
We just stared at each other in the eyes as we often did when there wasn’t any more to be said. Within a few moments, Jim’s cellphone rang. He asked me to pick it up for him, which I did.
“Hello,” Jim asked. “It’s for you,” he said, giving me his cellphone.
I don’t remember much of that phone call other than Jim wanted me to believe that it was a God-thing. A miracle. I was scheduled for an interview with a local consulting company that had ties with local millionaires and at the behest, most likely, of a local billionaire, war hero and visible owner of a local professional sports organization. From that day, forward, my life would be rescued from the garbage pile of overly ambitious programmers who dared to work their program and stay sober in spite of their best efforts to destroy themselves.
It would have taken a local billionaire with considerable influence to employ an IT developer who had been out of the profession for some three years. I was just twisting in the breeze, rotting inside a husk of my former self. I had been black-balled in town just as my former employer had promised nearly a decade prior, when I dared cross the threshold of HIS company with less than an enthusiastic embrace of a work ethic not duplicated anywhere except maybe Silicon Valley, or a southern plantation, but for astronomically smaller compensation or promise. A retired college professor in the AA program told me after I explained my 13 year journey in educational testing, that the reason why the fights in the Academy are so vicious is because, “the stakes are so low.” While I cannot say that ensuring a consistent primary education across the country is of little consequence, I do not think there are any parents reading this tome who would suggest that the K-12 public education system in the United States is “world class.” Clearly that “industry” needs more than I, or any of my considerably talented colleagues, could give it.
I could go on and on about my life after this seminal moment in my thirty years of sobriety, and I will at another time, but I’ve said more than enough to illustrate how desperate an alcoholic can be at twelve years abstinent, and the importance of the love of the people we get to know in Alcoholics Anonymous. The miracle isn’t just that we come and stick around; it is not even that we come to believe, together, in a power greater than ourselves who loves us until we can love ourselves and each other. The miracle is, also, that we freely choose to keep going, to keep believing, to keep trying to shoulder the burdens of our ancestors and of a world that is, quite often, beneath our lowest, most reasonable, expectations. We do this out of love for this AA outfit and we do it for us. Alcoholics Anonymous is about us. Not you, not me, not even of any one group you might call “home.” It is about our love and belief in the 12 Steps of AA, the 12 Traditions of AA and the giants on whose shoulders each and every one of us stands to tell the world, “Yes. Yes, there is a solution to all of your problems.” A loving God placed that solution right on top of my problem so that anyone at a complete loss could find it. He placed the steps of the program in order so any simpleton could work them, and even numbered them for intellectuals like me. And yet, I was so busy trying to look outside of myself for the magic of salvation from alcohol that I missed the obvious fact that a loving God does not hide what is earnestly sought after. Alcoholics Anonymous is about us ̶ we, the afflicted ̶ who somehow found the power in our powerlessness to become willing to be honest with ourselves. And my experience has proven to me that fear of people is absolutely linked to my fear of economic insecurity, or even the whispers that still seem to come from behind all those pretty bottles.
Eating Crow and Humble Pie 