Love and Sobriety
by John Wiley
Copyright©2007 John Wiley.
ISBN 978-1-937520-12-0
Published by First Edition Design eBook Publishing July 2011
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com
Smashwords Edition
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-59713-033-2 (PRINT)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006930525
Cover art and design by Gary Hesketh.
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Table of Contents
A.A.W.S. Permission
Dedication For Lisa
Forward
By Dr. Margaret C. Kiely, Ph.D Clinical Pyschologist
Introduction
By John Wiley
Where Is Forever Written
By K. Raye Dowdle
-Chapter One
-Chapter Two
-Chapter Three
-Chapter Four
-Chapter Five
-Chapter Six
-Chapter Seven
-Chapter Eight
-Chapter Nine
-Chapter Ten
-Epilogue
The Twelve Steps are reprinted with permission of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (A.A.W.S.). Permission to reprint The Twelve Steps does not mean that A.A.W.S. necessarily agrees with the views expressed herein. A.A. is a program of recovery from alcoholism only—use of The Twelve Steps in connection with programs and activities which are not patterned after A.A., but which address other problems, or in any other non-A.A. context, does not imply otherwise.
This book is dedicated with respect and affection to
Lisa
who has helped me emerge from my valley of the shadow of death, and has become my image of the Higher Power here on earth.
Forward
As a psychotherapist, I have been confronted with the personal and family problems brought about by Jellineck’s disease, the disease of alcohol. The myth of alcoholism that its victims are weak-willed, selfish and rarely treatable is dispelled in this sensitive, painful and true story of how a recovered alcoholic struggled to come to grips with this debilitating illness and succeeded.
The victims of Jellineck’s disease are often ignored by professionals and as a result, their lives are filled with shame and neglect. The negative and moral implications of this denial are well known and thus help for these victims is inconsistent and often tainted with such hopelessness that change is impossible. I am convinced that recovery for many will not occur until such myths are dispelled
This work of Love and Sobriety will go a long way towards demystifying alcoholism. It contains insights into the thinking and emotional life of an alcoholic. It will serve not only as a source of help for the individual and family confronting this illness, but also the professionals who are hampered in their efforts due to a lack of knowledge and insight into the alcoholic’s downward journey from life to the darkness of blackouts and despair. This personal account takes us into that blackness and also leads us back to a life without alcohol, to sobriety, and for those who succeed like John, to happiness. The majority of alcoholics, from 90 to 95 percent, do not make the journey back because we have failed to treat alcoholism as a disease. There is now scientific evidence that alcoholics are genetically predisposed to this disease and that blood chemistry and brain electricity demonstrate a pathological response to imbibing alcohol. This is a beginning but there is a long way to go.
I believe that this book will contribute significantly to that progress by providing us with a much needed, though often painful look, into the psychological and physical ravages of alcoholism. This is an incredibly honest, poignant story of human courage and perseverance, of light following blackness, of hope conquering despair. We owe a debt of gratitude to John for helping us to understand and to believe that Jellineck’s disease can be overcome.
—Margaret C. Kiely,Ph.D Clinical Psychologist
INTRODUCTION
My name is John, and I am an alcoholic.
Those are the words that every alcoholic learns to say in AA, out loud. In the beginning, most of us can’t bring ourselves to say them. We can’t admit that we are alcoholics, addicted to a poisonous substance—for us—that has taken control of our lives.
But even more difficult than admitting we have become alcoholics is admitting that the problem is not the alcohol, but us. If we weren’t addicted to alcohol, we would be addicted to something else. Sometimes we think that we have won the battle when we quit the bottle—in fact, the battle is only beginning.
The first 16 of my 70 years of life—my boyhood years—I am convinced I was even then an alcoholic, the gene just laying there inside me, waiting for the catalyst of alcohol.
For the next 15 years of my life, I was an active alcoholic, involved with the insane destruction of my own life, and hurting all of those attached to me. I am sorry for all those years of my life, and for all of those folks involved in it.
The past 39 years of my life I have lived in sobriety as a recovered alcoholic. I want the struggles of that 39 years to mean something to my fellow human beings even outside the circle of the life saving program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I am very, very grateful to God for the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my ability to live in sobriety for over 38 years because of AA, and also for the Hazelden /Twenty Four Hours a Day little book of daily meditations.
Because AA has traditions that I respect and hold dear, I must remain anonymous and therefore my name, and all the other names and incidents in this story have been disguised or deleted to protect the people involved, but I can assure you the story itself is very true.
There are three persons named here who are real however. Dr. Margaret C. Kiely, Ph.D. is a real person, and I wouldn’t be quite as contented in my personal sobriety without her counsel over the years. K. Raye Dowdle who wrote the poem, Where is Forever Written, is a very real friend. Gary Hesketh, the cover designer and artist, is also a very real friend.
I don’t know whether you have a problem with alcohol or not. You may be a recovered alcoholic, like me. If you have trouble hanging on to a reason to remain sober, this book may be valuable to you.
Or perhaps you may know some people who suffer from alcoholic addiction, through this book you may understand them, and help them.
Or it may be that you are deeply religious. In reading this book, you may see how religion can be demonic as well as uplifting.
As you tap deeper into the roots of your own spirituality, I hope you will recognize that combating an addiction like alcoholism needs your actions as well as your prayers.
When I admitted to and accepted my alcoholism, I made up my mind that nothing would ever cause me to take a drink of alcohol again. Whatever life was going to serve up to me, was not going to cause me to ever become an active alcoholic again.
Since January 7, 1968 when I had my last drink, I went through a divorce. After 10 years of drinking in a marriage and 10 years of sobriety, and as mean as divorce is, I did not drink again. Thanks to God, continued sobriety, and AA, I hung on to my sober reality.
Divorce caused estrangement from some of my own children, and terrific difficulty with step-children, but I did not drink again. Thanks to God, continued sobriety, and AA, I still hung on to my sober reality.
December 1983, I married Lisa and when the love of my life became very ill with a brain tumor 16 years later and couldn’t even talk, I looked after her until she died. That loss, and the past 6 years of my sobriety living with grief have been terrible, but I did not drink again. Thanks to God, continued sobriety, and AA, I am still hanging on to my sober reality.
The book is dedicated to Lisa. We had over 16 years together as husband and wife. We were married together in the Catholic faith, after struggling through annulment processes for our previous marriages.
There was no way we were going to pick a fight with Catholicism over getting married without annulments, and then have me lose my sobriety because I had gone against my conscience and then picked up a drink again
When this book was first published in 1985 by Wood Lake Books Inc. Lisa was right there with me when I wrote it. Lisa isn’t with me now.
In 1999 my beautiful Lisa developed a glio blastoma brain tumor. She lost her ability to speak. I looked after her for four months. Lisa died on March 9, 2000.
Lisa’s spirit asked me to get this book out into print again now, before I get to join her so we can walk under a rainbow again “up there.”
My last six years out of my 39 years of sobriety have been in solitary sorrow, Lisa and I are one-love forever.
Working on this book has given much meaning to my thirty-nine years of sobriety. I pray that it will give you Love and Sobriety, too.
—John Wiley
Where Is Forever Written
Above and beyond these earthly coils true love gives much . . . the moonglow in eyes that know heart twines never broken and takes away more . . . the loneliness of one half made whole bleak skies unshaded from gray. Where is forever written completed souls whisper the truth of many sad farewells and new sung hello's their journey upon this plane but a tiny teardrop in seas beating timeless against waiting shores . . .
—K. Raye Dowdle
Chapter One
The church was dark inside. For a very small boy, it had an aura of terrible mystery to it.
In the church, we never talked, except in whispers. The dark pews whispered back, huddled around the bases of the huge columns that soared up to the roof.
When I looked up to the ceiling, there was the devil getting his butt kicked straight into hell, an angel with his wings folded back, falling, falling, falling. And the Brothers, their long black robes whispering along the floor, would explain to us: “Do you see that? That’s what will happen to you when you sin.”
I was four. I didn’t even know what sin was. But already, I was being pointed down, down, in terror.
I was the youngest of eight children in a Roman Catholic family in the province of Quebec. In that setting, one is not asked if he wishes to be baptized. It is simply done. Within days, I was baptized into the Roman Catholic religion, with two good Roman Catholics as godparents.
I learned to pray at home, both formal prayers and real ones. My parents believed in the saying, “The family that prays together stays together.” After supper, we gathered in the living room on our knees to say the rosary. It was a serious business—no smiling, no laughing—saying the same words over and over.
We prayed for my oldest brother, who was in the Air Force during the war. First we prayed for him because he was in the war. Then we prayed for him because he was missing. Finally we prayed for him because he had been killed.
With my mouth I said the words of the rosary, while my mind tried to figure out how to tell Dad that I got my report card that day. Even while saying the beads, I recall that my strongest prayer was, “God, don’t let him get mad.”
I didn’t like traipsing into the living room to concentrate on black beads and death. But it was a form of escape—it beat doing the dishes.
Sundays were somber days. In the darkness of a winter morning, we struggled out of bed, searched for pants without holes in the knees, searched for two socks that matched, stuffed cardboard in the soles of shoes that had holes in them, and trudged off to Mass at the church before breakfast.
We worried about remembering not to eat even a piece of bread before leaving, an act that would have prevented us from receiving communion.
I didn’t understand why we went. It was a long walk from our home. Not even Mother and Father seemed happy about going. Those were hard times, and I’m sure my father would have welcomed a few more hours in which he could work, with so many mouths to feed.
But it was a duty one did. So we went, every Sunday, to be told we were sinful, and needed to be redeemed by the blood in the cup.
After Mass, we hurried home with our bellies touching our backbones, having fasted so that we could go and receive the Lord in our hearts. I found the idea confusing. “How did the Lord get into my heart from my belly?” I would ask my mother. Or, “Would God have been offended if I had eaten to get the strength to go to his house to see him?”
But when I could smell bacon and eggs frying in the kitchen, while I sat reading the funnies in the living room, that was when I knew there was a God.
After breakfast, the depression set in again. Everyone scurried off to keep out of everyone else’s way, but especially out of the way of Mother and Dad. I guess they would start thinking about the week ahead, about trying to keep a large family on the straight and narrow, and about trying to keep them all fed, and it spoiled their temper.
Montreal had a large Jewish population, many of my playmates were Jews. I wondered why they could he happy on their day of worship, but we couldn’t on ours.
Most of the religious thoughts I had came from my parents. Some came from my older brothers and sisters who were already in the Catholic school system. The first religious precept to stick in my mind was this—if I was bad, the devil would get me; if I was good, God would be happy.
I spent much of my time before I went to school trying to make God happy. But I spent more time, lying in the dark after I went to bed, thinking about the devil. He was more real than God was, perhaps because people spent more time talking about him, and what he would do if he ever caught me sinning, than they did talking about God.
If I had never gone to school, I might have developed more love for my church. But at the age of seven, I was enrolled in the nearest Catholic School.
Black is not a happy color. Black was the color of authority. Police cars were black. The strap was black. Priests wore black, Nuns wore black. The teaching Brothers all wore black.
I was terrified. When my mother led me into class for my first day of school. I felt as if I was being exiled to reformatory. My mother trudged off home. I was right behind her. She had to take me back three times.
From the teaching Brothers, I learned to fear God, to fear my church, and to fear them. Whatever else they taught me, they passed on a fear of God so great it bordered on paranoia. In their total dedication to God, they lost any sense of compassion towards those they were teaching. To this day, I cannot remember their faces, but only that they seemed to me to be mean and cruel.
I remember only one Brother who was a kind and thoughtful man. I never got the strap from that man. Nor, as I recall it, did anyone else. That was one man who emulated what I believe to be the spirit of God. I believe in a loving God. That is not daring to say that I know God myself. But in that man, I believe I saw a reflection of God.
As a Catholic youth, of course, I couldn’t expect to know God directly. God had to be approached through an intermediary, probably dressed in black.
Religious class was the most unpleasant part of the school day. It was not a time to discover God, but like Latin or Math a time for repetition and memorizing. I can still see myself, in Grade IV or V. In front of me on my desk is the Catechism, a book of questions and answers. Behind me, dressed in black like the bad guy in a Tom Mix western, stands the Brother. Instead of a gun, he carries a strap. It’s made from leather horse harness. It too is black, with white stitching standing out along the edges.
I think it was Emerson who said, “We can never see Christianity from the catechism.” He was right. But the reason I couldn’t see it was because the tears were streaming down my face onto the little book and all the pages were blurred. If I was asked a question and my answer didn’t come quickly enough, the strap descended. The question was asked again, shouted, as if making it louder would make the answer come easier.
So I learned about God while sitting in a pool of my own urine, feeling my knees shaking and my bowels loosening.
“Who is God?” asked one of those questions in the little book. I don’t remember the predetermined answer it gave, but I remember still the answer I wanted to give: “God is a mean son-of-a-bitch dressed in black and his name is Brother William!”
I didn’t go to Mass because of any sense of God’s presence in the ceremony. I went because I was afraid—afraid first of my father, then of those Brothers. Like everyone else, I went when I was told to. Once I was enrolled in school, the school chose the time for us to attend. Early morning Mass was for children, late Mass for adults. The system even reached into our homes on weekends, to get us.
Occasionally, my father had a run in with the school. Sometimes he wanted us to attend Mass at his time, not theirs. On those Sundays when we went as a family to the later Mass, we lived in fear of Monday morning. Always, we would be asked which Mass we had attended. We were prisoners who reported back to the penitentiary on Monday morning, reported back to guards dressed in long black robes.
I think that was where I first learned to provide excuses. You always had to have an excuse. There had to be someone else who could take the blame for going to the wrong Mass.
As an alcoholic, later, I spent fifteen years of my adult life making excuses, finding someone else to blame for what I was doing.
In the church, I followed the stations of the cross many times. The carvings along the walls were very graphic, and had a powerful effect on my mind. At first, I used to wonder why Jesus never took a punch at his tormenters. How could someone with so much strength that people still worshiped Him be so weak?
But gradually, because I was so weak in the face of my own tormenters, the black Brothers, I began to identify with Him. I learned to disassociate myself from the Brothers, and even from my own parents at times. I could walk into church, with the idea in my head that God was not like their description. And I would talk to God in my own way. We were together, the two of us. Even when I was getting a set of knuckles over the head, or the strap, I got the feeling they were doing it to Him, too.
In that sense, the system did give me a oneness with Jesus that I might not have gotten otherwise. To this day, if I am hurting or being hurt, I feel that God is getting it too. I’ve learned to wait it out, to see what God will do about it. It’s not just me that has to deal with it.
I never understood how it was that Jesus could tell adults that they had to become like little children to enter the Kingdom of God, while we little children were constantly being told how sinful we were. Jesus seemed to be telling us one thing, while adults were telling us the opposite.
Confession meant long lines of children desperately trying to think of something to be forgiven for. To go in without anything to confess was taken as a sure sign that we were hiding something terrible.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last good confession. I have said bad words twenty times. I wished my older brother had gotten smacked in the mouth twice. I peeked when my cousin, Elizabeth was taking a bath....”
“Say a good act of contrition. Here is your penance....”
When you got out, the one with the biggest penance to perform was a hero. He must have been really bad!
“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry, for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend thee, my God who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
With all due respect, I consider that an act of hypocrisy, and one that contributed, I am convinced, to my years as an alcoholic.
In the first place, a child doesn’t even know what sin is unless an adult tells him.
Secondly, in a child’s mind, if he can be forgiven for anything, there is no real need to change. He can always get forgiveness. My own prayer was, “Please God, don’t let me get killed before I get to confession.” Never mind changing your ways—just don’t find yourself caught on the last bus to heaven without that forgiveness.
So I never felt any need not to sin. I simply resolved always to get to confession after the sin.
The ceiling of our church showed God kicking the devil down to hell. That should have taken care of the devil for all time. But church and adults were saying no—God didn’t really finish him off. To this child, if the devil could take that kind of shellacking from God and still control so many things here on earth, then that devil was awfully powerful, perhaps more powerful even than God.
The process of penance itself said that the adults who prescribed it had less faith in the love of God than in fear of the devil. As a child, I knew that if I missed so much as one word of that penance, or if it was said in haste and without thought, then I was doomed. I was in the devil’s grasp, not God’s.
I knelt in the hard dark pews of that church, going over each word, each prayer. Had I missed that bead? Had my mind wandered? Had I said “Our Father” at the beginning?
Finally, at the end, I made the sign of the cross leaving the pew, genuflecting slowly and carefully, because God was on view there in the tabernacle. And if God wasn’t, then the priest was, watching every move from his confessional box.
But then the hypocrisy begins again. For after getting through all that, the little boy makes it to the heavy oak doors, and swings out into the sunlight. With a shiny quarter in his pocket given to him by an indulgent older brother, he skips down the road to the store for a chocolate bar, ready for all the joy that next week’s sinning could afford.
In other words, as a child I was taught that before you can feel good, you have to feel bad. After you feel bad enough, you confess. You dump it all on that poor man behind the door, because he has no choice but to accept it. He too is a prisoner of his fear. Probably as a boy he suffered the same way, and he ended up a priest because he was afraid to fight.
On Monday, that same boy goes back to class, in a state of grace, one with the Lord for having been to confession and communion. And he still gets the strap for not being able to answer the question out of the little catechism.
That’s the third learning of hypocrisy—that it doesn’t matter what you do, whether you are in a state of sin or grace, you’ll get it in the neck anyway. It’s a lesson I repeated over and over during the years when others were trying to get me to quit drinking. Why bother? It won’t make any difference....
Yet in spite of everything, religion attracted me.
The priests were looking for altar boys. I remember thinking that if I got closer to the altar I would be closer to God. I certainly wanted to get further away from the devil of the Brothers, and I figured he would probably stay as far as possible from the altar.
As it turned out, I loved to serve at Mass. I even loved the early morning Mass, when I had to clump through the snow to the church in the darkness. The priest and I exchanged small talk as I got into my soutane. I loved the look of the soutane, especially the red one with the white top.
One old priest was a terror to most of the altar boys. If you didn’t respond quickly, he would turn from the altar and glare at you. Later, when he was dying of cancer and was too weak to pray the Mass from the altar, he would sit in the doorway just off the sacristy with nuns’ wooden clackers in his hand, clacking them as he directed us to perform our duties. But for some reason he took a liking to me, which he showed by calling me by my last name.
I was sorry when that old man died. I think something of me died with him.
I was not a good altar boy. I used to trip over my soutane, or drop the book, or place things wrongly on the altar. But I remember that I loved the smell of the wine. I loved to pour it into the chalice, and I remember feeling badly if the priest took only little. I would have liked a swallow of it myself, even at that early age. If it hadn’t been drummed into me that this was the blood Christ, I might have tried it.
So much terrible nonsense was dished out in the name of God. Fridays were always the best day at school. People relaxed, looking forward to the weekend. Even the black Brothers sometimes allowed questions and discussion.
With fear no longer inhibiting us, our hands would shoot up. “Brother, may I ask a question?”
“Yes, John.”
“Brother, what would happen if I accidentally bit the host at mass on Sunday?”
He would draw himself up to his full height, all black and whispery. “Well, John, let me tell you a story,” he would start. Thirty sets of ears strained for the parable he would deliver, a tale of horror unlike any in the Bible.
“Once upon a time, there was a man who was very angry at God and at the church. He didn’t believe that the host was the body of Christ, and that if you hit it, it would bleed.
His parish priest told him that if he had the nerve, he should bring an axe to church, and try chopping the host in half. But if did, he would be in terrible trouble.
“So the man—who was probably a Protestant—came to church armed with an axe the following Sunday. He strode up to the alt at communion time, and put the host on the communion rail.
“Then he raised the axe—”
The thirty pairs of straining ears could barely bear the tension the brother adjusted his robe for the kill.
“—and smashed the host into two pieces!”
Thirty gasps.
“And the host bled all over the place, and the man died of shock on the spot,” concluded the brother triumphantly.
We were terrified. We never let our teeth touch the wafer at all. If it did, we almost died of panic.
Looking back, it seems like something out of the days of the Inquisition. It’s a wonder that countless law suits haven’t been filed for damaging children’s minds and ruining adult lives, because they haven’t been able to de-program themselves from their memories of fear and intimidation. I don’t know if the Roman Catholic Church still tells its children such stories. But I know that it still uses the same tactics on adults, to enforce its teachings about birth control and divorce, teachings which are no more God’s divine will today than the strap was 40 years ago.
My oldest sister was like a second mother to me. She was a tomboy, who could ski, play baseball, and do anything any boy could do, but better. While I was still young, she decided to enter the religious life, and become a nun.
Sundays now meant visiting a second prison. Now it was the women who were all dressed in black. I remember how neat and clean the convent was, and I remember feeling as if I were in a church. We didn’t speak above a whisper.
My sister, who had been so full of life and living, would walk silently in the room. I used to think her face beautiful, but now the joy and vitality of living was gone from it. It was like all the other faces, placid, as emotionless as still water.
I never enjoyed going to see all those dead faces. To a little boy, they seemed to be signs of defeat, of giving up. Yet my sister said she was happy. It confirmed my suspicion that to be with God, to be one of God’s people, was a serious and unhappy business. One had to approach it with gloom and foreboding.
Church and school and convent—they all smelled the same to me. They were dark and damp, repressive places filled with guilt-ridden and unhappy people. If I seem to dwell on this, it is because I believe that those early impressions strongly influenced the tragedies of my later life. I can’t claim that they made me an alcoholic—many others who went through the same experiences did not succumb to an addiction to alcohol. But I am convinced that a great many people, far more than we commonly recognize, did develop an addiction to misery. They only felt good, as adults, when they were feeling bad, when things were going wrong. If things didn’t go wrong naturally, their own attitudes would soon make sure that they did.
In my own case, these early influences meant that when I got fired because of my drinking, or my wife walked out, or, my friends turned against me, I could see all of these as preordained. This was how things were meant to be. I didn’t have to take any responsibility for myself and my actions—I was simply playing out God’s will.
To worship God meant remembering Christ’s terrible death, every day. On Sundays, we remembered his beautiful life of love and his teaching—but always against the fearful backdrop of the cross as a reminder that he had been killed for you, and by you. Because you were no good. You were a sinner. You would always be a sinner. And your only hope was to keep in constant contact with the priests who were his intermediaries. Only they could forgive you.
Perhaps, if I had belonged to a church that taught me love and grace, hope and faith, my life would have been different. But I was taught hate, not love. I learned that the Jews were “Christ-killers,” and that Protestantism was of the devil.
Today, I don’t believe that the answers lie in hanging our heads in shame. The answers come from our ability to talk, to challenge, and to ask for change. If my telling of these circumstances encourages others to rise up against hypocrisy, to demand that the forms of religion which twisted our minds and warped our understanding must now find ways to de-program us from our addiction to misery, then I will feel that my suffering will not have been in vain.
The only times I remember happy faces were at Christmas and Easter. In my red-and-white soutane, I could look out into the darkness beyond the flowers on the altar and see smiles.
When I knelt in the light at the altar, all those people were behind me in the dark. They were looking into the light, but they were not part of it. Perhaps that was what I most enjoyed about being an altar boy. I could be in the light. I wasn’t out there, crouched in the dark, contemplating the miserableness of my existence. I didn’t want to be out there, staring at that gruesome cross, seeing the blood running out of His hands, and His side, and seeing the look of anguish on His face. I wanted to be within reach of His table and His breakfast.
Even as a boy, I thought that if He had the guts to be crucified for us, then He would have wanted His children to enjoy the joyful parts of His life, including the taste of His food, the food of love and life and living.
So why were we forced to stare instead at death and defeat and gloom? It didn’t make sense.
At St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, a gigantic flight of stairs leads up to the towering basilica. We went up those stairs on our knees, one step at a time, a prayer at each step. If you had a problem, as I did each time I had a report card to take home, crippling your knees up the stairs of the Oratory was a good way to work out your fear.
At the top, in agony, you tottered into the hall where thousands of crutches hung, given by people who had been miraculously cured. I never understood why those crutches hadn’t been given instead to people who could have used them.
We lined up breathlessly to see the heart of Brother Andre, the humble little man who made the miracles happen. I never understood how cutting out a dead man’s heart and putting it on display was connected to Christ.
If this was really the true faith, why did the Jewish kids I knew talk about being the “chosen people?’ ”
If we could gain glory by visiting seven churches in one day, why were we forbidden under pain of mortal sin to go inside a Protestant church?
Why were we not allowed to read the Bible on our own?
But boys weren’t supposed to ask questions like that, so I never got any answers. Only now, at the age of 70, am I finally asking the questions, having submerged them all these years.
My oldest sister, the nun, told me once, “I knew you didn’t believe, even as a little boy.” But I did believe. I believed in spite of all I was told. And in the end, that belief gave me the greatest gift of my life—sobriety.
Chapter Two
When I was fourteen, we moved from our old house with its high ceiling and large rooms, to the lower half of a newly built duplex in the Cote des Neiges district of Montreal.
There were only three children left at home by that time. Tim was five years older than me, Jennifer three years older. All the others had gone: one brother dead in the war, one a salesman in the Maritimes, another a sailor; one sister in a convent and another, Theresa, the most loving of all of us, married at nineteen to a sailor just out of the Navy. She and Alfie already had one child.
Soon after moving to the new flat, I broke my right leg. I had been playing hockey. I wish I could say that I broke it while scoring goals for a junior hockey club, but there are rarely such dramatics in an alcoholic’s life, and there certainly weren’t in mine. I wasn’t even in a game at the time. I was skating home along the frozen slush packed down on the sidewalk, to get a hockey stick to replace one I had just broken. My skate hit a dry patch of concrete under the snow. I fell, sitting on my twisted leg.
It was a crucial incident for me, deeply affecting my alcoholic career. The break was bad enough that the surgeons had to install a plate to hold the two sections of bone together. Unfortunately, the first operation was not successful, and had to be repeated. I also developed an ulcer on the back of my leg, because of an improperly fitted cast.
Both resulted in an unduly prolonged convalescence.
A youngest child always finds ways to manipulate those around him. But while I was confined to bed for several months, I polished those skills. I learned how to exploit those who were compassionate.
My dad was the kind of person who felt personally responsible for everything that happened to his children. He became my prime target for guilt manipulation.
I didn’t see at the time what I was doing, of course. Only now can I realize that in that period I was developing some of the character traits that would eventually make me a successful alcoholic.
When the leg finally healed, and I had to learn to walk again, I diverted my tactics to my mother. I didn’t particularly want to walk again. Walking would mean going back to school, back into the old hassles with the Brothers. So I stalled—a habit common to most alcoholics, I learned later.
When it looked as if Father was going to get serious about this business of walking, I hid behind Mother. The trick worked well for a while. She made him feel like a bully, picking on me. He felt he had to defend himself. That occupied his mind enough to take the pressure off me.
Brothers, unfortunately, have little sympathy for younger siblings. My older brother Gerry came home from the Maritimes, where he was now a salesman. I never liked him much when I was a child; I liked him even less after this visit.
We were all in the living room. I sat at one end of the couch, my leg up on a stool, the crutches resting comfortably within reach against the arm, while I fiddled away at my stamp collection. The cast had been taken off by now.
“Hey, boy!” said Gerry suddenly. “When are you going to quit this baby stuff and start walking again?”
“I can’t walk yet,” I replied, sniffling a little for effect. I buried my face in the stamp collection, hoping that he might turn his attention to his gorgeous new girlfriend. He didn’t.
When I looked up again, he was standing right in front of me. He seemed about 14 feet tall. “Stand up!” he ordered.
I stood, painfully reaching for the crutches to support myself. But I barely got myself braced on them, carefully keeping the broken leg off the ground like a modern day Tiny Tim, when Gerry brutally knocked the crutches out from under me and gave me a push.
My foot had not been in action for almost a year, but it takes longer than that for reflexes to die. Instinctively, I used my free foot to keep from falling. It hurt like the devil—but it held.
The gig was up. They had all seen that my leg would support me. I had used every trick in the book, but now I had to start teaching myself to walk and run again.
Before long, I was registered in school again, but not at the old school. Instead, my father registered me at another school, which was primarily for French-speaking kids, but had a few English-speaking classes. As an unexpected result, I no longer had to fear the black Brothers; I had a compassionate and lovely teacher named Miss O’Neill.
Perhaps because I was still using crutches occasionally, and limped when I wasn’t using them, I benefitted from Miss O’Neill’s abundant sympathy. With her encouragement and gentle teaching, I found myself to be a successful student— much to Father’s surprise.
On one report card, I ranked third in the class, when I used to come in 28th or lower. My satisfaction was short lived, however. When I proudly presented my report card to Father, he asked, “And how many kids were off sick this month?”
It was a good question. A flu epidemic had cut the numbers in the class considerably. But it hurt, too. I fled to my room.,
That too, I realize now, is a personality characteristic of many alcoholics. Instead of facing problems honestly, we hide. We nurture feelings of being hurt, of being picked on, instead of accepting the truth and doing something about it.
Addiction and dependency are symptoms-they don’t start with taking a drink. I had a well developed alcoholic personality long before I had my first drink.
In fact, I experienced several of the other addictions of our society before discovering alcohol. A pre-occupation with sex was one of them.
Fifteen may seem old to discover sexual drives, today, but remember that this was 60 years ago. A girl in my class, Kathleen, had long black hair, and a well-developed body. I could watch that body for hours. I never got farther with her than carrying her books—I didn’t even know what “getting farther” might mean—but I knew that there was something more.