Along the wide road



There are many evils in this world; evils we do to ourselves, those we do to others and those that are visited upon us. Perhaps the greatest evil that happened to me in this life was alcohol. And, no one likes to talk about bad things, but it seems inevitably necessary at some point. If for no other reason, I would like to get my thoughts out on this.

Liquor was a friend when I had great and constant physical pain over the years. Alcohol was there when I had a lot of stress and emotional pain too. It was alcohol that assuaged me when family and dear friends abandoned me; though, it was in some part due to alcohol that at least a few of those people left in the first place.

For a few years, between early 2011 and mid-2013, alcohol was my constant companion. It was the friend who was there when no one else was. It mitigated my pain when there was nothing else to do it. Oh, and it effectively destroyed what was left of my life after I lost the newspaper and the young woman I loved, both terrible losses. And, it was alcohol that was my company when I lost the industry that was the staple in my life and success for so many years (print journalism).

Yet, alcohol was only half to blame. Booze couldn’t have visited its evil upon me if I had been able to stay away from it; from the moment I picked up the bottle, though, alcohol was in the driver’s seat. And, it drove me straight into hell. Regardless of the compulsion, though, or the need to not be tethered to the concerns of the world, alcohol had no real power over me until I reached my hand out and wrapped my fingers around that bottle.

In entertainment vehicles, such as movies and plays, alcoholics are frequently portrayed as people who cannot feel the gravity of their actions until long after events, at least that is my interpretation of popular media. But, I was clear enough to see my lover walk out the door after six years together and my daughters turn away from me, my economic and personal failures reflected in their lovely, disappointed eyes. I saw my friends, trusted or otherwise, leave my side; no shared history compelling enough to remain constant. And, I felt the absence of absolutely everyone: it was horrible and I would not visit that loss upon my worst enemy.

Then, there was that scene I will forever remember: Within my almost three years of homelessness, there were the days I spent living at a small hobo camp on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska. Without going into too much detail, I lost my job at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital after an injury and filed for workmen’s compensation. An injury I received in Airborne School in 1985, and during my duty in Denmark for the Army in 1987, were the basis of the denial in 2011, when my left shoulder was finally undone as I stopped a patient with dementia from falling headlong onto the ground, and when the rotator for my left shoulder finally gave out.

Still, though I was sober for hospital duty, nearly every moment of mine off duty was spent buying liquor, planning to buy liquor, consuming liquor, sleeping off liquor or recovering from liquor. It was liquor that was now running my life. But, while trying for survival in the outdoor encampment, in Nebraska’s first city, I gathered like everyone else in the camp, at the “employment agency” nearby at 5 a.m. Once there, the stinking, dirty lot of us were parceled out to manual labor jobs throughout the town by a thick, swarthy man with greasy hair and fingers.

I usually drew a job working a sledge hammer (using that bad left shoulder) for $5 per hour. There was no additional pay for overtime, nor security equipment despite working in an enclosed warehouse where chemical dust was floating through the air. The national minimum wage was $7.50 while we homeless earned just $5. And, there were days some of us were not paid for no reason in particular, and it was in Lincoln, Nebraska where this slavery was allowed to flourish by whatever powers that be.
 

If the Lord judges me to be a wicked man beyond redemption at the Judgment, and I am cast into hell, I will simply wake up in that encampment again, amid the frozen snow and below-zero weather, and waiting again in that terrible hall to get assigned to that chemical nightmare, where I broke large stones into little ones. It was there I lost the last of my strength and health. It was there that my love for this life died quietly and unceremoniously, and I lost my will to remain in the world.

A friend of mine died in our little, frozen camp. I could not look at him in the pre-sunrise hour he was first discovered. Some men were milling around him. Someone would call the police, but I did not want to see Billy. He was much younger than me and a drug addict. But, he was a nice boy with an easy smile. He was not stupid or mean, just addicted to meth, a sad fact during Billy’s 26 years, which contributed distinctly to him not having 27 years.

Whatever pitiful cash we made at our “jobs” was not enough to obtain housing or shelter it seemed, only enough to buy a little food to keep our bodies going. Sometimes, I would buy hot food from the gas station down the street. I would  walk along the highway to the station wearing my filthy rags and wet shoes and socks. And, at that gas station, I surely got my food -- and some fortified wine to drink it down. This is the nature of addiction for me.

Because I injured my shoulder a bit 20 years prior, in the Army, my workmen’s compensation was not paid and I was broken -- thrown out of my condo. Meanwhile, there were no barriers for people to fall back upon in Lincoln. It is a horrible place, unforgiving of personal disaster. A stranger had pointed to that terrible place in the woods where the poor and down-trodden gathered to try survival, grouped together back from the woodline behind that despicable employment agency in that neat brick building. Every day, the homeless who survived the night arose like the dead from their graves to fight for survival anew. And, a few who were not claimed by the weather were claimed by their own hand. None of us bums asked where someone was coming from, or where someone was going.

Even when there was a place indoors for me to stay, I had only God and alcohol with me for too long: It drove me mad. In another life, where my clothes and I had been clean regularly, I was bitter about the unabashed glee from long-time adversaries, such as my daughters’ mother, my professional rivals and my social frenemies consequent to my fall. If one allows it, alcohol, guilt and rage will drive someone right to the gate of hell and then, and only then, allow its passenger to either die or, as unlikely as it may be, attempt recovery. But here, in the Wilds of the Midwest, I truly believed I was going to die. And, it would not have been unwelcome; I called for God to bring me home every night. And, many nights, my borrowed bed bug-infested sleeping bag contained not only me and prayers for an end, but also an empty pint or half-pint liquor bottle. Still, despite everything, I kept reaching for the bottle and begging for death; though, I am sure I began my drunken sojourn as innocently as a child (in fact I was a child when the drinking started).

The bottle was not the devil, though. The disease was not the devil. I was simply obsessed with drinking and leaned upon booze too heavily after a few bad turns. It was me who brought myself to the brink of extinction: I had some eager help, though. People are cruel to the less fortunate and unlucky, and trust can make someone a fool very quickly.

There are a long list of physical, physiological and even psychological challenges I endure still. These things are not an excuse for alcoholism, though. If my ailments were actually a ready excuse for alcoholism then it would only stand to reason I could logically indulge my horrible thirst. Alcohol will kill me painfully, however, just as much as it will kill anyone without a lengthy list of personal and medical challenges to meet. Alcohol is a coward’s way out, and the way I chose for too long.

I did not find recovery immediately when I got back to New Jersey finally. There were nightmares waiting for me upon returning to my former home. As much as I may have left the perils of outdoor living and near slavery in the Nebraska Winter behind me, I was still living with a terrible alcoholic: me. And, it was not until about a year-and-a-half that I was able to finally admit, after everything I had put myself and others through, that it was time to recover from addiction instead of indulging it even one more moment.

Still, like a loyal driver, alcoholism waits outside wherever I am, the motor in its sleek sedan running, its lovely driver standing there smiling and ready to open the car door for a fare that has gotten away. Even after all that alcohol has done to me, I still look out the window sometimes, and imagine what it might be like to take that ride again; such is the illogical, fatalistic mind of my disease. There are times when an addict knows when one’s addiction is speaking and not really one’s self.

If I give addiction even one free moment within me, I will return to the smooth, wide road to hell I had been walking upon. It will be even more difficult to try to step off that pathway should I take even one more step upon it; so I believe anyway.

With hindsight being 20/20, I could see only two welcome outcomes for me in the throes of my addiction: quick death or recovery. The unwanted consequences of my actions and addiction might well have also included: imprisonment; long-term psychiatric commitment; lingering death at the hands of liver failure; or permanent dementia, from which there is no reprieve. I used to be a nurse aide in hospitals and nursing homes. I would tell anyone, without reservation, there is no death quite so horrible as one that involves dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Any death would be better, in my mind, than those things. Too often I have seen the empty husks of people, still living and breathing, walking and making noises, while the essence -- the soul -- of its former inhabitant, had departed. Well, that is my take on it. I would be horrified to think that one’s soul had to live, trapped in those bodies through the indignities of that terrible disease. This end is the only thing I have ever seen that could rival the punishment I came to know and survived through in Nebraska.

In the most important parts of my alcoholic trek through life, I had a nervous breakdown in 1993, when my former wife, Stacey, fled with my daughters, Amanda and Angela, from the purview of the Passaic County, NJ Probation Department and the Monmouth County, NJ Family Court. She simply took my children and never let me know where they were again. And, my father had paid for terrible lawyers who gave me awful advice on the matter (especially Mr. Ernest Caposela, ironically now a Passaic County Superior Court judge as of this writing). In the end it was my wonderful daughter Angela who found me, though by that time no longer a man of means or respect in the community, a shadow of my former self.

I eventually did find recovery, though, and after that I was sober between 1994, when I left the East Orange VA Medical Center finally, and 2000, I did not touch a drop of alcohol. I believe there was some part of me holding out that my absent children would be restored to me, but my children should not have been the reason I did not drink: Because I wanted to enjoy my life should have been the reason I did not drink. I suppose some part of me gave up at around that point, and the rationale probably started as, ‘So what if I do drink?’ Women were not enough to keep me sober: Sobriety is something one must do and want for themselves. My job as a journalist was perhaps crafted by drunks in the first place, ages ago, complete with a fraternity atmosphere. But, ultimately, it was the lack of my own hope that drove me to the bottle. It is a thing I will always regret, of course, but even my deepest regrets have to be moved past if I intend real sobriety.

This past time I found recovery, I can only pray it will be the last time I require recovery. I am doing everything I can to remain in the “Land of the Living,” which is my shorthand for being sober, hopeful and dedicated to the world as it actually is; not the world as viewed through the foggy lens of the bottom of a vodka bottle.

Heartbreak is hard for anyone, not just me. Yet, when people are in the midst of their heartbreak, and this is especially true of me, they can sometimes not see beyond their own pain. So, there is alcohol, with its car still warming on a cold Winter day, its engine running silently and that beautiful driver with a welcoming smile still waiting to hold that door. And, she never, ever goes away; she will track a fare jumper for all the rest of their days. Addiction requires one to fight it for the rest of their life, I think, and simply not look out the window at this and to find the peace one can find in life. In my experience, simply the best thing a drunk can do is not drink, go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and give one’s self over to whatever higher power one believes exists.

Alcoholism speaks to the fear in me; that part of me that chose to believe the sky was falling. When hope was restored to this recovering addict, perhaps not that much changed for the better-- but there is enough love in this world (if someone looks for it) to make the rest of the passage through it and ease the pain of loss, not to mention supplant those things with real joy again.

Well, I have stood on my soapbox long enough. Usually I tell stories and do not write editorials anymore, but this seemed like a good enough subject to try a monologue. This was my cautionary tale of alcoholism. I will not whip this horse dead. But, that metaphorical horse did deserve a good, stern flogging, so to speak, and so it has been rendered.