Errol Flynn saved my life...

You can always tell an accomplished barhound from an amateur. They have moves. The way they sit; stand, light a smoke, or gun down a shot. They usually also pick a spot at the bar where they can look at their reflection in the mirror behind the bar. This serves two purposes.

It allows them to see that they are actually existing in this certain space in time (sometimes there are questions) and they can see behind them. Very important to the accomplished drinker.

Recovery has it's tells, too.

There are phrases you hear, over and over, and the veteran to recovery has a certain air about them, more of an attitude. I know the word attitude denotes a general arrogance, but the recovery vet is much more humble, without even trying. So if you know a few things, and you go back to meetings after more research, you may fool a few folks into thinking you still have your shit in one sock. For a while.

I threw my game face on that night and arrived a few minutes early.

An old timer, (one who has been dry so long they shy away from open flames) was making coffee.
He introduced himself.

"First meeting?", he asked.
"Me? (I was the only one in the room.) Oh no, been around awhile."
"Bullshit." He went back to making coffee.

I failed to mention the old timers can also spot a wet drunk from 1,000 yards. I tap danced around the topic and admitted yes, I was coming back, but had over a year before I went back out. He was not impressed. Now I was too embarrassed to leave and too mortified to stay. Shit.

I took a Styrofoam cup of coffee and sat at the table, watching the regulars arrive.

The meeting filled up and a man walked in during the opening reading. Tall, tan and fit, he was a dead ringer for Errol Flynn. Not the actor. The Movie Star.

He was also from Texas and he owned his own sport fishing boat. We talked after the meeting and he agreed to sponsor me. He also gave me a job as his first mate on his boat.

I was now a professional sport fisherman. The day before I was a coked out pizza waiter. Once again, all I had to do was acknowledge the problem and ask for help.

The universe did the rest.

Now if I could just remember port from starboard...

Pidgeon...not to be confused with English. Seriously, it's not even close.

Apparently I had blacked out and tried to prove a point to God. Looked like God won.

I showered, took some aspirin and actually looked for a volume control knob somewhere in my room to dim the crashing of the waves. If anything, they were getting louder. God, my head hurt. (It was at this point I swore off Stienlager...not drinking, no, that would have made too much sense, and we all know it probably wouldn't have worked anyway.)

There was a restaurant next door with a patio by the water. Food seemed to be in order...food and a large Bloody Mary.  Perhaps two.

I ordered eggs Benedict and sank half the drink, munching on the celery. 

As the vodka hit bottom I looked across the Pacific to the horizon, and thought, damn, that's a lot of water. (What do you want...my head hurt.)

After breakfast and my two fortifying cocktails I felt human enough to wander through town. As of now, I was technically a tourist, so I did the touristy things. Gawked at the natural beauty, wandered through touristy shops and bought large buds of purple weed from sidewalk surfers on skateboards.

 (It took awhile for me to understand them as they all spoke that strange bastardization of the English language...Pidgeon. It really takes some getting used to. Vowels were dropped and entire words were omitted and substituted and it was done in a sing-song fashion. In fact, there was more of a cultural difference in the speaking of the language than the language itself. Very hard to describe.)

I tried to keep the drug and alcohol use to a respectable level, avoiding a huge bottom out, but my tolerance was wearing thin. I kept to myself and found out of the way beaches where I could soak up sun and body surf. My pasty Alaska pallor was replaced with a deepwater tan, and my hair bleached out from the sun and salt.

I had found an apartment on Mongoose lane, and started waiting tables at a pizza joint in town. One of my co-workers was a coke freak and after a particularly long and vibrant weekend, I decided to try and get clean one more time. I looked in the phone book and dialed a number. The meetings were a block away, in an open air pavilion. 

I had stumbled past the place countless times and never knew. All I had to do was ask for help, and there it was.

Here we go again...

Writing my wrongs...

So, another cab ride into a strange town, surrounded by beautiful scenery, thousands of miles away from anything remotely close to responsibility and inside I was miserable. 

If one is in recovery long enough, you hear about the hole in our stomachs...the one that no amount of booze, drugs, sex, relationships, (and no, the two are not mutually exclusive) shopping, or other peoples money can fill.  I mean here I was, literally in paradise and all I wanted to do was numb out. 

I told the cabdriver the same thing I had told the one in Alaska, and after about fifteen minutes he deposited me in front of a weekly motel, right on the water and I paid for two weeks up front. 

All the rooms had lanais' (balconies) and the Pacific Ocean was crashing onto huge rocks fifteen feet away. There was an ice and beer store a block away. 

I strolled through town, got something to eat and picked up two six packs of Stienlager and some ice.

I cracked a beer on my lanais and watched the sun set somewhere over Japan and did my best to fill the hole.

I came to around daybreak with what felt like an icepick lodged in my temporal lobe and empty beer bottles surrounding me on the floor.

My God, someone had cranked up the volume on the waves...I felt like hell and noticed my big blue recovery book was laying on the floor. Soaked.

 It smelled like urine, and I could only hope it was my own.

Captain Cook was eaten for this...

Now before I go off on a rant, and I am accused of being homophobic, uptight or, heaven forbid unenlightened, I declined his pass.
I did it with stoned style and grace, no need in getting ugly because someone, albeit a same sex someone, was attracted to me. In my defense, I was buff, young and alone, and I felt it a little rude to use these things as an excuse to grope my junk just because you turned me on to some weed. (Yeah ladies, a lot like the buy you a drink ploy...you know what I'm talking about.) But, rejection is still what it is, and I guess it made him mad.

He made me walk back to the terminal. (This was not my first rodeo by the way...growing up I was sexually abused a number of times and approached many more. By the time I was ten I had seen more naked old men than Heidi Fleiss. And before I upset some of you more sensitive types...I know there is no parallel between child molesters and gay men, I am not making that comparison, just stating a fact. I stopped being victimized by it a long time ago. To put it succinctly, I got off the cross, used the wood to build a bridge and got over it. Enough said.)

I boarded the commuter flight and hit on the flight attendant extra hard. (Just to be sure)

We landed forty minutes later in the middle of a perfumed moonscape of black lava fields.

A really big ass ocean on one side (for those of you in Texas, you know that this is actually a standard unit of measurement,) and grand, green and lush mountains on the other. Paradise.

I hailed a cab, and history, as it is want to do, repeated itself, one more time...

Poi tastes like cabdriver feet...

Again with the duffel bag.

This time I had a sober layover in the San Francisco Airport. The thought meandered around in my head that prior to entering an aluminum tube and traveling at 30,000 feet for roughly a couple of thousand miles over nothing but water; a drink may be in order.

But I held fast. I heard that if the notion came upon you, it was wise to make a phone call. I dialed a recovery hot line in the phone book while standing in a long tiled hallway amid a bank of pay phones and talked to some faceless, sober drunk, until the urge passed.

I later learned that it may have done nothing for me, but it kept him sober. And that was really the way this thing worked...it wasn't that altruistic, it was rather self serving...sure, I'll help others, as long as I'm getting mine in return.

I patted myself on the back all the way to Honolulu, arriving at one big freaking expanse of airport well after midnight. I deplaned and the warm, perfumed air was a rush, after the stringent, bracing sub-zero air of Alaska.

No hotties with garlands of flowers to welcome me, just Asian looking people working in an airport, buffing floors, nodding off at checkout counters and cleaning bathrooms.

I wandered around and looked out the big windows at the runway. It was dark, so all I could see were runway lights, but I was here. One may ask, now what? Did I have a job lined up, a place to stay, money in the bank? Have you forgotten who you're dealing with? Of course not.

I read a travelers account of the Islands and settled on the Big Island of Hawaii. Volcanoes, cowboys, marlin fisherman, and the Islanders killed Capt. Cook and ate him not far from where I was supposed to land. Perfect.

I had enough cash to rent a place for a couple of weeks and eat while I looked for work, but this time I had something else in my duffel bag...a big blue recovery based book. I had no intention of screwing this up, after all I was in paradise.

The puddle jumper left Honolulu at 7 a.m. for a forty minute flight to the Big Island. I dozed in a hard plastic chair, equipped with a bolted on, coin operated television.

One of the maintenance workers was buffing the floor around my chair, skinny, Asian with a pencil thin mustache. Kind of a Hawaiian John Waters. He stopped buffing and smiled at me. Uh oh.

He asked me if I smoked. Since he asked in a brusque, oblique way, I knew he wasn't talking about Marlboro's. I had heard legends of Hawaiian weed and thought to myself, why not, I'm not drinking, and I'm only passing through.The thought of the book in my bag never even bubbled to the surface.

He led me through the employees exit to his car, an old Dodge Dart, and we motored out to an empty portion of the runway. Halfway through the joint, I knew it was serious weed, and I was captivated by the planes landing and taking off, here in the middle of the Pacific.

That was when he put his hand on my knee.

Let us discuss insanity...

Insanity. The word conjures different images for different people.

There's the rocking back and forth in your own filth while yodeling pig-latin variety; carving up a family and placing them in the freezer "Donner...Party of six!" type, as well as simply talking out loud to yourself-and answering, to name, according to the American Psychiatric Association, but a few.

There is also the definition of doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. That is the variety I am most at home with.(Talking to myself not withstanding.)

One would think that armed with the self knowledge that alcohol and drugs were a bad mix for me, I would leave them alone, as in, burn your hand on the stove, don't touch it again, kind of thing.

Not so much.

Self knowledge rarely availed me anything at all, except fodder for guilt when the dust began to settle.

My first revelation that I might be alcoholic came one freezing night in the army, when drunk and carrying a bottle of Jack Daniels across a frozen parade field at three a.m.

I slipped and fell, shattering the bottle and cutting my hand. I watched it, helpless, as it pooled amid the shards of broken glass. The amber liquid mixed with my blood, melting the ice in small, concise spots. I cried when I saw the broken bottle.

The revelation struck me right between the eye's...I was a drunk, and there wasn't anything I could do about it.

Did I stop? Like hell.

Later, after treatment and gaining all the self knowledge about the condition I could handle, one would surmise I would recoil from the stuff as if from a flame. Instead I ran to the stuff...expecting things this time, to be different. (found out there are many sharp edges in sobriety...booze rounded them off. If I had learned to dodge, just a little bit...)

Now, that's insane.

That being said, we can resume our adventure...

Easing God Out (Ego)

I was twenty three and healthy. My roommate at the halfway house thought getting in shape would be a good idea, so we started to work out. The results were fast and I began getting noticed.

My boss was being little miss flirty and I ate it up. We had lunch together at a little Italian place on the wharf, not far from where I hid my box, although I neglected to tell her that. Need to know, and all. (I was reminded of Lady and the Tramp, but I stopped short of rolling a meatball to her with my nose.) It was a lot of smiles, long looks and stupid little jokes.

Her husband, the trooper, was at symposiums all over the state and as far away as Seattle. She was lonely. I tried to keep it innocent.

I failed to realize I had no self esteem. I thought if I looked like I had it together, and someone, albeit a married someone, found me attractive, how screwed up could I be?

Years later I would hear the following at a meeting: To have self esteem, do esteemable things. Who knew?

I started to cut back on meetings and began what would later become a pattern in my recovery dynamic. Get sober, meet a woman, and blow it, waking up broke, sticky and confused.

I was coming up on a year sober and our flirtations finally culminated in the physical. We went to a movie, "Against all Odds" and I recall Jeff Bridges drove a Porsche and drank beer in Mexico. The beer looked good, really good.

While Juneau was the State Capitol, it was still a small town, and her husband eventually heard the rumor. People disappear in Alaska almost daily, and I didn't want to be one.

I cashed in my terminal leave and caught the next plane to Hawaii. I was tired of being cold.

When you pray, move your feet. (African proverb)

I was learning that God was not Santa Claus. I was told to pray, and I did, even when I knew the words were just falling down around my ankles and not going anywhere. I also learned to take action and not lay down and take it in the kiester whenever anything negative occurred. I began to stand up for me.

There was a huge learning curve ahead for me but I learned about the whole one day at a time concept, and I placed one foot in front of the other; and things began to happen.

I applied for, and was accepted into a halfway house after being sober ninety days. I learned to take responsibility, in small, sometimes irritating ways, like making my bed, taking out trash, washing dishes.

There were setbacks for all of us in the house. A few ran away, a few got loaded, and a few hung on to recovery.

I applied for a job that was totally out of my element. I took a test for the State office building, and applied for a position as safety officer in the telecommunications division. I had no idea what the duties were, but I dug the title.

My boss was a pretty, auburn haired, thirty something professional bureaucrat, with caramel colored eyes. She was married to a disinterested State Trooper and she thought I was cute.

Hindsight being what it is, well, you get the idea...

Sought through prayer and medication...

The guys at the Vet center pulled some strings and I was taken to the Regional Rehabilitation Center, adjacent to the small Hospital, outside of town. I hadn't had a drink in 24 hours so I was starting to think this whole idea was bullshit. My body thought differently.

I filled out paperwork, which because of the tremors in my hands was mostly scribble, and I answered health related questions. I was taken to a room with a large window overlooking a nurses station. The fishbowl. The repository for all new drunks so staff could monitor them for the first day of intake. My body had started to get panicked at the thought of no booze and I was starting to slide into terrible.

For the next two days I shook; threw up, dry heaved, cried, sweated, stank, hallucinated and did it all over again, sometimes in reverse order.

When I slept I dreamed of my daughter. Still a baby, but in this dark, cold wasteland, and she would hold her arms out to me and I would run to her. But I could never reach her. I heard a voice I imagined to be hers saying, "It's all right, Daddy, It's all right." I cried alot.

After two days of this, I ate an entire fried egg, and it stayed down. One for the home team.

I was moved to a shared room down the hall and heard the new occupant of the fishbowl go through his terrors. I wasn't that bad, was I? The cute little charge nurse told me I was worse.

I had a roommate and we struck a chord. A lot like friendships in situations of major crisis, we bonded through survival and shared experience. We both thought being sober blew, but were open to see what happened. He had a job in the kitchen. I was offered one but turned it down. My back was to the wall too much to attempt to try anything normal.

I began attending 12 step meetings and counseling sessions and started to journal.There was a group of about fifteen of us of varying ages, backgrounds and sex. I was informed I was a liar, a cheat and a thief and I could make no valid argument against it. After a while my vision cleared and I could read again.

I started to put a few days behind me. People from outside the facility could attend the meetings and they were viewed as minor celebrities. Two of them were alumnus of the hospital and had been sober six months. That gave them apostle status in our eyes. Six months? Without a drink, or a drug? Aint no way, baby. That's impossible. But it was possible, and I began to think it might be for me, as well.

Two of the more popular folks who had gotten to this stage in sobriety were a 24 year old ex-logger and a 19 year old Indian stripper. They were sponsoring people in our group and we all thought it too, too cool.

I figured they knew something we didn't and we unknowingly placed them on pedestals. We wanted to be just like them when we grew up. We got real spiritual, real fast, and a few of us had butterflies blowing out our ass...we made ourselves sick. We had not so much gotten sober as we had gotten good. And that, was just plain dangerous.

Within a year they were both dead. He was found on the side of a mountain in a tartan sleeping bag, a hole blown through his head. She was found hanging in her mother's attic, moonlight shining through the attic window, framing her face as she twirled gently from the rafter.

Sometimes the gorilla wants to dance, long after you're tired.

I might have a problem...

I was so screwed up I failed to see that my circumstances, (living in a refrigerator box, under a pier in Alaska,) were indicative of anything other than really shitty luck. The area in which I placed the box was dry, although sloping toward the water at about a forty five degree angle. I would pass out in the box, and awake halfway down the slope.JG8D69D

I kept to myself like some tragic, phantom after my last foray into the public realm ended with me being passed out against the front of the Red Dog, while being pissed on by three Indians. I didn't have the strength or the self-respect to stop them. (Note- very hard to remove the smell of urine from tweed, just in case anyone was curious.)

While tending bar I failed to alienate everyone except for a group of Vietnam Vets who ran a counseling center in town. I was three years past Vietnam, but a veteran nonetheless, and I became an unofficial project.

One of the Vets, a massive trapper everyone called Bear, lived on a boat in the harbor with his huge black, Newfoundland. He thought a roommate situation would be better than the box, so after throwing me into the harbor to get clean, he invited me on board. (His people skills were what I admired.)

I always have had a fascination with Boats and the water so I thought things were looking up. And they were, except that the bow of the vessel was permanently underwater and the harbor master had condemned the boat. But no matter. We lived in the dry part, albeit at an odd angle to the rest of the world, but what was new.

Bear trapped for a living, and the animals kept him in beer and bacon and massive amounts of dog food. I ponied up my food stamps into the kitty and at least we ate. The chubby girl at the grocery in town felt sorry for me, so she would allow me to buy a couple of cents worth of candy with the stamps, then get the change back for beer. I recall looking at a .39 cent comb and thinking, no...beer money. I combed my hair with a plastic fork for a month.

Bear drank the way I did, and suffered horribly from PTSD, but felt that I might have a problem with drugs and alcohol.

The nerve.

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa...

I didn't exactly ease into a spiraling descent. More like hard right rudder, stick to the firewall, and nosedive into oblivion. The blackouts were coming fast and furious, but not black enough or long enough to erase the guilt and shame.

I came to one night observing a snoring lump in bed beside me. Not entirely unusual but I couldn't remember anything up till then. As I was weaving toward the bathroom my brain registered something propped against the bedside table. Still very foggy, it took awhile to come into focus in the ambient light thrown across the room. The light speared the object at a jagged angle from the bathroom doorway.

Oh, Dear God. It was a wooden leg. Leather straps and all.

It was then I could make out the top of the head in bed. Grey hair. Very, grey hair. Okay...that woke me up.( I dressed as quickly and as silently as possible, which was increasingly difficult to do while dry heaving.)

I made my way to the bar and let myself in, locking the door behind me. A half hour of power drinking calmed the nerves. Then I heard the clop. To be more exact, the clop, drag,sound of a one legged, older Indian woman, coming down the stairs, past the bar. ) I felt like the narrator in Poe's the 'Tell-Tale Heart,' except my madness was inspired by the damned clop, drag, clop, drag, as she searched for her vacant paramour. Not a proud moment but noteworthy in hitting bottom...

That little episode was instrumental in me drinking myself out of a job. (This in a town where drinking is a way of life, not just a hobby.) None of the other bars would touch me, so I applied for food stamps. A friend was letting me sleep on his floor in a used sleeping bag, and he told me later, he was waiting to find me dead in the bag one morning. Sorry to disappoint.

I eventually found a job washing dishes in a waterfront cafe. How sober do you need to be to do that, I thought?

The Southeastern part of Alaska is famous for sudden, blackout inspiring (no pun intended) storms in the spring. As I was failing to hold it together for an entire eight hour shift without a little 'medicine', I took advantage of the power outages.

Whenever the power would go out, the restaurant would cease all activity until the lights came back on. In the dark I would ease into the walk-in cooler across form the steamy Hobart and pound down as many beers as I could before the lights came on. It also occurred to me I needed to hide the results of my activity without taking the empties from the cooler. In a wave of brilliance I decided to shove the empty, brown bottles down the gullets of several large, semi-frozen, whole halibut we kept in the cooler. Genius, I thought.

That was fine until the manager needed a fish. Picking it up by the tail, a case of empty Ranier bottles were vomited across the kitchen. He looked at the bottles. He looked at the fish. He looked at me. I took off my apron and walked out.

That night I threw up on two lesbians at a party in my friends apartment. Even he had his limits.

I moved into a large box under the pier. Now this was living...

Ward is a little hard on the beaver...

I met the plane reasonably sober and when I saw my daughter all bundled up like a papoose I almost lost it. I think at that moment I knew I could not pull this off and get my shit together enough to make it work. But I stuffed that down deep and tap danced as fast as I could. I escorted my family into our little one room and showed them a crib I picked up second hand. My wife didn't seemed too bothered by living over a bar, and God knows I thought it was perfect, where else would I have lived?

As usual, my drinking escalated and she took notice. My bar manager noticed too, as I was gaining unnecessary attention with my behaviour. Considering the business he was in- it just wasn't cool.

My betrothed and I began fighting over the drinking. (This was the same women who stood in the Judges chamber six months pregnant with daisy's propped on her belly while the Judge asked me to sit down before I fell down, during our wedding. On the way home we stopped in a Target parking lot so I could pee. The police did not find it amusing.)

The end wasn't just near, we ran over it.

As usual, I had been out barhopping and upon my return she snapped, flying at me, swinging her fists, punching me in the face. I threw my arms out in front of me and struck her in the nose. We both stopped and I backed out of the room and went downstairs where I power drank to mask the shame and self loathing.

Her Mother wired her rescue cash and the following day they both exited my life.

Walking down the long, beige hallway to the airplane she removed her sunglasses and looked at me with a fierce hatred. Both her eyes were blackened and bruised. She never uttered a word, just walked to the plane. I didn't see her again for eighteen years.