Under the Broadway Bridge (Part One)
Part Two will appear in the December 2005 issue
I came to my first closed meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous because
I didn’t want to die drunk. That was on
September 29, 1987, the day of my thirty-fifth birthday. I was 6”
2” and weighed 140 pounds. My eyes were red, and I couldn’t
control when or where I went to the bathroom. I was wearing all the clothes
I owned: jeans with holes in the knees, a T-shirt that had once been white,
a jean jacket, and running shoes with holes in the bottom. I didn’t
own socks or underwear.
The man who brought me to the meeting sat me down at a
table and brought me half a cup of coffee. I was immediately resentful. Why
only half a cup? I tried to drink it. I was shaking so hard, I spilled the
coffee before I got it to my lips. I was waiting for the stranger sitting
next to me to make some kind of smart remark or joke. As sick and desperate
as I was, I would have done my best to beat him bloody.
The stranger reached over and gently took the cup from
my trembling hand. He said, “That’s okay. I’ll get you
another one.”
That is the story of my experience in Alcoholics
Anonymous. I have always received the best of the best from those around
me.
When it came time to pass the basket, the woman
chairing the meeting said, “And if you don’t have any money,
take some.” I took ten dollars. They said to beg, borrow, or steal a
Big Book. I stole theirs.
I was born in London, Ontario, the second oldest of
twelve children. We are of Irish and Scottish descent. I don’t
remember the first time I drank, but I do remember the first time I got
drunk. I was an altar boy and eight years old. Mass was over and the priest
had gone. I took a bottle of wine from the cabinet and went down to the
woods behind the church. As I unscrewed the top, I knew what it was going
to taste like in my mouth, I knew how it was going to burn my throat, I
knew how it was going to warm my belly and explode in my head. I knew these
things because I had drunk before. This time, however, I was going to drink
the whole bottle. I wanted to get drunk. I thought that if I could drink
this bottle of wine, maybe the pain in my life would subside. The cause of
the pain is irrelevant. We all have pain, some real, some imagined.
My parents didn’t drink and they didn’t
have alcohol in the house. I had seen drunk people on the streets, on TV,
at parties around the neighborhood. I knew what drunk looked like. Although
I knew what drunk looked like, I had no idea what drunk felt like, and it
was not what I expected.
It doesn’t take long for an eight-year-old kid
with a bottle of wine to get drunk. My parents were not impressed. The
police were not impressed. The priest certainly was not impressed. When I
woke up, they told me I had been picked up in the middle of a busy
intersection trying to sell wine to people in passing cars. So, at eight
years old, I was in a blackout, in trouble, and didn’t know how to
stop what was going on.
The summer I was nine, I was hospitalized with
rheumatic fever. I was supposed to have complete bed rest. Part of the
treatment was that every afternoon I got a half glass of beer. It was
supposed to relax me, to make my heartbeat regular. Can you imagine a
nine-year-old kid hitting the side of his bed and yelling,
“Where’s my beer!” I was now a daily drinker.
At nine years old, and fortified with a half glass of
beer, I wasn’t going to stay in bed. There were lots of kids in that
hospital. Some of them had cancer, some were missing arms or legs or had
had kidney transplants — I wanted to cheer them up, to play with
them, to make friends. The head nurse told me that if they caught me out of
my bed one more time they were going to tie me into bed. I didn’t
believe them.
I vividly remember them coming for me. I was under a
bed down the hall from my room. They pulled the mattress off the bed,
pulled the bed from the wall, and took me kicking and screaming back to my
room where they put me in a straitjacket and tied my hands and feet to the
bed with leather restraints. That was the first time that I felt totally
powerless, helpless, terrified. No one came to answer my screams for help.
I have been in that position many times —
powerless, helpless, and afraid. Sometimes it was the guy in the bar who
wouldn’t stop hitting me, even after I was unconscious.
Sometimes it was in the nut house and the padded room and more
restraints. Sometimes it was the police who were not too gentle with a
mouthy, defiant drunk. Sometimes it was teachers who refused to tolerate my
behavior in the classroom or employers who fired me for being drunk at
work.
When I was ten years old, I got pneumonia for the first
time. I remember my mother sitting at the side of my hospital bed softly
praying: “Please God, do not let him die.” God bless my mother.
This scene was often repeated in the following years. Many times I almost
died. But in my view, pneumonia had nothing to do with drinking. Pneumonia
was the result of natural causes. If you sleep outside in the rain and the
snow and the wind, you’re likely to get pneumonia.
I got my first job — as a paperboy — when I
was fourteen. I loved that job. Getting up in the middle of the night to
throw things at houses and be paid for it was an idea that really excited
me. When I made my collections on Friday night, I paid close attention to
who the party people were on my route. I soon discovered the garages and
sheds where they stored their beer and spirits. Now I could access a
seemingly endless supply that helped me cope with many mornings of
inclement weather. The job was so much easier with a wee bit of a nip under
my belt. (This habit of morning drinking to get the day off to a good start
was something I continued for years.) When the boss showed up on my paper
route one morning to find me quite tipsy, he fired me.
I really didn’t understand. It was a cold winter
day and the snow was blowing sideways. None of the other carriers had shown
up at the drop-off location that morning. I was the only one doing a route,
staggering my way bravely through the snowdrifts from house to house. I was
on the wrong street but didn’t realize it until my boss told me.
Almost every job ended with the same scenario. I was
not fired because I failed to do the work. I was fired because I was
falling down drunk. Many, many jobs ended that way.
One summer night when I was fifteen, I was crawling
home — too drunk to walk, too young to drive — and when I got
to the steps of my front porch, I saw my father sitting there, watching me.
He said, “Hugh, if you are going to live in my house, you can’t
drink.”
I had no choice. I turned around, crawled off down the
street, and never lived in my father’s house on a full-time basis
again. I hated my father for years because of that night. In my mind, he
threw me out. What really happened was that he gave me a clear choice. What
he didn’t realize was, that when it came to booze, I had no choice. I
was a drinker.
At twenty, I finally graduated from high school. I was
not the brightest bulb in the line, but I was certainly not the dimmest
either. It took so long to finish high school because they kept throwing me
out. I was expelled, suspended, and sometimes I just quit. I had a tough
time finishing, but it was something I wanted to do and I finally did in
1972.
It was the time of youth hostels, hippies, drugs,
booze, and free love. Oh, what a wonderful world. I was soon off on an
adventure with my oldest brother. We drove west as far as the car would
take us. The engine blew up in Edmonton, so that’s where we stayed.
My brother finally went home while I stayed on. I don’t remember much
of that time. I do remember an underground shopping mall where I slept at
night, begging on the street during the day. I remember I somehow got
enough money to pay rent. I think I stayed in Edmonton for about a year. I
landed a job at a produce company as an invoice clerk. I liked that
position, working in an office. I felt that I’d accomplished
something significant by getting that job and doing it well. But eventually
I was fired for being falling-down drunk at work.
I returned home defeated. I managed to get a job as an
assistant manager at a fast-food restaurant and bought my first new car. I
got fired from that job for being drunk. I got another job at a hospital
and as trouble developed in one department, I transferred to another. That
worked for several years.
I was drunk when I met a really nice girl. I was drunk
when I proposed to her. I was drunk at the wedding. I was drunk at the
birth of our daughter two years later. I finished my career at the hospital
and got a job as a city bus driver. I was drunk when I said, “Take
this job and shove it” – but they accepted my resignation
anyway. I was drunk when my wife threw me out after eight years of
marriage. Did I love that woman, that child of ours? Oh, yes, indeed. But
love wasn’t enough. I was a drinker.
I immediately went to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island,
where another brother lived. I stayed there for a couple of years. Again,
there was trouble and I had to leave with all the haste that
self-preservation dictates. I stopped in Winnipeg for a while — I
don’t remember how long. I went back to British Columbia. I went to
Ontario to visit my daughter a couple of times. I remember one of my road
trips from Vancouver Island in British Columbia back to London, Ontario. I
had bought supplies for the trip — and a carton of bourbon.
I ended up in Regina, Saskat-chewan. I was drunk when I
got run over by a car. Of all the things that happened to me, that one hurt
the most. The people in the hospital wanted to cut off my jeans, so I
decided to leave. A woman helped carry me to her car and asked where I
wanted to go. I told her any bar would do. I didn’t need doctors or
medication. I needed a drink.
I got a lot of free booze that night, but the booze
didn’t kill the pain. People couldn’t believe that I was out in
public, that I wasn’t in the hospital. The next day, I took an
ambulance back to the hospital. I was in and out of the hospital for eight
months, had several surgeries and hours of physiotherapy before they were
finished with me. Yet the day I was run over, I was in a bar instead of a
hospital. I was powerless over alcohol. It ruled my life. I couldn’t
stop.
I remember other signs that I was powerless over
alcohol. I’d been living in a park and it started raining. I
didn’t want to get pneumonia from natural causes, so I searched for
shelter. From the park bench I was lying on, I looked across the street to
a fast-food restaurant and saw a dumpster behind it. I staggered across the
street, crawled into the dumpster, and pulled the top down. The rain really
started to pour down. It was loud, sounding like nails pounding into the
metal. I was pleased with myself that I’d gotten out of the rain. I
began to root around in the orange garbage bags to see what treasures might
be in there. I found two Big Macs and I ate them. I remember saying a quick
little grace before that meal in the dumpster. I said, “Thank you,
God,” feeling certain God was looking after me. I was fairly dry,
reasonably fed, and comfortably tipsy. I went to sleep.
Of all the things I did in my drinking years, that is
the one that disgusts me the most. I was in such a screwed-up mental state
that I found that dumpster acceptable. It is beyond bizarre what alcohol
does to the mind.
Hugh J., Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
End of Part 1.
Part 2 will appear in the December 2005
issue.
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