Chapter 2: He Lived Only To Drink
· · ·
"I had been preached to, analyzed, cursed, and counseled, but no one had
ever said, 'I identify with what's going on with you. It happened to me and
this is what I did about it.'"
ON LOOKING BACK at my life, I can't see anything that would have warned me
or my family of the devastation that alcoholism had in store for us. To our
collective memory there was no drinking on either side of the family. We
were from a long Southern Missionary Baptist tradition. My father was a
minister, and I attended his church every Sunday with the rest of the family
and, like them, was very active in religious work. My parents were also
educators; my father was principal of the school I attended, and my mother
taught there. They were both champions of community outreach and well
respected. There was caring and togetherness among us. My maternal
grandmother, herself a deeply religious woman who lived with us, helped
raise me and was a living example of unconditional love.
Early on, the values of morality and learning were impressed on me. I was
taught that if you were well educated and morally upstanding, there was
nothing that could stand in the way of your success in this life or
hereafter. As a child and young man, I was evangelical---literally drunk
with moral zeal and intellectual ambition. I excelled in school and dreamed
of a career in teaching and helping others.
It was not until I was an adult, away from the family and doing graduate
work at a prestigious East Coast university, that I had my first real drink
of alcohol. I had tasted beer and a little wine before that and long since
decided that fruit juice tasted better. I had never been inside a bar until
one evening some fellow students persuaded me to go with them to a local
cocktail lounge. I was fascinated. I still remember the hazy, smoky
atmosphere, the hushed voices, the tinkle of ice in the glasses. It was pure
sophistication. But most of all I remember that first sensation of the warm
whiskey radiating through my body.
I drank so much that night that nobody believed I hadn't been drinking all
the time, and I didn't get drunk, although there were parts of the evening
that I didn't remember the next day. But more important than anything else
that night, I belonged. I was at home in the universe; I was comfortable
with people. Despite my active church and school life as a child, I had
never felt really comfortable; I was actually very nervous and insecure
around people and most of the time forced myself to be outgoing like my
parents because I thought it was my duty. But this night in the bar was like
no other time in my life. Not only was I completely at ease, but I actually
loved all the strangers around me and they loved me in return, I thought,
all because of this magic potion, alcohol. What a discovery. What a
revelation!
The following year I began my career as a teacher. My first job was at a
college fifty miles from my hometown. Before the school year ended, I had
been asked to resign because of my drinking. Within that short space of
time, drinking had become an accepted way of life. I loved booze. I loved
people who drank and the places where they drank. At that time in my life,
although I had lost my first job and embarrassed my family, it never
occurred to me that alcohol could be a problem. From that first night at the
bar a year earlier, I had made a profound decision that was to direct my
life for many years to come: Alcohol was my friend and I would follow it to
the ends of the earth.
After that first job there were many more that I lost, all because of my
drinking. I taught in many schools and in different states. I was no longer
the moral young man who had seen his destiny in helping people live better.
I was loud and arrogant, angry, abusive, always blaming and confronting
others. I was getting arrested and beaten up. I had developed a foul mouth
and was frequently drunk in classes and in public places. Finally my
teaching career ended in total dishonor. My family could not understand what
was happening to me, nor could I. In moments of clarity, I was full of
shame, guilt, and remorse; I had become an embarrassment to all who had had
faith in me; to others I had become a joke. I wanted to die. Now alcohol had
become the only friend I had.
I wound up in an insane asylum, which probably saved my life. I do not
remember how I got there; I do know that I had become suicidal. I became
comfortable there, and months later I cried when I was dismissed. I knew by
that time that I could not make it in the world. I was safe behind the
barred hospital windows and wanted to stay there for the rest of my life. I
could not drink there, but tranquilizers and other drugs abounded and I
helped myself to them. The word alcoholic was never mentioned. I do not
believe the doctors knew much more about alcoholism than I did.
When I was released from the asylum, I moved to a large city to make a new
beginning. My life had become a series of new beginnings. In time I picked
up the drink, got good jobs, and lost them as I had in the past. All the
fear and remorse and terrible depression returned tenfold. It still did not
register that the drinking might be the cause of all this misery. I sold my
blood. I prostituted myself; I drank more. I became homeless and slept in
the bus and train terminals. I scrounged cigarette butts off the sidewalks
and drank from a common wine bottle with other drunks. I drank my way to the
men's municipal shelter and made it my home. I panhandled. By this time I
lived only to drink. I did not bathe or change clothes; I stank; I became
thin and ill; I had begun to hear voices and accepted them as death omens. I
was frightened, arrogant, enraged, and resentful of man, God, and the
universe. There was nothing else to live for, but I was too frightened to
die.
It was at this point that a woman who was a social worker on skid row and a
sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous sat me down in her office and told me
her story---how she drank, what happened, and how she got sober. No one had
ever done this before. I had been preached to, analyzed, cursed, and
counseled, but no one had ever said, "I identify with what's going on with
you. It happened to me, and this is what I did about it." She got me to my
first A.A. meeting that same evening.
The people at the meetings gathered around me in kindness in those early
days, and I did not drink. But the spiritual demons of withdrawal descended
on me. I was black, and these people were white. What did they know about
suffering? What could they tell me? I was black and bright, and the world
had consistently rejected me for it. I hated this world, its people, and its
punishing God. Yet I believed the people in A.A. were sincere and whatever
they believed in was working for them. I just did not believe that A.A.
would work for me as a black drunk.
I genuinely believed that I was different until much later, when I had what
I now know to be my first spiritual awakening: that I was an alcoholic and I
didn't have to drink! I also learned that alcoholism, as an equal
opportunity illness, does not discriminate---is not restricted to race,
creed, or geography. At last I was released from the bondage of my
uniqueness.
In early sobriety I had to continue to live in a flophouse filled with
active drunks. Not drinking, I became acutely aware of my surroundings---the
foul smells, the noise, the hostility and physical danger. My resentments
mounted at the realization that I had flushed a career down the drain,
disgraced and alienated my family, and been relegated to the meanest of
institutions, a skid row shelter. But I was also able to realize that this
bonfire of resentment and rage was beckoning me to pick up a drink and
plunge in to my death. Then I realized that I had to separate my sobriety
from everything else that was going on in my life. No matter what happened
or didn't happen, I couldn't drink. In fact, none of these things that I was
going through had anything to do with my sobriety; the tides of life flow
endlessly for better or worse, both good and bad, and I cannot allow my
sobriety to become dependent on these ups and downs of living. Sobriety must
live a life of its own.
More important, I came to believe that I cannot do this alone. From
childhood, despite the love I experienced, I had never let people, even
those closest to me, inside my life. All my life I had lived the deepest of
lies, not sharing with anyone my true thoughts and feelings. I thought I had
a direct line to God, and I built a wall of distrust around myself. In A.A.
I faced the pervasive "we" of the Twelve Steps and gradually realized that I
can separate and protect my sobriety from outside hazards only inasmuch as I
rely on the sober experience of other A.A. members and share their journey
through the steps to recovery.
The rewards of sobriety are bountiful and as progressive as the disease they
counteract. Certainly among these rewards for me are release from the prison
of uniqueness, and the realization that participation in the A.A. way of
life is a blessing and a privilege beyond estimate---a blessing to live a
life free from the pain and degradation of drinking and filled with the joy
of useful, sober living, and a privilege to grow in sobriety one day at a
time and bring the message of hope as it was brought to me.