I Can Remember : Part 1 Of ?

They say that it's the small things in life that make it worth living. Simple, straight-forward moments that both keep us grounded and give us wings. There's romanticism at work here, but romanticism that manifests itself in a simple way. A sunrise, a smile, a hug, a warm meal with kind people, telling someone "I love you" and meaning it: these are the small and special things that they are talking about. Things that are small but are also quite valuable; our life's pearls.

"They," is a ubiquitous, abstract concept that we're all aware of--we're all aware of "them" and what "they" have to say. We've all had experience with "them" and "they"--what "they" say or think about this, that and ourselves. My father was one hell of a "they-er," and so was I for a good long time. Denial is one of an alcoholics closest friends and nothing perpetuates denial like deferred blame and guilt--and no one wears or bears these thorned crowns quite as well as a faceless "they."

I was fortunate enough to have a person I cared for (loved) actually say these words to me, to tell me that it's the simple things that matter--peanut butter on toast was one of the examples she gave me. This was a few years ago, and only recently have I been able (or willing) to cast my mind back and remember that conversation. At that time, of course, I was not capable of taking anything from this precious advice--it was too contrary to my experiences, to the flawed and black ideology that had already taken root at the core of my being and begun its cycle of bearing toxic fruit.

But I can remember.

On the other end of the spectrum, they ("they") also say that the devil's in the details. In practice, this is a phrase that usually accompanies an endeavor--the writing of a story, a song, the painting of a picture. Sure, the overall work is great--but just what is the one, tiny element that I feel is missing? What's this itch that I can't seem to scratch? Hell, the devil's in the details.

The saying doesn't carry a straight-ahead, negative connotation with it...but there's that word, "devil," lurking within the phrase. And while most folks, and most turns of the phrase, envision this variation of evil as a tiny, pitchfork-toting imp, for the purposes of this entry I'm going to summon up the full force of the word. I'm talking fire and brimstone here; I'm talking the ruination of souls--Lil' Imp is not the image I'm conjuring so much as the Lord High Satan himself.

Below are some saints and devils from my own life, from my own experiences with alcoholism, dysfunction and devastation. Even the most recent of them is still in the past: still not "now." But they are mine all the same--they were and still are. These are all moments that existed, that I lived in (or more so, through) and that still hold gravity and bearing on my life now.

I know this because I can remember.

I can remember my first taste of alcohol. I was ten years old. My first drink came to me by way of a half-full (or was it half-empty?) sixteen-ounce can of Schaeffer's offered by my father.

We were standing on the back porch of our home in York, PA--a porch that has for years now been overgrown with creepers and weeds. Addiction robs us of our awareness; there is no essence left when it's through. And no time or concern for back porches, weeds or creepers.

I believe that the old back porch fell into disuse long before my father's alcoholism became terminal, long before his passing due to acute alcoholism; long before my spiral and my mother's spiral into full-bore alcoholic insanity. But I can't rightly say with any real certainty; I was drunk so much and for so long.

But back then, during that early time, it was still a place where my father would go out to grill, to smoke his unfiltered Camel cigarettes and drink his few beers or slug of brandy a day. This golden time came long before his few a day became first a few too many, and then a few over the line of sanity and then, ultimately, only a few away from death's door.

His face was unshaven, grizzled, his hair was shoulder length; standing tall and strong in his blue jeans and t-shirt. The pack of unfiltered, full-flavor, full-tar Camels I mentioned earlier glared rebelliously out of his t-shirt's breast pocket; they called the world's bluff and the world looked away. He smelled of cigarettes, of beer, of brandy and most of all of the outside--this "outside" smell, a cold, wild, unkempt smell, is one that I still remember and one that I will always associate with my father. He was an outdoors man, a hunter and a fisherman, a Westerner and an alcoholic and looking up at him then, from my ten-year-old position so close to the ground, he looked like an immortal and a hero. There was no one stronger, I can recall thinking then, tougher or better than my dad. No one.

"This is nasty--it's not sweet," was my response to my first taste of Schaeffer's--a bit ironic, I suppose, because a lifetime of using and perusing brands and beers later let me know that Schaeffer's is, in fact, a very sweet-tasting beer.

"That's good, buddy. It's good that you don't like it. Don't start drinking," my father replied, Camel jutting from his mouth and grilling tongs in hand.

A father and a son sharing a beer on a summer night, the air cool, the sun low, the grill fired up and steaks sizzling: a slice of pure Americana if there ever was one. And not a completely unpleasant memory; seeing my father clearly in my mind's eye, strong and young and still right, is a precious mental photograph.

But, with the clarity of sobriety and with the matured perspective age and experience imparts, I can see the madness nipping away at the edges of this moment. A father and son sharing half a beer; Americana, as surely as I said earlier. But, for a father who is an alcoholic and for a son who has every odd stacked in his disadvantage, every card lying face up and screaming, "You will become a drunk," Americana is only empty romanticism: the self-deceptive kind, not the pure, strings-free manifestation I mentioned at the offset of this entry.

There was no evil at work within my father in that moment: only ignorance. He did not wish for the end he received 20 odd years later--emaciated, incapable of speech due to a trach in his throat (one that filled and then ran over with black bile and blood), his body gaunt and frail; broken and dying, regretting so much and understanding it all far too late.

Likewise, he did not wish to make me into the alcoholic I became. And I am not making the claim that this one long-ago moment did that trick, that it performed it all by it's lonesome; my intentions are to paint one picture that follows the theme of unknowing. One picture in a long line of them and most of them portraits of my own ignorance.

But this is how ignorance works in its purest form: under the guise of night, invisible to our waking minds. Ignorance implies not knowing, not knowing better; painful as it is to say and know, this means that there was no other way things could have played out when ignorance is the tune we dance to.

I can remember the first time I got falling down, rip roaring drunk. I was 13 or 14--I can't say with any certainty to which age I was closer, though I do know that middle school was still a new-ish thing to me. That's as good as I can do with recollecting that part of things, I'm sorry to say.

So, young--13 or 14. And I had put down an entire box of Franzia table wine.

The bathroom was spinning around me like a tempest, I was on my hands and knees, and I was kneeling in an inch deep pool of red puke. From what seemed to be outside of my self--slightly above and to the right, actually--I watched my hands rise to my face; my pants were soaking through to the skin, soaking through with stinking, staining vomit.

"No! I'm too young to die!" I remember screaming, breathless and hoarse. My nose was filled with puke, my sinuses were drowning in puke, my pants were stained and ruined with it and my hair was gelled with half-digested food and stomach fluids. I can't remember getting to the bathroom--all I can remember is the being there--but what is certain is that my world in that moment was completely saturated with puke.

And yet, despite the overpowering stench of puke, when I saw all that red on my own palms I was convinced that what I had vomited up was blood; that all of the lectures and talks that I'd heard in school about the dangers of drinking (lectures and talks that, in respect to waylaying my own alcoholism, unfortunately came too late) were all true.

I had done a bad thing, gotten shitfaced drunk, and now I was dying because of it.

If predisposition is prophecy--a concept that I believe does have merit--than that long ago moment I spent in an upstairs bathroom paralleled beside my life and alcoholism as it developed could be something right out of Nostradamus' writings. Because, in time and in years, I would actually hit the point where I was coughing up my own life's blood due to my advanced alcoholism.

While we're on the subject of my time in middle school, I can remember taking fifths of Crown Royal liquor with me to school in my backpack and then mixing it with my ice tea at lunch. And taking little, bird-small nips of it between classes of course.

I can remember polishing off six-packs of wine coolers and beers every night; I'd lay upstairs in my bed, listen to my parents screaming and fighting downstairs, and tuck them away one after another. My friends were drinking soda or iced tea and working on their homework; I was getting drunk.

Somehow I managed to maintain a high grade point average and attend "advanced" classes all throughout middle school and up until 10th grade, when I dropped out of high school due to "just not giving a fuck" anymore.

I went on to finish my final two years of high school at a local alternative school; but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Allow me to backpedal a moment.

We all have our gifts as well as our curses and my mind is a gift that I can only truly be thankful for, and more so than that respectful towards, in sobriety. I could, for a time, function as an alcoholic both physically and mentally--emotionally is another story--when it came to commitments like school and work and personal obligations like stories and songs. I could function, but I was certainly not present--especially as the years, and the bottles, stacked one on the other. But the makings of my mind as it exists now stand firmly in those past times; beliefs, concepts, ideologies change but I do not believe that capacity is fluid. Who we are as a person, so far as how our individual minds work, comes with the original package in my opinion.

Since becoming sober, I've had several people close to me refer to me as a "survivor"--one of them frankly telling me he "Doesn't know how I am, or how I did it, but I am and I did."

Do either of these things explain how I continued to achieve in school while working double time on the booze as a young, fledgling alcoholic? I think they both do. But, more so than both of them I did what I did--what I was capable of doing--because that's what we do as human beings. The thinking and doing and achieving in school as well as the pounding of beer, wine and liquor were simply what I was made to do at that point of my life: by way of genetics, circumstances and environments it was who I was.

That's where so much of the sadness comes from; it's a vacancy, looking back and having to say in honesty time and time again, "I was drunk for that. I can't remember. I can remember that, but I was still drunk. Drunk again for that moment." Continue ad nauseum.

But the remembering is important, the remembering of both those saints and those devils.

And I can remember.