As
I’ve told in other stories, I got drunk for the first time when
I was 13 years old. My father, a Communist Party organizer, had been
arrested in June, 1951, along with 16 New York comrades two weeks
earlier for violation of the Smith Act. It was a fearful time for
kids, especially us Red Diaper Babies; it was the McCarthy Era, the
Cold War. It was ducking under desks at school in drills in case a
Russian A-Bomb dropped on us; it was the Rosenbergs facing the
electric chasir for spying for the Soviets. I escaped by reading
historical novels and science-fiction – the past and the
future, because the present was too scary to deal with. Until I got
drunk and knew there was a better way.
In
my early teens I drank from my parents’ small whiskey stash,
and then beer sitting on the stoops in summer. I swore that beer was
the only thing that quenched my thirst during the hot and humid days
and nights. Mom and Dad didn’t drink much, although Dad, in
his seaman days after he ran away from home to escape his father’s
beatings, said he wanted to drink himself to death then. On a voyage
to the Soviet Union Russians at a seaman’s club asked his
opinions about things, and he got a first-ever blast of self-esteem. It
was like a religious conversion: the Catholic altar boy became a
dedicated Communist, and quit drinking. For Mom, I think the
drinking came much later, along with other addictions.
When
I was 14 one New Year’s Eve my father asked me if the party I
was going to, up in Yonkers, would have any drinking. I lied and
said, “I don’t think so.” He handed me a pint of
whiskey and said, “You’re only young once – have
fun!”
He
and Mom got into an argument over it as I was trying to sneak out our
East 12th Street apartment door. I almost made
it when
Mom grabbed me by the overcoat and took the bottle from my pocket,
declaring, “No son of mine is going to take whiskey from this
house!” Then she handed me two dollar bills and said, “Buy
your own!” I did, at a liquor store on 14th
Street
where age was never an issue.
I
don’t remember anything about that party except that there was
a bus strike at midnight and the subway was a long, snowy walk away.
Perhaps the alcohol fueled me and kept me warm. And I drank
regularly. I remember trying a sweet wine which I didn’t like,
so I stuck with beer and whiskey, and sometimes rum or tequila. I
hated scotch. I drank at home when my parents were out at defense
meetings. I drank on the summer stoops with friends and neighbors. I
drank at parties, and alone. I drank on snake-hunting excursions
to South Jersey. And I usually drank to get drunk. I vomited a lot
at first, but that slowed down as drinking time went on.
When
I was almost 16 I came down with Infectious Mononucleosis, the
“kissing disease;” a secondary liver infection put me in
the hospital for nearly two weeks. When I was released the doctors
said, “No drinking for a year,” and I honored that. I
didn’t want to end up in the hospital again! I celebrated the
end of that year of abstinence, now living in Washington Heights,
with a monumental puke out the window, moan in the streets, fall down
whiskey binge. It didn’t faze my girlfriend, Elaine, whom I
would later marry; her father was a drinker too.
When
Dad finished his two-year prison term and I married Elaine, my folks
moved to San Francisco, the FBI killing his employment chances in New
York and the Communist Party leadership unwilling to help him because
of political differences. Elaine and I borrowed her father’s
car and drove cross-country in 1958 to visit them, falling in love
with Los Angeles. Pastel-colored houses, flowers, hummingbirds –
heady stuff for two New York street kids.
We
lived in the East Bronx, in a fifth-floor walk-up overlooking the
Crotona Park swimming pool. I had worked as a rat cage cleaner at a
medical center and then as an apprentice painter after being left
back and quitting high school. Fed up with painting and the corrupt
local union, and with too much exposure to benzene, I got a job as a
keeper at the Bronx Zoo Reptile House. Elaine was going to Brooklyn
College, with night classes several evenings a week.
I
had to leave the zoo after a year-and-a-half when tests showed me
highly allergic to the horse serum anti-venom was then made from.
Safety was sloppy in the Reptile House and venomous snakes often on
the loose; bites were inevitable. The “cure” would kill
me quicker than the bite! I went to work for my father-in-law and
his partner at their little direct mail letter shop.
We
wanted to move. Those nights she came from school Elaine was
harassed not by neighborhood toughs – we were neighbors after
all – but by new young cops sent in to keep the streets
peaceable. We found that we couldn’t afford higher rent, and
comparable was hard to find, so instead I used my acquired painting
skills to fix up our apartment. I installed new florescent light
fixtures in the kitchen and bathroom, and laid down a coat of paint
in the bath.
I
was preparing to paint the kitchen and had paper drop-cloths. There’s
an alcoholic trait called Self-Will Run Riot, aka My
Way or the Highway! I carefully hooded the paper drop-cloths over
the gas stove to avoid the pilot light, but as I was going up the
ladder my knee bumped a knob and I turned a burner on. The fire
consumed the kitchen, and adjacent foyer, and smoked up the living
room and bedroom furniture. The firemen had to lug their hose up
five flights of stairs. We never heard from the landlord, but knew
we had to move. Elaine quit school and quickly got an office job,
and we moved our smoky belongings to an apartment in Astoria, Queens,
our rent nearly doubled.
After
a couple of months we were discouraged and decided to move to Los
Angeles, to those pastel-colored houses and flowers and hummingbirds.
The plan was to go to San Francisco and stay with my folks for a few
months, getting jobs and earning enough to move and set up in LA. Mom,
Dad and my sister Karen lived in Eureka Valley, generally a warm
spot on foggy days. With the help of former comrades Dad was working
in a warehouse under contract to Warehouse Local 6 of the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union, a union founded by
Communists, among others. He was out of CP life and just enjoying
being a worker among workers, a return to his pre-party roots.
We
were there about three months when the House Un-American Activities
Committee came to town to expose local Reds. Several hundred
students from UC-Berkeley protested on Friday, May 13, 1960, over
being kept from the hearing room and were dispersed by the San
Francisco police using high-pressure fire hoses and beatings. Seeing
that on TV news some 5,000 people turned up at City Hall on Saturday. I
was among them, with an ex-seaman friend of Dad’s, Tom
Masin, and when police were beating beatnik Jerry Kamstra on the City
Hall steps for taking pictures of the protesters, Tom and I surged
and shouted. A top cop said, “Get those two, they’re
trouble,” and we were got – my first arrest. (For
more, see
Busted at
http://www.storyhouse.org/albertl8.html)
That
made me a San Franciscan – although our first California
apartment was in Berkeley for a year – and it didn’t take
long to develop the San Franciscan’s contempt for Los Angeles,
or to realize that Berkeley was a world unto itself.
I
wrote a Talking Black Friday Blues which was picked
up by
local folksingers and made me part of the in-crowd, invited to
parties as well as being elected Vice-Chair of the newly-formed
anti-HUAC student group. It was at a Berkeley party that I
discovered red wine. Gallon jugs of Red Mountain Burgundy, to be
exact. I could drink this stuff like soda pop! And I did.
When
we staggered home around 3 a.m. I exploded from both ends, but I had
found the true love of my life – red wine. We drove to
wineries to taste; this was before wine tasting became a big tour bus
destination. I liked Louis Martini the best because they let me work
through their list and if I lasted, brought out the really good stuff
that wasn’t on the market yet. Cabernet Sauvignon was my
favorite, then Pinot Noir, then whatever was available, soon
graduating to 1.5 and 3 liter jugs of basic red. I steamed labels
off bottles and mounted them on a board to hang in our living room. I
also drank beer and whiskey, along with tequila and rum, but red
wine was my drink of choice. When we threw a party I switched to 151
proof rum because I had to sip that. I was a gulper, not a sipper,
and if I drank anything else I often was passed out before the party
was over.
I
was a blackout drinker from the beginning, although my blackouts were
so complete I retained no memory of either what transpired or of
memory loss. Others, however, did. One time several of us teenage
12th Streeters visited a candy store at 11th
Street and Second Avenue. We struck up conversation with the locals
who hung out there. I bummed a cigarette from one, Chick, and he
mashed it into my mouth. Chick claimed I had roughed him up for no
reason a month or so before. I could have passed a lie detector test
that I had never seen him before in my life. Much to Chick’s
disappointment, I declined to fight him.
Another
time Elaine and I went to a little party at her co-worker’s
apartment in Walnut Creek. She and I were good friends with Margaret
and her husband Tom. Margaret’s older brother and father were
also there, and we men went out for more ice after a lot of drinking.
The next thing I knew I was trying to throw the brother off their
outdoor second floor landing. Having no idea what I was doing or
why, I backed away and when he came at me I ran down the block. Elaine
joined me and I drove home. I drove drunk often, and never
got stopped.
In
later years I heard about blackouts, but didn’t fully
understand what they meant until a situation developed in the union
of which I was President, Warehouse Union Local 6, ILWU. Membership
had dropped due to plant closures during the Reagan years and we had
to lay off a business agent in the West Bay Division. Since we were
all elected by the membership, Secretary-Treasurer Leon Harris and I
decided it would have to be the one elected with the lowest vote in
the Division. That was Don, a heavy drinker.
We
won approval of our method by the General Executive Board and after
that meeting met with Don to explain how it would work. Our union
contracts forced employers to keep us on the seniority list while
holding union office, so Don had a job to return to at a coffee
plant. He listened and understood, and we asked him to finish out
the week by cleaning up his route and briefing the remaining BAs. I
was totally surprised when Don showed up at the office on Monday
morning with no memory of the GEB meeting or his layoff. So that’s
what a blackout was!
I
do have one brown-out, a vague memory of a fight and slamming a car
door on someone’s head. When, in recovery, I began making my
amends to those I had harmed, I realized that there were some I could
not make amends to – I didn’t even know who they were or
what I had possibly done. My sponsor advised me that I could only do
what I could do.
I
was always a functional alcoholic, able to do my job and generally do
it well, whether as an employee or union rep. I could wait until
work was done, then hurry home and down a couple of large glasses of
red wine before settling down with my family for dinner, continuing
to drink throughout the evening. In March of 1967 a union colleague,
Bruce Benner, invited me to join him on a gold-hunting trip to
Arizona’s Superstition Mountains. That sparked an annual solo
backpack where I fasted and detoxed as I explored Utah’s
deserts, Nevada’s ghost towns, the Sierra Nevada and Kalmiopsis
Wildernesses, with many return trips to the Superstitions. (For
more on this, read Gold Fever: Looking for the Lost Dutchman at
http://www.storyhouse.org/albertl13.html.)
On
the night of May 31, 1967 LeRoy King, International Representative
for the ILWU, visited our apartment in St. Francis Square, affordable
and integrated co-ops sponsored by the union. Would I go to work for
the union the next morning? A small ILWU office workers local’s
Business Agent had died a month earlier, and six contracts were
expiring at midnight. Thus began a 21-year career as a union rep.
I
learned quickly, did a credible job, and eight months later was
tapped to replace the deceased Washington, DC, Legislative
Representative, moving my family across the country. Bloody Mary and
Welsh Rarebit lunches became staples. After three years I realized
that I either became like all the other lobbyists in the nation’s
capitol, or I got out. Local 6 offered me a combination Business
Agent/Organizer post in Salinas, California, and I grabbed it, moving
my wife and two children across the country again.
After
stabilizing the union at the two major plants, McCormick-Schilling
and Nestlé Chocolate, my time was split between Salinas and
the Bay Area, and we moved from rural Prunedale in the hills north of
town to San Francisco. I went to Salinas on Thursday mornings,
stayed overnight, and returned late on Friday. Those Thursday nights
were pretty much drunken revelries in the company of local rank and
file activists.
While
organizing a group of young production line workers in San Francisco,
it turned out that one person was already in the union, John, the
shipping clerk. John thought it unusual the others weren’t
covered by the Master Contract and said he told the BA about it; that
the BA talked to the owner and came back to tell John it was okay. That
was not the kind of union I represented, so I resigned from
staff, went back to work at Woolworth’s Distribution Center
where I held my seniority, ran against that Business Agent –
himself a serious drinker --in the election a few months later, and
won.
Now
it turned out I was expected to drink, even paid to drink, taking
shop stewards or negotiating committees out for lunch during
grievance meetings or contract talks, and buying us both booze with
the expense reimbursed. I also drank on my own and turned in
receipts for meetings that never took place. No one ever noticed
that the Styrofoam cup I carried around with me in the union office
held red wine instead of coffee. After four two-year terms as BA I
was elected President of the 5,000-member local when Keith Eickman, a
non-drinker and my union mentor, retired.
During
this time my son and daughter entered their teens. Like me and my
father, and he and his father, Erik and I clashed regularly. One of
the many gifts of sobriety is the relationship he and I now have; I
have learned much about unconditional love and forgiveness from him. My
daughter, Deirdre, however, remains estranged. I have a strong
relationship with my sister Karen, who moved to The Netherlands many
years ago; sobriety has repaired many things in my life.
The
East Bay, a growing division of the local with a large Mexican
American membership at odds with the black-white coalition that
dominated the local for years, along with a number of left-wing
opposition groups, often voted against the officers, and my opponent
in the election carried the division while I won the others. I went
to my first East Bay membership meeting as President drunk, managed
to get through it, and realized I had better get control of my
drinking. I could not give the opposition a club to beat me with!
I
moderated my drinking during the day, sometimes not very well, and
when I got home in the evening quickly downed two large glasses of
red wine so I could sip continuously throughout the rest of the
evening. It was always a toss-up whether I went to sleep or passed
out.
I
knew I had a drinking problem. There were a thousand mornings when I
woke up with a hangover and told myself I was not going to drink that
day…and then drank. That confirmed my innermost secret, that
I was a fraud, weak, unable to not drink for just one day. The low
self-esteem that most alcoholics carry was confirmed in spades.
But
the day came when I did stop, and stayed stopped for four and a half
years. I knew about recovery meetings, but those were for poor folks
who didn’t have my will power! My disease went crazy. It was
all I could do to just not drink and everything else suffered. I was
a jogger in those days, usually about three miles, but would run
10-12 miles on Saturday mornings to shut me down physically for the
weekend. It was the only way I could get through, and my family
learned to do without me whether I was home or not. My opponents in
the union smelled blood and made ready to defeat me in the Fall
election.
I
saw my career collapsing, my marriage collapsing, and I was helpless
to do anything about it. All my energy went into just not picking up
the drink. But when things hit the fan on July 4, 1988, I ran away
to a Pacific Grove motel, passed a liquor store on the way, and said
to myself, Yes! It was a crawl on the floor, puke in the toilet,
pass out drunk, night. On July 5 I woke up with my last hangover --
it lasted for months – and a day or so later found my way to a
recovery meeting. I remember nothing about that meeting except that
it was a safe place for me; I was among others who understood, and
didn’t judge.
I
heard people say, Go to a meeting every day and don’t drink
in-between and you’ll stay sober, and I could do that. After
several months I began to see that there were people in those rooms
who had a life and were happy, and those were the same people who
talked about working the Steps, about getting a sponsor, about a
spiritual awakening. I had problems with the Steps – too much
God talk; it took me awhile to realize that atheism took as much
faith as religion. And a sponsor? I hadn’t spent 50 years
pushing people away to suddenly get close to someone!
It
took me a long stubborn while to realize that, as I heard someone
profoundly say at a meeting, There is a higher power and You’re.
Not. It. While I never embraced religion, I realized that in my
teenage escapes from the city out to nature, I felt the peace that
was missing at home, a sense of something larger than myself. It
slowly dawned on me that a higher power was as I defined it, one that
worked for me and had nothing to do with anyone else’s, as long
as I’m. Not. It.
I
returned to work in a Local 6 factory, a liquor bottling plant –
my higher power was testing me – and kept going to meetings and
not drinking. When it was announced that the plant was going to
close, I decided it was time to try something new. I obtained my
high school GED, began attending San Francisco State University
classes, and lined up some full-semester jobs teaching Labor Studies
in the Bay Area. I had done guest teaching as a union rep, and done
okay.
Eventually
I decided I’d better work the Steps, and tracked down a Twelve
Step Workbook. It was okay as far as it went, but when I got to Step
Five – Admitted to God, ourselves and another human
being
the exact nature of our wrongs – I had a problem. Eight months
sober, I developed an elaborate plan in my head to do a sort-of Fifth
Step with Elaine, in hopes of saving our broken marriage. But there
were a few things I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her, and at a
meeting I actually asked someone, Ven R, for advice.
By
the end of that conversation I’d asked him to be my sponsor and
he agreed. I said, Great, I’m ready for Step Five. Ven said,
come on over Saturday and let’s talk about…Step One. That began an
extraordinary journey. I embraced Step Four –
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves –
because I began to see that I wasn’t a freak of nature, or
dropped from outer space; that underneath my tough exterior was deep
fear. And that there was a long history of alcoholism on both sides
of my family.
I
developed a new class for Laney College in Oakland and it was
accepted, which, with City College and SF State, would keep me
economically afloat. Two weeks before the semester began I received
an urgent call from Laney: the half-time head of the Labor Studies
program had a big personal emergency and they did not have anyone to
teach anything. Was I available? I sure was, and after some time as
a temporary department chair, I made tenure—half-time, but
still teaching at the other two schools.
At
Step Five I chiseled, just a bit. I couldn’t tell Ven, or
anyone, one shameful thing — and it wasn’t even about
me, except in my head! And so my second year of sobriety was the
most insane of my life. I was holding on to a collapsed marriage,
out of that low self-esteem fear that if I didn’t hold on to
what I had I wouldn’t have anything. I had a nervous tic in
one eye, chronic neck and back pain, and dreams that I was in a plane
that was crashing. As I heard in meetings, Everything I ever let go
of has claw marks!
I
took a bold step and talked to someone about it after a meeting,
telling him, I’m afraid I’m heading for a relapse. He
said, You’ve already had the relapse, you just haven’t
picked up the drink yet. Got my attention.
People
talk about the Steps being “ego deflation at depth.” When I filled Ven
in on what I had left out of my Fifth Step he
looked at me and said, You know, I don’t remember your Fifth
Step. That, I submit, is ego deflation at depth!
I
signed up for a twelve-day San Francisco State plant biology course
in the Sierras and reworked a step a day in my tent, mailing them off
to Ven. When the class was over I went up into the White Mountains,
above the bristlecone pines (which are a good symbol for alcoholics –
battered, stormed on, lightning-struck yet surviving). I fasted for
two days at 14,000 feet, burying things I had brought with me that
represented the past I was letting go of, including my wedding ring.
I
cried my eyes out in the morning sun and, for the first time in my
life, felt connected to the human race. Al became Albert, a
more-or-less whole person. It was the spiritual awakening the Steps
are designed to bring a recovering alcoholic.
I
spent that night in a Bishop motel and went to my first and only
demolition derby. I even felt as one with the drunks cheering on the
car crashes!
Back
in San Francisco I told Elaine I had to move out. We hugged for a
moment, and suddenly I felt the relief flood her body. As a student
at San Francisco State University, I applied to live in a singles
room in their high-rise dorm and moved in right after Labor Day,
1989. I was, of course, the oldest person in the dorms and other
students looked at me curiously, but said nothing. I worked on a BA
in Labor Studies, which I was already teaching there, and earned that
in two years by virtue of a lot of writing in lieu of taking classes
and the community college classes I had taken over the years.
When
I first began attending recovery meetings I heard people say,
Alcoholism is a fatal disease. I thought that was a lot of rhetoric;
I personally had never felt my drinking was life-threatening. But
the longer I was sober the more I saw the truth of it. Many cases
didn’t go down on the death certificates as alcoholism, but as
suicide, car accident, heart failure, liver and pancreatic cancer,
or, like my pal in the ‘60s Dave Castro, being shot down in a
drug deal. I remember asking my Uncle Bob if his father, my
grandfather who beat my father badly, had a drinking problem. Bob
thought a moment and said, No, he was a moderate drinker. A sister
of his snorted and said, Yeah? That’s why he died of liver
cancer after cirrhosis of the liver!
And
some didn’t die, but got warehoused with alcoholic dementia,
unable to recognize even their families. And, oh yeah, there was
that solo backpacking detox in the Superstitions where, the only
person in the Wilderness and far from any recognized trail, I fell
and broke my wrist. Could have been my ankle, and I’d still be
there! Did I mention going snorkeling where the sea mammals hung
out…along with the great white sharks. It was amazing that I
was still alive!
I
began dating, making a list of (mostly) sober women I was attracted
to. Mary E, a long-time sober woman at a meeting I regularly went
to, was known as Snapshot Mary because of her interest in
photography. I invited her to an exhibit at a local gallery. She
accepted, we began dating regularly, and got married in our Mission
District flat in 1991, with former Episcopal priest and my new
sponsor Bruce K officiating. Ven and I had a disagreement over
making financial amends which I thought imperative to the Ninth Step
process. Meanwhile I earned a BA in Labor Studies and went on to
earn a BA in Interdisciplinary Creative Arts while teaching evenings.
One
of the first financial amends I made was to the American Museum of
Natural History book store, where I had stolen a book or two. I sent
a check and received a nice note back wishing me well. I sent a
larger check to Woolworth’s to make up for the childrens
clothing I had taken home stuffed under my shirt. A week or so later
I received mail from them and opening it saw my check. I thought,
They’re sending it back? No, I had not signed it!
I
had stolen a lot of paperback books from the toy store on 11th
Street and Second Avenue as a teenager, and that store was long gone. I
remembered a part-time library struggling to exist in the small
town of Placencia, in Belize. I put together a box of good books of
all kinds and sent it as a donation. With money from Elaine which
she had borrowed to pay off my share of our house, I made restitution
to Local 6 for all the unjustified free drinks I had enjoyed at their
expense. They chose to accept the check and not prosecute me, and I
was grateful. The Ninth Step says, Made direct amends to such people
wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others.
“Them or others” does not include me, and I was willing
to accept the consequences of admitting my transgressions.
I
had been writing stories and poems since I was 13, but emerged from
the Interdisciplinary Creative Arts program doing performance poetry.
Who knew? Sobriety had opened me up to all kinds of possibilities,
and I took a class in tap dancing, learned to play the alto
saxophone, discovering that when it came to improvising I only had
one riff in my head. Charlie Parker’s reputation was safe! I
embarked on a quest for a Masters Degree in History, and took cello
lessons for a year, my big achievement being picking out Bob Dylan’s
“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
Once
the Masters was in hand and my thesis, a scholarly researched
biography of my father, accepted for publication, I began taking all
the Archaeology courses I could, with no degree in mind. I also took
a six-month sabbatical to write a history of the Oakland-East Bay
labor movement which had given me so much and whose story was often
overshadowed by San Francisco’s. It was a way of giving back
for the support they had given Labor Studies, and me, over the years.
Mary
and I did a lot of travelling: with summers off, no kids to suppport,
two incomes and both of us sober, we visited her sister in the
northeast, relatives in New York City, my sister at her Holland home,
driving with her and her husband Aat through Germany to Prague; we
went camping in Australia and the Amazon jungle, cruised the
Galapagos Islands, snorkeled in Belize, explored ruins in the
Yucatan, and went to local recovery meetings along the way. In
Placencia, Belize, one meeting was listed and we went, but the space
was dark. Then a local man showed up; he was the only one in the
small town in recovery and had listed the meeting in hopes that
someone would show up now and then, as we had. It only takes two to
have a successful recovery meeting!
Ten
years sober on the Galapagos cruise I was reminded that it is
alcoholism, and not alcoholwasm.
The
last night on the water the captain met with the 20 passengers and
piña coladas were served. Four of us didn’t want
alcohol and were assured the drinks we received were free of it. I
took a first gulp – I rarely sipped anything cold – and
the rum immediately filled my head. I was scared, angry, and a
little voice in the back of my head said, Go For It. I didn’t,
and kept my July 5, 1988, sobriety date. It was a reminder that the
disease of alcoholism is incurable, and requires constant work to
hold at bay.
After
ten years I became dissatisfied with the marriage; it was no longer
working for me, and I had to leave Mary with some sadness, but
knowing that, for me, it was the right thing, that I had choices.
My
union mentor Keith Eickman invited to stay at his home atop Noe
Valley rent-free; he lived alone since cancer took his teacher and
poet wife, Nina. I was in my tenth year of tenured teaching and
decided I would retire and move to the Arizona desert, Tucson, in
June 2001, when my retiree medical coverage would be nailed down.
In
December, 2000, I drove to Tucson to scout out neighborhoods and
recovery meetings. Those meetings allowed me to transition
seamlessly, having a ready-made circle of friends. I did cut my trip
a day short to revisit the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix due
to a severe case of Gold Fever. (For
that story, see Gold
Fever: Looking for the Lost Dutchman at
http://www.storyhouse.org/albertl13.html.)
In
Tucson I settled into a regular meeting schedule and began dating,
going out not very seriously with five women at one point. I signed
up for Forest Service archaeology projects and that’s where I
met Kaitlin. We were both married to other people and just became
good friends. The first project we worked on together, along with
her husband and my grandson Danny, was in the Eastern Sierras, at a
campground the Forest Service wanted to convert to an upgraded fee
stop. There were bedrock mortars – grinding holes -- by the
creek, so we knew there had been some ancient activity here.
While
nobody on the project was finding much of interest, Kaitlin, Dean,
Danny and I were having fun while doing good archaeology, singing,
laughing, joking and just having a good time while the chipmunk we
had made homeless chittered angrily at us. Some, encouraged by a
woman we dubbed Mother Superior, thought we were much too frivolous
and when we finished our first unproductive unit, we were moved far
from the rest of the group, over a ledge closer to the creek –
and smack in the middle of a 4,000-year-old habitation site. We
uncovered artifacts the Forest Service Archaeologist had never seen
before!
I
would stop to visit Kait and Dean in their Julian, California, home
while en route somewhere else. I was still doing annual treks,
although no longer as detoxes. Once settled in Tucson, I emailed and
said I’d like to come for a visit, just for them, and not on my
way somewhere else. They responded positively and I went in
September 2002. No Kaitlin. The official story was that she, a
hospice nurse, was off with patients. Dean and I did some stuff, and
I returned to Tucson.
I
emailed both of them saying, Now it’s your turn to come and
visit. I never heard from Dean, but Kaitlin responded and we set a
November date. That’s when I found out that she had moved out
and bought a manufactured home out of Julian, down the Banner Grade. We
went to the Wednesday night Exodus poetry open mic where I
performed the Christine Tamblyn Memorial Lecture. Christine was my
guide and inspiration in my Creative Arts study, and had shown us a
video of herself which I modeled the fake Memorial Lecture on.
My
theme was, Poetry strips things down to the naked truth, and I
stripped – as Christine had done – as I lectured. Quite
an introduction to the woman I would fall in love with! Afterwards,
on the way to the car, without thinking I reached out and took her
hand, and that’s the moment friendship began to blossom into
something more. I remain grateful to Christine Tamblyn, who died far
too young – 47 -- of breast cancer. Gratitude is another gift
of sobriety.
Kaitlin
moved to Tucson in early 2003 and we set up housekeeping in a rental
in Barrio Blue Moon. With her talent for transforming living spaces
into works of art, after a year the landlord decided the place looked
so good she should raise the rent while building a studio on the 3/4
acre property. We scraped together what we could and bought a
manufactured home on 1-1/4 acres in Picture Rocks, a rural “outlaw”
community with few amenities over the Tucson Mountains northwest of
the city. Kait had an occasional beer or mixed drink, but never
tempted me, and I knew serenity. She named our place Wild Heart
Ranch, and made it an oasis for all kinds of critters, a source of
joy to me. All my life I had gone TO nature; now I
got to
live IN nature! (For
more on Wild Heart’s critters, read True Tales From the
Wild Heart Critterarium at
http://www.storyhouse.org/albertl4.html.)
When
Tucson enacted a Domestic Partners law in we registered in solidarity
with the LGBTQ community in 2004, and were married in September, 2006
by a Pima County judge. The judge told us, The three most important
words in a marriage are not I Love You; they are, Yes, My Dear.
Kaitlin, whose father had drinking issues, was another wonderful gift
of sobriety. Those gifts kept on coming! I continued going to
recovery meetings weekly at the Picture Rocks Community Center, and
sponsored a few people.
Alcoholic
self-centeredness had been replaced by a willingness to be of
service, and I spent several years as the volunteer Chief Operating
Officer of the little Rancho del Conejo Community Water Co-op which
had been the heart of Picture Rocks when it was founded by Mayme
Smith in the 70s. I did poetry presentations at the local elementary
schools, getting students to write a line on a subject I gave them,
and then combining those lines into a group poem and printing it,
along with the students’ names, for them to keep.
I
was active in the local community group, Citizens for Picture Rocks,
and Kaitlin served for a time as the group’s president,
initiating roadway cleanups, a youth contest for tee shirt designs,
and other welcome innovations. We became archaeology site stewards,
members of a state program to monitor and preserve ancient sites.
Kaitlin opened a studio in town and began giving classes, not so much
in art as in bringing out creativity. The women who attended
regularly became her tribe.
What
does all that have to do with sobriety? It reflects the results of
recovery, the gifts, the ability to love and be loved, living one day
at a time and finding the joy in that day…because it’s
there. Recovery has given me choices, and the willingness to do
things I might not have before, less self-centered. Performance
poetry, which evolved into rapping, archaeology, music, writing –
I wrote community news for Picture Rocks for a dozen years –
without the Look At Me shouts of my low self-esteem
drinking
years. And those gifts have literally saved my life.
Mostly
the compulsion to drink has been lifted, but then someone invented
chocolate red wine. I read about it and told Kait, On my death bed I
want a taste. One year there was a big display of chocolate red wine
for Valentine’s Day at a local market. I thought about it,
Well, I could buy a bottle now and stash it for when I die… I
didn’t, but again realized that alcoholics in recovery are
never immune to the disease. There’s a line in a reading
common to many recovery meetings: Remember that we deal with alcohol
– cunning, baffling, powerful! The word patient should
be added.
In
June, 2017, while driving to town I sneezed and broke two ribs. It
was diagnosed as Multiple Myeloma, an incurable blood plasma cancer
that sucks the calcium out of my bones. Another rib cracked not long
after. I did a year of “chemo lite” and that kept things
under control, although I did have to wean myself off the Tramadol I
was taking for bone pain. Side effects included neuropathy –
and my feet remain numb, along with a less common auditory neuropathy
that muffles my hearing. My bowels alternated between constipation
and diarrhea daily. I had little energy and was breathless after the
slightest exertion.
After
a year the cancer figured out a way around the treatment and my
lambda light chain marker numbers began rising. I went to infusion
therapies; the first gave me blood pressure spikes that, at one
point, caused me to pass out and convulse. The next two worked at
first, but then the cancer ate them for lunch. I was put on a
“last-ditch’ regimen that made me sicker week by week. In mid-October,
2019, I made the decision to stop treatment.
I
performed a rap for the occasion for the infusion room staff,
expressing my profound gratitude for all their work, a thank you they
rarely got from many self-absorbed cancer patients. I should note
that, under our broken health care system, the clinic and drug
companies took in over a half-million dollars from Medicare and my
teachers’ medical insurance. I was lucky to have good
union-negotiated insurance protected by a strong retiree
organization; the only thing I paid was a dollar per prescription.
The
oncologists were okay with discontinuing treatment, as was Kaitlin,
who said soon that the old me was coming back. The side effects
lingered, but some faded over time. At five months post-treatment my
feet, ankles and legs have stopped swelling up. No more compression
socks! My bowels are back to normal. The neuropathy remains, and is
not going to go away. Physically, with or without cancer, I am still
82 years old and cannot do very much. I avoid pain pills, and use
topical diclofenac on my arthritis hot spots. I have my sense of
humor and willingness to engage with the world back.
And
I don’t have to drink! Recovery has taught me to live one day
at a time, and to find the joy in that day; how to love and be loved. I
am writing this in Julian, California, where Kaitlin has set up a
wonderful home for us. Kait has roots and friends here, and it will
be a good place for her when I’m gone. The doctor said I have
months, not years, but all I really have is today. As I’ve
heard at meetings, Yesterday is a cancelled check, tomorrow is an I O
U, and today is the only cash we have to spend.
A
potential side benefit of living in California now is that the state
enacted an End-Of-Life-Choices law several years ago. Should the
myeloma become painful beyond my ability to cope without drugs, that
will be worth considering, a choice I may or may not make when the
time comes.
As
in Picture Rocks,
there is a small recovery group in Julian, and I attend the Friday
Nite Survivors open meetings weekly, making new friends and
sharing my experience, strength and hope, especially with newcomers
struggling to see a way out of their compulsion. With the Corona
Virus stay-at-home orders I still have access to online meetings
should the urge come upon me. So far, so good.
And
so this is how I will end my days, however many they will be: loving
Kaitlin and loving my family, and my sister and her family; reading,
writing, walking our old dog Gus, listening to music I love, cooking,
going to recovery meetings, enjoying the mountains and countryside,
and not drinking no matter what.
As
Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote shortly before cancer took him: “My
predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved.
I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above
all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this
beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege
and adventure.”
