Still Crazy After All These Years

I've struggled with mania and depression all my life. One time I was hospitalized, locked up and treated until I came down. Since that experience I've spent my life trying to explain how it was brought on by unique circumstances and I've been very vigilant to make sure it never happens again. (See “Insanity” in my blog)

A few years ago I heard an interview and I realized there was nothing unique about my experience at all.  It is just your garden variety mental illness and the name of that illness is bipolar. I am bipolar and I have learned to live with it. I've done OK,. Twenty-four years ago and 20 years after my hospitalization I went too far again. That time I wasn't caught. I've had a lifetime of doing the best I can.

Bipolar and alcoholism are closely related and for awhile it seemed like everyone in AA was bipolar. It took me awhile to realize “bipolar” was plain old manic-depression. I didn't think I was bipolar then, maybe a little bit manic-depressive but not bipolar.

My mental crash and burn, locked up in an Air Force psychiatric ward, occurred in 1970. I've always regarded it as a unique and scary event in my life. For years afterwards I guarded against a recurrence. In the Air Force I fought against a label and got my experience labeled a drug reaction, at least that's what they told me. I never answered yes to any question about mental illness. For a short time I did serve on the board of the Los Angeles Mental Health Association and was a volunteer in their programs. I felt a kinship with the crazies we served. They were like my friends and myself on the Psych Ward at Lackenheath.

When I got sober in 1983 I was afraid of life without alcohol I would not be able to treat my episodes of euphoria, short circuit the mania I always feared. Alcohol calmed the agitation that made mania so uncomfortable. I had some sense it stopped the mania. The insanity of alcoholism was another problem and one that I was not as aware of until I had been sober for awhile. When I stayed sober I felt less fear of insanity. It seemed I had found a way to deal with myself and find equanimity.

AA is not proof against insanity. In 1992 I was 10 years sober and working my program when I had a long manic episode that I wasn't aware of at the time. It deeply affected me personally and professionally. There were incidents of being out of control that I looked back on with embarrassment and I don't think at the time I was fully aware until much later how much mania affected my life.

Even with that my insanity never came up until over 30 years after the incident in the Air Force. I took a psych test to be a peace officer. Somehow the test showed an anomaly that I had to explain. I was honest on the test and I was honest, and positive in my interview with the psychologist. I was passed and became a juvenile hall counselor, a peace officer.

It came up again when I took the psych test to become a sworn peace officer, a cop. I got a letter asking me to send my medical records from the Air Force to Sacramento. Who knew they still existed but they did and I sent them on to Sacramento. A long six months passed and I was scheduled for an interview with a psychiatrist. The contracted psychiatrist also consulted with San Francisco Juvenile Hall. We talked about Unit B-4 where I worked. Apparently for him anyone who could work well on unit B-4 was good enough to be a police officer and he passed me.

As a police officer I was very aware that in a way I had slipped through the cracks. There were highly stressful situations that occurred and long nights without sleep, but I was careful to control my stress and never let the lack of sleep go on very long. The Angel Island Fire was one of those incidents and there was a lot of euphoria in the event itself, being part of a force that in the end won, but afterwards, I enjoyed the calm and slowed down, finding a balance within a few days.

In 2011 I retired as a California State Park Ranger. It has been 46 years since 1970 and my stay at Lackenheath hospital. After 1970 there was never again a mention of any insanity or mental illness in any of my personnel files and no lock downs in any special wards.

In the interview on NPR I heard someone tell about their struggle with bipolar illness throughout their life. They had struggled with it and overcome it, though it was always there and they had gone on to a successful life.

The person's story resonated with me. Yes, I am bipolar. Bipolar is a mental illness. I have struggled with it, fought it, and lived a good life without being overcome. But I have a mental illness. I am just another person with mental illness, a mild case maybe, but who's to say.

I've been known as a risk taker, an unpredictable and volatile personality. How much of that is personality, how much is insanity? I suppose it's a spectrum. Most of the time I'm within the norm.

A few days ago I was working on my blog and it was going very well, I became euphoric at the way the words were coming together and worked late into the morning one night. There it was the euphoria that becomes insomnia that gets worse and becomes mania. So I did what I've tried to do all my life since 1970, I got careful about my sleep. I made myself go to bed on time. No more staying up late. This morning I got up at 5:30 am. I'll continue to monitor my sleep, make sure I get enough, go to bed when I don't feel like it, stay in bed when I feel like getting up. I will get enough sleep and the mild euphoria I'm experiencing will pass. No danger of going into mania, only a slight and lingering fear of what could happen.

As I finish this two weeks later I know that was a phase of euphoria that passed. Euphoria puts me on edge. What happens if I can't make myself fall asleep, if the insomnia and mania continues? But one more time it didn't.


Thanks to Paul Simon 1975 for the title

Cathy

She calls herself Kate now.  When I first met her she was Cathy, Cathy Bruemmer.  I thought it was Brenner, an Irish girl, and quickly learned it was Bruemmer and she was German.  The e is an anglicized addition, an attempt to get Americans to pronounce Brümmer with an umlaut over the u.  Or maybe it was just how an Ellis Island Immigration official, probably Irish, spells an umlaut u when he first hears it. 

Her parents were Midwestern Germans, her father Catholic from Illinois and her mother a convert from Nebraska, solid hard working people, though her father had a subtle and delightful silly streak.  He didn’t work that hard when he was being paid but he liked his own projects.  He built an airplane once and flew it until he crashed it.  He enjoyed life in a German way.  Her mother, the stiffer spine in the family softened with a little Thunderbird wine in the evening, was a ranch raised girl who had come to the big city during World War II.  Wilbert was 4F and stayed home which gave him a great advantage with beautiful women, an advantage I don't think he usually had.  Minnie was not only strong willed and hard working; she was good looking too.   

Cathy Bruemmer was one of a kind.  Her parents lived in a cracker box house facing the quiet streets of El Segundo, but the back wall thinly divided their home from Imperial Highway and the runways of LAX.  Cathy was a free spirit.  When I first met her, she was wearing one of her long dresses that she made for herself, I think it was green with a garish print.  We had just come out of the 50’s, her father drove a Ford Falcon station wagon,but she was well into the 60’s, ahead of the rest of us.  She was attending Mount Saint Mary’s College on a scholarship and worked in the fabric department at Penny’s where her mother also worked. 

She did all the cooking for her family.  Her father didn’t like onions or spicy food of any kind as he defined it.  It was after we were married that she bought her first garlic.  But within the confines of her family, she cooked and baked wonderfully, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and German chocolate cakes.  After we were married and her imagination was free to concoct anything she wanted including onions, garlic and even occasionally olive oil, she was a great cook, though her food, Italian, Russian, Chinese or French always had a faintly Midwestern German subtext.   

She was excited about movies, literature, and art.  She was a free spirit.  She was in trouble with the administrators at Mount Saint Mary’s; they knew the long dresses were a sign of rebellion.  Essentially she was a good kid.  She had been 5’7” in the third grade and all of 80 pounds and it was only now in her freshman year of college that she was growing into her own height with hips and small sexy breasts.  She was really quite pretty but she didn’t know it.  I don’t think she’d ever really been kissed yet, never had a boyfriend, and didn’t do drugs. 

Many years later she liked to drink white wine with ice cubes and to smoke pot before she had sex though she could do just as well on a couple of margaritas.  She was still outspoken and still a little naïve.  She was working as a teacher at a Catholic high school in Santa Fe Springs.  A co-worker had been disciplined unjustly and in the lunchroom one day Cathy said, loud enough to be heard, “That’s why we should have a union.”  She was fired the next day. 

I fell in love and in lust with her at first sight.  A week later when we got together we made out until our brains nearly fell out and groped each other virginally.  We were Catholic and had grown up that way.  We were well suited to each other.  We were excited about each other but we didn’t know what to do with it and in fact didn’t make love until our wedding night, which we did wonderfully, after two years of Catholic foreplay. 

I think I was the first man, very young man, to appreciate her and she was beautiful, beautiful long legs and a lithesome body.  She was always envious of women who were fuller in the chest, but I thought she was wonderfully shaped.  She looked like a girl to me.  She had an inept grace about her.  She reminded me of a young and clumsy gazelle, who could jump beautifully into the air and stumble a moment later on her long legs. 

We were inseparable from shortly after we met.  Her family welcomed me and we did our college friends together.  I had become part of the literary and artistic circle at Loyola and I think Cathy found my friends very exciting.  We did her large circle of family friends together.  She was exciting intellectually, a voracious reader like myself, and though her family were working class Republicans, she was becoming a liberal Democrat. 

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964.  It authorized President Johnson to execute the Vietnam War but it really didn’t become an overriding consideration for college students until 1966 when Cathy and I met.  I received a IA draft status.  IA, one 'A' as we said it, meant you go next.  A grammar school friend of mine was killed in the DMZ in May, 1967, and I decided for Cathy and me that I would join the Air Force and hope I could avoid the fate of a draftee in the jungles of Vietnam. 

In the summer of 1967 I went off to Basic Training and then technical training at Keesler AFB in Mississippi.  In April the following year at the end of training I received orders along with the rest of my class to go to England.  I had been an English major.  Cathy was a history major.  I went home and we got married.  I was home a couple of weeks before the wedding could be put together and finally we enjoyed on our wedding night what we had put off so long and a honeymoon drive to San Francisco. 

At Christmas time in Mississippi I had been invited to bed by a young woman named Charlene and being a virgin I didn’t know how to say no.  For a couple of weeks Charlene and I made the beast with two backs badly and then life went on.  Stupidly in a very drunken moment, I chose to tell Cathy about this liaison the night before I left for England. 

I know it was devastating, but she struggled through it and joined me in England a month later.  We didn’t talk about it and never worked through it.  I think it was always a smoldering resentment that Cathy had against me for the rest of our marriage.  We conceived Sean during our first summer.  We both loved England and we did OK together.  There were resentments and struggles but nothing terrible. 

We lived offbase in the town of Bedford.  After a couple of years, a gypsy came to the door one day and Cathy invited her in.  Cathy told me about it when I got home.  The Gypsy predicted my promotion to Staff Sergeant and something about us which Cathy wouldn’t reveal.  I always had the feeling that the Gypsy predicted we wouldn’t last as a couple and that Cathy believed her.  It seemed after the Gypsy that as hard as we might try our marriage was always doomed. 

We had a hard time while I went to UCLA and she stayed at home with our two sons.  We struggled in our rented house when I got a job at Bank of America.  I think I have a normal libido and like most men I would love to enjoy most of the attractive women I see.  I am also a bit of puritan and even today I don’t have the energy or flexible conscious enough to cheat, not that it doesn’t seem attractive sometimes, but just that it’s too much trouble.    

Having gotten married at 21 with very little experience prior to that, I did wonder what it was like on the other side of the fence and as Jimmy Carter would say, I wasn’t faithful in my thoughts, but for the most part I acted faithfully. 

Cathy had her faults.  She was a terrible spendthrift, she was always buying something that saved us hundred of dollars that we didn’t have the money to afford.  She could be obnoxious and abrasive.  And together we probably drank too much.  But overall we did as well as most couples do and potentially probably could have stayed married for a lifetime. 

Unfortunately our minds didn’t go that way.  By the 1980s we seemed to hate each other.  Whatever either one of us did seemed to be against the other.  We came from an old view of relationships, husband working, wife at home, and that didn’t work well post-feminism.  I thought Cathy took advantage of me and I was stuck on a treadmill and I’m sure she found me limiting and critical of the new life she was trying to lead, a new life she had always been trying to lead.  And what I thought of as the curse of the gypsy hung over us.  My marriage in tatters, frustrated I looked elsewhere and found one woman who would sleep with me once and others who might.  I was no longer even trying to be faithful. 

Cathy graduated from Cal State LA and I think she felt empowered and limited in the roles we set for each other.  Finally in 1983 we separated and in the following year divorced. 

I’ve never regretted divorcing Cathy, now Kate.  She’s a good person and tries hard but even today 30 years later we only accommodate each other as friends.  I find her naturally abrasive.  I love her and I care about her, she’s the mother of my three sons, and today she is like a sister that I’m not really that close to.  Without our history we might not be friends at all. 

It makes me feel bad.  She was so beautiful and so exciting when she was 18, I wonder what happened to the girl I loved and regret my part in making her at all bitter.  Alcohol played a large part in it.  I’m of the school that accounts the downward spiral of alcoholism almost inevitable until one is given the grace to leave it. 

It is a sad thing.  I wish I had been able to give my boys a stable home life until they were 18.  I wish that I myself had been able to have a stable middle class existence, enjoying the warmth of a home and roots, instead of the searching rootlessness that was my 40’s and even 50’s.  

But life goes on and I’m here and I’m not there, and I prefer it this way.  

Mom

My mother was a very admirable woman.  In her long and rich life she made strengths out of her weaknesses.  Against incredible odds, she survived the loss of her mother, a crippled father, the Depression, and deafness.  Not only did she survive, she made a comfortable life for herself and her children.  She had an amazing ability to cope and she did it better than anyone could have ever imagined.

My mother was born February 3, 1918 in Flatriver, Missouri, now called Park Hills.  Her mother, Lorraine Jackson died a day or two after she was born, maybe from the Spanish Influenza which was particularly devastating to young adults at that time or maybe just childbirth.  Her father, Munroe Lashley, was crippled about the same time by polio. 

My mother was raised by her grandmother, Malissa Jane Firebaugh Lashley, who still had four or five of her own children at home.  I think my great grandmother also took care of some other grandchildren left by one of her sons.   My great grandmother had at least 8 children of her own and my mother had two older brothers, Tommy and Charlie.  As a child she had the mumps which left her so deaf she couldn’t continue on with school.  She was called a dummy and her formal education stopped at the age of 9 in the 3^rd grade. 

When she was 14 she went to live in St. Louis with one of her uncles, Walter, and his wife.  Forty years later she still hated both of them.  She never talked about it.  I only knew about it because on a visit to Missouri I met them.  They were very friendly and nice to me.  I told her about them and she dismissed them with a bitter remark.  It seems Walter’s wife treated her as a servant.  As a young woman, 18 or so she worked in a candy factory in St. Louis and her best friend was Pat.  They kept in contact for the rest of their lives.  . 

In St. Louis sometime after she left Walter and his wife she remade herself from an impoverished orphan into an attractive woman, a transformation that included having all of her teeth pulled and false teeth made to replace them.  She was raised Hard Shell Baptist.  I don’t think anyone in her family was particularly religious.  One of her aunts who lived near us in California was Foursquare Gospel, but she didn’t have any respect for that and always talked disparagingly of holly rollers. 

At the end of 1939 she met my father, got pregnant, and converted to Catholicism.  They got married and moved to Glendale, California.  My father got a job at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank.  In 1942, my father went back to St. Louis and enlisted in the Army Air Corps.  After a short time my mother left her two children with my father’s mother and joined my father.  She went with him to San Angelo, Texas and Lake Charles, Louisiana.  When my father went overseas she went back to live with my grandparents in St. Louis.  She adored my grandfather and at his urging went to work in an aircraft factory in St. Louis, probably McDonnell Aircraft.  The company provided training and my mother had a real talent in math. 

A story I have heard but don’t know the facts of is that my father returned from the War and was in St. Louis some time.  I have no idea how long, before he returned to his wife and two children. 

I was born in 1946 and my younger sister was born in 1950.  After my younger sister was born we moved from the Barracks to a rented house near the railroad tracks and my mother was working for Weber Aircraft in Burbank.  Weber made seats for aircraft.  I remember she was laid off at one time and collected unemployment.  I remember at the Barracks my mother used to do laundry with a wash tub and wringer affair, but on Ash Street she had a washer.  After that she always had a washer.  She never used a dryer.  I remember her hanging clothes on a clothesline in the back yard. 

At this time I felt protected and cared for by my mother.  I liked being around her. 

My mother was always trying to get me to wear what I thought were outrageously colored clothes.  Both my parents had grown up in the Depression and my mother was particularly aware of the cost of things and the importance of making do.  I think some of the clothes must have been on sale because they couldn’t sell otherwise.  My mother was an extrovert and I was an introvert particularly as a child.  My mother was always trying to convert me. I think we both thought of it as a moral question and not just a personality trait.  I preferred quiet and out of the way.  My mother thought that was something she could change in me.   

In 1952 my father got a job with Stainless Steel Products, a new metal fabricating company.  He worked there another 30 years.  My father earned most of the money, but she took care of it.  My mother began looking for a house to buy in Burbank.  My father had very little to do with these things and took his allowance from my mother each week and left everything else to her.  We moved to 817 East Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank above downtown on the slope up to the Verdugo Hills.  We called it living in the hills and it was a wonderful neighborhood.  

My mother stopped working and took care of us and the house.  In 1954 we visited Missouri and saw her father and brothers and my father’s parents and relatives. 

My mother smoked Herbert Tareyton cigarettes and called them Hoppies.  She used Sen Sen to freshen her breath and shared the Sen Sen with us.  I don’t remember my mother particularly drinking.  If there was a party or some event it was common that my mother got drunk.  She would come home apologetic, defensive and aggressive.  She told us all how much she loved us, and we’d never know how much she loved us and how hard her life was.  She’d grab us and hold on tight.  I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I didn’t want to be there.  

After her conversion my mother was a devout Catholic.  She sent us all to St. Robert Bellarmine Grammar School the local parish on our side of town. 

My mother took care of all the money in the household and made sure we knew she had grown up in the Depression.  She seemed to be particularly shaken by the recessions in the 1950s, though my father never lost his job our household standard of living went up and down with the aircraft industry and space effort.  Around 1958, 1959 she went to work at the Disney commissary and brought us giveaways and stories from the Zorro Television series.  My father apparently didn’t like her working and she quit that job after awhile. 

I remember other than those rare episodes when she was drunk or in one of her self pity moods, which usually went together, I enjoyed being around my mother.  When I became an adolescent she seemed to change.  She was more aggressive toward me.  I think she drank a little more and often had wine in the afternoon.  She was very discouraging of any relationship with girls I might have.  That seemed a major theme for her and my elder sister that I should be protected from the inclinations of the male sex, sent to an all boys school, protected from females. 

After grammar school she enrolled me at St. Francis of Assisi High School an all boys school in La Canada.  La Canada is a wealthy neighborhood in Los Angeles at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains between Pasadena and La Crescenta.  My mother was very concerned that the boys who went there from rich homes shouldn’t know I didn’t have more clothes.  I had to wear white shirts so they wouldn’t know how many I had.  I’m not sure what that was all about.  I had plenty of white shirts which I wore for four years of high school. 

My mother served me my first glass of wine when I was 13 or 14.  We drank wine together in the afternoon, initially just a small glass, but I could have as much as I wanted.  It was a rough red wine she bought by the case of gallon jugs.  My father drank red wine with his meals.  My mother drank it during the day. 

She found my cigarettes sometime around then. I started smoking when I was 14 after my freshman year.  My sister Joan came home from college smoking and that summer I started. My mother had stopped smoking Tareytons and started smoking Salems before I was in high school.   In my senior year I began smoking openly at home.  I bummed Salems from her.

The whole time growing up my mother never belonged to any sort of organization, parents’ clubs, Cub Ccouts, card groups or anything else.  I think it had a lot to do with her hearing.  My mother couldn’t hear people in groups.  The way she lived was largely shaped by her hearing problems. 

During the 1950s my mother was referred to Doctor Howard House, an ear surgeon, who was pioneering surgical techniques to repair some types of hearing loss.  My mother was operated on in 1952 and her hearing was partially restored.  She had additional surgeries after that and while my mother was still hard of hearing it was not what my sisters remembered from before.  She could hear one or two people in a conversation as long as we spoke clearly and one at a time.  Of course, long before that she had learned to compensate for her hearing by dominating any conversation that she was part of.  If she controlled the conversation, she could hear better.  She still wasn’t good in a group and she avoided them.   

At that time it seemed like my mother began to drink more.  Whenever there was a party or some event she went to we would expect that she would get quite drunk and maudlin, how much she loved everybody and how no one appreciated her.  When my eldest sister went off to the convent in 1959 my mother became particularly maudlin and protested how much she missed Ellen and how devastated she was by her loss.  These episodes became more and more frequent. 

When Ellen came home for visits, my mother clutched at her and tried to control her every moment and cried when she wasn’t there.  At first Ellen would visit and stay in the convent but eventually she stayed at home on her visits where she was a virtual prisoner of my mother.

I graduated from high school in 1964 and my mother and I went to my graduation.  I don’t know where my father was, probably working that Saturday.  I went off to the seminary that summer.  My mother seemed very pleased to have a future priest in addition to the nun she already had.   

After six months I returned and got a job at the Phone Company and my mother was supportive.  I lived at home.  She still wasn’t fond of the girls I dated but that seemed to be normal. 

In September, 1965 I went off to college.  My mother paid many of my expenses the first year.  I paid my tuition from my employment at the Phone Company and the next year she paid my tuition.  I met my future wife, Cathy, in my second year at Loyola.  My mother really disliked her.  She only became tolerant of her after our first son was born.

When I returned to Los Angeles my mother helped out financially while I went to UCLA.  She gave me odd jobs to do and paid me well.  We struggled through the year on the GI Bill and those extra few dollars helped.   

As I write this, I’m struck by how supportive my mother was and how until I was 14 or 15, I had thought of her as my best friend.  There were moments when she was particularly hard to deal with, particularly her drunken tirades of despair and protests that no one appreciated her, but overall she was there when I needed her.  My father was a distant figure. 

When I had a family, my mother talked this wonderful support and love for her grandkids but she was destructive around my kids, feeding them candy and sugar treats, promising them things that she didn’t deliver and demanding that they visit but not really paying any attention to them when they were there.  We had thought she might babysit the kids, but we left them with her once and it was a terrible experience for everyone.  She complained about it for weeks afterwards and said we were taking advantage of her. 

When I got sober my mother repeatedly tried to convince me to have just one beer with her.  "One beer won’t hurt," she said.  I couldn’t believe she was undermining what was obviously an improvement that I desperately needed.  When we left home my mother began complaining of my father’s alcoholism, but never talked about her own.  My sobriety starting in 1983 seemed to offend her.  When my father got sober in 1991 she tried to convince my father that AA was stupid and he could still drink, he just needed to drink less.  She wasn’t successful.  He stopped going to meetings but he didn't drink again.    

Sometime in the 60’s my mother and father had become very active alcoholics going from what was probably Stage II to Stage III alcoholics or even Stage IV¹.  They bought their vodka by the case.  As alcoholism does, it got worse until my father’s recovery in 1991.  My mother continued to drink until she died. 

So what was it that made my father OK at the end, a loving and loved parent and my mother not?  By the end of her life, I avoided my mother completely.  I found her destructive, mean, and venomous.  It wasn’t just the alcoholism.  My father had been an alcoholic and even during his worst days, there were warm moments when he was sober. 

My mother was an extraordinarily strong character.  Her survival alone was a testament to that.  And she had gone from extreme poverty in the 1920s to a middle class life in the 1950s where her children were able to go on to college.  It was all through my mother’s efforts.  My father contributed a paycheck and even that was at the urging and nagging of my mother.  I don’t think my father would have been employed fulltime without her taking care of everything for him. 

Somehow my mother was living a lie.  There were so many lies we didn’t know what the truth was.  The first lie that she never admitted was that Ellen was born in October when in fact she was born in August, only 6 months after my parents were married.  She also made such a deal of how much she loved and was loved by my father, when it was obvious growing up that most of the time there was little love or respect between them at all.  My father had as little to do with my mother as possible, was normally very sarcastic to her and the only time it seemed like he loved her, was if any of us were disrespectful to her and he would attack us viciously for it. 

She never thought any of us loved her enough.  I don’t think she liked the men in her life.  When I began acting like a young man my mother attacked me and accused me of being like her father, someone I barely knew, that I didn’t appreciate her and no one got to treat her that way.  

When I had my own family, she demanded that we come and visit and when we did she complained that we didn’t do it enough or she complained about my sisters and how seldom they visited.  Holidays she demanded that we spend time with them, and my sister from Chicago went along with her and thought our duty was to make my parents holidays what they wanted.  After a few years, we stopped going.  There was no room for us and our family in the holiday and I felt my children had a right to a normal Christmas.

My mother certainly gave birth to me, but in the end, I didn’t want to have anything to do with her.  In writing the facts of my mother’s life, it‘s hard to explain the animosity and coldness I felt toward her. It doesn’t seem fair or reasonable, but those of us who knew my mother knew that it was necessary to fight for your life when you were near my mother, to keep her at bay, to erect a wall against her.  She had nearly destroyed my eldest sister and Ellen stayed as far away from her as she could.  My youngest sister had left home at 18 and had nothing to do with my mother and father or any us until this day.  She is still hiding from us.      

My mother died alone.  Maybe my sister was there.  Maybe she wasn’t.  If she was, it was only because she had to be.  It was our mother, and mothers should be loved and respected.  I mean no mother is perfect and you hear people complain about their mothers all the time but in the end, no matter how bad they were, they were our mothers, right?

My mother’s strength of character is something I hope I have inherited.  I am a survivor.  I’m persistent and I work hard.  My children have strength of character and their children do as well.  Maybe that’s my mother’s legacy.  She gave our family backbone and some good math genes.  We're all her beneficiaries.  I’m sorry she didn’t know how to bend a little.  I think her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren have an ability to hear that she didn’t.  I hope we have learned to listen and with our strong characters to bend a little.   

^1.          Stage I alcoholism is when drinking is fun most of the time.

            Stage II alcoholism is when drinking is fun but sometimes it’s a problem.

            Stage III alcoholism is when drinking is a problem but sometimes it’s fun.

Stage IV alcoholism is when drinking is always a problem and it’s never fun.  The alcoholic has to drink to survive.  

My AA Story

From the 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous:

Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.

This is my personal story.  I can’t write my own biography without talking about my alcoholism, how I stopped drinking and what it means to me.  I am not a spokesman for AA.  There is nothing official about this, it is just my story.  The AA members I mention in the story are deceased and their anonymity is no longer an issue. 

I had my last drink December 13, 1983.  I haven’t had a drink since.  I went to my first AA meeting a week later, December 22^nd, 1983.  

I grew up in alcoholic family.  My grandfather, my mother, and my father were all alcoholics.  I started drinking at around age 14.  My father drank red wine with his meals.  Our family’s self image was that we were sophisticated drinking red wine like Europeans.  My mother bought the wine by the case, Pride of Cucamonga, four large gallon bottles in a cardboard box from the Monte Carlo Italian Deli.  It was a Zinfandel that left a red stain on my teeth.  I started having a glass of wine with my mother in the afternoon.  

After that I could pour myself a glass of wine whenever I liked and I drank a little wine with my meals.  At first a half glass, we used water glasses, of the Zinfandel was enough.  By the time I was senior in high school I would have a full glass or maybe two if I felt like it and I began to go places with a bit of buzz on.  At 16 I started drinking beer with my dad and by the time I was 17 I was going with my sister who was 21 to the liquor store to buy a six pack of beer.  My father, my sister and I would drink it until it was gone and sometimes go for another.  One time in a liquor store in Glendale the clerk stopped us.  He wasn’t going to sell me a six pack of beer.  I deferred to my 21 year old sister.  He wasn’t going to sell her the six pack either.  Other than that one time it was never a problem.

By the time I got to college, I could drink pretty well.  I still drank beer as much as was available, but I eventually learned to stop sometimes when there was still beer left.  I remember one wedding I attended I got so drunk I tried putting the make on the groom’s sister.  She was married and much older than I was, and I think she may have thought it was funny.  I don’t remember ever seeing the groom again.   

At college there wasn’t much opportunity to drink beer.  By this time I drank mostly at home.  Sometimes there was a jug of Red Mountain wine at a party and I always drank my share.    

I went in the service at 20.  On the base servicemen could drink 3.2 beer on base at 18 and in Mississippi we could drink 3.2 beer off base.  I turned 21 a few months later and I could drink hard liquor but mostly I stayed with beer.  After Mississippi I was stationed in England and I became a regular at the local pub, the Gordon Arms.  My new wife and I drank red wine, Volipacella from Italy in half gallon bottles in baskets.  We bought it at the Class VI store on base.  We had quite a collection of empties hanging on the kitchen door.  We used them as candle holders and gave them to friends. 

There were a few parties or events where I drank too much, but most of the time it was just fun.  I loved the pub.  For less than a pound, I could drink all night and most nights that was 3 or 4 English pints, 20 ounces each.   In the service we didn’t think anyone drank too much.  I remember being a little shocked at Sergeant Welch drinking bottles of Ripple as he drove me home one Sunday morning after our shift.  And Sergeant Irving, an older man in Personnel, had an alcohol problem. 

I came home from the service and went to college.  We lived on the GI Bill, $240 a month and my wife and I could barely afford the Safeway Chablis gallon bottles we bought weekly.  On weekends I drank my fill of beer at my in-laws house or at my parents.  When I went to work at Bank of America drinking was a regular part of the job.  My first boss got a DUI, driving under the influence, and quit LA and went back to San Francisco. 

In the PR Department we often went downstairs to a bar after work.  As the newest and youngest member of the department I would freeload the best I could from my better paid co-workers.  At one time, one coworker and I made regular visits to a Carl’s Junior in the Broadway Department Store basement mall where they sold pitchers of beer for $4.  It wasn’t very dignified drinking pitchers of beer in Carl’s Junior, but it was cheap.   

By the time I got sober my drinking had progressed to a quart of wine every night starting with a glass at dinner.  I drank martinis when someone else was buying and sometimes I had a bottle of gin at home.  Every so often we’d discover something new like putting cheap scotch in coffees or using tequila to make margaritas.  Scotch and tequila never lasted very long in our house.  So while I didn’t think of myself as a hard drinker, just a little beer wine, I was drinking hard liquor frequently and beer and wine all the time. 

One of our favorite things to do was to make fondue with white wine.  We dipped our bread in the cheese and drank Chablis while we did it.  Afterwards I’d make margaritas in the blender and we’d get really blasted.  Like the red wine when I was a kid, the fondue pot made us feel sophisticated. 

I had friends I drank with and friends I didn’t drink with but most of my friends were people who enjoyed a few drinks and what I thought of as convivial company.   I drank a lot of what I didn’t think of as drinking.   Beer and wine didn’t really count.  When I worked in the bank branches my regular lunch was to go to a mini-mart, buy some cheese and an apple and a can of beer.  I gave the beer a lot of thought.  Sometimes it was a 16 oz can but sometimes a 12 oz can because I had to do something at work or needed to be more alert or maybe it was a couple of 12 oz cans because I deserved them.  These decisions included a lot of factors and subtly balancing them out.  I didn’t get much work done in the afternoon, but I don’t remember anyone complaining.   

Occasionally I found myself drinking too much in the wrong company.  I seemed to have offended my wife’s co-workers at a party at someone’s house I can’t remember.  I thought of myself as just flirting with pretty women, but I may have been just boorish.   I tried to avoid those situations that would get me in trouble, but sometimes I just couldn’t.  One time I invited my friend Burton Katz to join me and my drinking buddy Bill Kline at the Sportsman’s Lodge.  Bill and I could down a few and it was with Bill, who always bought, that I indulged my taste for martinis.  The next morning Burt called me at work and told me how shocked he was at my behavior and he didn’t want to ever see me drink that much again and how I shouldn’t hang out with people like Bill.  I never invited Burt to drink again.

I was embarrassed by Burt’s call.  It was like a pebble in my shoe, something I couldn’t forget.    

After that I was working at our Century City branch.  It was not a good situation.  One morning I came in to work smelling of wine. I can’t remember who pointed that out to me.  After that I was more careful about when I stopped drinking.  I made a new rule to stop at midnight on weeknights.  I had a lot of rules around drinking.  One day the Regional Vice President came to the branch and announced to the staff that I was transferred from Century City to Loan Administration Department.  In the Loan Administration Department I was a replacement officer for loan officers in the branches who were on vacation or sick.  My friend Bill had just barely saved my job for me. 

Shortly before I got sober I was invited to a party at a customer’s house.  By that time I had figured out it was better sometimes if I didn’t drink.  I did OK that night, but after the party I bought a six pack of beer and drank it in the car as I drove home.  I had learned to put my beer in a large coffee mug and drink it that way in the car.  I took an accounting class at UCLA Extension and before the class I would have a beer in the parking lot.  When my wife drove me to a football game at the high school she taught at I put a healthy serving of gin and a little vermouth in a travelling mug and arrived at the football game blasted with my face numb from the gin.  

I drank and I drove.  I drove to the places I drank and I drove back from the places I drank.  Sometimes when I had too much to drink, driving was a struggle.  There were things I could do, close one eye, hug the line, things that always got me home.  I was never stopped by the police.  I think those were different days.  I don’t remember any checkpoints.  Even among my drinking friends drunk driving arrests didn’t happen or no one knew about them.  My first boss was the only one I knew personally.   

A week before I got sober, I called a priest my wife and I were seeing for marriage counseling.  I don’t know what I said to him, but at some point he said, “You’re nothing but an alcoholic” and that I was nothing but a self-pitying drunk.  I didn’t think he was much help, but he was the first person who ever called me an alcoholic to my face. 

It was preying on my mind.  The 13^th of December I went to my estranged wife’s house and dropped some boards off I thought she could use.  She gave me a beer, I had a second and then I went home to my parents’ house.  For some reason I decided not to have any more to drink that night.  I never drank in the morning before going to work and I didn’t drink at lunch the next day.  That night as usual I stayed at work late after everyone left.  I found myself at work alone, writing in my journal.  After my wife and I separated I lived at home with my parents and most nights I stayed late.  I made tea in the bank lunchroom.  My parents were alcoholics and were bad company in the evenings.  Dinner with them was a dismal affair, so I normally waited until I was sure they had gone to bed before I went home.  They went to bed early, thank god.   

Writing in my journal I admitted I was an alcoholic.  Writing makes me honest.  It was almost a joke.  I was Irish and Scotch Irish.  Both my parents were alcoholics and I drank every day.  Of course, I was an alcoholic.  Years before I had attended training for supervisors in which an Employee Assistance person told us how to recognize and deal with the alcoholic among us.  I remembered the class.  That’s where I had first heard alcoholism is a progressive disease.  For the first time looking at myself I finally admitted, I was an alcoholic.   

That summer I had decided my Saturdays were lost in a beer haze and I decided to stop drinking for awhile to see how that was.  It was OK for a couple of days and then I went to a party and was doing just fine until they brought out champagne left over from a wedding.  Well just a glass of champagne and my short days of sobriety vanished.  For the first time I realized I needed to drink.  I didn’t think about it after that, but it was always there.  I was drinking hard liquor now.  I was drinking and driving and drinking had caused a number of problems.  My boss made pointed remarks about my drinking.

The next morning I called EAP, the Employee Assistance Program, and talked to a counselor.  He agreed to come out and see me.  “How was next Wednesday?” he asked. 

I told myself I wouldn’t drink before I saw him.  My last drink had been a beer at my estranged wife’s.  I didn’t drink that week.  I didn’t drink that weekend.  I went out to lunch with a friend and when I normally would have had a beer I didn‘t.  It was easy. 

The counselor came the following Wednesday and gave me a schedule for Alcoholic Anonymous meetings in Los Angeles.  It was a thick little book.  He told me I sounded like an alcoholic to him and there were different programs I could go to but the only one that worked in his experience was AA and he said that’s where I should go. 

I spent a lot of time poring over that little directory looking for just the right meeting.  Finally I decided on a meeting at St. Francis of Assisi Church on Brunswick Avenue in Atwater.  Eleven years before I lived on Brunswick down the street from St. Francis.  The little Episcopal chapel always seemed to be a place of peace and tranquility.  I had been to St. Francis High School and afterwards a Franciscan monastery.  The image of St. Francis was familiar to me.   

I waited at work until it was time to go.   I arrived in Atwater early and went to the Brown Keg Liquor Store across the street and bought a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes.  I usually didn’t smoke cigarettes but it seemed like a cigarette night.  I was wearing my banker’s blue pinstripe suit.  I went in and found a seat in the chapel and waited to see what would happen. 

My marriage had fallen apart.  We had been separated a month.  I was living at home with my parents.  My job was about as bad as it got.  I worked for Joe Bent who was later fired because he was out of control and a petty tyrant.  He seemed to take satisfaction in torturing the people who worked for him.  I was an Assistant Vice President.  The Assistant Manager, another AVP had recently been fired.  Joe told me I was never going to be the Assistant Manager and it was true. 

I think I had been placed at Joe’s branch because Joe and I were both problems.   I was known to give supervisors a hard time and they didn’t really care which one of us crashed and burned.  The smart money was on Joe but if they were lucky they’d get rid of both of us.

My life was a disaster.  I needed to start doing something about it.  I thought Alcoholics Anonymous was like going to yoga, a self improvement class.  I figured I had a lot of problems and it wouldn’t hurt to stop drinking.  

The format of the meeting was three speakers who shared.  The first two speakers were probably newcomers and gave short 10 minute pitches and then a regular speaker with a little sobriety telling his AA story.  One of the speakers went through a list of woes in his life.  It was a laundry list of things gone wrong, mostly good intentions failed and he ended each failure with the refrain, “And if I don’t drink, it will get better.” 

I heard that.  If I don’t drink, it will get better, no matter what and I believed it.  At the break, everyone was friendly and they gave me the two books I would need to get started, Alcoholics Anonymous and 12 Steps and 12 Traditions.  The books were for sale.  I only had a couple of dollars and some change on me.  They said that would be OK, I could pay the rest later.  They also pointed out that the meeting I was at was a gay meeting and that I might be more comfortable at other meetings.  They told me about a place in Glendale where there were meetings every night.  

That was Thursday, December the 22^nd.  I went to my next meeting Saturday, December the 24^th.  Later people asked me how it was to get sober at Christmas time.  Christmas time?  Hell, I didn't care what time of year it was.  I had more important things to worry about than Christmas that year.   

On Christmas Day I did go to my ex-house and see my sons.  I told them I had stopped drinking.  My middle son, Ted, who was 12 at the time, said, “That’s a very brave thing to do, Pop.”  I didn’t think it was brave but when he said that I thought this is something I’d better stick with.

My sons were 14, 12, and 8 when I got sober.  I tried to be as good a father as I could be.  I never thought about it before I got sober, a few beers was who I was, but alcohol did not contribute to my being a parent.  I wasn’t there a lot of the time for them.  It takes a lot of time to drink.  I came home late.  I spent time on the couch barely conscious.  My moods were unpredictable.  Even when I wasn’t drunk I could be volatile and angry without provocation.  As a person I was unreliable.  I drank and I drove with my children in the car.

It’s hard to admit, but drinking was probably more important to me than parenthood. 

A Start in AA

The first few days were easy.  I just didn’t drink.  I read the books they gave me.  I drove down to San Diego on the day after Christmas and visited with my Uncle Ed.  My uncle had been sober since 1946, though there was a short time in the 1960s when it seems he might have gone out again.  It was either the booze or a manic episode or probably both.  My Dad got involved, no one explained it, and he was found in San Francisco.    

My cousin was there for the holidays and I learned she had gotten sober a couple of years earlier.  She and I were only a few months apart in age and she always made sure I knew she was way ahead of me in just about everything.  She sneered I was still in the pink cloud phase of sobriety and that it would go away.  Out of spite to my cousin I kept my pink cloud through good times and hard times.  I claim it never went away. 

I drove back to LA and went to a meeting in Atwater on my way home.  I remember in that meeting people tried to warn me about slippery places.  I thought I didn’t need to worry, I had this program and it was easy.  I started going to meetings once a week or so at the Windsor Club in Glendale.  Club Houses and there are thousands of them are separate from AA; run and funded by their own boards, usually AA members.  They provide a place for people to hang out and rooms for AA meetings.  The Windsor Club is a two story brick building with a lounge and café in the first story and meeting rooms upstairs.  It even had a parking lot and when there were meetings the parking lot and the streets around the club house filled with cars.  It was a popular place.   

The Monday night meeting at the Windsor Club was called the Gong Show.  It was a large raucous meeting with 150 people or more.  The room was packed, every seat taken and people standing up along the walls and in the back.   It was the standard LA format, a reading from the Big Book and the 12 Traditions, cakes for anniversaries and chips for newcomers at their first meeting, and chips for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and six months.  There was a 10 minute speaker, usually someone new, and then a circuit speaker, one of the AAs well known for their pitch and invited specially to give it.  

Most AA meetings are pretty informal but the Gong Show took informality to an extreme.  The meetings were rowdy with bikers, punks, suits and street people, mostly on the younger side.  I attended regularly and it seemed like everybody knew each other.  After a few weeks I still felt isolated and out of place.  I didn’t know anyone and no one talked to me.  It just wasn’t working.  I realized I couldn’t even make it in AA.   

I went home devastated.   I opened up the Big Book and read the Fifth Chapter, “How It Works.”  I just wasn’t getting it.  I read the chapter; I read the 3^rd Step prayer.  I did everything I could think of.  I don’t believe in God, but I’ve always believed in the power of prayer.  I don’t know who I was praying to and I didn’t care.  If it worked it worked.  The 5^th Chapter didn’t tell me who was in charge.  It didn’t tell me how to become part of it.  It didn’t tell me what makes it work or how to get started?  It didn’t answer any of my questions.  It just gave me the Steps and recommended I work them.  Exhausted I finally went to bed. 

The next day everything seemed to change.  It seemed like a weight had been lifted.  One of my friends, a customer, called to see how I was doing.  That day I had this feeling that people cared about me.  It wasn’t anything major, just small things.   

At the Gong Show there was one gentleman, who like me wore gray slacks, a blue blazer and a tie.  Church, as he was called, seemed to always be around and he seemed to get the program.  He seemed comfortable with himself.   

When I got him aside I asked him to be my sponsor.  He told me he was gay. 

I asked if that made any difference.

He said, “I don’t think so.”

I said, “That’s fine with me.”

I think he said, “If it doesn’t work out, I’ll help you find a new sponsor.” 

Church was my sponsor until he died 9 years later.  At that time he had about 5 years of sobriety.  He worked for a commercial insurance brokerage downtown.  He was comfortable with himself and he worked a wonderful program.  Under Church’s guidance I began working the 12 steps.  He also recommended I find another meeting.  He recommended a meeting in Pasadena known as the Women’s Club.  The Wednesday Night Speakers Meeting met in the South Pasadena Women’s Club for fifty years or more. 

I went to the meeting and came back and told Church it seemed like everyone there was blue eyed, well dressed, and they were all lawyers and bankers.  He said, “Yes.” and looked at me.  I realized maybe instead of the bikers and down and outs at the Gong Show; I should start hanging out with people like myself.  Of course, there were more than just white people and professionals at the Women’s Club but overall it was a more gentle and sophisticated meeting. 

I started attending meetings regularly at the Women’s Club. 

I still went to the Gong Show but not as often.  One night I came in late and was standing in the back of the room.  There was a young man there dressed in white jeans and a white turtleneck.  He looked pretty cool, but he didn’t seem to be able to stand still and nervously he backed up to the counter in the back of the room.  There was a coffee urn there and as he backed up he hit the spigot and hot coffee poured down his white jeans.  I felt sorry for him, he was trying to be cool and it wasn’t working.  It reminded me of myself.  By this time I knew the Gong Show was mostly newcomers like I had been.  The court card people, people ordered to attend AA by the Judge, hung out in the back and that's where I had been trying to make friends.

The place to find AA is not in the back of the rooms, but up front where people are getting it and not in meetings where everyone is a newcomer but in meetings where people keep coming back.  It doesn’t happen overnight.  In South Pasadena I got a job pouring coffee and I didn’t just stand around anymore.  I became one of the regulars who stuck my hand out when I saw someone uncomfortable.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.   

In Pasadena I got to know people.  I worked the steps, gradually I became very comfortable with this meeting and sometimes even comfortable with myself.  After awhile I began to sponsor people.  Eight years later I was the secretary of the South Pasadena Wednesday Night Speaker’s Meeting known as the Women’s Club.  At work where I was just another bank Vice President I wondered what people would think if they knew I was the head drunk for the Pasadena area including San Marino.  Of course, the secretary of an AA meeting is not that important, as the book says “Our leaders are but trusted servants.”  Most importantly I belonged and AA worked for me. 

It’s been 28 years since then.  I don’t attend AA meetings much.  I’ve never connected in the Bay Area with AA the way I did in Pasadena.  My job and weird schedule made meetings hard to do and I don’t have much in common anymore with newcomers.  Even some sober AAs aren’t comfortable with cops.  I’ve been sober so long I look like the middle aged white guy that doesn’t have a clue. There are enough new people who are cool and who are getting it to take care of the newcomers. 

I’ve taken the concept of service as I learned it in AA and done it elsewhere.  I worked as a counselor at San Francisco Juvenile Hall.  As a Park Ranger and cop I was always open to helping people in need, especially people mired in addiction with no way out.  Sometimes the best way to help is to arrest them.

When I got sober it took a long time to recover the trust I had squandered with my sons.  I tried to be there for them.  I tried to control my own anger, fears, and rage.  I tried to listen and I tried to support them.  Most importantly I tried to insure that nothing came between me and them.

Years later I have a very satisfying relationship with my adult sons.  I appreciate them.  We are friends and they are part of my life.  With Paloma I have another chance to be a parent and I think I’m better at it than I was the first time.  I have my sons as good examples for being a parent and they give good advice.

My life has been good and the first principle of my life today is I don’t drink.  The speaker 28 years ago was right.  If I don’t drink, everything gets better and better.