A foreshadowing (alcoholism)

First broadcast on Ex-Pat Radio, Radio Alfa, Krakow, 25th November 2007

Like most of us, I don’t really know what ‘alcoholism’ is. Although we use and abuse the words alcoholic, alcoholism, and alcohol particularly, I have a limited knowledge of what the words mean exactly. And yet I do have a vested interest in the subject, for my father was an alcoholic. He died two years ago, of a heart attack, his system wracked by years of alcohol abuse.

Like many alcoholics, my dad left the family home - soon after the birth of his two sons, finding the parental responsibility too much on top of the traumas that had scarred both his childhood and now his adulthood. In the language of the early 1970’s, he dropped out. He lived for the next thirty years in a thirty-storey tower block in the centre of a large English city: the concrete jungle, he called it. The tower blocks of post-war England were once shiny, new and full of hope. But the cracks soon began to appear, the concrete developed concrete cancer and naïve optimism was replaced by premature aging and cynicism. And thus he lived a perfect existence in his hole in the ground in the sky.

It was the 1980’s and England was booming: in the champagne bars of London, money men pissed away centuries of industry while Margaret Thatcher talked of ‘the trickle-down effect’. But, in the steel and coal-towns of England, all I saw were broken families from the once-proud communities and societies which Thatcher said didn’t exist. A self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.

I sometimes wonder if a man’s life is just one big self-fulfilling prophecy. Even without the responsibilities that most other men seem desperate to have (a family, a job), my father continued to drink for the next thirty years. And each visit I made to him saw him get a little older, a little greyer, a little smaller, in every way. He once repeated to me the oft-quoted maxim that ‘For years you take from the bottle, and then one day the bottle starts taking from you.’ In my father’s case, I couldn’t say when that tuning point came, as it must, for any heavy drinker, eventually. But knowing him as I did, probably the bottle started taking from him the very first time he tasted, as he called it, ‘my lord alcohol’. Ten, twelve, fifteen years of age? Like many an alcoholic, he was doomed from the first drink. Deep childhood traumas combined with a weakness of spirit crippled him, tying one hand behind his back, but leaving his drinking arm free.

We think it’s easy to spot an alcoholic, certainly the more pathetic cases. Here, in Krakow, grey shambling men splutter and argue with cronies on street corners or collapse - bodies swimming in cheap, strong booze - on park benches, to sleep it off before the next round of self-mutilation can begin. Sure, they’re the chronics who remember only two things: where their bed is and where to get the cheapest, strongest hooch. But they weren’t born like that, stinking of booze in their mother’s womb. And there are, of course, many shades of alcoholism, many types of alcoholic and many ways to use and abuse alcohol. I do not have an alcohol problem, at least not in comparison to anyone honest enough to stand up and say in front of other people: ‘My name is John Marshall and I am an alcoholic’, as my father, like millions like him around the world, do in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. However, at 40 years of age, I’m finally beginning to learn something about my life and my past experiences. I know now that alcohol has, on occasion, helped damage both my relationships and my self of self-worth. But, whether through hard work, chance or the grace of God, I know I shall never follow in my father’s footsteps. I once spent a month working with an American actor and recovering alcoholic. I asked him what he thought of my drinking habits, of my youthful excesses and partying of that time. ‘Certainly not alcoholism’, he replied. ‘But possibly a foreshadowing’.

A foreshadowing. Is a shadow a sign of something that already exists or rather a warning of what may be? I could, if I wanted, let an alcohol dependence happen, let it creep up on me. Especially in this society, especially in Krakow. Not a shambling drunkenness, of course, but an over-dependence on the social lubrication that is alcohol. Many people’s social lives revolve around the consumption of alcohol and, through legalisation and taxation, governments encourage this. Most people who drink, I am sure, would like to cut back, just a little.

But then I remember my father’s face when my visit coincided with his government benefit money: ‘Better to live like a king for a day, John’, he would say, toasting my health, ‘than a pauper for a fortnight!’ He would then break into a verse of two of his favourite song, ‘Giro Calypso’, penned himself specially for the fortnightly occasion and I would make my excuses and leave him in a pub with a fifty-foot bar while the going and his legendary humour were good, not wishing to witness the three-day binges, Dantesque hell-holes, outbursts and recriminations, mostly against himself, which would usually follow.

The last time I saw my father was just after his triple-heart bypass, a couple of years before he died, having ignored the doctor’s pleas to quit drinking and smoking. I decided never to see him again. After thirty years of drink, I no longer recognised him. A greyness lay heavily about him, like a fog, malevolent, cruel, like a cancer oozing out of his dying body. His eyes were gone, but, most distressingly, so had the mind. There was nothing of any value left: the zany English humour, the joy of simply being alive, the good-hearted mockery of those who daily confine themselves in suits, commuter trains or factories, all was gone. The bottles had finally drunk their fill of him and tossed him aside. He was just one more grey man, old before his time, walking alone on the streets of Birmingham, afraid of his own shadow and everyone else’s.

In truth, I knew and still know little of my father’s existence after he left the family home. He ran from anyone who may have been able to help or comfort him, that much is clear: his mother, his brothers and sisters as well as, later, his own wife and children, all of whom reminded him in some way of the pain and guilt he had experienced as a child and sought to blot out with alcohol and a self-imposed exile from humanity. However, there was one group he welcomed with open arms: a family whose members knew each other only as ‘Lincoln John’, ‘London Barry’ or ‘Birmingham Mary’. Alcoholics Anonymous was and is a lifeline for millions like my father. There, they ask no questions. Why should they? All the stories end in ‘rock bottom’ and, anyway, they know more than most what liars alcohol has makes of us. Instead, it’s enough just to be able to walk in sober, stand up and say, perhaps for the first time, ‘My name is John and I am an alcoholic’.

Alcoholic or not, we each of us, somewhere, have pain or shame which we are holding tight within or perhaps denying even exists. But once this truth, this hurt, is faced, openly and without self-deception or condemnation, we begin the healing process. Immediately, we feel a flicker and a promise of hope. Something tells us that we are not alone, there are others with the same hurt and we know, in the depths of our spirits, that we will never be alone again.

© John Marshall 2007