Hippopotamus Sea
My Viral Sobriety
By: Jared Bryan Smith
Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2010 by Jared Bryan Smith
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First Published 2010 by Books For Free, LLC.
Editor: Barton Wright, Book Cover Design: Sharline Bramucci
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ISBN: 978-0-9845955-0-1
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Published in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to Rand Hopkins, who told me I was a writer, and that it would help to heal. RIP Rand and thank you.
“Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond
Hippopotamus Sea
Moon Rocks in the Loony Bin
The first time I was checked into the loony bin, I was carrying three rocks. In my deluded mind that July in 2006, they were a moon rock, a space rock and an earth rock, the latter I was certain was also an ancient arrowhead. I’d found them all in my gravel driveway. I was shaking, paranoid, and still drunk even though I hadn’t had a sip in the several hours I’d been waiting in the lobby to check into the Dekalb County Crisis center, which others would later give me a reality check about, and refer to as the “loony bin!” They were right and I was loony. When I heard the rocks clamor onto the counter after emptying my pockets, my uncle said “Traveling light, aren’t we?” My only possessions were one Rolex, one wallet, the clothes on my back, and three rocks.
When I emptied the contents of my camouflage shorts, a sane person would have seen three very common, non-identical rocks, the kind you see every day in your yard or driveway. Not symmetrical, not very triangular even. But to me, a psychic CIA deep cover agent in training, these were perfectly triangular rocks that were hard to let go of. They were my weapons, in case any Al-Qaeda were just around the corner. The delusions I was living with sound ridiculous to me now, but they were real and quite serious at the time. However comical they are to me now, at the time they were scary as hell.
My uncle, my brother, and my sister really wanted me to check into the loony bin immediately, but I definitely still had some reservations. Fortunately they were adamant, and having three adults sign you in, makes it happen in Georgia. The way my uncle persuaded me though, is still amazing to me. The fact that he quasi-understood my delusions well enough to sell me the idea is fascinating in its own right. That I bought it, even more so.
“Bryan, if you are in psychic training for the CIA, who do you think sent us here? Don’t you think you talked just a little too much to your brother about the work you’ve been doing? Don’t you think they want you to check in here, right now, just like this so he can witness you check in?” My Uncle Jack delivered it with all the sincerity of a 5 star general.
How could I dispute such a brilliant argument? If my uncle did believe I was a psychic CIA agent in training for a deep cover mission to Afghanistan, then I sure as hell babbled a whole hell of a lot to my brother about my super secret mission! Of course! I was only here at Dekalb County Crisis to play the part, to completely disqualify all the Top Secret information I’d divulged to my brother! How silly of me! Why didn’t this occur to me sooner?
It’s really hard to keep state secrets on a Crown Royal and amphetamines diet. It finally made sense to me! So we sat there, my uncle, my brother, and I for a long time, my sister had returned to work after signing me in. They interviewed me with my brother and uncle there, my uncle eyeballing me to make sure I didn’t weasel out of the qualifications for admittance, for which I was batting a thousand. I lied straight to the nurse’s face when she asked if I drank liquor. “No,” I said, to which my brother said “You ordered six Crown and Sevens last night right in front of me!” Oh yeah, except for when I had witnesses. I admitted to it, but still didn’t fully acknowledge I drank liquor too much. This was just a dog and pony show so my brother wouldn’t believe I was in the CIA. It was important for my cover, so I just kept playing along. In my mind, I was being debriefed.
We went back out to the lobby, and my brother left around that time. So I sat with my uncle at Dekalb County Crisis for several more hours while they found me a bed. I began to go into what I now know is detox, but at the time just thought I was going even more insane. Shaking, shivering, voices in your head, hundreds of them, a ludicrous committee. Ranging from full blown hallucinations to implied innuendo. I thought my uncle was an angel and then five minutes later he was the devil. I twitched, thought insane thoughts, I listened to an orchestra of voices in my head, all telling me to do conflicting things, and I sat on my hands and waited to go into the loony bin. The CIA wanted me to, and alcoholic junkie I may be, but by God I’m a patriot! I’ll await my bed to convince my brother I’m nuts. For God and Country!
They say if AA doesn’t fix your drinking, it’ll certainly ruin it. I, too, found this to be the case. Nine months before I checked into the loony bin, I’d tried AA for about 28 days—well, exactly 28 days. I’m an executive recruiter and have worked for some pretty good companies in Atlanta. At the time of my first AA experiment, I’d already owned two of my own recruiting companies, but had drunk them into the ground and now worked for CV Confidential and was about to be fired for not showing up to work for a week. So I begged for a second chance and offered to go to AA as a buffer to being fired. I smoked weed every day, thinking I was original and that I’d fool everyone, but it’s all been done in AA. I found out later this is called the Marijuana Maintenance program. It didn’t work for me either. I did find a girl that could deal with an alcoholic, though, and who also had some pointers as to how to work through your alcoholism, mainly through other medications from the doctor, so they’re OK. Adderall was her drug of choice. The shrink wouldn’t give it to me, as after just a few questions he could tell I was an alcoholic. Not to be discouraged, I went to a general doctor who hooked me up, and I was off to the races.
Now I’d tried other combos before. You name it I’ve done it, other than crack. But meth and ice kept me up for days on end, the year of opiates had caused me to go through hell on withdrawal so I’d sworn them off, and coke was just ten minutes of fun for three weeks of hell. Not that I hadn’t given all these drug combos their chance, I just knew from repeated pain that none of those combos worked for me. Adderall and drinking, though, that combo worked perfectly—for about nine months, when I suddenly found myself being checked into the loony bin by three of my very busy family members. When I was in there, I called one of my best friends, Adam Archer. Three days before, I’d called him from the Ritz Carlton, while playing the drunk big shot, now I was calling him from a loony bin. “Only Jared Bryan Smith,” he said. “From the Ritz to the Nuthouse in three days,” and he laughed uncontrollably.
So the Adderall had worked wonders on my ability to work with a hangover, but it also fed my appetite for the drink. Like a mini coke binge every single day, with me drinking the uppers away every night. Well, I guess for me, it took about six months of binge drinking and 60 milligrams of Adderall a day to drive me to the edge of paranoid schizophrenia.
I know that I was insane now, looking back, but I was the last to know then. The rocks were the first proof I had that I was nuts. After three days in the insane asylum, I checked out, and the rocks they handed back to me were clearly just regular rocks. Not the Moon Rock, Space Rock, or Earth Rock. Just rocks. The other huge indicator I had was the jigsaw puzzle they had inside the loony bin. I’ll never forget it. It was as clear to me as the image of those perfectly triangular rocks were. It was a big puzzle of shiny Christmas tree decorations, and after spending the first several days organizing the other nuts in the place to help me, we finally pieced together the border of the puzzle. This being done, we could begin filling in the inside. The only problem was that the cover of the puzzle box didn’t match the picture. I looked at it for hours on end trying to match it up, and it just wouldn’t match. The problem, of course, wasn’t the top of the puzzle box, it was me. I had lost the ability to see the true from the false. In madness, we literally see things differently than others see it. It was like living in a different dimension.
When I was 11 years old, my father committed suicide because of alcoholism. I thought he’d gone nuts. I never realized until well after I was sober that the two went hand in hand. Late stages of alcoholism and paranoid schizophrenia, with full blown hallucinations, both visual and audible, as well as paranoia beyond belief, are all part of detoxing or living with late-stage alcoholism. My father had lived to be 37 before he found it necessary to blow his head off with a .357, and I always had a lingering doubt that I, too, may have to deal with alcoholism someday, but not this soon. Not at 28 years old.
After six months or so of being a drunk, Adderall-addicted nutcase for CV Confidential, they’d eventually let me go. I’d started my third recruiting firm in Atlanta and named it Seek and Employ, Inc. The CIA delusion stemmed from a client I had who asked me innocently enough to find them Arabic-speaking auditors. I was still a Fortune 500 executive recruiter, and one of my clients in particular, a Fortune 100 international conglomerate, had a need for auditors, CPAs who spoke Arabic and were born in the States, to audit their many overseas facilities. Well, this slowly went in my head, from me trying to recruit candidates for a job to my telling people I suspected it was CIA related. Before I knew it, I’d told so many people my conspiracy theory, that in my drunk, amphetamine driven, deluded mind, I believed it myself, and I was posting ads worldwide for this job order, to recruit potential Al-Qaeda and try to get into the States. I started off thinking it was a possibility, but it would grow in my mind as I drank and lost touch with reality.
Also, something happened that fueled the flames in my fragile little pickled mind. Three resumes sent to me from London, Egypt, and Rome matched the Arabic names I found in an article online about a thwarted jetliner takeover attempt by Al-Qaeda in England, during that summer of 2006. By God, I was a superhero! I was so deep under cover they hadn’t even told me I was undercover! They were just tapping my computer, and letting me advertise on Craigslist worldwide and reaping in the results! I was a patriot, a lifesaver, and an All-Around Great American! This calls for a drink! By God, this calls for a binge! This line of thinking led me down a very dark, chilling path. The elation soon turned to paranoia that for this scheme to work, they were literally tapping my phones, every keystroke, and sending people to follow me everywhere. It also incidentally turned into the delusion that I was Al-Qaeda bait, trying to invoke a response. So I began carrying around knives. Drinking with a loaded gun always at my side, and of course the rocks, when a knife or gun is just too damn obvious.
Around this time, a Colonel in the US Marine Corps began talking to me at North River Tavern, in Sandy Springs. I let him crash at my house one night, and I told him how much of a patriot I was and how I’d been recruiting Arabs for my Fortune 100 client, but how really it was for the CIA, which by now I believed adamantly. I told him I’d love to be embedded in a unit in Afghanistan, and lo and behold, he said he could make it happen, and could even get me a grant to do so. So now, I’m a super secret undercover hero, and also an agent in training to go to Afghanistan to do God knows what, drinking and drugging more and more every day. Until just a few days before the 4th of July, 2006. That’s when the direct psychic connection to the CIA really opened up. That’s when rather, I began to believe the voices in my head to a certain extent. I often times negotiated with them. For instance, the first really crazy thing I was ordered to do by the new committee in my mind was to carve the microchip out of my ankle. Well, I got the knife. I even looked at the scar from where Grady Hospital had rebuilt my ankle after a skateboarding accident, and then in a modest retreat in the direction of sanity, I negotiated with myself. I decided that the satellites wouldn’t be able to track the microchip in my ankle as long as it was underwater. So a few nights before the 4th, I began drinking with my foot underwater in the bathtub. This would obviously throw the satellites off. Now don’t go asking the logic of how you can be simultaneously training for and hiding from the CIA. Obviously the CIA was just testing the uplink device, to see if I could hear them or not. That is about the logic I was running with at this stage, always drunk, always high, now half the time with my foot submerged in the bathtub as I drank.
July 3rd, Caroline Gerard, the poor girlfriend of mine I’d picked up at the AA clubhouse moths before, who was still debating as to whether I was insane or not, was still enjoying the benefits of dating an only mildly ridiculous psychotic. She would soon leave, but as of yet had dealt with my shooting guns in the house directly at a brick chimney, listening to bullets and brick shrapnel ricochet, throwing knives, and all-around insanity. On July 3rd, though, I picked up the pace. We went to the Ritz Carlton on Peachtree and I bought a $900 dollar room. I’d just closed some deals with my third company, oh yes, and saved a 747 or two from going into the ocean, so we’re going to celebrate. They put us on the top floor of the Ritz, obviously because we’re important, most likely because of my CIA connections, I thought. This was all pretty impromptu as we’d only left the house to go shopping, and had ended up drunk at Phipps Plaza at the Tavern and gone to the Ritz when I decided I was too drunk to drive home. Two DUI’s and numerous close calls had at least made me paranoid about some of the right things.
Once we were there, we ordered a case of Budweiser’s, iced down, placed in a huge brass bowl, as if we were white trash royalty, and I went and picked up a Rainbow Family hippie, or so I believed, to buy some shrooms from, and we drank until about 5 in the morning, finally passing out for an hour or so. At about 7 or 8 in the morning, we awoke to a HUGE black helicopter flying directly outside our window. I mean I could see the pilot’s eyeballs and they were definitely Feds of some sort. The significance of a black helicopter to the truly paranoid really can’t be overstated. To have one right outside my window must have sent God laughing into a tailspin, because it freaked me the hell out! Being paranoid already, it couldn’t possibly have been that they were there to provide security for the famous Peachtree Road Race, though I’d acknowledged the possibility. The fact that they hovered directly outside our room was definitely a message! We left the hotel room and beelined to the car. I dumped the shrooms in a Porta-Potty and we hauled ass back to my house. We slept most of that day and when we awoke we had just enough time for us to make it to Mountain Park to watch the 4th of July fireworks. We both felt like we’d slept way too long for it to still be the 4th, but we just chalked it up to time travel and headed for Mountain Park. As a professional black out drunk, I’d long ago written off huge gaps of time by time travel, it was the only thing that made sense.
Crazy thoughts were coming hard and fast once we got to Mountain Park for the fireworks show. We were both drinking, of course, but I remember her bitching so much I thought she must not be human. “She must be a robot. You should kill her!” The committee was getting louder and crazier. And then I thought, “No, don’t hurt anyone, just run!” So I took the less evil of the two options and left this poor East Cobb uppity girl in this little niche of Atlanta called Mountain Park. I ran first to a few old neighbors I used to know in the area, and then I bolted like a madman, ran for the nasty ass lake and swam through it until it turned into a creek. I followed the creek, keeping my foot under water, of course, to hide it from the tracking satellites, following the creek path all the way through Brookfield West, the country club neighborhood I’d grown up in, keeping my foot submerged, untraceable, like a ninja! I maneuvered the way out to King Road, from where I walked to the closest Taco Mac. From there I called a cab and went home. All part of the mission.
I drank a little more and then woke up with the voices full blaring. For some reason they told me to go to Chattanooga. I have no idea why. My brother lives in Chattanooga I thought to myself, but I really didn’t know why the hell I was being summoned to Chattanooga, to save my life. Must be a CIA mission. All I could do was follow orders I guess, pop some more amphetamines, and do what I’m told. So I hopped in my little white BMW 318 and I hauled ass to Route 75 northbound. I got off at an exit up 75 and saw one uniformed Military Police guy at a gas station on the way up. Wes stayed near each other on the entire ride up, and that was all the vindication I needed in the world to rest assured that I was just following my psychic CIA orders. Hawks seemed to be everywhere as well, and I was positive they had cameras in their eyes, trailing me. When I arrive in Chattanooga, I check in to a motel with the simple name Motel. That’s it. I then walked to the Marriot where I also checked in. That’s how spies roll, I guess.
Once I was in the Marriot bar, and had ordered a Crown and Seven, even though I didn’t drink liquor, the news began announcing that North Korea had launched some missiles. And here I was summoned to Chattanooga, a town surrounded by mountains and powered by the gravity of water, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and in my head it was the perfect place to survive a nuclear blast. Surely this was no coincidence. More fuel for the flame. Now I was on a short list of VIP’s who, when the CIA wanted their topnotch talent to survive the nuclear holocaust, were alerted via psychic hotline, of course. Also, Fox News stated that intelligence agencies were concerned about a group of Hezbollah infiltrating the Mexican border to attack anywhere inside the US, so keep your head up, the news said. To me, that meant: go hang out in as many bars as possible and keep an eye out for Hezbollah-looking grunts. Roger that, over and out. I was thinking and speaking military speak and jargon to the best of my ability to anyone who would listen, scary-eyed, drunk as ever.
When I met my brother at the Marriot and told him about the accumulation of events, my saving a jetliner, being connected to Langley via the psychic drunk hotline, and my dodging the North Korean missiles, my incredible intelligence must have gone right over his head, because he came right to the bar and he looked at me like I was a nut! He did his best to humor me and even took me out to dinner with his wife, which in my state of mind was a dare, to say the least. This must have been where I had the six or so Crown and Sevens he inventoried for the detox center the next day. After I told him and his wife they needed to procreate on orders from the CIA, and made several other ridiculous statements, he and I left his poor wife and went to another bar, where I kept a drunken eye out for Hezbollah guerillas potentially attacking Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Eventually he dropped me off at the Marriott and went home, and thankfully at some point called my uncle confused as to what he should do, and rightfully so. I’d said a lot. At one point I think I asked him to take me into the woods and put a bullet in my head to stop the voices. That was, of course, in between the messages I was delivering and that was probably the closest to the truth of how I felt. I think I felt that I would be better off with a bullet in my head, than with 15 voices going off all at once.
He and my uncle plotted to get me into Dekalb County Crisis as soon as possible, and the next day they confronted me in the street, and on my way to the nuthouse I went. It was the beginning of the end of my drinking. Thank God.
The Long Road There
I didn’t go insane overnight, it took 17 years of drinking and drugging to become the paranoid delusional nut I described in these last pages. When I finally did get sober for the final time on December 24th, 2006, I had attempted the program my own way several times over with not so great results. When I finally did it the way it was suggested—got a sponsor, prayed specifically for strength to stay sober through the day, and thanks once I had, called my sponsor every day, began working the steps, and began going to 90 meetings in my first 90 days—the urge to drink and drug left me almost instantaneously. The voices in my head went away almost as rapidly.
And then the next challenge appeared before me. I was diagnosed hepatitis C positive. The first time I heard someone in the rooms of AA mention it, I didn’t even hear them correctly. I heard Hippopotamus Sea, and I was so fuzzy, I disregarded it as unimportant. I heard lots of strange things those first few months, as my mind was just a haze. I’d continue hearing about it in the rooms, though, and eventually I heard it correctly, hepatitis C, a blood disease that just so happens to attack the organ my vice required to filter alcohol, my liver. Though I’d only used needles once in my entire life, I asked the doctor to test me for it. At first he told me, “No, that’s a drug addict’s disease.” I asked him to kindly check anyway, and sure enough, I was sick.
He told me the cure was twelve months of Interferon treatment that was most closely described as low-level chemotherapy. I’d watched my mom go through five years of chemotherapy before she died of cancer, and I was scared to death. I was scared of being an outcast forever. I was scared I’d be alone for the rest of my life, branded hep C positive, and I was scared it was going to kill me. My doctor told me it could take me five years or it could take twenty, but I would eventually need a new liver and mine was already very dysfunctional with my liver enzymes through the roof. My urine had been a deep dark brown for almost a year, and it had hurt to pee for a while, but I’d just written it off as being caused by too much drinking. When I’d finally quit drinking and my urine stayed that nasty color and it still hurt to pee, and my whole side of my body ached constantly, I knew something was badly wrong, I just hadn’t known what. Had I not been in AA, and heard other members talk about hepatitis C in those rooms, I don’t know if I’d have ever found out. The doctor also told me people with criminal records were not the highest on the list of liver transplant patients, and oh brother, I had a record. After just being relieved of the burden to drink, it was the last thing I wanted to hear. I thought a lot about how I’d gotten there, and just what I’d done to deserve this. After much thought, I’m a lucky man and life isn’t fair. If it was, I’d be dead and buried, serving a life sentence, or worse.
The story I present to you from here on is not one of bold, ego-establishing tall tales, but that of an angry young man who had a traumatic event happen to him at a young age, and who stayed angry for years. It’s about a punk fuck-up, who thought the world owed him something. It’s a humbling statement of how I was, what happened and what I’m like now. It’s an apology to some and an explanation to others. It’s a thank you to Alcoholics Anonymous, and ultimately, I hope that it gives hope to some alcoholic, drug addict like me who has just found out he has hep C and thinks his life is over. Because it isn’t. Most of the miracles in my life have felt like a punch to the gut at first, and so was finding out I was hep C positive. But the reality is I contracted a disease that attacked the one organ my primary vice required, the liver. And had I not gotten it, I don’t know that I would have stayed sober. For me, it had to be life or death for me to finally get sober, and get that first year of sobriety under my belt. I had to be at the precipice, at the crossroads of my soul, and then and only then did I get real honest, real fast, and learn to live the program and stay sober.
The most ridiculous of my delusions are also the funniest too me now. They are ego driven, and the madness is funny to me in retrospect, that the CIA would need a repeat DUI offender with ruined credit to conduct its missions! When they checked me into that loony bin, I thought I was connected to Langley via a psychic connection and they were giving me orders to do their bidding one thought at a time. I’d really lost it. I had ridiculous evidence heaped upon even less stable assumptions and illusions to support all of my lofty hallucinations, but I’ll come back to how whacky and out of hand these eventually got. They weren’t just the byproduct of drugs and alcohol, though that was the nuclear fuel that drove them. They were the culmination of many years of anger, hatred, resentment, and finger pointing.
They started with the suicide of my father when I was 11 years old, the ultimate surrender, in my eyes, to the disease of alcoholism. My anger and resentments began for me around that time probably peaking around 2006 after my mother finally lost her brave battle with cancer. Within two weeks of her leaving this harsh world I had lost my mother, my father, my girlfriend of a considerably chaotic three-and-a-half years, and the medicine I was using to cope with it all, opiates. When she died, I quit opiates on my own using alcohol and Xanax to fight the withdrawal, but from that time forward, my drinking no longer even had a semblance of its prior control. I’ve met more than once person, whom after Dr. or even Hospital ordered morphine, lost all control over their drinking, and I’d be willing to bet that future generations will find more data regarding that aspect as well as genetic predispositions, but for me, I probably had it coming. In 2004, after my mom died, all control was lost, and within two years I was stark, raving mad, eventually leading me into the loony bin. It wasn’t fun, or hilarious as I can make it sound now, it was the scariest time of my life. I’ll try to capture my life up to the point I brought you in, what happened, how it got even worse, and what it’s like now.
I will talk about Alcoholics Anonymous, though I won’t share any names or break anyone’s confidentiality, as that is actually against their policy, as well. But fortunately, another policy states my membership is only dependent upon my desire to stop drinking, so if they can’t kick me out, I don’t see how I can write this without speaking of it. I would rather share with you my solution than tiptoe around Captain Obvious and insult the reader’s intelligence.
Just as those rocks were different shapes in the world’s reality than they were in mine, the puzzle pieces didn’t match the cover, and the CIA were communicating with me by thought, so was my alcohol and drug problem. Delusional. Not the main issue. My world was a mess. Einstein said “You can’t fix a problem caused by a level of thinking with the same level of thinking.” He was right. You can’t fix a broken thing, your brain, with a broken thing, because your brain is, for all human concerns, broken when you come into Alcoholics Anonymous. Here’s how I got there.
Childhood With My Father
I thought at the time I had a pretty good childhood, but looking back I had quite a bit of oddball behavior long before the traumatic events of my father’s death. Not so odd in relation to other alcoholics I’ve met since getting sober though. For instance, when I was a toddler, my mom told me I once cracked the childproof lock on some pink medicine I enjoyed, and having enjoyed one sip, I’d snuck back into the fridge, and drank the entire bottle, forcing her to rush me to the emergency room to have my stomach pumped. I also remember wondering about death quite a bit for a child, once asking my dad if I had ever lived before and if I were to die would I live again. I was about 7 years old, and he was shocked, and told me what he knew about reincarnation and quizzed me about what I knew. Shortly after that philosophical discussion with my dad, my mom walked in on me in our kitchen holding the biggest knife we owned to my chest. I remember just being curious, not depressed.
I was also overly infatuated with girls from an early age. My mom caught me playing doctor with Kelly Rogers at age 5, and I repeated that business as often as possible with any girl that would let me. My mom was horrified, but my dad, drinking Budweiser in a can on the front lawn, thought it was hilarious. “Son, I remember a girlfriend I had that I used to go sneak a quick look at from time to time, but damn son, I was 16 years old!” and he laughed his jovial happy drunk laugh. He was great when he was great, but the happy drunk laugh would keep coming less and less, and the ominous stares, and screaming and yelling would ultimately replace that awesome laugh over the years, as his disease of alcoholism would get worse. Still, though, my behavior, with or without his drinking, was already a little odd long before any major tragedies, and in retrospect, our entire family was already a bit dysfunctional.
The funny thing about living in a dysfunctional home is as a child if you don’t know any different, you think everybody’s family is just as dysfunctional. On the outside everything was pretty much the same, I mean all our neighbors had about the same amount of stuff as we did, same style of houses, same cars. My dad was an atheist as far as I could tell because he barely ever went to church when our mother dragged us every single Sunday. He once told me “Son, never shine another man’s shoes,” which I would later find directly clashed with what I’d learned of Christ washing his disciples’ feet. My mother would strong-arm him into church for Christmas and Easter, though, and once or twice he played drums for the church, though they used full drum sets less in the 80’s than they do nowadays. The day they finally joined RUMC to become members, I remember my dad had gone to church and then gone to work, selling houses. Laying on his bed later that evening he said that the same day he’d joined the church he’d sold five homes and asked me “Do you think God did it?” I said I didn’t know and he laughed and said “I don’t know either.” He’d thought about the coincidence at least, but he wasn’t sold on God, I could tell.
My dad used to say we were Upper Middle Class, whatever that is supposed to mean. My first indication that things weren’t exactly the same as my friends was that I never wanted to go home. I remember staying at the house of a friend, George Donaldson, and never wanting to go home to my mom and dad fighting. George’s dad was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I still tie my fishing hooks the way he taught me to. I couldn’t get my dad to ever go fishing with me. I did notice George’s dad was at his baseball games, and my dad was never there, but at the time I just didn’t think much of it, and I think my mom would cover for him, saying he was working and she couldn’t get him to take off. I couldn’t get my dad to do much of anything but the occasional drunk driving mission through country roads with the moon roof open in the Cadillac to go get candy at midnight. When I did have friends over, this is what he would do to make himself the coolest dad ever. And it worked. My friends loved him. Keith York, Shane Oleander, who is now dead to this disease as well, and George Dickinson are the only friends I remember that knew my father. He died too early for most of my friends to have ever met him. But the Cadillac rides were the top end of his benders. The bottom end included screaming and yelling at the top of his lungs over silly chores not being finished, painful scoldings over unavoidable childhood blunders. My mom would swear physical violence took place frequently, though to this day I can’t recall any specific details. She would claim I’d blocked it out and truthfully, I just don’t know. I once cut my finger open with a Swiss army knife he’d given me for my birthday and he screamed and yelled at me over it as though I’d done it on purpose.
The ultimate realization that my home was dysfunctional came when I was walking home from Shane Oleander’s house and I stopped halfway home and began crying right there in the street. The mystery of whether he was going to be in a good or bad mood had lost all its shine and I was just miserably afraid. Although my dad had those cool moments, his moments were just as apt to be verbally abusive and screaming and yelling at my mom, and I found myself spending lots of time by myself in the woods, or trying to spend time at other friends’ houses. There was a distinct moment in time that I remember when I was basically told by Shane Oleander’s mother that I needed to go home, and a fear welled up in my stomach. I remember clearly walking home as slowly as humanly possible, and thinking for the first time that this was not normal. I’d seen other friends cry about not being at home. I knew they looked forward to going home at the very least and I absolutely dreaded it. I eventually stopped crying and went home anyway, worried about getting in trouble with my mom, but that memory has stuck with me for a long time. In later life, when I’ve feared going home, something has clicked inside me. There’s something seriously wrong with not wanting to go home, and I’ve used it as a barometer for my life more than once.
Towards the end of my dad’s life it was super obvious why I wouldn’t want to go home. I guess I was roughly 10 years old when my dad really went over the edge with his drinking. I stayed up listening to him talk on the phone many nights previous, and I’d heard about his DUI’s and his arrests. One conversation sticks out in my head vividly. He was reading an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet to Bob Kleff, one of his infamous drinking buddies. They would talk for hours and at this time my dad had escalated from just drinking lots of beer that I recalled in the earlier memories, starting at around 5 years old, to then drinking lots of Piña Coladas with loads of rum in them. They looked like milkshakes and I probably stole more than one or two sips from them, but was still revolted by the taste at that age. Ah, if only that had lasted. So he was on the phone reading down the list of possible indications that one is an alcoholic. He and Bob were laughing their asses off about how ridiculous this list was. “If you HAVE to have a drink for New Year’s Eve. If you’ve ever had a drink to ease the pain of a hangover from the night before. If you’d ever been in trouble with the law because of your drinking,” and so on. He thought they were so funny, but even at the age of 8 or 9 when he was reading that, I could hear a bit of fear in his voice. I remember thinking clearly that he fit all those categories and that it didn’t sound too funny, but I knew better than to correct my father. I honestly don’t remember him hitting me ever, but my mom says it happened quite a bit. I don’t know how much of that is exaggeration or justification for divorcing him, or how much I’ve simply blocked out. I know I have a lot of unexplained scars and I know I was scared of him, and I know he did verbally abuse us both. Regardless, I kept my mouth shut when I overheard that conversation.
Before he would get uncontrollably sick there were lots of signs he was headed in the wrong direction. My mom would spend hours crying, sometimes in the house, but often she would walk out into the woods and cry and pray, where I would follow her silently and watch. He was unpredictable, and it was maddening to watch her suffer. One time a year or so after we’d moved to Roswell, a considerable upgrade from our first home in Norcross, she dinged the garage with her beat up old station wagon. He came home, screaming and yelling and throwing a fit, over a tiny ding in the wood paneling of the garage. The tirade lasted hours. Then a few months later, three kids running wild, I think my brother Carson darted out of the station wagon at the last second as she was backing out of the garage again, leaving the door open, so that when she reversed she not only ripped the door almost clean off the station wagon, she almost took out the wall separating the two garage door entrances. Fear instantly came over her face and I was immediately scared for her as well. She began panicking, crying, calling friends, pacing the driveway in a frenzy. Eventually she mustered up the courage to call Morris, my dad, and just face the music, telling him the worst. We were all scared for her, and watched her apprehensive, filled with fear. When she told him, he just laughed, said not to worry about it. It was insane, there was no logic to his reaction, no right or reason, it would have almost been easier to understand if he’d gotten mad.
Just a few months later, on my brother’s birthday, I crashed my bike accidentally into the same stupid garage, and you’d have thought I burned the whole house down. It was unpredictable. That memory becomes hazy for me as well, because it got so bad. After being screamed at, berated in front of all my brother’s friends, and heavy-handedly marched to my room, I took a little miniature hammer that was in my room, and I began hitting myself in the head numerous times, over and over again until I had obvious bumps all over my scalp. I went to my mom’s room after a while and had her feel my head, and she of course accused my dad of beating me. Amazing manipulation for a child. The fight went on for days, and quite honestly, aside from the bike, I can’t remember what’s real and what’s not from that story. So much was told and retold by my mother over the years, I’ve really lost a point of reference on what happened and what didn’t. I believe he was verbally abusive, and a little rough handed and being a manipulative, vengeful victim, I banged my head up to get him in trouble and get my mom’s attention. My mom would later counter that memory and say he’d definitely beat me that day giving me those bumps on my head, and I created the self-inflicted story to protect my fragile little psyche. Same as I can’t remember why I’ve got a huge gash scar on my forehead, she would later tell me. Short of hypnosis I guess I’ll never really know. Regardless, it was all a little less than stable and it was progressively getting worse.
A year or two later he’d leveraged quite a bit to start a new business, Roswell Realtors, and buy a large house in Brookfield West, the country club I remember all the cool kids lived in and I’d wished for ages we’d move to. Right after we moved in there, shit starting hitting the fan. He began drinking nonstop. It had progressed from drinking beer all day to the Piña Coladas, to now just chugging vodka at the kitchen table. The fights were intense and daily, and my mom cried a lot as did I, and my little brother and sister. She had three children with this man, and here he was clearly losing his mind. He made my house a living hell that year. It was fifth grade. I remember beginning to really act out around this time, though I didn’t know why at the time. James Floyd, a skater kid, wanted to fight me because I’d made fun of his poor mother for being our bus driver. I wish he’d kicked my little snobby ass, but he didn’t. He received a beating the likes of which if my 12 year old son inflicted on anyone else I’d have a shrink talk to him. I guess James and everyone involved in that little scuffle thought that a fight consisted of a few shoves. Herein lies some evidence that I knew what a punch was. I punched James in the face hard several times until he was bleeding all over the bathroom floor. He complained of having a metal plate in his head, so I picked him up and put him in a head lock and slammed his head into the bathroom wall. I was mean, I was cruel, and I don’t know where it came from. James Floyd has also since died of addiction related issues, and I wish I’d been more kind to him back then. Who knew we would have so much in common.
By then though my dad had certainly crossed the threshold and I didn’t want to bring friends home anymore, period. By fifth grade the ups and downs of an alcoholic father had turned into only the downs. I remember waking up to go to school and seeing him drinking at the kitchen table. When I’d come home from school he would be watching CNN at first, and ranting and raving madly at the television. He was absolutely disgusted that they would repeat the exact same 30 minute segment over and over. I can still get irritated by that monotony but his ranting was just lunacy. “Brainwash Bryan, over and over again! Watch now that 30 minutes is over it will start again!” And he would go from laughter to tears over and over again. For months this continued, and then it got even worse. He began watching the TV without the TV on. He would have the exact same ranting sessions, the same big worded diatribes with CNN, but now, the TV was off. I lost all hope in him at this point. Now I really didn’t think he would get better. I didn’t think he was an alcoholic, I just thought he was nuts. Obviously the urge to stay away from home stayed strong.
Eventually I remember my mother telling us that he was going away to get help. I had no real idea of what this meant at the time, but she did share that he had been checked in somewhere by herself, my uncle and my aunt. That it took three people to check him in, and that he would only be in there a few days, but that there was hope. I wasn’t buying it still. After that he would supposedly go to Alcoholic Anonymous meetings every day. I do remember getting a little bit of hope out of this, though it was all so vague that I didn’t know what to think. Mostly I remember thinking he was just absolutely insane and beyond the possibility of help. I remember thinking, yeah he’s an alcoholic, but he’s also absolutely crazy. What do we do about that? How are Alcoholic Anonymous meetings going to help him think the TV is on when it’s really off?
This went on and off for a few more months throughout the winter of 1988-1989 or my 5th grade year. There must have been a lot of talk about the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings because there is a moment in time that stands out vividly, and would stand out in my head for years to come. Eventually when I had my moment of clarity, this moment stood out in time above much chaos and confusion. It was lucid and clear as day. We were at the Roswell Recreation center, and my brother had a basketball game. How my mother kept us in such domestic trivialities while this chaos went on is incredible and ultimately speaks volumes of my mother and her desire for everything to be status quo. So there is my dad, miserable at this game, and we walked outside where I recall everything clearly. I hugged him and said, “Why don’t you quit drinking and go to the AA meetings?” He looked me in the eyes, with real fear in them, and said, “They don’t work. As soon as I leave the meetings I go right to the store to get more to drink. Alcohol is everywhere.” The fear in his eyes was so real, and so concentrated that I’ve never quite been able to get it out of my mind. I don’t think I really associated it with alcoholism at the time, but more or less with insanity. I really just thought he was nuts. That statement, though would be a reason why I didn’t try AA for many years. It didn’t work, my dad had told me so quite clearly with a real fear in his eyes. I often felt like my dad gave me far too much information, but this would have wider implications than his telling me there was no Santa Claus in first grade.