Resilient Addicts

My friend Julie once quipped, “By the time the family dysfunction distills itself down to the youngest, it was like a really fine hooch.” Julie was referring to someone else’s family, but her words perfectly described the emotional inheritance I received. Especially the hooch part. It wasn’t a question of if, but when, I embraced that deadly liquid escape.

Friends of Bill W.

Inwardly, I roll my eyes at AA meetings whenever a newly-recovering alcoholic gives a litany of reasons they drank. Indicting those who harmed them in some way, they invariably punctuate their narrative with variations on the tearful responsorial “and so I just drank.” Gads, I want to interrupt them and query, how it is so simple a matter of drawing an exact straight line between incident and bottle, cause and effect? If this were true, then everyone would drink, every single day. Or they should. But to blame it all on the actions of others? No.

I don’t doubt that terrible things happen to drunks, for I certainly found myself in terrible situations when I was drunk or high. Most often, I was the culprit of my own misfortunes. Always there was a choice involved, whether to put bottle or spliff to my lips, whether to socialize with unreliable people, whether to take care of myself afterward. Abdicating responsibility for my well-being to others or to a substance rarely served my best interests. Nevertheless, my interest in escaping reality did make mood-altering substances very attractive.

Anyone who has been held in the grip of addiction recognizes in other addicts a peculiarly haunted look of reprieve after they’ve dried out, cleaned up, and assessed their situation. Alive despite the odds, an instant bond forms between us over that haunted gaze. We share a grim understanding of hell played out on earth, episodes of ugly violence upon ourselves first but also upon others, realizing the collateral damage of relationships destroyed beyond repair. As only other drunks who have “been there” can understand, we laugh uproariously in the sharing of scenarios that are not funny at all.

Beneath the laughter, a collective sigh of relief resounds a tinge of awe. None of us deserved another chance at life, nor can any of us can claim to be innocent victims of our circumstances. Yet here we all are, nevertheless, recovering our souls bit by bit.

Some interpret alcoholism as a symptom, an outward expression of multiple dysfunctions of thought and feeling.  To that hypothesis I would add the scientific verification of a genetic predisposition to the illness. How, why, and what defines alcoholism as a medical condition challenges conventional wisdom indicting a person for their moral failings as the cause of their drunkenness. I know of no one (myself included), who set out to become addicted, ruin their lives, and wreak havoc in the lives of others. Yet I confess that sober types do have to admit to our particular mindset toward escapism.

My father’s sister once penned quite an unpopular family memoir that seemed to showcase alcohol playing a leading role in the stories she recounted. That I hearkened from a family of drinkers came as no surprise when I read it. Aunt Betty’s anecdotes slyly winked at all the incidents caused by a bit too much imbibing. I recognized within her stories a sense of grim hilarity shared by drunks conversing in recovery. It was all there, in my family’s history. Both sides, it seemed.

My paternal grandma’s membership in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) became the stuff of giggling table talk at holiday gatherings. We would mimic her severe, disapproving demeanor or playfully threaten someone with a visit from the WCTU. If someone in the family actually had a problem with drinking, the matter was only obliquely mentioned. Speaking about something without actually discussing it enabled me to dismiss my own drinking as unsubstantial, inconsequential in the overall narrative of a family genealogy full of hijinks. After all, I never did anything awful like what Aunt Betty documented.

Mute the Rage Button

My mother’s agenda of storytelling, combined with my innate survival instinct, led me to paste a veneer of gratitude over any burbling distress signals of hidden truths. I was a smart, capable kid who never lacked for food or shelter.  Watching me perform at the piano or sing in the church choir, I seemed normal. Perhaps I seemed a bit too eager in speaking out of turn in class, playing the tomboy, or inventing passages into my piano assignments.  My lapses into surly moodiness could not be quelled with punishment; those made me even more taciturn.

As the youngest member of my family, I could not protect myself from physical and verbal taunts of my three older siblings. Hating my vulnerability, I adopted their vocabulary, games, and attitudes. I watched the news with my father, aping how he argued about politics and the stuff of the world. Determined to make myself bigger and better than my small weakling child self, my pseudo-maturity masked inner fear and self-loathing. My sudden temper tantrums now seem obvious warning flags of inner distress, but at the time I was simply labeled a brat.

Practice sessions at the piano often sent me into rages – at myself – for failing to learn a passage as instantly as I wished. I would bang on the fall board (the lid covering the keys) with my fists and yell expletives. Some part of me knew to avoid destroying any instruments in the Music Room, including the vinyl hi-fi records. All of these were sacred items, links to a sonic sanctuary where I could unleash whatever unspeakable thoughts and feelings coursing through me into a howling wall of noise clamped down with music. I routinely blared the stereo for hours in that room, wrapping myself in orchestral and jazz music playing on the turntable.

No one ever feels good about themselves during junior high, and I felt ugly, inside and out. Negativity seemed to ooze out every pore of my being. Nothing except music fit, and even then I wrestled with my inadequacies of skill and knowledge. I absolutely loathed the hand-me-down clarinet assigned to me in fourth grade. Lee and Finch had played it, now it was mine. The instrument utterly failed to shut out the emotional tumult building inside me. At the end of band rehearsals, instead of dutifully placing my clarinet on the storage shelves as other students did, I drew a bead on the shelf from across the room and then violently shoved the encased clarinet like a bowling ball toward its shelf slot. Not surprisingly, I was demoted quickly to last chair in the third clarinet section.

Simmering in self-hatred for having ugly teeth and hair, I began to lash out in more obvious behaviors. My temper flared in colorfully foul language among friends who encouraged me to act out. Several girls in junior high smoked cigarettes. Most of our dads smoked; I would sneak drags off Dad’s cigarette when he left it in the ashtray at the piano.  I thought it a fine idea to become a hoodlum.

Stupid, impulsive decisions grew out of my sour moods. A friend dared me to shoplift; I don’t even remember what I stole at the drug store. The same pal and I started fooling around with boys during study hall. I had no idea what I was doing, but I wasn’t about to back down from a dare to put my hand down the front of a boy’s trousers.

One of my teachers sent home a report about my negative attitude.  Mother chewed me out with such fury that I feared my chair would spontaneously combust. “Who the hell do you think you are?” she screamed at me. Had I not been so damn selfish, she bellowed, I would prioritize our family’s esteemed reputation as pinnacles of our town’s moral and intellectual structure. If my indiscretions brought family ruin, then my mother would personally stoke the fires of my punishing hell for it.

I shifted to sulking in the presence of family. But fuming within me was a burning anger that I felt certain could have decimated everything in my path. Whenever others were safely out of earshot, I banged on the piano and made up verses laden with cuss words.

Enter The Horn

Then out of the blue, my seventh grade English teacher approached me in the hallway at school and asked, “Do you want to play the French horn?” I impulsively accepted her offer. Never mind that I had never heard of such an instrument, I just wanted a distraction. And yes, please, I wanted to play something besides that terrible clarinet.

Many an important transaction occurred in the two grocery stores in my hometown. It was at the grocer’s where Mother found recordings of classical music to buy with her grocery allowance. It was at the grocery where she bumped into my English teacher, and the two stopped in the aisle to discuss the price of handing over to me her daughter’s castaway French horn. Adjusting their hats at an agreed sum, Mother pulled me along as we moved on, and my English teacher gave me a smart smile before moving onward the other way.

Not until Mother brought the instrument home and I opened the case in the Music Room did I realize that the horn was a brass instrument. No reeds? Lots of spitting?  Playing loud with the boys who played trumpet? What a glorious thing! Mother hired a college student to give me lessons every other week. I quickly flourished, happy to be the only one in junior high band to play the French horn.

Newly bonded with an instrument that fit me perfectly, I nevertheless entered high school wholly mystified as to my purpose for existing on this stinking planet. I argued in class just for fun and distracted classmates with constant talking. Sometimes I became disruptive in choir rehearsals,  purposely singing wrong notes (loudly) in choir or talking.

Sitting in the brass section as both the only horn player and the only girl, I brought my experienced lexicon of profanity to comment on missed notes. Sitting along the back rows of the band, I blasted my horn and cussed like one of the guys. I was a cranky little brat, but my grades were good and I played a mean French horn with gusto and perfect pitch.

Dope’s Deceptive Cadence 

Then a miracle happened, or so I thought. I was granted permission to go to a friend’s house in town after school. On our walk there, we joined another friend and took a detour into a wooded lot behind some houses. One of them produced a joint and lit it. Since we had all been smoking cigarettes since junior high, we knew how to inhale. Within a few puffs I felt marvelous. For the first time in my life, I felt free of all cares. “Now here’s a way to make all of that stuff go away,” I remember telling myself.  For a mere dollar, instantaneous relief could be mine!

Just the thought of getting high elevated my mood for days in anticipation of my next total escape. I liked the easygoing nature of my two friends who toked with me; they were in choir and girls glee, and we began to hang out just for fun. We sang our glee tunes outside class, made up new words to some of them, and laughed at the pretentiousness of other girls.  We embraced our outsider status. They would remain social partiers while I seemed to veer hellbent toward oblivion with increasing urgency.

Smoking pot helped me tolerate the horrible taste of alcohol, introduced into high school socialization. Based on anecdotes about the amount of beer required to attain drunkenness, I opted for a quicker route with Southern Comfort whiskey. It never occurred to me danger of combining two mind-altering substances. Nor did I compare my intake to that of my chums. I should have paid closer attention to how well I was tolerating these substances.

My inebriated chums became sloppy, and they stupidly divulged thoughts and feelings better kept to themselves. They stumbled, lost their car keys, puked, or made out with someone they didn’t like. Some got into brawls. By contrast, I felt calmer and more composed the more I imbibed. My amiable and friendly manner reflected feelings of being liberated from cares, far away from the persistent ugly thoughts, images, and howling noises running just beneath my consciousness.

Becoming a Musician

Music, a far safer form of escape than drugs and alcohol, nevertheless became an addictive habit too. I busied myself with enrolling in every choir and band offered at school. To my regular piano lessons, I added horn lessons to my schedule. The first trip I made when I earned my driver’s license was to the closest city to take lessons with Nicholas J. Perrini.  Nick played principal horn of the city’s symphony orchestra, and he was the horn instructor at the Conservatory of Music.

Every other week, I drove forty minutes one way to have a lesson with Mr. Perrini. Afterwards, I would get a hamburger at White Castle and head over to the Conservatory to play in a high school honors wind ensemble. These trips seemed blessed respites from home, town, high school. So too, the sequential technical drills for becoming proficient on my instrument held my attention.

Rituals of practicing and performance also developed my focus of attention toward strengthening my ability to compartmentalize feelings, memories, and thoughts. Thus, post- traumatic survival fused with post-traumatic growth along the winding tubes of the French horn. Just as I had once traveled the air to hum with the trees and used it to fly away, I discovered another symbiotic space.

Growing up in a rural Midwestern town, I heard live Bluegrass and Country music more often than live orchestral music. Special family weekend gatherings at the township house featured a local band with a fine fiddler, banjo player, and square dance caller. So when Pam, a high school friend who sang and played bass in her dad’s band, invited me to join in on piano and vocal harmony, I was thrilled. Pam and her father showed me how to play from lead sheets on the piano. They encouraged me to harmonize by ear the vocals they had already honed on tunes, and I found I could easily join in just by listening closely. These were valuable skills to build toward my future vocation as a musician. It was also cool to have a job like this in high school, on weekends when I would have been socially isolated at home on the farm.

I thought it especially cool to have gig money for pot and booze. Many of the gigs were barn dances or weddings, where alcohol flowed freely. Just as I had once entertained the schoolyard boys with my cussing, I took on dares to slug bottles of homemade hooch and hard liquor at barn dances. Driving home after midnight on unlit rural roads, I must have been pretty lit. Perhaps a guardian angel steered my rusty old TravellAll station wagon safely home, for I was likely blacked out.

Destined to pursue music as my major in college, I accepted Mr. Perrini’s invitation to enroll at the conservatory at the university. The school was close enough to home that I kept my job in the band. Hoping that college would help me create a new life and personality, I planned a careful balance of music and alcohol/pot use to mute my inner emotional distress. What could possibly go wrong?