Thirty Rooms To Hide In (24 page)

Most chemical dependency counselors will tell you no alcoholic voluntarily submits to accepting help – they simply run out of options. Old-timers in A.A. often say the door to their meeting rooms ought to be just one foot high. “Like those dog doors,” one member told me, “because that’s how most of us came to our first meeting – crawling on our hands and knees, completely humbled.”

Whatever made our father finally decide to accept help we’ll never know. Perhaps he woke up that next morning, saw his black eye in the mirror, and knew he wouldn’t be able to explain it at work. By then, it was no secret his boss Dr. Coventry was losing his patience.

“People were talking to me about smelling alcohol on his breath during working hours,” Coventry told me during our interview in Rochester. “He finally admitted he had a serious problem. But by that time it had gone beyond me to the Board of Governors and they recommended he go to the Institute of Living in Hartford. Roger could not go on the way he was.”

With the news of Dad’s impending hospitalization, we felt the eye of the hurricane move over the Millstone. In the sudden quiet we shared what little information we had; even Kip was unsure, recording in his diary, “Dad in sorrowful mood. Told me he planned to fly to Philadelphia Institute Of Living (or is it Hartford?) at 4:00 this afternoon. Can’t quite believe it. No one seems to know how long he’ll be gone. Estimates run from 2 months to 2 years.”

Like the weekend runs we’d taken in our motel hideaways, this too happened fast but now it was Dad leaving the Millstone, not us. There he was, standing in the hallway holding a suitcase and suddenly we were being called to come tell him goodbye. Jeff was going to drive him to the airport and remembers waiting for Dad in the car out in driveway. “The top of the MG was down. Dad got into the passenger seat and as he closed the door Mom appeared out of nowhere and gave him a very affectionate but reserved series of strokes on his head. She said something like ‘Good luck.’ Dad didn’t look up. He muttered something I recall along the lines of ‘
You
don’t care.’ He looked like he was going to cry. He didn’t. But on the way back from the airport, I did.”

The next morning, the first of many hopeful letters from Florida arrived in the mail.

Grandpa’s letters, August 21, 1965

Dear Daughter: These pages I suppose you will prefer to tear out and dispose of, inasmuch as these Blue Books are bound into volumes for purposes of family history. But I can hardly write without some comment on the great significance of what happened yesterday. I judge that your strength (which I marvel at) must have been taxed almost to the limit.

Today all we do is think of you and pray for your deliverance from a tragic situation – you and the boys. What seemed so auspicious and happy in 1944 has become a sad business indeed. We turn over in our minds this development and wonder why and how. At the same time, we deplore our helplessness. There is nothing we can do. Our one and only daughter is in deep trouble and her parents cannot help her.

I am not sure whether this Steinhilber is your attorney, or friend or the psychiatrist but I shudder at the necessity of his advice to be alert for violence. I telephoned your friend Tony Bianco about that (when you first revealed the situation) and he assured me that the gun was not available to CRS. [When Grandpa was mad at Roger, he referred to him by initials.]

Of course, he could buy another. I cannot escape the fervent hope that none of you will ever see him again. It does worry me that he might leave Hartford and suddenly appear at the ‘Stone. It is my judgment you should change the locks on all doors. Your mother agrees with me on this.

We believe the crisis has passed and your success is a good one. But I confess to continued disquietude. I do hope that CRS’s absence is long-continued and that this will bring some surcease to you, battered and bruised as you must be. How dear you are to our hearts.

May God bless you and your boys.

For decades alcoholism was considered a lack of willpower at best, a moral failing at worst. It wasn’t until 1966 it was even classified a disease by the American Medical Association, and even then treatments for addiction were medieval: electro-shock therapy, insulin shock, heavy sedation.

That this was in fact the kind of treatment my father was about to receive in Hartford is no dishonor to the doctors there; it was simply the best medical thinking of the times. Western medicine loves to
cure
stuff, but alcoholism can’t be cured, only arrested.

No matter how many needles doctors stuck in their drunks, or how many Rorschach ink blots they showed them, upon dismissal most of their patients gave them a cheerful thumbs-up, walked out of the hospital and into a bar across the street.

As the doctors scratched their heads over their patients’ continued drinking, strange meetings were being called to order in basements of churches everywhere. Gathering to sit in the uncomfortable folding chairs were some serious Grade-A Losers – booze hounds, smack heads, pill gobblers – men, women, a Noah’s Ark of Dysfunction, all of them swilling horrible church basement coffee and smoking way too much. Hardly any of them had ever spent a Sunday sitting upstairs in the regular church. God had never offered much to this crowd; religion, next to nothing.

“Religion is for people who want to avoid hell,” one A.A. old-timer told me. “Spirituality is for people who’ve already been there.”

Sitting happily here in the folding chairs of Alcoholics Anonymous, people who’d completely rejected the church or had simply never believed in God were discovering a new form of spirituality. Like the good Christians upstairs, they too were lowering their heads and praying – but to whom or to what, it didn’t matter.

“As long as it’s something bigger than you,” they were told.

Down here in the basements of A.A., it didn’t matter what your higher power was. It could be the power of group,
The 12 Steps
on the wall, good ol’ God, or the divine luminous being at the center of your personal Buddha. Fine with them if you thought the Bible was bullshit or if your ass hadn’t warmed a church pew in decades. What mattered down here was humility and surrender. What mattered down here was admitting that you, by yourself, were completely unable to beat your addiction. What mattered was developing a willingness – that’s all, just a
willingness
– to believe that something outside of your excellent self might be able to save you from the insanity of your excellent self. And absolutely any higher power would do.

One veteran, sober for 35 years, recalls arguing about “all this higher power crap” with his first A.A. sponsor, a man named Bennie.

“I told Bennie, told ‘im, I don’t believe in God.

And Bennie says, ‘That’s fine, I
do
, so you just go ahead and pray to Bennie’s God. That’s right. Just put your hands together like so and say, ‘Dear Bennie’s God, I seem to need some help gettin’ my sorry ass out of this deep pile of shit I’ve put myself in.’”

“I know, I
know
,” the old-timer shrugs. “But ... Bennie was right.”

These people didn’t care about religion. It was all about getting out of yourself, about a willingness to believe that
something
out there could restore you to sanity.

In fact, whenever the word God was used in A.A. they went out of their way to clarify this higher power was “God
as we understood him.
” They even underlined this phrase in all their literature.

Unfortunately, Roger Sullivan had never heard of Bennie’s God. God – as Roger understood him – was
Irene’s
God and He was fucking scary.

Irene’s God thundered down at all the skinny boys whacking off in the bathrooms of Daytona Beach and roared, “ONANISTS, GO YE TO HELL!” People who didn’t pray to Irene’s God went to hell. People who missed Sunday services went to hell. People who had heretical thoughts, or who were horny, or opinionated, or drank, were all sent to hell by Irene’s God.

Further separating Roger from any consideration of spiritual help was the disease itself. Doctors do not expect patients to lie to them about their ailments, but that’s what Roger did once he arrived in Hartford; it’s what all alcoholics do –
“I’m fine.”
How strange it would be to hear a patient protest,
“Shut up. I don’t have lupus. … You have lupus.”
Yet an alcoholic will look up from his pool of vomit, from his slashed wrists, from his smoking wreck of a car and say, “
I’m fine. Leave me the fuck alone.”
Little wonder A.A. calls the disease “cunning.”

It is chilling in fact the similarity between alcoholism and good ol’ fashioned demonic possession, the kind seen in
The Exorcist
. Like the devil, an alcoholic just wants to hide in his room, curse God, puke on visitors, and die. Attempts to cast out either alcoholism or devil get the same response: both demon and disease will deny they exist. And when exposed, both will try to make deals to survive, or threaten suicide, or lash out, or play dead. Alcoholism is well described as a sickness of the soul because it is in the soul the alcoholic’s problem lies.

In the soul of every alcoholic, of every addict, there is an emptiness. Years before he ever takes his first drink he feels this void, this sense of incompleteness and melancholy, and it tells him, “You are different. You’ll never fit in. And you’ll never be truly happy.” One day that first swig of vodka comes along, or that first hit of meth, and as the feeling swarms up through his body it fills that empty place with light and warmth. He feels the missing piece in the puzzle of his life click perfectly into place, and thinks, “I’m
home
.” The experience is seared into his memory and not merely as the first time he feels high but the first time he feels human. “This must be how
normal
people feel,” thinks the grateful addict and so begins the long and fatal attraction.

Seen in this light, booze isn’t the problem. To an alcoholic, it’s the solution. Seen in this light, alcohol is a coping mechanism, the symptom of a deeper spiritual problem.

Unfortunately, none of this spiritual instruction was to be part of Roger’s treatment. During the four months of his stay in Hartford, he was given pills and tests and lots of care by well-meaning professionals, but not once did anyone tell him it was his mortal soul which was in need of care.