The Bottom Line: Addiction can be found at the bottom of a beer can as easily as in the bowl of a crack pipe
I officially crossed the senior-citizen line a few years back, which means I have earned the right to unburden something most people will not believe.
I do not drink. Never have. I have had fewer than a dozen beers and a handful of mixed drinks in my entire life, all at weddings, anniversaries, or concerts. Two of those beers were the product of July sun, Peter Frampton, Santana, and REO Speedwagon at a racetrack in Tulsa when I was nineteen. The statute of limitations has run out on my underage drinking (I think), but don’t tell the Fuzz just in case.
I grew up in a house where my father was always drunk or working hard to get that way, and my mother took a lot of pills to survive a miserable marriage she stayed in for sixteen years because she came from the generation that believed a boy needed a father.
The day she finally found the courage to leave, she apologized for making me choose between her and my sperm donor. I told her she was about ten years late flushing the turd. We walked out that night with the clothes on our backs and never looked back. I was already a grown man. Survival had required it.
Once she got away from him, she became a different person. I saw the old man three times after that. The first Saturday I went back for our things, which he had piled under the carport. We exchanged words that set the tone for the rest of my life. There may have been punches thrown. Well, actually, I knocked him on his ass when he called Mom a bitch. So there was just one punch thrown.
The second time was after my first daughter was born. Katrina begged, then demanded, that we take Stephanie to meet her grandfather. He and his portly Cherokee girlfriend made it clear they had neither time nor inclination for some stupid brat. In the car on the way home I said, “I told you so.” It is the only time in nearly forty-six years of marriage I got to say that without being put in my place.
The third time was his funeral. I went to make sure the SOB was dead. If you ever see a man watering a headstone in Dayton Cemetery, leave him alone. That is just me visiting Dad.
I will give him credit for this: pattern baldness, a strong work ethic, and a refusal to let anyone bully me, mentally or physically.
What I did not get from him is what I value most. I applied the same rule to everything else. I have never taken a recreational drug. I can count on one hand the times I have taken a painkiller stronger than Tylenol. I have never smoked a cigarette, a cigar, crack, or the devil’s lettuce. It is not my deal. I learned by example that putting anything in my body that put me out of control of the situation was the wrong way to go.
Falstaff and Pabst Blue Ribbon are as deadly as fentanyl when measured in that circle of addiction.
That is the one inheritance Billy Jack left me that I claimed: clean and sober, always.
I knew someday I would have children, and I needed to meet that standard so I could hand a clean life to my grandchildren by example. So far, so good. The three kids and the grands are quality people. I do not know how much of that was me--mostly it was Katrina--but she is not here to take the credit, so I will.
I have no tolerance for drugs. My addictive personality would have me in rehab inside of weeks. After heart-attack surgery, they gave me a pill that made me see Hell and demons. I took one and then hurt like hell until they pulled the staples out of my chest. Drugs and I do not get along.
A few weeks ago I picked up a weird infection in my left leg after scratching myself raw picking through the woods to a deserted cemetery. Deer urine, proteins, leptospirosis—the usual hillbilly cocktail.
The leg swelled up like a black-diamond watermelon. Buckets of intravenous antibiotics and antibiotic pills the size of hubcaps later, I was still in a lot of pain. Once I got home I thought, I’ll take one of their pain pills, because I was considering a hillbilly self-amputation at that point.
I took one. Tramadol. Sunday afternoon. I do not know whether the leg hurt on Monday because I went on a twenty-two-hour trip that included almost nineteen hours of sleep. I dreamed, or hallucinated: Beatles’ Yellow Submarine meets J.R.R. Tolkien meets Looney Tunes meets Beavis and Butt-Head in the Amityville Horror house.
I kind of woke up Monday night, noticed the leg had shrunk considerably, and went back to sleep.
That single prescribed tablet confirmed what I already knew. I still do not understand why anyone would do that on purpose and call it recreation. Be it cheap beer or synthetic drugs, I just don’t get the attraction. Given the inheritance I grew up watching and the kind of personality I got stuck with, addiction has always seemed to represent a choice in my eyes. . I am not interested in arguing the medical model. I only know what succumbing cost, and that I refuse to pay that price.
The irony is almost too neat. The man who spent his life chasing the last drop from the bottom of an aluminum can taught his son, by repulsive demonstration, never to chase anything that changes the shape of the world.
I did not get his thirst. I got the photograph of what the thirst costs. One Tramadol later, the lesson is still holding.
The old man is in the ground. I am still here, still sober, still the man who learned the hard way that the greatest inheritance is sometimes the one you refuse to collect.
