MORNINGSIDE: Memories, second thoughts, and why we shouldn’t have heroes

 

So what happens when your hero turns out to have feet of clay?

Well – is there any  other kind? Isn’t this realization a kind of punishment for the sin of having a hero in the first place?

This all goes back a long way, so bear with me, please. It was back in the 1980s, and I was living in Hinton, a small town in Alberta in the foothills of the Rockies. Like a lot of people, I was a huge fan and rabid listener to Morningside, that folksy, down-home, ultra-Canadian radio program which ran for three hours every weekday (with a cornball ten-minute drama tacked on at the end, which now seems utterly cringeworthy, but there you go. This was CULTURE,  and the drama  even provided that all-important “Canadian content”.)

Of course, at the helm of Morningside was one Peter Gzowski, always presented as an avuncular nice-guy, friendly, down-to-earth, and only stirred to ire if anyone dared question his rabid Canadianism. He seemed to champion local stories, pride in your small-town community, tales of everyday heroism, people heroically struggling with serious health conditions, and predictably dull interviews with Literary Figures, the usual round of third-string Canadian novelists who were making a wee splash with their latest book.

Now it seems painfully parochial, awfully small-time, but  then, at least where I lived, it was a very big deal. I even began to send in some of my short pieces, and did backflips of  delight when some of them were actually being read on the air. It never occurred to me I was giving stuff away when I should have been asking for the dignity of some sort of recompense. This was MORNINGSIDE, the champion of the small-scale Canadian author! How crass were you to even think of - ? But the utter glory of hearing Gzowski cough and wheeze his way through the piece was supposed to be enough. Certainly, my small-town neighbors in Hinton were thrilled I was getting so  much national exposure.  At that point, I had a weekly column in my local paper, but back then, newspaper columns were read today, and used to wrap  fish tomorrow.

After a  while, a friend of mine began to get HER pieces read on the air, so we sort of banded together, keeping an eye on each other, of course, but mostly cheering each other on. Then there was The Morningside Papers,  a series of books made up of all those donated bits of folksy stories, thrill-packed adventures in tiny towns, and even a few moderately-more-serious topics. My first piece in the Papers was a  thrill, as was the second and third. My friend Amber also had quite a few of her own writings in the Papers, and at one point we had a champagne celebration that was covered in the  Hinton Parklander. Fame at last!

But the BIG one for me was being asked to  appear on the  show to respond  to a man who had written a rather lame folk song about the Great Hinton Train Crash.

It wasn’t that big a deal when it happened, but it was prime Gzowksi  material, small-towny, folksy, of the earth, of  the Common  (of course, Canadian) Man. So I got on there and talked  to the guy, who hummed and hawed  and  said  that, actually, no, he knew nothing at all about Hinton and only read about  the crash in the newspapers. I was especially incensed when he  referred to our  glorious community as “a sleepy little pulp-mill town”. I had  a few word s to say about THAT.

It made for good radio, or OK radio, though of course there was no recompense except the shining glory of being ON Morningside! My small-town friends were ecstatic, and I actually got a few gigs on Edmonton radio as a result (and by the holy, they PAID me, though not very much. At least they didn’t shame me for asking.).

At one point, a new producer came on-board, and I recognized him as Glen Allen, a man who wrote a truly hair-raising series for Morningside on getting sober. This was his Detox Diary, first-person, present-tense journal entries (Day One, Day Two, etc.), written in what now sounds like rather purplish prose, It was “You Are There” stuff, recounting his physical breakdown as a result of floods of booze, cigarettes and pills. “My liver is as big as a house” was one  memorable phrase, as was his insistence “I loved  booze  more than some people love each other. What a time it has been! The rye and  ginger years, the rum years, and then the discovery of Russian vodka, the Ultimate Weapon, the sweet sting of the steppes rising from the bottles with the strange-sounding names. Taken neat, it was strong enough to run a tractor.” If any of this seems creepily detached from the reality of vomiting blood in a detox ward, then you’re right, it IS creepy and actually irresponsibly dramatic. By the end of it, on Day 12 or whatever, he’s citing  a psychiatric nurse who described him as “superficial, infantile, and lost in life.”

I should have listened.

Because he was so honest and courageous (confessing he left little glasses of vodka all over the house, so that “passing from  room to room, travelling by the Stations of the Cross, I would never be far from good cheer”), he was deemed a hero. He was confessing all this on public radio - reading his pieces himself, of course, not in Gzowki’s wheezy baritone. Back then, before social media and reality TV exposed the public’s blatant schadenfreude, the myth was that the more you “shared” this harrowing stuff, the better for the public good. And, of course, it couldn’t help but help YOU in your “journey”. So  everyone thought.

So Glen landed the gig. He was “in” with Gzowski, and thus with Morningside, though, as was typical with him, he lasted less than a year.

I  was actually kind of riveted by his Detox Diaries, and when they appeared in the Morningside Papers, I  wanted to get in touch with him. Oh yes, and I also wanted to run some things by him for  the show, which worked after a  fashion. They used maybe ten per cent of what I sent in, and Glen let me in on the fact Gzowski thought I was  a nuisance and wished I would go away. But what I was to learn about Glen Allen should have turned some lights on.

He was the  son of Ralph Allen, whom I had  never heard of, but who was fabled as some sort of  founding father of Canadian journalism. And Gzowski  idolized him to the point of sainthood, if not godhood. The fact Allen died in his 50s from smoking  and drinking just added to his mythology. So here was his son Glen, fresh off those astonishingly self-revealing and unnecessarily graphic  pieces about booze (not a confessional, but "a last letter to a lost love", he called them) that he read on the  air – and Gzowksi began to rhapsodize about him, calling  him a “shy and courtly writer” and “one of the finest journalists in Canada”. He was a fine writer when he was able to  sit up and tap at a typewriter, but a lot of the time he was, by his own admission, face-down.

 It was a strange sort of bromance, with Gzowski constantly trying to pump Glen for stories – any stories, anything at all – about his hero. He didn’t want to play, making it clear his father was horribly cruel to him and they never got along. Gzowski  even claimed that trying to squeeze Ralph Allen stories out of his son was like “a tongue probing the exposed nerve of a tooth.”  He also described “the smile that ignites his face”, though he was disappointed that this odd facial blaze reminded Gzowski  of his mother rather than his hero Ralph.

As a producer, Glen Allen lasted barely one season, but by this  time he  was truly encouraging my writing  and even urging me to try to sell some of it. I eventually did get gigs with  the Edmonton Journal, and eventually wrote for papers all over the country, including the Montreal Gazette and the Globe  and  Mail. Would I have gone ahead with it without  Glen’s promptings? Yes, I would, but it was still kind of nice. In the fullness of time, I wrote five novels (well, five and a half)  and published three - with publishers, folks, real ones, not the other kind. If my timing had been different, who knows, I might have sat there inhaling all that toxic second-hand smoke.

Starting with me, of course, Glen and I began to write to each other, and this correspondence (pen to paper, with envelopes and stamps  - this was the old days) went on, on and off at least, for nearly ten years. We shared a lot about certain mutual struggles – I gave up drinking and joined AA when I was 36, realizing it was doing terrible  damage to my loved ones and my life. And like Glen, I had fallen down the mental illness rabbit hole when I was only in my teens.

You have to understand how people idolized Glen’s  writing. It was, as I was to realize later, writing that calls attention to itself, inciting “ooooohs” and “ahhhhhhs” from the audience, like watching a fireworks display. But it would have helped if he had stuck to facts and not resorted to so much embellishment and  florid storytelling, which I now see as unnecessarily manipulative. “Respect your readers” should be the first law of journalism.

I was to find out later that Gzowksi  had pulled a lot of the same shit, doing just about anything (including staging  disaster scenes  to boost his reputation as a reporter) to get famous. I  was also to find out later that he privately groused about me because I was only sending my pieces in  to  get exposure on the radio. Horrors! A writer wants people to hear them? And to even think about being paid was even more reprehensible.

But back to Glen, and the fact that his commitment to sobriety was shaky at best. I was also to  learn he had bipolar disorder and had crashed completely at the time of his detox diaries. To hear him talk  about it, his life at that time was a smoking ruin, he had no job, his family was hanging by a thread, and he was close to actual death, but here was Gzowski, idolizing his dead Dad and willing to do anything  to squeeze information out of him. 

So he was hired.

 A few years later, when Gzowski  retired from Morningside, Glen wrote a long newspaper piece about his ten-month stint on the show (which actually was about average for him sticking  at anything). The piece was called “In the Spirit of Eros” – “eros” as in “erotic”. I will try not to read too much into that, but added to the tongue probing at an aching tooth, you’ve  got to wonder.

Some of his letters were beautiful  in that  powerful storytelling  way he had, but there was always  a smokescreen, a sense he wasn’t  being very truthful and that it was all from some sort of strange arm’s length. He did land in detox again because he was swallowing  benzodiazepines like candy, and I never had the sense he really became a part of AA, just went to meetings, sat at the back, then bolted out the  door. He never had a home group and was "terrified" to get a sponsor, presumably because he wasn't putting too many sober days back-to-back.

In those ten years, he  worked at five different jobs in three provinces. Newspapers, magazines, radio. He even did a short stint at Macleans magazine, which his legendary father had founded. (Glen was totally obsessed with this man who had treated him so shabbily, and referred to him in almost all his letters.)  I could  not keep  track, and he never provided a  home address. I didn’t  pry, because he was supposedly intensely private in spite of his detox True Confessions. He had a  “companion”, but never gave a name. I did wonder sometimes if it was a man or a woman, though ultimately I don’t think it mattered, because nothing ever lasted with him.

Then the trail went cold. He stopped answering  me, perhaps taking off on another adventure somewhere – he constantly talked about “hitting the road again”, and “hiding out”. In the fullness of time I realized he had dragged his wife  and small children all over the world, each gig lasting  a year or two. Many of these countries, such as Chile and China, were not  even English-speaking, which makes me wonder if he really did care about his children and their wellbeing. It seemed utterly selfish to me that a man who was supposedly so lavishly gifted had to keep hopping  around as if his feet never touched the ground. 

Then it  stopped, the trail went cold, Morningside ended - but not after a final piece of  mine appeared in the last Morningside Papers. But there was something wrong at the end of it.  Something awful.

The name of my town was listed as KINRON, Alberta. Kinron. There IS no Kinron, such a place does not exist, and to make matters worse, I  had already been ON the show doing an interview from Hinton.  No one seemed to think this small gaffe meant anything. No, not to folksy, small-towny, parochial Morningside! Why should I be so  upset, when they were generous enough to select my writings for the show?

KINRON.

Ultimately, I heard Gzowski  had died of emphysema, after writing an astonishing detox diary of his own – claiming he was in rehab for smoking. I have never heard of such a thing, but to his last gasp  he never admitted to his alcoholism. He was as destructive a drinker as Glen, but much less honest about it. It was only later that I found out about his “secret son”, a child  he had fathered with an anonymous woman, only to keep paying him off to  keep his mouth shut.

Funny,  because the same thing happened with Glen. He told a harrowing story (to  me, anyway – to  him it was just reporting) about moving in with a woman he barely knew, fathering a child with her, then leaving when the baby was only six months old. He put all his things in a garbage bag and sneaked out, likely in the middle of the night, never to return.

Yes, he was an afflicted soul, but as he was to claim years later in another harrowing You Are There piece (about getting  shock treatments in a psych ward), this was one of those long stretches when he insisted he was perfectly well and totally functional. He claimed to only experience a bout of mental illness every ten years or so, with “eight or nine trouble-free years” in between, before "the demons came calling" again. When they finally did, the shock treatments he wrote about made him euphoric, and the newspaper piece he published made him seem positively giddy, enraptured by the sudden bright colors, the murmuring of friendly voices (psych nurses) and the pleasant ticking of a clock. To  someone who is bipolar, this is NOT good news.

By the time I read that piece, he was dead by his own hand. Hospitalized again, the fifth or sixth  time in three provinces in two years, he took  an overdose washed down with beer, wandered away from the psych ward into a freezing Toronto  winter, and froze to death by the railroad tracks. There was even a police report about  a “missing man”, showing someone who did not look like Glen at all, skeletal, with glazed eyes and a front  tooth knocked out.

I know how I am supposed to feel about all this. In fact, it seems horribly cruel to feel any other way. Compassion, even pity, and huge admiration for his courage in describing how the doctor glued electrodes to his skull and flipped the switch, sending a jolt of electricity through “the addled spheres of my brain”.

But the piece was written with a lot  of mythologizing  and glib phrasing that somehow held it all away  at a safe distance, while pulling the reader in, forcibly, with that inevitable first-person, present-tense style he loved to use.

I know it was an awful death, and I can kind of see why he needed to write about the shock treatments, but this idea that spilling your guts is always  a good thing has aged like milk. I am sure most people reading his psych ward diary were taken aback  - even I was, and I knew the man well enough to know this wasn’t the first time. Nor did he need to recount every single one of his bizarre manic episodes, in which he heard jabbering foreign voices in his head, hired a film crew for a non-story on corrupt bankers in Montreal, hallucinated seeing his dead father in elevators, went on  several wild hitchhiking trips in Northern Alberta, and believed the Mafia was after him.

This seemed a lot more like paranoid schizophrenia to me than bipolar, but maybe he was both. The weird dissociative thing pushed it all outside himself. When he wrote about an accident after a bad drunk, he said “an arm was paralyzed, and stayed that way for  a month.” AN arm, not HIS arm. Another time, he cut “an arm” with a broken bottle. And the poetic ramblings in between were what we writers call “making story”, We don’t ever let mere facts get in the way.

I don’t know why all this has come back to  me now, except I think I do. I am not at all sure the health problems I am struggling with now are going to be survivable. It’s not looking good. So is this bizarre death from 20 years ago  haunting  me because my  own death is imminent? And what will that be like? Can it be any worse than what happened to Glen?

Gzowski  wheezed out his last in a cardiac ward in 2002, and Glen lay down and died like a homeless man three years later, having literally run away from a psychiatric ward. I see him now as running and running, even during those long stretches of “trouble-free years” he claimed to have. He fathered a child during one of those stretches, then abandoned his daughter and a single mother with no means of support.

So  do I forgive all this because he was “mentally ill”? He was, but so am I, technically, living with bipolar  disorder which has come close to finishing me many times. When I tried to share some of my mental health struggles on Morningside, the pieces were treated like dead rats. You had to be the son of a hero to get away with that.

So I’ve done a lot of things to try to shake this off. Morningside now seems embarrassing to  me, not just small-time but totally hypocritical, willing to mangle the name of one of those quaint small towns we all were supposed to celebrate, even after featuring many of my writings and even an interview from  my home  town which was on the air.

KINRON.

Yes, Kinron, which is “nowhere”, and in a way Glen was Nowhere Man, but it seemed like self-exile to  me, and during those supposed (self-reported) long, long stretches of sobriety and stability, what was his  excuse for yanking his small children all over the globe, never letting them settle anywhere, and abandoning an infant daughter? The suicide attempts he so willingly recounted were all very public – he  jumped in front of a bus in Montreal, he took pills in New Brunswick and waited for the  tide to carry him out (resulting in a coma), then ended up in Toronto as the “missing man”, frozen to death beside the railroad tracks. These attempts all had something in common. They were extremely public, and were all geared towards finding his dead body in  a very public place. Being a newspaperman, he knew all about getting the story, and he knew in each case it would invariably  get into the papers (he was a public figure, after all), and his family would be approached for comment. As if they hadn’t gone through enough hell already.

 So I have a lot of anger mixed in with the pity and bafflement, and I now see his “diaries” as sensationalistic and far too graphic to be of any real help to  anyone. In the final analysis, I don't even think it helped him. We don’t need to hear about the technician “plunging a needle into a ready vein”, knocking him out, gluing electrodes to his skull, flipping the switch like something out of a Frankenstein movie. He even phrased it, “And out I am in this fourth of eight shock treatments at New Brunswick General Hospital.” Out I am? This takes his usual, attention-grabbing (if not lapel-grabbing) “you are there” to a  whole new, ghastly level. How can you SAY you’re “out” if you are indeed unconscious?

Someone should have blocked the publication of this piece, particularly when it was reprinted after he  died. At very least, he should have waited to write it after the course of treatment was finished he was only at the halfway mark) and he came back down to earth. Someone should have taken him aside, but no one did, because the writing was so impressive. He worked at that. He did die rather horribly, and I grieved, and kept all his letters for a long time, until I couldn’t  any more and decided I needed to dump  the whole subject, but since writing is my way of making SOME  sort of sense of my life, I’ve  needed to do this now. Morningside, with its faux-folksy host  (with the secret son) and Son of the Legend (with the secret daughter) now make me feel a little queasy. That was then, of course, and this is now, the only now I have.  There’s a Cole Porter song which keeps coming into my head: aptly, it’s called Every Time we Say Goodbye, and one of its more memorable lines is, “But how strange the change/From major  to minor.”

Yes, when the fog lifts and the lights come on and the Frankenstein scenario is finally over, things definitely slide into  a minor  key. If anyone actually reads this, and I am a fool to  think anyone will bother, no doubt I’ll get blasted for NOT having warm, fuzzy, folksy memories of Morningside and Peter Gzowski,  everyone’s jovial favourite uncle. But  Kinron. And all those pieces, when I did not  yet realize it was OK  for a  writer to actually try to  make  a living with their skills. For even thinking about being paid, I was roundly shamed  and branded an opportunist.

I  won’t do my usual thing and break this up with photos or  images or whatever, because I’m too tired right now, I’m exhausted from treatments of my own (though no  electrodes are glued to my skull). A lot of  time has passed, more than half my life, and an awful  lot of this stuff has aged very poorly. For  the most part, though there are likely a few diehards, Gzowski is no  longer seen as the folksy hero, his endless wheezy chain-smoking and equally-endless drinking starting to make him look kind of shabby. No doubt Ralph Allen was a nasty piece of work (smoking and drinking himself to death as well), a narcissist who made everyone think it was a privilege to  work for him. Glen - poor lost Glen - was doing himself in steadily through most of  his 65 years. Yes, he kept a record, but  though his writing was praised for its “oooooohh”, “ahhhhhhhh” factor, I see through all of those tricks now.

There’s a not very nice name for these attention-seekers in this  age of internet fame and infamy. Yes, those were different times, but not THAT different. Don’t pretend to be this shy, private person  who only spills his guts (FOR PAY, by the way – he was paid for everything he did on Morningside – son  of the Legend, after all!)  for the public good. What he wrote did not reduce the stigma or “raise awareness”. It had shock value, and as  a seasoned writer, he knew it did and chose it deliberately. But gut-lurching shock is not a public service. It’s a deliberate demand for attention, sympathy and even pity, and though he no doubt was treated like a hero for it, there was always something in it for him. If nothing else, it got him another job when he had crashed in flames once again.

So  don’t have heroes. They have feet of clay, as we  all do. I hope the public is at least a little more sophisticated now, a little more skeptical. I suppose when I heard my pieces read on the air, it did give  me a momentary thrill, and made me a teeny-tiny celebrity  in my sleepy  little  pulp mill town.

HINTON, folks. Not Kinron. Kinron does not exist.

They just didn't love you enough

A harrowing scene from one of my favorite movies. Bette Davis is scary in this thing - at the height of her genius. Has anyone ever captured alcoholic self-pity better than this?

The loneliness of the long-distance drinker

ABC | PEOPLE

Elizabeth Vargas to Share Story of Alcohol Abuse and Anxiety in Book, ABC Special

By Mark Joyella on Aug. 23, 2016 - 5:40 PM

Two years after she announced she would write a memoir, 20/20 anchor Elizabeth Vargas will mark the release of her new book, Between Breaths: a Memoir of Panic and Addiction, with an hour-long ABC News special.

The special edition of 20/20 will feature ABC News Diane Sawyer interviewing Vargas about the secret she kept for years–and the difficult recovery she continues today.

Sawyer and Vargas will also report on the link between anxiety and alcohol abuse; and Vargas talks to an expert at the National Institutes of Health, visits a treatment center and speaks to alcoholics who are trying to get and stay sober.

The special airs Friday, September 9 at 10 p.m. ET, and the book will be released the following Tuesday. “When I first began to worry about my own drinking, I turned to books other women had written about their own alcoholism. I learned I was not alone, and it helped me find the courage to reach out and get help,” Vargas said when the book was announced in 2014. “I have spent my entire life telling other peoples’ stories. This one is my own, and is incredibly personal: the burden and loneliness of of the secret drinker.”

You know, even as I sit here, I wonder if I even want to do this.

I watched the 20-20 special with Diane Sawyer last night. Couldn't NOT watch it, I guess, for the same reason everyone else has: the train-wreck-in-slow-motion effect, the watching through your fingers, which is even more dramatic with a "celebrity" who has been in the limelight for some time. Not just for her journalism, but for her drinking.

Now, barely two years sober, Elizabeth Vargas announces she's releasing a memoir about her alcoholism titled, very curiously, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction. Note that "panic" (with that odd image of breathlessness) comes before "addiction". And nowhere does the title mention alcohol.

Strangely enough, last night, that's almost all she talked about: stumbling around blind-drunk, coming out of a blackout in the Emergency Room with her blood alcohol at a near-fatal level. . . fucking up at work. . . I don't know. I guess it's just that I've heard it all before. And heard it, and heard it, and heard it, particularly from celebrities.

All the way through this hard-to-watch thing, Diane Sawyer kept mentioning "red flags" (hiding booze, excuses at work, chunks of lost time, being unable to get off the sofa for her kids). But I saw some red flags of my own.

When I first saw an item on 20-20 about Vargas and her alcoholism, she said she announced it only because she was "scooped" and wanted to set the record straight. She looked very, very uncomfortable. Her smile was tight, her body language rigid, and she looked as if she couldn't wait to get out of there.

The story goes that her first stint in rehab was pretty much of a disaster. As was her second. The third time seemed to be the charm, except. . . 

Except that there were still red flags.

Sawyer: Do you think you hurt your children?

Vargas: Oh, no. I'd die for my children.

A little later on:

I will never be able to forgive myself for the way I hurt my children.

Sawyer asks her, near the end of the piece, "I know not every alcoholic wants to say how many days they have in. . . "

Vargas didn't just shut down. There was an audible slam. No, she did not want to say.

Sawyer was not quite ready to let up. "But do YOU know?"

"Oh yes. I know." But her face had closed down again, as it had done several times during the hour.

I have to tell you what I think about this. Addiction makes you lie. Otherwise, how could you hide all those bottles? And you don't necessarily stop lying because you have stopped drinking.

I don't think Vargas knows her sobriety date. She has had to start all over again so many times that she has lost track. But in the 15 years that I went to AA, I came to realize that a person's sobriety date is more important than their "belly-button birthday". If you don't know it, don't remember it, it's very likely you'll just keep re-setting the clock. 

So now, a book, a tell-all.  I wonder who told her to do this. For surely, someone did. Writing a memoir is a way to redeem yourself - quickly - by "breaking the silence" and "helping others reach out". It puts a shiny cover (literally) on the whole thing, makes you look noble for being brave enough to share it, and makes it all - what? Containable? At very least, it turns it into a commodity that can be bought and sold.

We live in a culture which claims that throwing the gates wide open and pouring out every trauma to the public is the path to "healing". "Sharing the pain" is supposed to give us lasting and/or permanent relief. Going public is therapeutic, isn't it? Well - isn't it?

I don't know how we've come to this point. It's not that I didn't identify with Vargas' blackouts, trips to the ER, high blood alcohol levels, and even screwing up at work (in her case, even on the air). It's that I DID identify. I did most of that stuff, and repeatedly. But I came to realize - the hard way - that it is very, very dangerous to expose yourself, to peel your skin off like that, when you're newly sober (meaning, the first five years or so).

Though Vargas wasn't as tight-lipped and uncomfortable as on that first night of revelation, there was still some acting going on. This woman makes her living in front of the camera, has done so for twenty years. Her face flitted from warmly confidential to deer-in-the-headlights to wretchedly guilty, to unreadable. Understandable, perhaps, but why stand under the glare of TV lights so soon? 

But the thing that I puzzled over most was the emphasis. The show I watched last night was almost all about alcoholism. Yes, there was some reference to anxiety and panic, but not as much as I thought there would be. And yet, the title of her memoir leaves out alcohol altogether! "Addiction" can mean playing too much bingo. The "between breaths" - a very strange allusion, I think - seems to be pointing to something like asthma or emphysema. It's as if she still can't quite spit it out - in writing, at least - that she's an alcoholic. Perhaps "someone" advised her not to put that in the title. Emphasize the panic and anxiety. They'll go down better. They are, after all, badges of honour in her high-pressure industry.

Why do I get this slightly vertiginous sense of spin?

It has taken me a long time to write about all this. Last November (November 30, to be exact) I celebrated 25 years of sobriety. Though I no longer attend AA, I would return to it in a heartbeat if I felt my sobriety were compromised. But I still remember, as booze-drenched as I was, what my last day of drinking was like.

You have to remember that date, or at least the date you first dragged your ass into detox or a meeting (or a meeting in detox). Otherwise, you're doomed to repeat it. It means you're "vague-ing" it off (and vague can be a verb, as far as I am concerned).

My last day of drinking was stupid, boring and depressing, but it summed up the sad joke my life had become. I was huddled in bed in the middle of the afternoon. It was deluging rain outside, had been for days, and so dark it was almost like night. The blinds were closed.  I had a bottle of cheap wine in my hand and I was taking pulls out of it. When I had sucked it dry, I threw it on the floor and said, "It's not enough." And then, for the first time in probably years, I heard myself.

In moving to Vancouver from a small town in Alberta, I had wanted so much more. I had ranted in my diary about this in a nearly-unreadable, intoxicated scrawl: "How the FUCK did this happen?? I had so many dreams and I lost them all and I want them back. In fact, I insist on it!" It was a funny thing to say during your last week of drinking.

There was another thing. I have to say this, I really do, because it's so important, a huge factor in my recovery. Before moving to Vancouver, I wondered aloud to my much-older sister what would happen if I couldn't adapt myself to life in the big city. She shrugged, made a pooh-pooh mouth, and in her best little ice-water voice, the one with the heartless little lilt in it, she said, "Oh well, I guess you'll just self-destruct."

Lying in that bed shaking my empty fist, I was GOD-DAMNED if I was going to let that poisonous prophecy come true. That toxic bitch probably has no idea how much she helped me that day.

But I digress. I think. 

I don't know about getting my dreams back, but at least I didn't die. It was extremely rough in the land of the sober, and sometimes I thought sobriety was even worse than drinking. I latched on to people very hard back then, and I think in a lot of cases I made them uncomfortable. It was extreme even by AA standards.

But I wasn't going to put my "anxiety" (or my PTSD or my bipolar disorder, then undiagnosed, or perhaps underdiagnosed) ahead of my drinking at a meeting. I had to talk about alcohol, even as I was thoroughly sick of it. Because anxiety wasn't really my problem. Panic wasn't my problem, nor was some sort of vague respiratory condition. Calling it that would have sanitized my messy, tawdry, stigmatized condition, and I couldn't afford to do that.

It's a long time later, years and years and years, and though for the most part I don't even think about alcohol, watching something like that 20-20 show last night can start things clanging. I don't think Elizabeth Vargas is out of the woods yet. She may have a couple more trips to rehab before she gets her feet on the ground (and don't get me wrong - I sincerely hope she does). Whoever advised her to do the book so early in her recovery - a recovery that seems rather fragile to me - is cockeyed. And if she decided on her own, then SHE'S cockeyed. But I think somebody should have taken her aside and set her straight. Too much "brave" too soon can be a recipe for rehab (again). And fourth times are seldom lucky.

The 20-20 Facebook page has hundreds and hundreds of comments, almost all of them rhapsodic, about Vargas' honesty and courage. But I think when sobriety is relatively new, these kinds of revelations need to be shared only with a trusted few. To throw it wide open is to open yourself to infection. It's peeling all your skin off. Why is unmitigated, unregulated, unrestrained "sharing" considered so therapeutic? Because it reduces the stigma! - doesn't it? 

Except that it doesn't. 

So what does? People going about their business, sober, once they have met the dragon face-on. Living a good life, a productive life, even a happy life - sober. It's being an example. People can pay attention to it or not, but if there are enough examples walking around like that, it can't help but make a difference.

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Little Sexpot (short fiction)

It’s not that she wasn’t grateful. When you don’t get to go anywhere on a Saturday night because everyone thinks you’re a loser and full of shit, you should be grateful for any kind of social contact at all.

Or so her siblings thought. Her sister Noreen was thirteen years older than she was, and obviously Mum and Dad were going to trust her with her little sister's wellbeing. Besides, it was good for her to “get out”, much better than hiding in her room crying like she always did.

Her older brother Don had lots of friends too, and their wives came along, but that didn’t stop the “goings-on” that were considered to be all part of the fun. She noticed the minute she stepped into the babble and funk of these parties that she was the mascot, younger than anyone else by ten years or more. Was she game? A target? Who knew, but what she did know was that she was supposed to be grateful.

There was an obnoxious creep called Shivas, but after a while she figured out that it wasn’t his real name, that it came from his habit of making a certain drink called a Shivas Special. Chivas Regal and one ice cube. Another was Tang crystals dissolved in vodka.

They were all quite interested in seeing how the mascot would react to having her glass filled and refilled. After all, she was allowed wine at home. Lots of it. Her parents didn’t frown on her drinking and even seemed to think it was “good for her”. Her brother and sister waved the banner of booze at every opportunity, insisting it was an unalloyed good, even when they woke the next day vomiting and ashen.

The party deteriorated over time, got louder, with people bumping together and the smell of pot wafting under door-cracks. Once she felt a hand, someone’s hand, didn’t know whose. Then her brother’s best friend started smiling at her. She looked the other way. Like the Ugly Duckling, she just didn’t believe it at first.

But then he sort of beckoned with his eyes. Come upstairs with me. Upstairs?? His wife was over in the corner flirting with her brother like they always did. Did she dare to do this, could she sneak up with him and –

This is how it always happened.

It happened because her brother’s friend was a really good kisser. He knew the spots to touch. Her body responded like flame, though she felt overpowering shame at her reaction. She knew she wasn’t supposed to feel this way, to feel anything at all. But she also knew she had caused this, somehow. He managed to convey without words that he had always found her attractive and not mousy or fat.

All she knew about sex she had learned from books, the books stashed in her father’s bureau drawer under his underwear and pajamas. When her parents were away at choir practice, she took them out. They were very clinical and  did not deal with passion or pleasure, as if those sensations did not belong in the field of sex.

But she knew about erections, because he was pressing his against her body with force. Her heart beginning to race, she wondered if she would be raped. She wondered if she should fight back, break away. But the truth is, she loved the attention.

“Hey, you two!” a voice came up the stairs. “Get down here, will you? Quit messing around.” It was a woman’s voice, and at first she wondered if it was the man’s wife.  When she came downstairs, stumbling a little, she saw it was her brother’s girl friend, her makeup badly askew. The woman grabbed her around the waist and squeezed: “Little Lolita,” she crooned. “Little sexpot.”

The booze continued to flow. Her sister held court in an astonishing display of vanity and narcissism, “looking after” her little sister by ignoring her and handing her over to the good graces of Shivas and his endless noxious drinks. People made less and less sense. She felt more hands on her and didn’t know who they were.

She remembered trying to tell her sister about what was happening to her at these parties, what was being done to her. Done to her by married men with their wives in the next room (or even the same room). Her older sister rolled her eyes a bit and said, “I don’t know why you’re so upset! You don’t seem to have any friends your own age. This way you can have a social outlet with the grownups.”

When she told her a little bit about the seductions, she shook her head.

“Are they having sex with you?” For one second, concern seemed to flicker in her eyes.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. You’re exaggerating. I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with a little smooch and a snuggle.  Look, we’re trying to include you and I really think you should be more grateful.”

Much later, she read about something called Walpurgis Night, a sort of witch’s Sabbath with hideous swarms of demonic figures that swept through communities leaving blackened wreckage in their wake. But this was supposed to be an advantage for her, a social outlet!

How many 14-year-olds wouldn’t give their right arm to be included in a group of adults with full-blown adult privileges?

She would go home after midnight, stagger into the bathroom and throw up all the Chivas Regal. The next morning, pale as a spook, she would throw up again, with her mother hearing her but saying nothing.

Her mother knew. She knew everything. Wanted to be rid of this social liability, to hand her over. Keep her happy. Later that day the family received a bouquet. She knew it was from her brother’s friend, the one who had pinned and groped her. It couldn’t be anyone else.

”Had a great time last night," the sloppily-written tag read. "See you next week."

It was not signed. Incredibly, her parents did not ask who had sent it, but put the pink roses in a vase on the table. 

Twenty years later, the family was absolutely horrified to learn that Little Sister had joined AA. It was a total disgrace to the family, who had never had problems like that and never would. It was obviously an act of hostility on her part. They could never understand why she wasn't more grateful for all they had done for her. When she began to see a therapist, it was even worse, for that implied that the family was crazy. Then they decided that SHE was the one who was crazy, and the matter was closed.

Post-script. Some years later my brother's friend, the one who liked to send me roses, lost his job and all his money and (finally) his wife, and shot himself in the head. I suppose these things never end well. For me, they never end at all. 

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Death of a hero

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day, though almost nobody knows about it or pays much attention. For the most part, the best sufferers of mental illness can hope for is pity.

But there is another way, something that might just break through public indifference and scorn, and that is the power of story. This piece ran in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal in 2005. It mourns the death by suicide of my dear friend and comrade Glen Allen, an award-winning journalist and great human being who suffered deeply from the effects of bipolar disorder.

I will not say he "lost the battle" with this sometimes-nightmarish disorder because I think he won, in that he lived for over 60 years, loved and worked and married and had children and wrote and taught and travelled all over the world. Even in the midst of unbelievable pain, he was articulate and wrote with a grace I'll never approach. I'd like to share this article again, just as it went down ten years ago, when my grief was very fresh.

December is long and dark at the best of times, and this year the merriment of Christmas was dulled by a death. When I opened my daily paper to the obituary section, I saw a face that made me gasp, a face I had never actually seen but knew as well as my brother’s. I read the account of his death in disbelief, shocked but not completely surprised that my friend had frozen to death beside some railroad tracks in Toronto, full of pills, after wandering away from a psychiatric ward.

My friend was Glen Allen, newspaperman, Maclean’s correspondent, world traveller, insightful and witty writer, gentle, courageous (and sometimes lost) soul. What brought us together was some ferociously honest writing about alcoholism, and what held us together for years and years was a mutual struggle with various demons. He always wrote about them better than I did. Or so I always thought.

I never knew Glen in the usual sense. I never saw his face. I had heard his voice a number of times, most memorably when he read his Getting Sober and Staying Sober pieces on CBC Radio’s Morningside. I sensed straight-from-the-shoulder directness and convoluted complexity in one person. This man was in pain, and so eerily distanced from the pain that he could write about it in prose that shimmered and shocked and stung. His writer's mind was so alive and focussed as to be almost crystalline, whereas the rest of him seemed to be slouching towards oblivion.

Sometime during his short tenure on Morningside, I began to write to Glen Allen. This guy just had a magical way with words, and seemed like a genuine (and pain-ridden, and large-hearted) human soul. I just had to get in touch with him. I was delighted to get responses, brief at first, then longer and longer, and over time we developed a sort of relationship through the mail. This was in the days of real letters on paper, written by hand, and I always delighted in his vital and elegant script, even if it deteriorated pretty badly towards the end. Often he’d write on beautiful blank cards, and I have one in front of me now, gorgeous sprays of crimson and gold called Flowers for Lord Buddha.

I think my letters must have gone on and on. I could hardly help myself, in those days, since I had no idea what was wrong with me and why I could not settle myself the way everyone else seemed to. But Glen had the same square-peg syndrome, which in his case registered as endearing eccentricity. He had a black lady cat named Imelda (I can’t think of a better cat name, can you?); he was concerned about his future once, and consulted a psychic in the backwoods of New Brunswick; when asked to be a speaker at a meeting, he shared his “experience (long), strength (not much), and hope (I’m going to hang on if it kills me)”.

Ten years is a long time, ten birthdays, ten Easters, ten Christmases. What did we write about? I can barely bring myself to open the file folder that holds all his letters, preserved and precious to me. The stark end of his life has made it impossible But I know we wrote about recovery: from alcoholism (we were both afflicted, and though his sobriety was patchy at best, he genuinely loved AA and treated it with the greatest reverence in his writing), from our parents (both of us had grown up with oppressive, cuttingly sarcastic fathers who withheld affection unless our performance in life was perfect: meaning we were never loved at all), and the worst thing of all, depression, the thousand-pound rock that weighs on the sensitive soul and destroys pleasure and joy and love. Both of us had bench-pressed thousands of pounds over the years, and though he told me his official diagnosis was manic-depression, now rather slickly called "bipolar disorder", I did not realize we shared the same affliction until this past spring, when I experienced what is delicately referred to as an “episode”.

I thought then of Glen, wondered where he was, how he was doing. It wasn't the first time. Wasn't even the twentieth. We wrote to each other for an incredible ten years, while Glen pulled up stakes and moved again, and again, and again, afflicted with terminal restlessness, an attempt to outrun his own pain. But in 1996, I finally lost the thread. I tried and tried. I even e-mailed his brother Gene, but got no answer. The trail was cold, and I had to surrender him to fate or the angels.

When I read his obituary, accompanied by a picture of Glen looking like a mere boy, sweet and shy, someone who just called out to be loved, I was barely out of my own thrashing battle, still trying to figure out what the hell happened to me, how the genie had exploded out of the bottle and derailed my life. But I kept thinking: Glen would know. He'd know just what to say to me, he'd know how to spread balm very gently on the raw wound of my mind. Like a sherpa, he'd been there before me, braved the elements and somehow survived it all.

Until now. When I read of the way he died, frozen to death like a street person (those souls he so identified with and wrote about with such compassion), with no one to hold him as the life ebbed out of him, I wanted to scream at the injustice of it all: at the medical community's complete inability to help such a large-hearted, lavishly gifted human being; at the gap between Glen and his loved ones (there was no doubt he loved them, but something always got in the way), at the grim, fearful, love-deprived boyhood that left scars on him, and in him, that would never be healed.

I did take out the folder, and looked at his dear, graceful handwriting, but haven't read the letters yet. I had thought of writing a piece about him, a sort of tribute, but I knew no one would really get it. When I think of him, which is often, tears well up, and I just want my funny, sardonic, gentle, wounded, wonderful brother back.

There is a song from the 70s by a group called Bread that I keep hearing in my mind. It has a haunting lyric that is like an impressionist painting of Glen's life:

"For a love that wouldn't bloom,
For the hearts that never played in tune.
Like a lovely melody that everyone can sing,
Take away the words that rhyme, it doesn't mean a thing."

The words seem to make a melody of themselves: I think I knew his name. I never knew him, but I loved him just the same. Wish that I had found the way, and the reasons that would make him stay.

But he couldn't stay; the pain was too great, the loneliness had hollowed him out, and the demons that screamed inside his skull had to be silenced once and for all. Such a person, making an intentional exit, is often described as "finally being at peace".

I think it goes beyond that. I think he is everywhere. I know he hangs around here, a warm spot in the room, a kind of disembodied smile, and I don't want him to go.

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