Growing Up Alcoholic

When I was growing up I remember always being thirsty. We even brought it up one time with the doctor and they ran some test to see if I was diabetic for some reason. And no, I wasn't diabetic. Of course, I was alcoholic. Just they didn't have a test for it.

But it was clear with hindsight that I had the personality type that leads to being alcoholic as an adult. I like to call it the ego driven personality type, and now I can say it is just a stage of development humans go through on their way to becoming full adults.

But yeah, being driven excessively by ego had me a sitting target for the alcoholic personality when things were to grow with me.

For starters, I had this overwhelming feeling of sentimentality and nostalgia - I could invest incredible power and awareness into some mundane experience and build such a story around it that I would find myself teary with sadness.

I would raise my arms above my ears and look around saying to my nine year old self "You know, you're probably never going to be here again in you life..." as I looked up at the rafters in the church from the little projector room.

Like it was a real destiny moment and the power and sheer awesomeness of the moment was something to be mourned. But all it was in reality was that I had snuck into the back of the church and wasn't supposed be there.

It is something we alcoholics do all the time without realizing - invest way too much meaning and depth to simple coming of age moments as though they are real turning points or game changers, when in fact they are what happens to everyone.

Making a mundane everyday part of life into an imagined movie moment was something that served me well when I had to choose between buying two bottles of wine on the way home, or just finishing what I already had and worrying about it later.

"But I might not ever have the chance to drink while I'm watching the Ross and Emily get married on Friends episode again..." would work, turning an everyday weekday watching TV into a sort of 'life moment' where getting a tattoo to remember the occasion would not be out of place. Or at least getting as drunk as possible.

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Growing up alcoholic I remember being addicted for the first time - and knowing the just-fucking-have-to-do-it-no-matter-the-consequences feeling of smoking out the side of my grandparents house. And them blinking at me when I said I wasn't smoking.

"It was a man at the bus stop" I lied, unpacking my lunchbox, "He was breathing all over me."

And being caught again and then, the time staying at my grandparents and opening my little packet of 15 cigarettes and seeing a tiny scrap of paper in my grandfather's copperplate hand "Bravo Brendan, Join the idiots" placed delicately alongside the three cigarettes.

And me smoking and breathing out in that forced, open mouth blowing way, thinking to myself "Fuck them, I'll show them!" and building another deep story around the episode, like it was a swirling technicolour outtake from the movie of my life.

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Growing Up Alcoholic

My grandfather in Ireland was a fucking alcoholic - I say fucking because he was such a drunk bastard, so the story goes, that my own father had to walk down the street and pick him up from laying in the gutter drunk and exhausted.

And again, like a true alcoholic, I have this movie clip in my mind, sentimentally embossed with that sepia gloss and utterly tragic trill from a Irish whistle as my Da' (as they are called in Ireland) taking shameful steps in his too-big hobnail boots as he walks through the early evening rain and the other neighbours peer disdainfully out their windows, washing slung low across the street, shiny cobblestones and maybe even a little terrier dog skipping alongside him.

And the grandfather, my very own grandfather, face slumped against the wet gutter, as my Da' comes up to him and nudges his shoulder with the toe of his boot, and sees the grandfather's eyes slurr open and he tries to say something but he is so completely spent with drink that all he can manage is "It's gone" and my father knows he means the money - he's drunk all his pay and gambled the rest.

And my Da' turning to look up at the tsk tsk neighbours as they silently close the windows and draw their curtains, and looking down at the grandfather and knowing he loves him and tugging him by the shoulders, urging him to make one last effort to stumble home. Like soldiers on the Somme.

And the screen fades to black and the sombre lilt of Danny Boy rises in the background as my father walks back home to his own mother, knowing the cupboards are bare....

It's a part of my growing up alcoholic that this is about all I know of my grandfather - apart from knowing he would eat dinner before us all, separately, because he would be already drunk and my father didn't want the children to see the grandfather drunk. Like it would make me an alcoholic or something. Well, that one didn't work...

And then he died and my own father didn't even mention it to me. So that grandfather, Aeneus was his name, has started to erode from the family history and you can see the sands of time filling in the serifs around his name as we speak.

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I went to Ireland as an eight year old and sat in the dank, narrow room as the grandfather burned peat for heating. And I felt my asthmatic lungs filling with mucous and me too proud to say what was wrong, holding my shoulder blades wide so I could draw breath and trying so hard to understand his thick Irish accent.

And then the toilet outside. And me writing a story on hotel stationery about a my travels and taking photos in my mind to fill the gaps in the story.

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Growing up alcoholic I always placed such a pressure on myself and such an anxiety on myself that enjoying the moment was simply impossible. As an alcoholic it stayed much the same - never being able to enjoy the moment without a drink or a drink in the very near future.

Like the times going to the beach to swim with the family and me having beers in the car on the way, at like 9am in the morning. Perfect day, sunny, kids, umbrella, waves, bikinis - and me not coping without an early morning beer buzz.

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Growing up alcoholic is part of who I am, and I can't change any of that history now. It is part of the past story of me and writing this helps me exorcise those embarrassing shameful moments and be at peace with how being an alcoholic is just part of who I am.

Like just last Saturday, at the in-laws winery, and me not drinking, laughing that I always wanted to marry a girl whose father had a winery - and now he finally has one and I finally am making some real progress not drinking.

And sharing with a friend who is walking the tightrope of drinking - and she asking, as if to reassure herself "but you haven't stopped because you're alcoholic - it's not like you had a problem or anything?" And me, a little proud of myself, a little melodramatic perhaps, maybe even reverting to my own personal movie again and saying

"Alcoholic? Yeah, it's like I was born to do it."

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