Thirty Rooms To Hide In (27 page)
Read Thirty Rooms To Hide In Online
Authors: Luke Sullivan
Tags: #recovery, #alcoholism, #Rochester Minnesota, #50s, #‘60s, #the fifties, #the sixties, #rock&roll, #rock and roll, #Minnesota rock & roll, #Minnesota rock&roll, #garage bands, #45rpms, #AA, #Alcoholics Anonymous, #family history, #doctors, #religion, #addicted doctors, #drinking problem, #Hartford Institute, #family histories, #home movies, #recovery, #Memoir, #Minnesota history, #insanity, #Thirtyroomstohidein.com, #30roomstohidein.com, #Mayo Clinic, #Rochester MN
Dad flubs his line in the family film, Christmas, 1965.
Dr. Mark Coventry, my father’s boss at the Clinic
I can vividly remember after the Hartford episode, Roger and I were standing in my office at the Mayo Clinic. It was a beautiful day, we were looking out the window and he said he was doing fine, felt great and was very optimistic. He said he was really off alcohol, now and forever.
Dad’s sudden return to the Millstone was a car crash in backwards motion. The metal popped smooth, the pieces of glass flew out of our hair and assembled into a window, the grill of the Mack truck that hit us backed away – and there was Dad again, sitting in the kitchen, smiling.
He simply showed up back at the Millstone. He never apologized to any of us, showed no contrition, made no amends, and simply walked in the front door – a drunk driver striding through the hospital ward where his victims lay, waving and smiling in at everyone through the eye slits of their head bandages.
(“Say … about that axe thing? Waaaaay outta line, I kid you not.”)
But in 1965, the needs of the alcoholic’s victims weren’t part of the typical treatment plan. Once the addict had dried out and filled in his discharge forms, it was “Bye-bye, don’t be a stranger” and a cab to the airport. Modern treatment for alcoholism now addresses the needs of the family along with the alcoholic. If only someone had come to us and said, “What happened to you was wrong. Let’s talk about it. Here’s why it happened. Here’s what alcoholism does to families, here’s what it does to trust, here’s what you can do to rebuild.” This didn’t happen. When Dad returned in January of ’66, we simply picked up where we’d left off, hard-splicing the family film from the “Fist Fight Scene” to “Hi, Honey, I’m home.” There was no reconciliation.
All the crimes went under the rug, along with the injuries.
Denial of the injuries was denial of the car wreck and since most of the past eight years had been a car wreck, all the emotions of those years were denied too. Family life was again refracted through that 1950’s prism of cheerful dishonesty. The billboard grins were back in place and everything was just hunky-fucking-dory.
But behind the grin, even we four little ones could tell Dad hadn’t healed; he’d simply stopped bleeding. Where one might have hoped for a joyful rebuilding there was only a depressed sort of resignation. Remembering Christmas ’65, Myra says, “There was a level of defeatism in Roger then. He wasn’t the same vigorous person he’d once been. Something was missing.”
Part of it was a sense of “victim” he carried with him, apparent even in a card game of Hearts he played with his sons that spring. Chris remembers ribbing him when Dad drew the Queen of Spades in a bad hand. “Dad took it personally. His reaction was disturbing. He just quietly put his cards down and walked away.”
“Something was missing,” said my Mom. I’ve gone through the family photographs many times, looking for this missing something and today I wonder if I’ve found it on one-quarter inch of film in a family movie – the one made on Christmas Eve, ‘65. In two frames of this 8mm film, my father’s self-pity and resignation show plainly; two frames in an emotional Zapruder film that capture him in an unguarded moment.
Dad is facing the camera speaking into the microphone of the cassette recorder. (He’s making a sound track he hoped to marry to the 8mm film at playback.) Though this audio tape has since been lost, by lip-reading I’m able to make out one word, “holidays,” and guess that he’s making an introduction to the night’s filming. But he flubs it. His introductory remarks have some small stumble of tongue and his shoulders slump, the muscles in his face sink and just before the camera is turned off his eyes roll wearily to the left and then close in defeat. I see a weight descend upon him. Perhaps I’m too unforgiving here. It’s just a guy flubbing a take. So what? He’s pissed, big deal.
I roll the tape back over the play-head and it is
there
: a heavy-lidded roll of eyes; an irritation much deeper than this stubbed-toe of a moment merits, a look one might see in a teenager who’s just been asked to move the refrigerator and barbells up to the attic. Rolling the film (now transferred to video) back and forth over the play-head, it’s plain the world is too much with him. Even if I am reading too much into this quarter-inch of 40-year-old film, from the psychiatric records I know that Roger’s tenuous hold on sobriety was not founded on honesty or insight or strength of spirit – only abstinence.
The treatment he received, though it was the best available at the time, was clinical, not spiritual. That he was diagnosed as passive-aggressive was probably correct. That his sense of self was not strong also seems true. But neither diagnosis helped him become whole or happy.
* * *
I am one of the drunks taking part in a group session in a modern rehab center. There are twelve steps written on a wall poster, five alcoholics in folding chairs, and a counselor. And in my fantasy, sitting with me in this 21st-century facility, is my father. He’s getting a taste of modern chemical dependency treatment; the kind that could have saved him. There are no Rorschach ink blots in the room today.
The counselor is leading the discussion and you can tell he didn’t learn this stuff from a book. He’s a recovered cocaine addict devoted now to helping others beat their addictions. In this small room of chairs and drunks he has heard every story there is.
“Roger, during family week we had Myra in here with the group. We all heard her read a list of injuries your drinking has caused her and the boys. I was pretty shocked to hear some of that stuff. Like: ‘Roger threatened me with a gun.’ Interesting that you didn’t bring that up during your intake week.”
Another group member choruses: “Yeah, or that part about the axe? Jesus Christ.”
Dad says, “Well, she’s always dominating me, telling me what....”
The counselor leans over, interrupts. “Is that how you solve problems in your house, Roger? A glass of bourbon and an axe?”
“Well, of course not!” flashes my father’s anger
. (“Who does this $10-an-hour orderly think he’s talking to? I’m a doctor from the Mayo fucking Clinic. Goddamn guy’s probably got a bachelor’s degree in psychology and he’s telling
me
?”)
“None of us here buy your bullshit, Roger. Sorry, but the ‘She’s dominating me’ stuff doesn’t sell here. We met Myra during Family Week, Roger; little five-foot-somethin’ bit of a thing, sat right where you are now. Not quite the shrieking harpy we heard about from Roger during his first two weeks here, is she, guys?”
“She seemed scared of you,” says another patient through the steam of his coffee. “And no shit, with you hittin’ her and wavin’ a gun around.”
“I hit her just that one time, for Christ’s sake!”
“Mmmm,” doubts the counselor. “When you first arrived, you said you’d never hit her. Which is it?”
“What does hitting have to do with anything? Just tell me why I drink and I’ll fix it! Look at my M.M.P.I. scores about my mother and you’ll….”
“Roger, nobody here gives a shit about your mother or about
why
you drink; we already know why. You drink because you’re an alcoholic and ...”
“I haven’t had a drop since ...”
“Since the night you slugged your son, we know. Twenty-one days so far, congrats. But Roger, you aren’t gonna get sober or happy until you get honest with us. This isn’t about your wife, uh, ‘dominating’ you or whatever, or about your mother or any of that stuff.”
“You have no idea of the pressures I face!” Roger erupts. “Have you ever – one goddamn time – ever had to tell a little girl where her leg went when she woke up?!”
“No,” the counselor says, barreling on, “but I once had to tell a little girl, ‘Your Daddy was decapitated by an alcoholic who hit him with his car.’ An alcoholic kinda like you, Roger.”
“THAT’S UNFAIR!”
“And then I somehow managed to get through the rest of that horrible day without getting drunk and threatening my wife with an axe.”
“TOTALLY UNFAIR!”
“That’s precisely your problem, Roger. You want the world to be fair and it isn’t. The world isn’t fair. Okay? This just in: some of us have shitty parents. Some of us get fibrosarcomas. Little girls lose their legs. We all get rotten rolls of the dice and you know what? Most people pick themselves up and just sorta move on. Most people when they get a flat tire they call the Triple A. You get a flat tire and you call the goddamn suicide hotline because your flat tire is so much worse than everybody else’s flat tire because you are Dr. Sullivan from the Mayo Clinic and when things don’t go Dr. Sullivan’s way, well, that just gives you the perfect excuse to go medicate your feelings with a quart of bourbon and threaten your wife with a chair or a gun or an axe, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it, you big crybaby?”
Roger looks into the counselor’s eyes; then up at the ceiling; down at his hands.
Boxes of Kleenex are usually set in the center of these group circles. If Roger could have opened that door just a half an inch, if he could have leaned forward and reached for a tissue, he might be alive today.
* * *
Dad came home armed with only a piece of paper: his diagnoses (passive-aggressive personality with a side of alcoholism). That, and the half-finished wallet he’d made in a crafts class where he practiced sewing until the shakes passed and he could pronounce himself fit for surgery.
Perhaps he did go through some kind of emotional scrub-down and humbling self-inventory that modern rehab centers require, but the record does not show it. Whatever insights he’d had were purely intellectual, not spiritual. He wasn’t sober. He’d simply stopped drinking and had achieved this in a closed hospital environment. He had no clue how to face the slings and arrows of the real world and when he stepped back into it, the first arrow went deep.
