6B
University Daily Kansan / Friday, May University Daily
Alcohol
Continued from p. 4B
back yards, but I was always drinking."
In 1969, he moved to Lawrence and in 1709 enrolled at KU. He became a regular in many Lawrence bars and discovered that in a university town, someone always is drinking. He spent the days with drinking buddies for a lack of anything better to do.
"That's the standard excuse for drunks in this town, that there's nothing else to do," he says.
He leans back in the chair and runs his fingers through his graying hair. He lights another cigarette. John smokes several packs a day.
While he smokes, he tells stories about fights he got into while he was drinking, cars he wrecked and people he injured, including himself.
"Literally, I should have been dead. My guardian angel must have been breaking union rules because he was working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, saving my life," he says, laughing.
John's life as a drunk was not a laughing matter. He felt miserable many times and made endless attempts to quit, but he never made it.
One morning he woke up, after spending the night with a drinking buddy, with a hangover so painful that he made up his mind to quit for good. Then he saw his friend's alcoholic father, who was in a nearby room drinking.
"I must have looked like death warmed over, because he took one look at me and said, 'You need a drink' and grabbed a half-gallon of scotch."
John made a more serious attempt to quit in 1977, when he joined AA and stayed sober for 10 months. Then, in 1983, he became a friend who wanted to buy him a beer.
"I didn't have the guts to tell him I wasn't drinking. So I drank the beer, and I didn't get drunk. And I thought, 'Oh, I can handle this.' Well, the next time it was, 'I can handle two beers, and I can handle three beers.' Before two or three weeks had gone, it was two or three six-packs. I was right back where I started."
John still likes to visit bars to socialize but order only soft drinks. He always asks for a drink.
"I stay away with great fear from just ordinary American beer because that was my great failings."
The last time John joined AA was not a failure. He learned to accept that he couldn't control alcohol because the alcohol controlled him. He learned to live one day at a time, he learned to depend on the AA support system and he learned AA's secret.
"AA's secret, insofar as it has one, is go to meetings and keep the cork in the bottle. What they basically do is sit around, drink a lot of coffee, smoke a lot of cigarettes and talk.
"It's the support system that helps you. They may not be able to help you with your problems, but they can sure help you talk yourself out of wanting to drink. I couldn't have done it without them."
John says he couldn't have done it without his religion, either. He is a Roman Catholic and goes to most services and gatherings in his church.
Under his thin, white shirt a scapular is visible. Every day he wears the two pieces of brown cloth, joined by two strings, on his chest and back. He says a prayer every morning when he puts the scapular on and every night when he takes it off, thanking God for getting him safely through the day. That way, one day at a time, he lives his life.
His two annual drinks are part of a ritual that is tied to his religious beliefs, and he doesn't want to hold himself as an example for other recovering alcoholics.
"I happen to be blessed by God that I can take a drink or two a year," he says. "Most alcoholics could not resist that. It's not something to play with."
But Paul, another AA member, said that a recovering alcohol never touches alcohol or visits bars. "He's setting himself up to drink." Paul said.
John's foremost goal is to get a job. In December 1986, after four years, he quit his job with KU. He wants to get off unemployment benefits and start paying off debts. Another goal to keep up with about topics in Roman Catholicism.
"I've actually taken steps towards some of my goals after I quit drinking that I would never have done had I still been drinking," he says.
longtime friend of John and Diane's
John's personality has developed since he quit drinking, says Virginia Henderson, a Topeka resident and a
"The thing I appreciate is that he's not dying. Before, he was going down the tube. If he should start drinking again, I'm afraid he would go pretty fast."
"I think alcohol caused a lot of insanity with John, and it wasn't until he joined AA that he regained his sanity," she says. "He's a lot more open and a lot more flexible. I enjoy his spirituality more."
John says that he doesn't know what the future holds but that he knows alcoholism is a progressive disease that will catch up with him if he starts drinking again.
"No alcoholic will ever say he's
Still, he doesn't fear it daily because after five years, sobriety has become a part of his everyday life.
quit — unless he lies to himself," he says. "Something may happen tomorrow, and I may go out to drink."
But Diane is afraid. She says she worries when he comes home late and sometimes when he is in bars or at parties. She worries that one single drink will set the snowball rolling and take them back to where they started. That's why she worries every Easter when John has his malt liquor at home, and every Christmas, when he has his wine at church.
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