4B
University Daily Kansan / Friday, May 1. 1987
AA helps alcoholics live day at a time
Editor's note: A policy of Alcoholics Anonymous prevents the real names of members and their families from being published in stories that identify individual members as alcohols. Because of the requirement, John's real name and those of his family are not used.
By KIERST MOFN
Staff writer
John has only two drinks a year — at Easter and Christmas. Five years ago, those two drinks combined would hardly have wet his tongue on a typical Sunday morning.
John, 39, is a recovering alcoholic. In September 1982, groggy and hungover, he staggered to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a final attempt to beat a disease that had controlled him for 17 years.
So far, his attempt has succeeded. Except for a one-night slip in 1984, John has stayed sober since that first meeting. He has married, had two children and found a home in Lawrence.
He says his family is the most important element in his life, both because he enjoys being with his wife and children and because they were
his motivation to quit drinking.
Before, his life centered on his drinking, which ruined two previous marriages and several relationships, he says.
One night in 1982, John had a date with Diane, whom he soon married
"She had a beer, and I had two or three pitchers, a pint of Scotch, put the moves on her best friend and things like that." he savs.
"I woke up the next day, sicker than a dog, and I said, 'That's it!' I looked at Diane, and I said, 'I've got too much going here. I'm not going to take the chance on wrecking this one, too.'
John didn't take that chance. He went to AA for help staying sober because he did not want Diane and her son Chris, to leave him, he says
"I realized that I had two people that I loved very, very much. Intellectually, I knew that somewhere down the road she was going to take off if I didn't sob un."
But Diane will not take all of the credit for John's decision to quit the job.
"I refuse to take responsibility for
his life," she says. "Because of me, he may have chosen to quit drinking, but he didn't quit for me."
When John finally did quit, it was after years of heavy drinking and even more years of experimenting with alcohol.
"The first time I remember being drunk was when I was about 4 years old." John says as he lights a cigarette. He sits in an old chair in his apartment. Their children, Chris, 6, Mike, 5, and Nancy, 2, have left their toys strew on the floor around him.
John explains how, as a 4-year-old, he fell out of his high chair because he had drunk a can of malt liquor that a couple had given him at a family dinner.
That was an exception, he says. He did not start drinking heavily until 1965, the summer he graduated from high school.
He had moved with his foster parents to Topeka from Marysville, where he grew up. He had a job that paid $1.11 an hour, which he says went a long way then. And he paid no rent, so he had a lot of money.
"I didn't have a whole lot to spend
it on, so I drank a lot of beer." A lot of beer then meant several six-packs a day, he says.
"It was a very social thing," he says. "It was not like I was a secret drinker or anything like that. It was what you did. You went out with your buddies, and you had beer."
His foster parents and friends knew that he was drinking, but they didn't know how much. He didn't tell me about the bank several gallons of beer each day.
"All alcoholics are liars," he says.
"I admitted that I drank, but I still downplayed how much I drank."
In 1966, he moved out of his foster parents' home, and it was up and down from then until 1982, he says.
It was mostly down. John was unemployed for long periods at a time. He slept wherever he could find cover, ate whatever people would give him and scraped for money wherever he could.
"An alcoholic can always find money to get drunk on," he says. "I slept in abandoned buildings and
See ALCOHOL, p. 6B, col.1
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