Peter Jo's Story - As told in a 12th step letter to Gavin
Dear Gavin,
I write this in the spirit of true unconditional love. I think that there may be a little bit of you in a little bit of me.
My name is Peter and I am an Alcoholic. And I am not for one moment saying that you are. That is entirely your business and up to you alone to decide. I am not here to sell anything either! If you drink or use drugs it is your business. If you want to stop – it becomes my business. The following is just my story, which I hope may ease your sadness.
I must have been a bitter disappointment to my father. He probably wanted me to be a homicidal soldier or a serial killer. Why else would you hold a child not yet three, who stands as high as your knees and relentlessly hit him until he stops crying? We were alone in the house at the time and I can still hear him saying, “Stop it, stop it, stop it.”
It took a while, but as I walked away I knew that my view of the world was changed – it was obviously a very dangerous place to be. My spirit was broken. And my fear of authority was born.
They took me to the doctor when I was four because I had not yet spoken. The doctor did some tests and said that I was not mentally retarded; I just didn’t want to speak yet. In those days they did not ask why. Clearly I must have thought that if I stayed silent or better still became invisible – I could avoid a reoccurrence of that agony.
After that, other than to hit me or push me out of his way he never touched me. I recall him entering the room and saying to my mother, “Look at him, he is crying just because I’ve come into the room!” If he knew why he frightened me, he must have been living with horrible guilt.
On my first day of kindergarten away from the safety of my mother, I knew that I was going to my death and screamed blue murder. Had my first teacher been a man I would have surely died on the spot! The subconscious powerless dread – of me against the world, left me only about seven years ago. When friends of my father’s asked me what I wanted to be, I would always answer, “A policeman” and walk away in a sulk. I planned to frame the bastard when I grew up and have him sent to prison. Often it was all that sustained me when the dog lead came whistling across me. Thank goodness he didn’t drink or he might have finished me off for good.
I was an intensely serious and obedient child. My school uniform was always immaculate. In the schoolyard I would stand up against the wall watching the other kids roll around laughing, wondering what they all found so funny. This living was a serious business! Always something of a loner, I was never ‘one of the boys.’ Paradoxically for the last four years, I played all the lead roles in the school plays. I was not shy; I just did not want to be me. For a short time I could be someone else.
Well I eventually lived through my school days – hating every minute of my time in that tough boy’s school. I remember thinking two things the day I left:
‘If I was old enough to drink I’d be drunk now,’ and, ‘Now I start learning. ’ And I read every book I could get my hands on.
Due to Dad’s fear of heights I became an accomplished rock climber for three years, in Snowdonia. After reading a book on lion taming I ‘mucked-out ’ six tigers in a circus for several weeks – long story. Then after trying to get into stunt-work, I dropped out of drama school seeing only endless unemployment ahead. I went into commercial art ‘for a crust’ through my twenties and crewed my boss’s fifty-seven-foot yacht through an exhilarating force eight gale in the Bay of Biscay. Having even more fun than that I ran with the bulls in Spain. Pursuant to getting stabbed and robbed in Marrakech, Morocco I went through three years of hermit-hood in London. Successfully lying about my credentials to Scotland Yard I worked in the courts during that time, followed by a stint of stewarding in the merchant navy. ‘Dunno about a death-wish but I did seem to love living on the edge.
I met an old guy who had managed a café I used to frequent in my early teens with my swaggering schoolmates. He said, “I used to watch you. Every Saturday there’d be that group of lads and there’d be you. Them in a bunch and you looking on, always on the outside.”
I immigrated to Australia and became an animator for Hanna Barbera in their Sydney studio. The years went by and hiding my secret dread of authority, living in fear of being sacked I over-achieved in everything that I did. Always feeling less than I had to do better than my peers in order to feel as good as them.
At Hannas’ I discovered that if I had two ‘tinnies’ at lunchtime I could work faster in the afternoons. My line was smoother and more confident. Then subsequent to an accumulation of fear, tension and work-a-holism my spine seized up and I finished up paralysed for six months. A friend advised me to drink a bottle of sherry a day to help me through the agony of the paralysis.
After I recovered I acquired quite a taste for Fosters beer and cheap brut champagne. I was producing up to a thousand frames a week – that is a thousand drawings! Only about six of us were that fast and on piecework the money was incredible.
Then I started to feel more anxious and less confident about my work. One day in the studio I remember a small crowd of colleagues around my desk praising the scene I was working on. ‘How nice,’ I thought, ‘they know that I am lacking in confidence and they are being kind.’ I felt unworthy of this status. Sometimes I felt that I had even lost the knack to draw! Yet logically, I knew that I was one of the best artists in the studio. Whenever the animation director asked to see me, I thought they had found out that I was a fraud. Not good enough.
Subconsciously I had always thought, ‘what if I had been thinking that I was doing it right, but all the while had maybe been getting it all wrong?’ I mean EVERYTHING! All the others understood how the world turned in civilisation and perhaps one day they would all tell me! The shame and humiliation of somebody doing so publicly was often a youthful daydream of mine. It was a terrifying fantasy. Constantly lonely I longed to be just normal. And why the hell was I more anxious than everyone else?
After ten years of secret wretchedness, (even alcohol ceased to work for me any more. By now it only unfocussed my eyes.) I walked away from animation, the one occupation that I had truly loved and totally succeeded at.
At parties everyone else’s booze became rightfully mine and blundering about in a daze I was becoming openly lecherous. When Vonny, my wife said something simple like, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough to drink, darling?” I would rant and rave about being over twenty-one and cuss her vilely for spoiling my fun as she drove me home in our flashy sports car. Poor Vonny came to dread parties, starting to live in fear of my verbal cruelty and my bouts of furious inappropriate over-reaction. It is said that on average, drug or alcohol dependent people cause psychological and emotional harm to the twelve nearest friends, acquaintances, or family members in the closest proximity to them. I had become the one thing I vowed never to be, the frightening tyrant my father had been!
I would promise Vonny and often myself that this time I would not drink. The next morning she would be telling me what I had said and done in blackout and I would squirm with self-loathing and shame, having done it yet again. It was becoming impossible to look people in the eye. I felt that they might see how really bad I was on the inside and my hands were beginning to tremble in the mornings.
Then as I said, I walked away from the pinnacle of a career that I had really loved. ‘There – now you have what you deserve. Dad was right. You’re useless. Satisfied?’
I thought I had just ‘burnt out’ and that’s what I told our friends. What really happened was that I had done exactly what any typical alcoholic will eventually do – self-destruct!
I started taking my portfolio around the advertising agencies, but my hands shook with fear across empty conference tables. I was intimidated by the bull-shitting demeanours and barking voices of the brash executives. I never arranged meetings in the mornings. I was paranoid until I had a drink, just enough to make my vision a little unfocussed.
Until I had downed my first drink I was a shivering mess of fear. A feeling of being late for my very life overcame me! Breakfast had been out of the question for years. My rock-hard shrunken stomach could stand nothing but coffee. Every day I awoke to a feeling of foreboding doom, that this would be the day that something would happen to totally destroy my world. The doorbell or the phone ringing sent me into spasms of unreasonable panic. Deep within I knew that today would be just as safe and wall-crawling-boring as yesterday, yet I could not dispel those terrifying inappropriate fears. Every single morning I woke into what I now know to have been panic attacks.
‘Reality sucks’ was a favourite saying of mine. That and ‘Everyone else gets the breaks.’ I became more and more cynical and dreadfully lonely. I began hiding bottles and drinking alone in my bedroom. The only thing that made me smile was sitting alone and naked on the bed with a bottle of Fosters, my only friend, in the crook of my arm. I would hold a sharpened throwing knife lovingly against my heart. Smiling down at it I would think, ‘One day I’ll have the guts to push it in.’
My only friends were Vonny’s friends by that time. Unbeknown to me, everyone was most concerned for us, asking her how I was and I had found a job yet? Due to the total demise of my self-confidence my illustration work had ceased and Vonny was keeping me. Unemployable, I had become a derelict in my own home. One day she asked me what I wanted to do with my life and I answered, “I just want to live until I die.
” What was wrong with me? I could no longer feel anything.
I wondered why Vonny didn’t leave me – I didn’t love her, she surely couldn’t love me! So why didn’t she leave me? I hadn’t meant it to be like this. Who the hell had altered the script?
I would hear folks say, ‘wouldn’t be dead for quid’s’ and I’d think, ‘I would!’
I found out later that booze is like an anti-biotic. It kills all feelings, not just the bad ones, but the good ones too. Also the reality I saw as being so terrible that I had to drink to shrink from it – was not real reality! The alcohol in my brain had distorted it. Real reality is exciting not fearful. Being born with the gene of alcoholism it had been the cause of my discomfort even before my father physically abused me! It had nothing to do with him. I had experienced the ‘isms’ of alcoholism before I took my first drink. That was why I was always on the outside looking at life, not being in it. Anxious inadequate and over-sensitive, I had always merely pretended to be part of everything. In the end, due to my addiction, I became a fear-filled grinning people-pleaser – a servile self-effacing victim who turned evil with alcohol.
Unlike the primary alcoholics who are out of control from their very first drink, the disease insidiously builds up in some of us. If only I had known sooner, I would not have lost my career. Alcoholism is incredibly devious, cunning baffling and powerful.
I was made aware of all this only in retrospect, after we had invited a couple over for dinner on the 8th May 1990. When we had finished eating the guy said, “Well I’m going to pop up the road to an AA meeting now. Would you like to come along Pete?”
“Yes OK I probably qualify by now,” I answered with a grin and sat all through the meeting, mentally nodding my head thinking ‘I do that, doesn’t everyone?’ Back on the street I was laughing my head off saying, “Shit – I’m an alcoholic"
I had walked into a room full of people just like me. I was no longer alone. The relief was intoxicating. (Bad pun?) I later found these quietly courageous men and women to be Sensitive, compassionate and full of real unconditional love. The only god I knew was one that I had come to hate and in that room it didn’t matter. Nobody was judging anyone else. How could they?
And these calm polite people knew exactly what I felt like inside. They were the only people who could possibly know. Doctors couldn’t, priests, vicars or psychologists couldn’t because they had not been there. If someone discloses to me that they are alcoholic I know immediately how they have felt, throughout their whole lives. Much more than any psychiatrist could ever discern. There is a cliché in AA that goes, ‘The Ten Commandments are for people who don’t want to go to hell. The twelve steps are for people who have been there.' I found out two things: There is a God and it ain't me!
When I was home in the UK last, I heard that my niece had been raped. I asked her if she sat with other girls who had been attacked and she told me that no such group existed in my hometown. I encouraged her to talk to her counsellor about starting one up. I could say nothing to ease her pain because I had never been raped. Only the other girls would be able to understand her feelings and know what to say. She could get a list of phone numbers of fellow sufferers to ring day or night. She would find her own tribe.
Well finding my own tribe certainly worked for me. After having to drink every day to survive, since that first meeting on 8th May 1990 I have not touched a drop of the damned stuff. The morning after I looked out at the harbour beneath a blue sky and saw colour in it. The day before had been sunny too, but I had seen no colours. It had been black and white and every other bastard was getting the breaks. Like I said, I was no longer alone.
I had hope.
All my life I had been running and had finally found a safe place to stop, only to find that there had been nobody chasing me in the first place! After a few months I realised that I had not thought about a drink for a week. The desire – the compulsion to drink had left me; without my doing anything other than not picking up a drink a day at a time and sitting in meetings. Magic!
One evening recently I was lying on the floor with our cat and Vonny said a lovely thing, “You’re a lucky cat – but then anyone is lucky if Peter loves them
.” That is not what anyone would have said ten years ago.
Drug addiction or alcoholism is an inborn declining and progressive disease that always gets worse – never better. Without help it would have killed me and still could. It’s called alcohol-ism – not alcohol-wasm.
If booze were the problem everyone would be an alcoholic. I am the problem, or at least the chromosome inside me is. The gene can miss whole generations, affecting just a few of us. And a tablet cannot cure it since it has been proved to be a physical, mental and spiritual disease – a soul sickness. You can’t touch or see an addiction, even under a microscope. It is a spiritual thing, to do with the mind and the will. Some stop with will power, but without AA they find themselves more lonely and unhappier than ever.
When I am alone I am in the worst possible company. Only with others in recovery, living with unconditional love, spiritually – not religiously – can I live a life of fulfilment and joy without bloody booze. Forgive me if I sound somewhat evangelical here. I repeat: I am not here to sell anything. If you get AA, something a lot more powerful than marketing will lead you to it, believe me – it is divine!
I know a Catholic nun who virtually lost her faith in God until she came to AA!
It is impossible to believe in anything when you drink like we did. I know mothers who have done things to their children that they would have killed other people for doing. Surely no greater love exists than mother love! Yet their love of booze was stronger.
That is how cunning baffling and powerful it is.
Apparently ten percent of Alcoholics get AA and only five percent of those manage to hang onto it. Trust me, we are a very privileged few. Many rich and famous, smart and successful folks have died in their arrogance. At the last count there were seventeen thousand members in Sydney, attending over four hundred different meetings. The majority of us would be dead or insane by now but for the telephone and each other.
The World Health Authority officially decreed it a disease only about ten years ago. The only known cure for it is Alcoholics Anonymous. The author Scott Peck said AA was the greatest event of the twentieth century. The world famous evangelist Billy Graham referred to it as the greatest miracle of the century.
There are no bosses, rules or religions in AA; it’s run on total anarchy. The only condition is a desire to stop drinking. The principles of AA go far beyond mere group therapy. Something that is spiritually magic happens in those rooms that gives us courage, self-respect and peace in contented sobriety. We often call the meetings ‘clinics of calm.’ Sitting there with feelings of safe serenity I often think, ‘This is how I was meant to be.’ Nobody knows how AA works, it even baffled the founders; it just does. The last paragraph of page 84 onto 85 in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous comes the closest to explaining it.
Albinos cannot lie in the sun. Diabetics have to watch their sugar intake. If I cannot feel grateful what I have, I am grateful for what I have not. To me any mood-altering drug, including dope, is poisonous. I am just one drink away from being a drunk. Today I have to live in the reality of truth, without resentments fear, anger, or self-pity. Like Clint Eastwood said, a man’s got to know his limitations. If I dropped out of AA, in six months time I might think, ‘Maybe I’m not a real alcoholic.’ I might try to drink like a gent – just once more. I could then end up a year later grinning up at you in abject terror from a gutter in Darwin or Casablanca.
If you’re lucky it will kill you. If you are not it will drive you insane first. ‘Well do you feel lucky punk?’
With every fibre of my being – I despise booze for what it took from me! Animators earn well over the national average today. But for booze, I could perhaps be parking the car of my choice behind garage doors that recognised my voice! In those days of wine and roses I looked good on the outside, but inside I was a shrivelling mess. Today I don’t look as good – until you look into my eyes. In there I look good. In there you will see joy and a modicum of serenity. I’m happy now. I have completely lost the fear of people and financial insecurity. Some people only dip the tips of their fingers in life. Those are the ones who judge that I could be doing better for myself. They think that joy comes from outside – a better job, a newer car, a bigger house, a pretty wife, a rich husband, winning lotto, whatever! Theirs is not my path and these days I stroke my cat and try not to judge anyone.
Everything is perfect; we are all just at different levels of not believing it is.
I read a lot about Buddhism and Taoism. Indeed I live more as a Buddhist than a Christian. However I still believe in a simple kindly God of my own understanding. I am not brave enough not to. The outcome of anything is none of my business. I have learned in AA that what anyone thinks of me is none of my business – my life is no longer my business! The song ‘I Did It My Way ’ must make our creator belly laugh.
In my ensuite every morning I say, “Thank you for my health Lord, Thy will be done.” And that is about as religious as I get. I figure that if I live throughout the day as I think My Higher Power, (God, Great Spirit, Big G, whatever) would have me live it, then He, (She, It, Ugh,) will help me to do whatever I do. Common sense! Failure becomes a fallacy; a myth, it only means that I have aspired to the wrong thing or direction. I can be creative, daring and tenacious with a quiet courage I never possessed even prior to my alcohol abuse.
If I succeed, well that’s good. If I fail, well that’s good too. Ah So!
As the sage Lao Tse said, the way is clear, why do you throw rocks before you?
I have exchanged fear for excitement by simply forgetting to be afraid. When fear does show itself, I hum the Twenty-Third Psalm and it vanishes immediately, (it works for me.) I hear a voice in my head that says, “Know that I am here. And worry not for tomorrow, for I am there too.” You see it is the three year-old-boy inside me who fears. Looking down at my body I see that I am big and strong now. Nobody can hurt me any more. I’ve finally got it right. I grew up (only about six or seven years ago.) I thought it would be dreary, but growing up is simply responding instead of reacting to everything. Many people live their whole lives clinging to the reactions of three-year-olds.
I see tomorrow fearlessly with all the wonder of a child. Doing my Tai Chi on Balmoral Beach, I can be moved to tears watching a wave hit a rock in the sunlight. Without having to be aggressive, I am no longer a victim. People just don’t mess with me any more and I have earned back the trust and respect of the people around me. I don’t have to be anything – I only have to be. Ghandi said, ‘God is love.’ And where love is, fear cannot reside. An older sober member used to say, ‘If AA isn’t about love it isn’t about anything.’
I smile a lot today, why wouldn’t I?
At any given moment, we are all exactly where we are supposed to be, doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing, and we are not doing it wrong. We are doing the best we can with what we’ve got. And sometimes that does not seem to be much – that is when we are growing. We are never nearer to our maker than when we can feel no faith and vainly struggle for it. As the Buddhists say, just asking the question is the answer.
“I’m bored,” a guy told his sponsor, “What do I do if I don’t drink?”
“Why that’s serenity you stupid bastard” was his reply, “Enjoy it!”
In early recovery I cried buckets on and off for almost eighteen months and a lot of the time I did not know why. I think it was because of a metaphysical change going on inside me. Before, all the people who drank had been exciting and those who didn’t were boring. Unbidden, somewhere along my spiritual journey that got all changed around.
After a few years in AA I sent a letter to my father in the UK, telling him what he did, what it did to me and forgave him, in my heart. I signed it ‘your loving son’ and cried my eyes out. Nobody told me to, or even hinted at it. As I posted it however, all those years of fearing authority left me. Today I love my Dad and thank all my torturers. They gave me compassion, which can only be obtained through suffering. They made me into a gentle useful human being. I see all men as my equal, no better or worse than me and I can look them right in the eye with a conscience as clear as my dear friend, the sober Catholic sister.
When I was home last, I left waving to my father from the back window of the taxi, but he was not waving back. He was looking away from the car, out across the fields. And I know he was crying because he loved me!
My life was not so hard. I knew a guy all through school whose single mum was ‘one of us,’ an alcoholic, and some nights he would sleep under a railway bridge while she was screwing some guy at home. As far as I know he never missed a day at school and never swore. Today he is a resigned Royal Navy frogman, a fifth dan black belt judo expert, owns several health clubs and does not drink. Luckily the gene did not reach him, but it might hit any of his children or grandchildren.
Circumstances do not cause alcoholism they only exacerbate it. I know a few members who had idyllic childhoods and were primary alcoholics. In other words, they were alcoholic from their first drink in their teens. My great grandmother had it. So did my nephew. He was taken into hospital with malnutrition. He was twenty-three stone and had been living on cider. I took him to three meetings, but he couldn’t hack it. He gave up heroin “Just like that” he said from his hospital bed, “Don’t know what all the fuss is about, it was easy,” but booze was too powerful for him. He died horribly of this damned disease in 1995 at the age of thirty-three. On both sides of the family, only the two of us got the gene in this generation. I take everything in my life with an absurd lightness today. Everything that is except my alcoholism. It is a fatal agonising disease. Next time you look at a bottle of Glen Fiddick imagine it's full of petrol.
Recovering alcoholics are not bad people getting good; we are sick people getting better. All our stories differ, yet they are the same. We seek the similarities, not the differences. Many people come in shaky and afraid that AA won’t work for them. Many more come in afraid that it WILL work!
Some people are too clever to get AA but nobody is too dumb. AA is a simple program for complicated people. I am perhaps more complicated than most. I like to complicate it. We all do it our own way. All you have to do for now is just sit in meetings and let it all just wash over you, that’s all. There is no wrong way. We were all unsung heroes when we started. It may be the bravest thing you ever do, but each day it gets easier and it can save your life!
Put simply; I had no choice, I was unhappy and I had to drink every day. I went to one meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and I never had to drink again.
And if that is not a miracle – then there are no miracles!
Today I choose not to drink and even when shit happens, I choose to BE HAPPY! I know how you feel Gavin and I’m here for you if you want me to help. I promise you one thing absolutely; your life will get better.
Like I said: If you drink or use drugs it is your business.
If you want to stop it becomes my business.
Pick up the phone when you have had enough. When you want to go to a meeting.
I enclose a Jack Brennan Twelve Steps tape for your amusement and edification. I am always here for you.
Unconditionally,
Peter Jo.