Drinking
“The drink” was a curse for the men in my family.
My Dad drank beer to settle himself down with the hope that he would make it through the days without the haunting memories and through the night without the nightmares. I am sure he also drank to numb himself to his deep unhappiness and feelings of inadequacy.
He had chronic high blood pressure as long as I can remember and the drinking (and smoking Pall Mall cigarettes) made it worse. I remember taking the streetcar with my mother to visit him when he was hospitalized, ‘drying out’ and in danger of ‘stroking out.’ I am pretty confident that the ‘hospital’ was actually a rehab facility. When he came home, he stayed away from the beer for awhile, substituting a lot of ice cream, but the abstinence didn’t last long. All of his friends were drinkers, most of them World War II veterans. The neighborhood ‘country club’ was Andy’s North Pole Tavern at the northeast corner of 73rd and Halsted. The customers were mostly working class men in their 20s or 30s who had grown up in the Depression and survived World War II. With what we know now, we could call all of them drug abusers, the drugs being alcohol and nicotine. It was no accident that during the war the government made alcohol and cigarettes so readily available to servicemen. The nicotine in the ‘butts’ stimulated a release of adrenaline, dopamine and endorphins in the brain producing a mild euphoria, a temporary ‘up’, while the alcohol produced another temporary ‘up’ followed by the slow ‘downer’ effect. When I was in Vietnam, virtually every Marine (including me) drank too much and smoked too much and many enlisted men used more potent drugs. While all my father’s men friends were drinkers, not all had the same vulnerability to ‘the drink.’ Some got along quite well; Dad didn’t. He didn’t have much ‘capacity’ or tolerance for alcohol. He drank to forget, to calm the anxiety, and to escape the nightmares, but like so many self-defeating attempts to escape, it didn’t work and made things much, much worse, for himself, for my mother, for my vulnerable little sister, and for me.
My grandfather Dennis died at age 69 in 1952. I was 11 years old. He drank when he had the money, but he had precious little money. He lived on social security which was a short step away from penury. He usually lived in a rented room, sometimes in flophouses on Chicago’s Skid Row on West Madison Street. I learned only recently from my father that Dennis often ‘got rolled’ when he cashed his social security check, sometimes with injuries that landed him in the Cook County Hospital emergency room where my father would pick him up upon discharge. I remember my mother and me traveling to County Hospital to visit him when he was hospitalized. I suspect that it was after some of those muggings that Dennis would stay with us in the basement apartment, sharing the one bedroom with Kitty and me. For a time he lived at an old age home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. My mother, Kitty, and I would visit him there and Kitty and I would help the sisters make their rounds with their meal carts. I suspect that life with the sisters was too confining and ‘too dry’ for Dennis, however, as he didn’t stay there long. He carried in one of his trouser pockets a wad of soil wrapped in a Kleenex which he would regularly replace as it got ragged, a bit of the ‘old sod’ from Ireland. Why did he drink? I can think of a lot of possible reasons, but of course I do not know.
His oldest child was James, my Uncle Jim. When my mother was angry with him, or was chiding him, she called him “Seamus.” She had ample occasions to chide him for he too was a drinker and not a very responsible fellow. He was a bit older than my mother and was in the Navy during the war. He worked as a construction laborer or on any other job he could get, but would usually blow his earnings at a tavern. Sailors usually have a wad of money when they pull into port since there’s little opportunity to spend any at sea and there’s no drinking on Navy ships. Hence the cliché of spending like a drunken sailor. James clung to this aspect of a sailor’s life when the war was over. He had no car or other significant belongings that I can remember. Like my grandfather Dennis, he slept in rented rooms. He would occasionally show up at our apartment drunk, looking for some money or a place to stay the night. The Irish have a saying: the man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, the drink takes the man. Uncle Jim was the man. He was a good hearted guy and good to Kitty and me and our cousins. As I wrote earlier, he would take us on the CTA buses to Comiskey Park for a Sox game, to the Brookfield Zoo or Lincoln Park Zoo and to Riverview Amusement Park, taking terrible snapshots of us with a little Kodak Brownie camera. We had many photos of the backs of us five cousins leaning on a guardrail looking into a zoo cage. Uncle Jim gave me a magnificent green J. C. Higgins bicycle for Christmas one year. It took up almost all the open space in our little living room and had to be moved into the basement area outside our back door. During the winter, I rode it back and forth in the basement (no mean trick). In the Spring, I hefted it up and down the steps to get to and from the sidewalk. James had a job as an exterminator for a time and took me out in the company panel truck to teach me how to drive ‘stick shift’ in south side alleys and parking lots. That I was much too young to drive didn’t deter him. He was my closest uncle and we were friends. He was my sponsor for Confirmation at St. Leo’s and I took his name as my Confirmation name, becoming thenceforth Charles Dennis James Clausen. Kitty and my cousins and I knew Uncle Jim as a kind and generous man, and so he was, but like my father, he also was a lost soul. My grandfather’s death did him in. He was ‘odd’ during and after the wake and funeral and then he disappeared. No one knew where he went. Sometime later, I can’t remember how long, my mother got a letter or a telephone call from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. James had been picked up on a park bench by the police in Washington. He was delusional, schizophrenic. He stayed at St. Elizabeth’s for some time and was eventually moved to the Elgin State Hospital (originally the Northern Illinois Hospital and Asylum for the Insane) in Elgin, Illinois. In an odd coincidence, a childhood friend of his, Angelo Passerelli, was also committed there, but Angelo was in even worse mental shape than Uncle Jim, almost catatonic. After I got my driver’s license, I drove my mother to Elgin from Chicago to visit Uncle Jim until 1960 when the state shut down the hospital. The old buildings were torn down in 1972 during the period when mental patients were being released by the thousands in response to civil rights lawsuits. I don’t remember where he stayed once released from Elgin, probably a group home of some sort. He still attended family gatherings where he would tell us of “his fiancée,” who sometimes was “a ballerina,” other times, “the Blessed Virgin Mary,” sometimes both. Home was the sailor, home from the sea, aground on a shoal of delusions.
The second Healy child and middle brother was Donald, called ‘Bud.’ Uncle Bud was a machinist who worked on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico early in the war. Somehow he ended up in the Army during the last years. As a worker on the atom bomb project, there’s no way he would have been drafted or even permitted to enlist unless there had been some problem with his work or behavior. My father wondered whether it was drinking, but we’ll never know. He married Mary Horigan, the Aunt Mary who lived for years with my mother and father after Bud’s death, then with my sister Kitty and her family. Mary is 88 now and in a hospice in a nursing home in Phoenix almost blind, hard of hearing, and living in the past. Before my mother and father married, my mother lived in a rented room in the house of Mrs. Horigan, Mary’s mother. After the war, Bud had a job of some sort working for the City of Chicago and he kept that job most of his adult life. He and Mary lived in a flat above a tavern on 79th Street, near Loomis Avenue. They had no children and occasionally Kitty and I would visit with them or perhaps more accurately, be babysat by them. They were kind and good to us. Bud spent many after work hours in the tavern downstairs from their flat. He was a heavy drinker, but a quiet one. He developed cirrhosis of the liver and died in his 40s, leaving Mary Horigan Healy a young childless widow. She didn’t do well living on her own, and my mother took her in. When my mother died the summer after Andy was born, Kitty took Aunt Mary in and cared for her through her old age, failing bodily controls and dementia. When Kitty visits her at the nursing home now, sometimes Mary recognizes her, usually she does not. When Kitty brought me up to visit her several months ago, she thought I was her brother Matt, long since dead. Long before Mary ended up in the nursing home, when her sight, hearing and memory were failing and she was increasingly incontinent, she would tell Kitty of her prayer to die: “I tell God, ‘I’m ready, God’ What’s the problem?’” Alas, poor dear Aunt Mary.
The third brother was Brendan, called “Bim.” He served as a tail gunner on B-24 Liberator bombers in the Army Air Corps during the war. Somewhere along the way he lost half a finger. He used to tell us that the Easter Bunny bit it off. He was a participant in the strategic air raid on the oil refineries ringing Ploesti, Rumania and ‘saw a lot of action,’ as they used to say.’[1] He was a drinker during the war and early post-war years but he married an Army nurse named Mary (many ‘Mary’s in our clan) and this Aunt Mary, from New Jersey, was a bit like a drill sergeant. She got Uncle Bim straightened out and he stayed that way. They lived in Elizabeth, New Jersey, so we rarely saw them. They had three sons, my three other cousins, whom I really never knew. Bim worked as a mail carrier for many years before he and Mary retired to New Mexico where Bim died many years ago. He was personable and friendly and very easy to like.
Grandma and Grandpa Clausen were also drinkers, but not like the Healy boys. There was a tavern right across the street from their house on the southwest corner of Racine Avenue and 73rd Street that they and my father would occasionally patronize. Dewey was a quiet drinker; indeed, he was a quiet man whether drinking or not. I never knew him to get drunk or to miss a day of work for any reason. All of us cousins liked him a lot though he didn’t have a lot to say to any of us (or seemingly to anyone else for that matter.) Charlotte had a cool, sometimes cold, personality and tended to get nasty when she drank too much. I remember my grandfather snapping at her when she got out of line. “That’s enough, Charlotte” or words to that effect. The difference between a mean drunk and a mean sober person is that when sober the mean drunk has the mean streak under control, but the source of it is still there. I have no idea where my grandmother’s nasty streak came from. Although it is risky business trying to ‘psych out’ your parents and even riskier when you move up the ancestral line, I’m sure that my Grandmother with her emotional coolness and her nasty streak and my grandfather’s noncommunicativeness had a lot to do with my father’s personality, his inability to deal with strong emotion, and his inability to talk about any sensitive personal issue.
The only non-drinkers in the family were my mother and my Aunt Monica, who used to joke that they would get sick before they could get drunk. Neither one drank much at all. For this, I am immensely grateful, as the drinking by the rest of the family was more than enough to make life difficult for the nondrinkers, Monica, my mother, and the five cousins.
Some therapists suggest that there are four universal or at least general rules in effect in alcoholic families: rigidity, denial, isolation, and silence. This analysis rings true to me.
Rigidity relates to exercising inflexible control over those aspects of life that can be controlled as a compensation of sorts for the lack of control over the erratic and uncontrolled behavior of the alcoholic(s). There is a way things are to be done, and only that way. Some things are not done, “period.” Everything has its place and there is a place for everything.[2] The rule-maker is intolerant of change, which is seen as threatening. Spontaneity and playfulness and indeed ordinary happiness are squelched. It’s all related to the very same deeply pessimistic psychological phenomenon that Brecht wrote about in To Those Born Later.
Denial is refusing to acknowledge that something is terribly wrong in the family, especially the destructive behavior of the alcoholic(s). If the self-destructive and pernicious behavior is recognized and acknowledged, then of course something should be done about it but experience and the pessimism that infects the family say that nothing can ‘be done about it.’ The tension is resolved by not admitting, even to one’s self, that there is something that requires action.
Isolation refers both to the family’s cutting itself off from social contacts other than with other drinkers and to isolation within the family, family members not communicating with each other about the terrible reality in their lives. Among the aphorisms in one of my high school Latin texts was Pares cum paribus congregantur which was translated as “Birds of a feather flock together.” Drinkers gravitate to other drinkers just as other addicts hang out with ‘their own.’ A family with a serious alcoholism problem within it will not form friendships with or even socialize with families not beset with the same problem. Doing so involves too much risk of shame and disapproval, rejection and ostracism. It also would involve a direct threat to the ability to remain in denial, so the alcoholic’s family ‘keeps to itself.’
Silence, of course, is obvious enough: don’t talk about problems, especially the destructive behavior, the emotional abuse, the neglect, the shame, the fear, the isolation that attend the behavior of the alcoholic(s). Some state the rules as: don’t trust, don’t feel, and don’t talk. Don’t trust in or have positive expectations about the future because you can never trust the alcoholic not to screw things up. Don’t feel because your feelings all hurt. Therefore, avoid feelings to avoid hurt, just like Paul Simon’s I Am a Rock. Don’t talk about the terrible situation for all kinds of reasons. Especially for the child of a drinker, there is the enormous power and authority disparity at work. Even for the spouse, talking about the drinker’s behavior may spark anger and recrimination and trigger more drinking and/or more emotional or other abuse. Above all, there’s the pessimism, the feeling of futility and fatalism, that talking about the behavior will ‘only make things worse,’ that ‘it won’t do any good.,’ and that because the drinker is more closely wedded to the drinking than to his spouse, more attached to alcohol than to his children, that therefore “Talking won’t change anything so why bring it up?” I can’t count the number of times I have heard my father say “The less said, the better.” Our family motto, alas.
All of these rules were at work within my family, some to a greater extent (especially isolation and silence,) others to a lesser extent. Some (especially silence and denial) had a lasting impact on me that was exacerbated by later experiences in the Marines. But for the influence of my mother and of a few others to a much lesser extent, they would have drained all joy from my life.
So this was the family of my childhood: Grandma and Grandpa Clausen, Aunt Monica and the three cousins in the house on Racine Avenue; Grandpa Denny and Uncle Jim living solo in cheap rooms; Uncle Bud and Aunt Mary living above the bar on 79th Street, and Uncle Bim, the other Aunt Mary and cousins off in New Jersey and not a part of our lives in Chicago.
[1] The Ploesti raid was a semi-suicidal, long range, extremely low altitude raid designed to cut off Hitler’s supply of oil, gasoline, and aviation fuel. Only about one-third of the bombers and airmen who left Libya on the mission returned safely.
[2] Forgive a footnote for some examples of ‘rigidity.’ From 1995 to 2003, I visited my Dad every three months in Florida. During all those years and I’m sure for many years before, not one thing changed in his house unless Kitty, Geri and I caused the change by, e.g., buying him a new chair, a kitchen table, a sofa. No additions, no subtractions, no moving anything from “its place.” His house was like Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations, with the clocks all set at ____. For a few years, he and his friend Art met for breakfast Monday through Saturday at a local eatery. He would leave his house at exactly 7:18 every day to rendezvous with Art. At breakfast, they would discuss when the mail lady had delivered the mail, when the trash collector picked up the trash, when the morning newspaper was delivered, always with the unstated premise that making those rounds at the same time each day or week was really important though neither of them had a thing to do that was in any way dependent on when the mail or newspaper was delivered or the trash picked up. This ‘rigidity’ notion is pretty clearly related to obsessive-compulsive tendencies and anxiety in my father: paying every bill as soon as it arrives in the mail, checking his watch every five or ten minutes though there is nothing on the schedule making time important, doing as soon as possible anything that has to be done at some time in the future His life motto seems to be “Let’s get it over with.” I believe that all this behavior is related to chronic anxiety which has its roots in the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima, watered by the Hartmann outrage in 1947.
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