For Joshua (2 page)

Drinking is why we are separated.

That’s the plain and simple truth of it. I was a drunk and never faced the truth about myself—that I was a drunk. Booze owned me. I offered myself to it when I was a young man and it was only too glad to accept me into the ranks of its worshippers, the ones who are willing to pay with everything for one more round. I drank because it made things disappear. Things like shyness, inadequacy, low self-worth—and fear. I drank out of the fears I’d carried all my life, the fears I could never tell anyone about, the fears that ate away at me constantly, even in the happiest moments of my life, and your mother did the only thing
that she knew to do and that was to take you away where you could be safe. I don’t blame her for that. I’m thankful in fact. I drank on and off, like I’d done all my life, and your mother grew tired of my constantly returning to the bottle. She refused to let me see you. When I finally got sober I knew I had responsibilities, but by then we’d been apart more than two years. This book is my way of living up to some of that responsibility.

As Ojibway men, we are taught that it is the father’s responsibility to introduce our children to the world. In the old traditional way, an Ojibway man would take his child with him on his journeys along the trap lines, on hunting trips, fishing or just on long rambles across the land. The father would point out the things he saw on those outings and tell his child the name of everything he saw, explain its function, its place in Creation. Even though the child was an infant and incapable of understanding, the traditional man would do this thing. He would explain that the child was a brother or a sister to everything and that there was no need to fear anything because they were all relations.

The father would perform this ritual so the child would feel that it
belonged
. He would do this so that the child would never feel separated from the heartbeat of Mother Earth. So that children would always feel that
heartbeat in the soles of their feet. He would do it so that kinship was one of the first teachings the child received. The father would do this to honour the ancient ways that taught us that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe.

And he did it for himself.

He performed this task so he could learn that devotion is a duty driven by love, one which has its beginnings in the earliest stage of life, and that teaching, preparing a child for the world, begins then as well.

This book is my way of performing that traditional duty. I do not know if or when we will be together. Because of the way I chose to live my life, the price we’ve paid is separation. I am neither a hunter nor a trapper. I am not a teacher, healer, drummer, singer, or dancer. Nor am I a wise man. But I offer this book as a means of fulfilling that traditional responsibility. I want to introduce you to the world, to Creation, to the landscape I have walked, to some of the people who have shaped my life. All I have to offer is all that I have seen, all the varied people I became, and maybe you will glean from all of it an idea of the father that my life and my choices have denied you.

I was thirty-two years old the summer I met John. I remember feeling like a much older man throughout that spring and early summer. I was weary from the effort of trying to hang on. I’d been hanging on for a long time by then. Meeting him was like the feeling you get after a long portage, when you see open water again and feel the relief and the expectation of a better journey.

My first marriage had ended two years before, and I felt like a failure. I felt there was nothing I could do, nothing I could build that would last, nothing I could choose that would bring me happiness. So I’d spent two years trying to get as drunk as I could so that I could forget. Two years
choosing numbness over feeling. Isolation over the tug of life. When you give yourself up to it the way I did those two years, liquor becomes something you immerse yourself in, not just something you drink. And when you drink, you drink down.

There’s a belief in the beginning, with that first swallow, that you’re elevating yourself somehow, lifting yourself above the problems, the pain, confusion, and fear that live in your belly. You drink to drown these things, to fill your belly with courage, your mind with painless thoughts, your spirit with abandon—and you believe you raise yourself above it all with one liquid rush. But you always drink down. Because when you give yourself to alcohol, in the complete way that you do to love, sometimes, or to God, you surrender the right to innocence, to humanity, and you forfeit the permission to enter those glittering palaces filled with the laughing, energetic folk you crave to be among. Instead, you learn to pay the most expensive dues in the world and join the club of drunks and sots who drink the way you do, or preferably even worse.

You drink your way down to dank, dark rooms where conversation is a mumbled order for one more round, and downward further to one-room mansions where a jug is the only furniture needed, and then downward to the riverbanks,
back alleys, and isolated places where solitude is a virtue. You drink down from languid sips from splendid glasses to furtive gulping from cheap bottles. You drink down from Scotch and vodka to mouthwash, shaving lotion, rubbing alcohol, and Lysol. You drink down to the point where you forget everything about being human and you learn to live for the burn in the belly that says you can last one more hour, one more jug, maybe one more day.

I drank like that for years. I had to, because I knew no other way around the feelings churning in my gut. I always drank down to where I couldn’t drink any more, then endured the rigours, the terror, of sobering up and re-entering the world. Because I was a binge drinker I had extended periods when I didn’t drink, and during those times hope would rise in me that maybe this time I could avoid the seemingly inevitable collision with myself that always ended in that crazy downward spiral. In those times I worked, fell in love, played and lived almost like normal people do. Except for the fact that I never changed anything, never sought a reevaluation of my attitude towards life. When the fear returned—as it always did, sometimes after a year or more, sometimes after a few months—I drank because it was the only way I knew. It was all I had ever learned about coping.

Sometimes I sought sobriety with the same desperation
with which I sought a drink. When I did, I play-acted at liking it. I gave memorable performances as a journalist, radio host, husband, lover, and friend. I could have earned an Oscar if there were a category for Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Role, because I never learned to be among people the way others do. Life, the way I lived it, had never prepared me for that. Life as a drunk had taught me that reaching out was a pushing away, not a pulling in. Instead, I only ever offered enough to be invited in from my aloneness, then lingered on the edges of the circles I joined. I liked it at the edges because escaping back to alcohol was easier from there. Far easier than when you were immersed in a life. Knee-deep even was too far for me, so I only ever offered up the minimum, the least I could get away with offering of myself to keep from being alone.

But alone is where I always ended up. I never believed that there was anything that could change that, spin my life on its axis and show me a new direction. But I was wrong. I came off a binge in Calgary, sobered up, went to work, and became very deliberate in the choices I made. Deliberate enough to put ten months together without a drink. And that’s when I met John.

John had waged his own battle with the bottle. It was a monumental struggle because he had drunk the same way I
did, except he had been a daily drinker, one of those who drown themselves in it from sun-up to sunset, until they keel over in defeat or death. John had been defeated and he knew it. He had been sober more than ten years when we met and had become a teacher of the traditional ways of our people. When he met me for the first time he just smiled, shook my hand, and looked at me with a pair of deep brown eyes that seemed to see right into me. He nodded at me and clapped a hand around my shoulders. No words were spoken, but I heard him say a lot in that small gesture. John
knew
. He knew in the intuitive way one desperation drinker knows another—by the history stencilled on our faces, the look that makes us pariahs, outcasts amongst the normal drinkers, but tells us we’re with another of the same breed, both when we’re drinking and when we’re not. He knew about the journeys I had taken, about the search for a right place, about the people, the things, the jobs, the money, and the light that was sparked in me every now and then that I could never keep lit. When he looked at me I felt
known
, and I trusted him.

He was an Ojibway. That helped. Fiftyish, he was tall, lean, with grey hair he kept tied in a long ponytail. He loved to joke and tease gently. His laugh was loud and contagious. When he told a story he was capable of making the world disappear and you would feel lifted up and transported to
another world for as long as that tale lasted. He was the first person I’d ever met whom I could describe as disarming—he owned that indescribable knack for scaling the walls that damaged people like me erect around ourselves.

I started to tell John the stories of where I’d been. About the times in my life when I was confused and the many times I was afraid. I told him about the great weight of not knowing where I belonged, or where I was supposed to go in life. I talked about the wandering paths of my exile. I had worked as a tavern waiter, serving beer to longshoremen and the sailors who worked on the shipping lanes of the St. Lawrence River, and as a labourer on construction sites; I had pushed huge sleds filled with raw steel plates around a factory floor, planted trees, levelled railroad tracks, been a radio disc jockey, newspaper reporter, television host and producer, and I had mopped floors. Through all of these jobs I was looking for my place. But I’d never found it.

I tried living in different places: Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Ottawa, Kenora, Minaki, and a lot of smaller places for brief periods of time. In my younger days I hitchhiked around the country three times, looking for that one place I knew I could feel at peace, whole and content. I saw a lot of Canada, met a lot of people, did a lot of things, but I never found that one place.

But I came close many times. I would be in a place and it would feel right. I would feel
right
. One time it was on a high spire of rock in front of a waterfall in the Rocky Mountains. The cliffs on either side of me dropped away suddenly and the place where I stood was about the size of a tabletop. The water poured over the face of those cliffs about twenty feet in front of my face and there was a mystical feeling of emptiness in that span of twenty feet—an emptiness and a fullness at the same time. I could have stepped off and dropped straight down for hundreds of feet, landing in the swirling waters of turquoise, white, and silver. The mist was like pellets of mercury—icy cold against my face. The mountains were gathered around me like the heads and shoulders of friends, and there was no one else around for miles. It was just me and Creation in all its purity and I felt
right
. I stayed in that spot for hours just absorbing it all, hoping that I could carry some part of it back into the world with me, some part that would let me feel that way wherever I wound up. I couldn’t.

Still other times I would be at a play, a concert, a movie, or reading a book somewhere, and I would become so wrapped up in it all, in the sheer joy of experiencing someone’s magic spread out before me, that I would feel content and safe. The magic that is creativity would spark a light in me, a light that I
found in literature, in the brush strokes of great painters, in music, dance, theatre, and film. When I was lost in that generous spirit, I would drink it all in, hoping that I could carry some part of it back into the world with me, some small part that would allow me to feel that rightness, that security, wherever I wound up. I couldn’t.

I tried finding rightness in money, cars, clothes, and all the bright and shiny things of the world. But they were only ever things, and I learned that things fade, get old, fall out of fashion, become uncool, unhip, unspectacular and incapable of giving a feeling of rightness anymore.

I told John all of that. Later, after I saw that he avoided judging me for what I said, and only murmured in agreement or recognition as I spoke, I told him about the booze. We began to talk. Real conversations that dizzied me in the ease with which they emerged from the great silence my life had been until then. In the beginning, these talks weren’t big ones. In fact, they made me feel like a little kid again. When you’re a kid and you have something you really, really want to say but can’t find the words for, you spend a lot of time doodling around in the sand with your toe. With John, at first, I did a lot of doodling around.