Wasted: An Alcoholic Therapist's Fight for Recovery in a Tragically Flawed Treatment System (3 page)

My hands vibrate. I’m going to be sick again.

THE POLICE RELEASE
us at 8:37 the next morning. Twenty-three unbearably long minutes until a liquor store opens. The car impounded, we walk arm in arm, more to hold each other up than out of affection, to the nearest liquor
store, in Penticton Plaza at Main and Duncan. We sit in silence on the curb in front of the liquor store. It’s not cold, but we both shiver. Shoppers heading into Safeway shoot condemning looks our way.

Someday soon, we’ll have our day in court. But today the party continues.

The young clerk can’t quite hide his disdain as he rings in another forty-pounder. We’re past caring. We
take a cab to the dilapidated little bungalow that I share with brain-injured Todd. A friend who knew I was down on my luck—and knew Todd needed company—suggested we bunk together. His house is within two blocks of three liquor stores, the home that is a metaphor for what has become of my life.

• 4 •

MY LIFE HAS
shrunk to a radius of about eight blocks of downtown Penticton that stretches from this little yellow bungalow that I share with Todd on Government Street to my office over on 275 Main Street. My office, where I still have the audacity to see clients. Without a car, without a licence, I ride—no, wobble—to work on my bike through Penticton’s back
alleys. If I stick to the back alleys, no one will know that I drink.

Earlier this summer I was weaving down the back alley behind my office, helmet dangling from the handlebars, clutching a bottle of Smirnoff in one hand, when a familiar young voice called out to me.

“Hey, Mr. Pond, is that you?”

I foot-stomped my bike to a shaky stop by the Dumpster behind Martinis, a
new nightclub on Martin Street. Careful. Don’t drop the bottle. The bike stopped with a chainy clunk.

“Hey, Bryce, how you doing?” I steadied myself and tried to look nonchalant.

“Mr. Pond... that you?” Bryce played minor hockey with my oldest son for years. Emotions fast-forwarded across his face. Shock gave way to pity gave way to concern gave way to embarrassment. I had to get
out of here.

“Everything’s great,” I yelled as I pushed off and ride, pumping furiously past him. “I’m late for a client,” I yelled over my shoulder. I looked down at my feet. I had only one shoe on.

THERE’S A PHOTO
of me from the day I got my master’s of social work, beaming proudly, surrounded by my equally proud mum and family. The boys were very young when I decided to go back
to school. Nights I pulled the graveyard shift at Juvenile Services to the Courts. Days I spent at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, cramming my sleep-deprived brain full of Adler, Ellis and Jung. So tired... I remember waking up toward the end of that year with a start, hands gripped white on the steering wheel in the dark and drizzly pre-dawn. The transport in my lane blasted
his horn. Then the sick realization: I’m in
his
. He careened over to the shoulder and saved both our lives.

Back then I drank only on weekends, when all the other young fathers did. Never wavered. Some kind of subconscious survival strategy looped in my brain: “Drink during the week now, buddy, and you are done.”

But as thesis time approached I could not keep up with the punishing
workload. On the final weekend, the thesis due on Monday morning, I wrote around the clock. Up in the kitchen cupboard, tucked in the back of my mind: a full bottle of Bacardi white rum. Sunday at noon it whispered to me. I ignored it. By ten p.m. I was positively vibrating with anxiety and anticipation. With the boys and Rhonda in bed, I clamoured to the cupboard and broke the seal, and the booze
and the prose flowed. I finished the bottle—and the thesis—off at five Monday morning. I fell asleep on the couch. Rhonda quietly got the boys up and hushed them off to school, where she worked as a teaching assistant.

Almost noon I woke up to find the empty bottle of Bacardi tucked in beside me on the couch. I wrenched it out with a little too much force and it flung past me to shatter
on the floor. Shit. Shards everywhere. I rushed to pick them up, cutting my feet in the dash to the kitchen for the dustpan. Blood gushed and puddled on the floor and oozed out over the edge of the white dining-room carpet. I felt woozy and sank down again on the couch.

I woke up next sure that someone was watching me. Glanced at the clock. Holy shit—it was three thirty. The kids were
due home from school any minute. But it was too late. Ten-year-old Taylor stood at the end of the couch and looked at me, confused and afraid. “Are you okay, Dad? There’s blood on your feet. And there’s some on the carpet.”

“Yeah, I’m not feeling very good, and I accidentally broke a glass. It’s okay. You go upstairs and play.”

I cleaned up the mess before Rhonda got home with
the younger boys, then, riddled with guilt, I took Taylor to McDonald’s. And as he stuffed a Big Mac in his mouth, I talked.

“Did it scare you when you saw me like that?”

“Yeah, Dad, it did. It scares me when you get drunk.”

“It will never happen again, Tay. I promise. I don’t want to scare you or your brothers. Or your mum.” I hugged him, softly rubbed his back and tousled
his head of blond curls. “I love you, son.”

We chowed down our meal and I vowed to myself that this had been my last bender.

When we got home, I resolutely told a relieved Rhonda, “I’m going to
AA
.”

Passing out in front of Taylor scared me into action.

I went to my first
AA
meeting. But I wasn’t like those people. They were drunks. I sat through the entire meeting
without saying a word. As I left, an old fellow says, “If yer thinkin’ ’bout drinkin’ or thinkin’ ’bout not drinkin’, yer an alcoholic.” I didn’t want to admit yet just how much my thinking revolved around drinking.

In 1995 I got my master’s. We returned to Penticton. I quit my government job, cashed in my pension to set up my private practice. “Stay the course, Michael,” was the audio
loop that played now. Every time I felt the urge to drink, I went mountain biking or played hockey. Or snowboarded with the boys. Or worked more.

In 1996 the practice took off. Each successful relationship built with a client begat several more. By 2000, after a few years of favourable word of mouth, the agencies came calling. The Workers’ Compensation Board. Health Canada. Social Services.
The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. The
RCMP
’s Victim Services. The school boards. The Indian bands.

Lucrative contracts meant I could hire staff. At my peak in the early 2000s, we had four counsellors and an office manager working for Michael Pond Associates Ltd.

As the business took off, so did our social life, which swirled around hockey. Every day the boys practised
or had games. I played three times a week with my buddies, most of us dads with our kids in Minor Hockey. After games, we’d all go for beers and nachos at the Barking Parrot or the Barley Mill.

Weekends shifted to the boys’ games. Cradling beers, all the dads screamed support to their sons and heckled refs.

“Put your whistle in your pocket!”

“Get some glasses, ref!”

“Homer!”

After the game, the partying moved to a designated house—often ours. As a dozen young boys careened around the house, their parents got plastered. Three beers becomes four. I’m not alone in excess. We all drink too much, laugh too loud. We egg each other on. “C’mon, Mike, have a rum and Coke.” “Hey, try this new martini.” Every winter weekend becomes a socially sanctioned
bender.

When summer arrived, we switched to barbecues. Living in the heart of wine country, Friday-Saturday-Sunday became one extended wine tasting. Friends who worked in the industry introduced us to each new varietal. Everyone else sipped. I pounded them back. I drank faster than everyone else. Only when everyone else was feeling a light buzz, I felt nothing. “Hey, how come I’m the only
sober guy here,” I’d think, dismayed. I’d drink more, quickly, to catch up. And after a half-dozen glasses of wine, I became the life of the party. Or so I thought. “Oh, Mike, you were so funny last night” became “It’s nine thirty and there’s Pond, passed out on the couch again.”

But during weekdays, I still function. Up at five a.m., take the boys to hockey, go for a bike ride, office
by seven, do reports and invoices, see clients, go home, enjoy a rum and Coke with Rhonda, put the kids to bed, have a few more rum and Cokes. Hey, I can handle this.

2001. More warning signs. I began to create little stashes of gin in the garage, on the new boat. In the summer of 2002 I counted at least twenty “wine-tasting” parties. I’d go to the parties then come home and hit my stashes.
The audio loop was now, “Hey, buddy, don’t you think you better cut back?” But I don’t want to stop. I can’t stop. Alcohol is woven into everything that gives my life meaning. My boys’ sports. My evenings kicking back with rum and Coke and Rhonda. The warmth, the security of belonging to a tight-knit group of friends, intimacies shared, relationships forged over successive glasses of wine. Can
you think of a worse place in Canada to live for an alcoholic than the Okanagan? How many times did Rhonda and I mix up gin and tonics and cart our lawn chairs down to the shore of Skaha Lake to watch the sun set? I can’t give that up.

As my drinking ramps up, my practice is increasingly focused on dealing with alcohol’s devastating impact. I sit on two boards for Victim Services and the
Brain Injury Society and counsel those who’ve survived catastrophic crashes where a drunk was at the wheel. I look down at my notes. At one meeting my hand is vibrating so badly I can’t read my own handwriting.

Referrals from the Ministry for Children and Family Development bring broken families, many of them First Nations, often involving child sexual abuse. My thesis had been a treatment
outcome study of adolescent sexual offenders, so I was well equipped to deal with this kind of trauma. Or so I thought.

The more I work with the First Nations families, the more I see how endemic sexual abuse is. Standard family-of-origin intake histories reveal abusers and abused in every generation. We don’t understand this yet, but this is the brutal legacy of life in residential schools,
a legacy that never touches white people except when the tragic headlines leap out of the morning paper.

“Teen runs over her own brother on local reserve.” “Three brothers under 15 burn to death in teepee fire.” “First Nations youth shoots his own cousins in drunken drug war.” We ingest the latest horror with astounding indifference.

“Critical incident stress management.” That’s
what I did. I’d be called to the charred remains of the teepee, where chaos reigned, where the sound of ceremonial drumming, keening and wailing punctuated by screaming condemnation filled the early-morning winter air. I’d attempt to soothe the unsoothable. I’d book follow-up appointments for grieving family members and the
RCMP
officer first upon the grisly scene.

Then I’d get back in
my truck and drive back over the mountain, and in the solitude and quiet, the tears would come. I’d unconsciously drive to the nearest bar and pound back a shooter, look down and my hands would be shaking again. The next day there would be a dozen angry phone calls. People threatened to kill people. But each time on the way home, there was this little window of time where the warmth of the booze
took the edge off. “How can I hold it together?” I asked myself. Over and over.

I didn’t.

The superintendent of the school district gave me several warnings then pulled my contract.

One of the school counsellors said, “You’re more fucked up than the families we send to you. Get help, Mike.”

A client from one of my Employee Assistance Program contracts came to my
office and knocked on the door. I heard her. I lay on my couch, sick with detoxing and so hung over I couldn’t possibly respond. She knocked over and over and over and finally I staggered to the door and flung it open. “Oh my God, you’ve been drinking,” she said. She fled.

Rhonda wanted me to cut back. She got ever more insistent. First I tried the controlled drinking model. I knew the
literature said it rarely works. “Okay, Rhonda, at the barbecue I’m only going to have two beers.” I’d be on beer number one and one of the guys would walk by and say, “Here, Mike, try this new spiced rum.” Or, “Pond, you’re the only one who didn’t get a shooter. Push this one back.” Rhonda would cruise past, see the beer in my hand and say, “Is that still your first beer?”

“Yes it is.”
But Rhonda’s no fool.

I began to call in sick, telling my staff to cancel all my clients and reschedule. “I have the flu.”

I’d get up after a day or two and still be half-loaded. Couldn’t go in. Called my staff again and told them to cancel and reschedule again. And again.

One night I broke down the two doors to my office because I needed a place to sleep. An early-morning
client walked in through the smashed-in door frames and found me passed out on the leather loveseat. The next day, four resignations sat lined up on my desk. All the staff had quit. I’m sorry, Mike, I can’t lie for you anymore.

Then it became Rhonda’s job. She can’t do it either.

So I promised to stop. Again.

I tried abstinence. I can quit drinking, I say to myself. I do.
Dozens of times over 2003, 2004 and 2005. I’d stay dry for a couple of weeks at the most. Once I white-knuckled it three months. Then I took the boys on an idyllic snowboarding weekend at Sun Peaks Resort. I dropped them off at their friends’ and started to feel sad. Overwhelmed by all the damage I’d done to my relationship with my sons because of my drinking, what do I do? I get drunk.

Modern neuroscience tells us that this deep into my addiction, it would take a lot more than willpower to pull me out. Booze had completely rewired the reward circuitry in my brain. Now, even just
thinking
about something I associate with alcohol, like the fresh breeze on my face as my boat skims the water, a beer between my hand and the steering wheel, and my dopamine spikes way out of proportion
to what would naturally happen.