We were having a party on the east side of the house. It was bright, sunny, warm summer day and I was no more than 5 years old, running around on high octane energy apparently driving everybody crazy. I ran over by my grandfather, my mother’s father, who called me over and gave me a full glass of beer. In his Polish-German accent he said to “drink this down then go take a nap.” I chugged the beer and experienced an immediate warmth and glow, yeah the only way I can describe it was a glow, spread throughout my entire body, and my consciousness was filled with a soft tint of yellow-orange that I would later paint over and over again in many of my paintings, I still use the color to this day. The color filled my brain and became a part of my cellular structure, I could feel it happening even at that age and never forgot that moment in time. It is so vivid, it feels like it just happened. I went over to the small couch or bed that was on the porch, and fell asleep, bombed from the effects of the beer that I just ingested. Like I said, that feeling never left me.

Many years later I would revisit that moment and magnify it a million times during a nine or ten year period in my life. I started to drink and party after my last football game of my senior year in high school. I suffered a concussion the week before during the Aquinas game when I got trapped by this mammoth tackle and knocked flat and cold. I never told anybody, finished the game, and played my last week of practice and last game at Whitseboro in a fog. All I remember from the Whitesboro game was the coin toss when the Whitesboro captain shook my hand, got in my face and breathed the most foul smelling breath right into my face. God did it stink. When the bus arrived back in Auburn and I unloaded my gear for the last time, my friend Tom was waiting for me. He took me out to a few bars to celebrate the end of a high school football career. I drank some beer, the first beer I had since the Grandpa episode thirteen years earlier. Beer and double concussions do not mix. After two or three glasses, I told Tom I felt sick and wanted to go home. You know, from that moment on I was never right, in being. A state of existence that last for what seemed like a very long time, but was in reality about nine or ten years. I played the basketball season without any alcohol of anything, but started back in once the season finished and into my high school baseball season. The spring of 1969, I would go out with the guys and girls, hippy types from school, and get filthy drunk usually on the weekends. I drank beer, graduated to hard liquor, and combinations of the two. Never any drugs, that would have to wait until college.

My addiction started that day Grandpa gave me my first beer. I was addicted before it became popular, a status symbol of sorts, for movie stars and athletes, before it spread into the general population where anybody who who wants to make few bucks writes a book or goes on a talk show describing their experience with addiction. Grandpa was a great guy and he taught me a great many things, all good; and as I look back, the day he gave me that beer and set in motion my addiction mechanisms, he probably did me a favor, giving me a tool to survive what was coming at me down the road.

I endured many things, too many separations, injuries, illnesses and deaths some of which mine but most to to other people who I loved and who were and are very close to me. I have described on this website many of these things and experiences on the various pages of this website and in the book “Echo Chanter”, the first three chapters of which are on this site. I have written a mountain of literature and painted an ocean full of art and drawings in an effort to understand and conquer the psyche that was created during my first twenty-five years or so. That is what survival is all about. My factory accident resulted in Percodan addiction coupled with whiskey, mostly sour mash and real pure rye whiskey, Old Overholt to be exact. I ingested more pills, drugs, vitamins, and alcohol, all in combination, than I care to remember. Most were prescription, I turned into an expert manipulator to fill my needs, and found many reason to set in motion the events that would lead me through the fields of mental anguish and psychological agony. It was just the way things happened. Most of it was ultimately of my own doing, but the many things that I could not comprehend as a little kid, were not under my control. Like I said, things just happened. I could not handle most of it, did not have the tools to handle most of it. I internalized and built walls to survive, huge walls, locked myself in a self-made dungeon, just to get through another day. God did it hurt, little kids suffer things on a purer level, and I can still feel the pain. I never started numbing it until I was eighteen years old. Toward the end, I think I was about twenty-six or so, just after my factory accident, I was taking bottles of Percodan, probably 90 or so every three or four days, and drinking quarts of whiskey to wash it down. The whiskey was a carry over from my painting days.

Some other things finally happened. The doctor who was giving me all the drugs found out what I was doing and the pipeline was closed. I was losing control, not yet out of control. I cam across the name of a pain clinic in Syracuse and went over, with Ma, for an interview with a counselor named Sue. They documented the after effects of my factory accident, realized the physical pain was real, and told me I had to quit the drugs and booze cold turkey, had to begin psychotherapy three days a week, and do everything their way. One transgression would lead to my dismissal and I would be back on the street. They did give me a prescription for a muscle relaxant to help with the spasms from the nerve injuries that resulted from my factory accident, and said I could smoke, but no drugs or booze. I bought in and did what they told me. With the help of a loving family who for some reason put up with me, Ma, Louie and FE, I managed to get through. I did every vitamin regimen imaginable, smoked cigarettes, took my muscle relaxants, did my therapy, and eventually solved some problems. I have not had a drink or used illegal drugs or prescription narcotics in over thirty years.

It is amazing how the spirit, your spirit, my spirit, stays separate from all the turmoil, the pain and the suffering, whether it be from outside sources or self imposed. Spirit manages to isolate itself, and remain unpolluted by our efforts at self destruction. At least, as I now understand it, I did nothing that would kill or damage my spirit. I needed it to survive. I also had the help, I know how it sounds, of beings from other places. They reside in our family house. Some go with me wherever I go. I even gave Ma my guardian angel, a powerful, powerful being, during her cancer and at the end of her life here on earth. I thought it might make her journey a little easier. They replaced mine with a trainee. At least until Ma no longer needed mine. May taught us to pray to the angels and saints, a process she totally believed in. I know they exist. I know they are with me. Some people kill their spirits. I did not.

That is the way the way one segment of the first thirty years of my life evolved. Too much pain, too much that I did not understand, too many things that I was not prepared to handle, that my sensitivities could not ward off or bury. Too many things internalized until I exploded; but I lived to tell the story.

Addiction