Mike Runner is our Sunday Guest Contributor, and he brings a perspective to Wings Like Eagles that is unique and challenging.
I normally cover topics relating to the horror of having someone else bring darkness into the home. Mike covers the same topics, but from a completely different angle. He was the one who brought darkness to his family. Mike is an alcoholic.
It is my hope that the perception of what we think we know about Family Crisis is shaken up a bit. Because there is far more involved than we think. Much can be understood by examining the other side, and I deeply appreciate Mike's willingness to help us gain understanding as he shares with us the mind as it is affected by alcoholism.
He isn't just an alcoholic. He is an intelligent mind, has a bright, hopeful future, and he is my friend. And this is his story.
If you read Part 4, you know that I am waiting
for some rather serious good news, or bad news, or maybe something in
between. There is no update and I
continue to wait.
I give credit to God
and my recovery program because I have traditionally been about the worst
person at waiting in the history of mankind.
Right now, I rarely even think about it and I am not particularly
stressed.
Strong recovery works, and the fact that I can wait patiently
is very encouraging to me. It is
progress. People can change if they both want
to, and if they get help.
It was never the traumatic events that brought on drinking
for me. As a matter of fact, I am great
in a crisis and I never overreact. I would
often drink to dull the tedium of life, because I was stressed about waiting
for something out of my control, to shut down my head, because I was bored, or
at times because I could not function without it.
There need be no “trigger” or “why” for a true alcoholic to
drink. Alcoholics will name all kinds of
triggers or justifications for drinking.
I worked so hard today, got in a
fight with my wife, I deserve to celebrate, I lost my job, my client bought it
for me so I was obligated, I’m happy, I’m sad, ad infinitum.
In my case, my two triggers were breathing
and days that ended in the letter Y.
For new readers, please be aware that I am writing these
things so you do not have to go where I went, and to remind people who have
been there, that they don’t want to go back.
Jail is where my alcoholism eventually took me.
We mumble the word yet
in recovery meetings a lot. Often
someone will share that they don’t think that they have a problem--they are
there because their spouse made them go, or something similar. Because, after
all, they don’t have a DUI, have not been to jail or been through what some of
us have been through. Yet.
If you are an alcoholic, the “Big Book” of AA promises that
eventually you will end up in one of three places: jails, institutions, or in the morgue. I have been to the first two and I would like
stay out of the third at this point of my life.
If you stop and work a strong program, you need not go
through the yets. If you keep yourself in a state of
denial, and you don’t stop and work a strong program, you are more than welcome
to take my old bed in 14A. Families, if
they do not stop and work a strong
program daily, be prepared for the calls from the jails, or the hospitals
because they will come.
Back to jail.
Before I start at 5am in the joint, I realized something
yesterday that was interesting. The
color of jail is very drab. Everything
is painted the same color, other than the cell doors. What is strange is, the color was so drab
that a month later I cannot even remember the color and I tend to notice just
about everything. I believe it was an extremely
dull light beige. I can see myself in my
top bunk looking up at the ceiling, which I did for hours on end at times when
we were not allowed to get out of them, but I just can’t remember the color.
At 5am my name was called and I went through a series of
slamming doors until I reached a window.
At the window I was handed my new wardrobe. My new outfit consisted of white socks,
underwear and a t-shirt. My pants and my
over shirt were prison orange. I was
sent back into a cell to change clothes.
Though prison orange is not my best color (orange just doesn’t bring out
my eyes), I was relieved to change out of my current clothes as they wreaked of holding cell smell and probably had
about every bacteria known to man crawling all over them.
I was also handed a care
package in a plastic bag. In the
bag, there was a tiny toothbrush and toothpaste, a black comb, a hotel-sink
sized bar of soap, an inch and a half long razor that didn’t work at all, a
pencil stub, two pieces of lined paper and two envelopes.
I soon realized that two important things
were left out of the care package… a cup to drink out of, and more importantly,
deodorant. The lack of deodorant I
believe to be flat out cruel. In jail,
you only get a full change of clothes once a week. That is gross enough in and of itself, but
without deodorant the smell of 50 men is almost unbearable after a week.
On about day five I smelled horrid and I knew
it. I could smell myself from a distance
which doesn’t make any sense but seems true to me. It is very discouraging to take a shower and
then put clothes back on that smell far worse than a men’s locker room.
After I changed clothes, a deputy told me that there was no
need to worry, because I was going to a unit that was filled with young drug
addicts and crazy old men. He was trying
to be reassuring but it didn’t work. I
guess he wanted me to know it was unlikely I would get stabbed or murdered
where I was going.
I walked through another
steel door that automatically closed behind me and I stood in the longest
hallway I have ever seen. A voice over
the speaker said, “Keep moving” in an extremely rude tone to which I was
already accustomed.
I felt like I was in a horror movie as I walked down the
silent corridor that seemed to stretch for a good city block. I halfway
expected Jason or Michael Myers to step out in front of me. I could see another steel door far off in the
distance. I eventually reached the door and
walked into a small room with a person in it who told me to grab a bed
roll. The bedrolls were about the
thickness of a yoga mat and probably less comfortable to sleep on than dinner
rolls. I immediately noticed that there
were no pillows anywhere in the room. I
asked the deputy in the room if there were pillows and he just laughed.
I learned that week that it’s amazing how much more easy it
is to sleep with a pillow. I never did
learn the reason why there are no pillows in jail. I imagine it is just to make people
uncomfortable. I would understand no
pillow cases as I suppose someone could strangle someone or put items in it and
beat someone to death, but I still don’t understand the lack of pillows. A two-inch thick bedroll on a steel bunk with
no pillow would be how I would sleep for six nights.
As I walked through the door into block 14, I was thinking
to myself about how gigantic the jail must be, because the nearly endless corridor
only went to one cell block. In the
middle of the area there was a round raised room that resembled a small air traffic
control tower with windows on all sides.
This is where the deputy could watch all of the cell blocks. There were at least 4 units in the block,
perhaps 5 but I specifically noticed 14A – D.
I noticed a man with a white beard in 14B standing by the
gate. I would later be told that people
called him Santa Claus and that he had poisoned his wife of 40 years because he
had “just gotten tired of her constant nagging,” which they found funny in a
twisted sort of way.
They yelled at me to step to the door of 14A. The door opened and I walked into my new
home. It was the loudest slamming of a
door I had ever heard. By this time it
was roughly 5:30am and everyone was asleep.
I had no idea of where to go, or what to do, and I wondered how well it
would go over if the new guy woke everyone up.
For some reason, around this time I noticed a tag on my
bedroll that said, “Bob Barker Enterprises.” Later I would learn that everything in jail
that is not bolted down is made by Bob Barker.
Go figure. Of course Bob was not
a fan favorite among inmates and we would never watch The Price is Right on the little TV.
If you have money in your account, you
are allowed to purchase small items once a week, and they’re all overpriced. A popular phrase in jail is, Bob Barker: The Price is Wrong.
Assuming nothing odd happens this week, next week we will
look at life in 14A, people who dress up like Norman Bates, and we will explore
the question, How exactly do people get
contraband into a cellblock?
No comments:
Post a Comment