Oct. 20, 2001 - 20:46 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Hindsight

A number of years ago while I was still drinking in moderation I helped a man move a lady friend of Heather's. We spent a long, hot, sweaty, summer's day handling stuff, some packed in large boxes that should have been split into smaller boxes. After all, who can lift large boxes of books without the danger of popping a hernia ?

Afterwards we returned the truck and headed back in our car. On the way back to Heather's friend's house where we were supposed to have dinner I spotted a tavern, I said "Hey Neal, lets go in and have a beer on the way back." He readily agreed, I parked and we walked into the tavern and sat at the bar. As I sat down I ordered a beer for each of us. Before my beer was half gone he had emptied his glass, ordered another one and downed that before I finished my first. I thought to myself, "Man he's worked himself into dehydration." I was thirsty myself and ordered another beer. He began to order beer with a whisky chaser. The realization that I was with a problem drinker dawned on me, probably at a slower rate than it should have. There were times I had done the same thing but not to the extent he carried it.

I gently suggested we had better hurry and go to dinner, that it would get cold if we tarried too long. He would say, "Uh huh, gotta have another one, then we'll go." Then another and another. After trying every ploy unsuccessfully to move him I told him, "Hey Neal, I am going to leave and go eat now or Heather and her friend will fry me." He tried the, "Just one more bit," but failed to sway me and he was ordering yet more when I left.

I arrived at the friend's new domicile and was greeted with, "Where is Neal ?" I told the friend that I thought Neal was tying one on, because I couldn't pry him from the bar. She paled and with a shaky voice said something to effect, "My God he is an alcoholic and just got out from drying out." Heather and I took her to the bar I had left him, she walked in and back out again because he was no longer there.

When she came out she thought a minute and asked us to take her to a bar on the way to her new place and leave her there, planning to go from bar to bar 'til she found him. Heather and I offered to take her from place to place but she refused, telling us that it would be a short walk from bar to bar and said that when she did find him she would pour him into a taxi and take him back to the place from where he had just been discharged. We left then and went home. Later that evening she did find him and got him into treatment.

Heather kept me posted, Neal dried out and came out again. But it didn't last, he was too far into addiction. He died a short time later.

For a long time I felt the guilt for causing his death. Further down the road I took some traveling positions with my company where having a few drinks after work with the customers I worked with was part of my instruction.

I complied, but would eat dinner first, drink one beer and sip on a drink as long as I could drag it out. But I let myself get into the habit of drinking a bit more as time went on. Overseas, unless a man had a particular hobby he could pursue on base, drinking seemed to be the cure all from total boredom. At the unit's monthly dinners the food would be liberally washed down with Mateus wine.

After my tour was over each time, Neal's fate would come to mind and I would abstain for a year or more. Unless I did it when totally blitzed I never invited anyone to have a drink with me again.

Somewhere along the line I had finally had enough to drink and went the alcoholic route.

Later on, in the process of alcoholic recovery it finally dawned on me that Neal's lady friend had a responsibility to take me aside and suggest that we shouldn't stop for a drink anywhere, using the excuse that dinner would be waiting when we got back. In a diplomatic way it would have given me the idea that he had a bit of a problem with drink and I would have brought us to dinner without a problem. As it was, after his first beer, being an addict he glued himself to the bar not to be shook loose.

To this day it bothers me and puts me into discomfort when I think about it, but this is one place where it would be nice to have pre Hindsight . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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