Words can hurt. Use them carefully. You never know what inner struggles others are dealing with. If you have nothing good to say, silence is a wonderful option.
Protect yourself and treat yourself with respect. If we treated our friends the way most of us treat ourselves… we would have no friends.
Gravity works.
The sun rises and sets every 24 hours regardless what you think.
You are what you eat. Eat well and in moderation.
Don’t take yourself to seriously. No one else will.
Tell people you care about how you feel. No one can read your mind.
Matter exists in at least 3 states, solids, liquids and gas.
Money matters. You can’t pay rent or eat with good intentions.
Very few people speak truthfully. Many exaggerate. If something is to good to be true then proceed with caution.
There are 2 types of workers. Those that do a good job and Those that promote their careers.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Don’t go to sleep angry.
Shit happens. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.
Generally speaking, following the crowd is a bad idea.
It is not the lies we tell each other that are problematic. It’s the lies we tell ourselves and believe that are the problem.
Change happens. Get used to it or learn to suffer.
Learn to give without an expectation of return: or don’t give.
Fears fall into 2 categories. Rational and irrational.
Avoid the words Always and Never. They rarely happen.
A phenomenon that plaqued me in early sobriety was hysterical laughter at the expense of others…
At meetings people would share deep personal gut wrenching tragedies and I would just howl!
And not always with the greatest of results. Some people believe it or not, are very put off by others finding funny what they deem important or sad.
I don’t know why this happened, but it did.
Sometimes people just say funny things and sometimes people take themselves far too seriously and often times, people just out and out exaggerate or lie. I can identify with all that!
Things got so bad I didn’t believe anything anyone said at the meetings.
Then Michael spoke. He was an alcoholic and suffered from schizophrenia.
He shared that he lived in a very small apartment and noticed that someone had moved something in his apartment without his knowledge. He spent the next 2 days searching his place for whoever moved the item, before he realized that it was him.
After that he shared about seeing his shadow when he was a kid and thinking that someone was following him.
I knew that shit was real to him, which stopped the hysterics.
The problem with early sobriety is it is the absolute last place you want to be. Every fiber of your body is in need and want: except for this voice that is telling you…
‘If you don’t stop you are going to die soon.’
Once the physical pain stops and that was no more than a few days, the loneliness begins.
If you’ve been drinking alcoholically long enough then you don’t know anyone who isn’t in the condition that you are trying to leave.
That’s where the meetings are helpful. When I found my father, I needed to tell someone, so I shared that at a noon meeting.
One of earliest speakers I heard in A.A. said he had a sponsee who announced to him one time that he wanted to get married. The speaker(sponsor) reminded the newly sober Sponsee that he didn’t know anyone.
This did not seem to deter the sponsee, so the Sponsor asked him “why?”
The Sponsee looked at the sponsor and answered, “because I want to be happy.“
When Jack said, “You wouldn’t catch me dead on a street named Temperance.” I didn’t know what he meant.
“Why? I asked.
“You know what Temperance means?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t. “
Jack wrote for a local newspaper. He loved to talk and educate and waved his vocabulary like a sword.
“The land that is Temperance Street was donated to the city by the Temperance Society on the condition that alcohol not be sold or used on the premises for eternity!”
“That is hilarious… I live in an art studio above a bar that sells alcohol legally and every drug from crack to heroin is sold there under the table illegally.”
The last time I saw Jack I was chasing him down the street for something he said that I took offense to but now I don’t remember what. We were both lit and whatever it was had faded into the ether of time.
After I left Temperance Street they turned the bike courier bar into a respectable restaurant or at least that’s how it appeared a decade later from their fabulous street level patio with perhaps the finest urban view in the city… according to a restaurant food critic I overhead.
I left Vancouver in the spring of 1986 just before the EXPO 86 began. When the world entered the city, the city tried to clean up the East Hastings homeless and drug problems… I couldn’t even imagine and left.
Later in Toronto, just before I met my father for 45 minutes, I lived in an art studio above a bike courier bar on Temperance Street in downtown Toronto.
An alcoholic writer I knew who found out that I lived on Temperance Street snarled, “You’d not catch me dead on a street named Temperance. “
I met a bike courier there in the late 90’s by the name of Rod who was tall and skinny about 6’1″ and 150 pounds. He had that unwashed look that many drug addicts model so well except Rod didn’t partake other than smoking some reefer.
He told me about walking down East Hastings Street the year before during the crack cocaine epidemic and 2 dealers actually got into a fist fight over who saw Rod first to sell him crack. Rod thought that was hilarious.
“I just fucking walked away man… said ‘keep your fucking poison!”
Rod wore a jade necklace around his neck that he got in Guatemala.
He found the jade in a cave there under a few feet of bat shit and it was quite valuable. Apparently if jade is under bat shit for more than a century… it gets a certain patina. Rod had his jade checked out in a museum and it had that patina.
The other story I remember Rod telling was how he perfected cooking pot cakes in Guatemala. He went into the mountains and besides jade returned to this little seaside town there with 80 pounds of pot in a knapsack. Since this could have got him jailed he turned the 80 pounds into pot cakes which funded his year long Guatemala vacation.
On a side note, the first and last time I ever tried pot cakes was with Rod. We were at a bar in Kensington Market and I tried one. I waited 30 minutes and nothing happened. Against his warnings I took a second. After a bit I couldn’t move my feet. I never felt so vulnerable.
I was 42 had been trying to get sober for 3 years. This was not without setbacks. I forgot about finding my father; Until…
I walked into a restaurant in downtown Toronto for breakfast. You have to understand that this was not a usual occurrence. In the restaurant foyer there was a cameraman, a clown and a woman with a microphone.
I tried to slip past them, but the clown blocked my path. The woman stuck her microphone in my face and asked me,
“Are you here to support the sick children?”
I was staring at the clown and thinking to myself, ‘I wonder how much time I’d have to serve for beating up the clown?’
Which of course would all be caught on camera.
The woman repeated her question and the clown sensing danger, backed up. I stepped forward and put my face into the clowns face, close enough to where I could see tears forming and fear. It was at this point I realized that the clown was a woman.
I left without breakfast and thought about what had just happened. A strange event for me where this woman kept asking me if I was there to support the sick children.
‘Who was sicker than me?’ I thought.
‘Could this be a message?
‘From who? I don’t fucking know!!’
‘Don’t ignore this.’
‘If this is a message… what is it? Sick Children? Parents… Father. Try to find your father one last time.’
I phoned the Red Cross. I told them I was looking for my father. I gave his name. They looked under new listings and and found 1 number.
I called. My father answered the phone. I met him the next week.
It happened just like that.
I met my father for 45 minutes. The man my mother told me was dead. I prayed when I was a kid and asked God if I could see my dead father. If I could hear his voice? If I could look him in the eyes?
With those prayers answered, I moved on and sobered up. More than anything, I realized I didn’t want to be anything like my father.
While I was making peace with the Cockroaches in my Hotel Room, I was making love with another tenant, who was a lovely native Indian woman from Vancouver Island.
I found a job working at a car wash and marveled at how much smoother the paint was on higher end cars like Rolls Royces or Jaquaurs.
Then I got an evening job in the kitchen at the ‘Town Pump’, a venue for great live music and average food.
Then I got a midnight to 8a.m. job at Hambrger Mary’s, a 24 hour fast food joint that catered Hookers, Transvestites and a very colorful yet dangerous brand of streetlife.
I was working my way out Vancouver. I gave up the Welfare cheques. I gave up the car wash in the cold and wet, slept during the day and worked from 4p.m. until 8a.m.
Bill Kennedy the Hustler could not grasp why I worked so much. In this world of Skid Row; an honest God Fearing, hard working individual like myself was seen as peculiar, I think.
Bill suggested I take a look in the welfare office… He thought there would be cheques there with my name on them.
I was looking for my father. Everything I did or didn’t do was stained with that. His father, my grandfather Patrick asked me to wait until he was dead before finding his son, my father. I agreed. Patrick died in 1985 at the age of 100. I knew by what Patrick said that my father would be in some shit hole nightmare vagrant situation either in Vancouver or Toronto.
From my cockroache infested welfare funded Hotel on East Hastings Street, I began my search.
I found a Hustler from the Yukon by the name of Bill Kennedy. He was 30-35 short and wiry with one blue eye and one brown eye. He worked maintenence in the Hotel we stayed for rent and cash. He picked up one welfare cheque with his own ID papers and another cheque in the same building with false papers. On boxing day 1985 I sat with Bill in his room having coffee and looking out Bill’s window. His view was an alley just off east hastings street. A man in bums clothing was feeding a pigeon and when the pigeon was close enough and let its guard down long enough for the bum to catch it and break its neck. Bill and I looked at each other shocked and finally Bill said as the Bum sauntered off with the dead pigeon. “Dinner, I’m guessing.”
That was as hard-core as anything I ever saw. I saw what was considered to be the best looking Transvestite in Vancouver. A beautiful Philapino gal that I never met but I wanted to. I saw a Hooker wearing a bikini walking up Hastings Street on New Years Eve in the cold and later in her room she main lined heroin. I saw a band singing a song entitled, ‘ I was fucking Donna the night that Elvis died,’ and and another band who sang a song called, ‘Your Old Lady is my Old Lady Too.’ But I never found my father; not in Vancouver. That would happen 14 years later in Kingston Ontario.
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