Mark75

I am 52 years old. I have four children, 2 of whom are in college. I married my high school sweetheart 25 years ago and we enjoy a happy and loving relationship. I am a professional with a good career and live in an old farm house in the country... So how did I end up in a mandated recovery program, after 2 months in residential treatment, a year ago as of September 14th?

The times were the late sixties... My mom married my dad at young age, their "real" anniversary was never celebrated in our house, maybe they thought we'd do the math. My parents were young when the summer of love arrived, and they wanted to be a part of it. I was 10 or 11 when we went to peace marches on the campus of the university where my dad worked. The university was in an otherwise very rural and conservative part of a conservative state... But there I was... on the front page of our local newspaper in 1968 making a peace sign for the camera while marching with my parents protesting the war in Viet Nam... Our neighbors, our family, my classmates were horrified and I was a freak. It didn't help my relationship with the other kids in the neighborhood when my parents let a bi-racial hippie couple (a very rare item in this small rural city, even now...) from San Francisco... who were draft evaders.... live in our garage and make pottery. I was known simply as the n1gger lover on my school bus in seventh grade.

We'd all go to the country and pick mushrooms and asparagus in the spring and marijuana in the late summer. My father would dry it out over the stove when we got home... I was 11 or 12 years old when my mother passed me a joint for the first time while we listened to the Santana's Abraxis album my father brought home the day it was released. Not long after that, Barbara started living in our garage after the hippies left for Canada. Barb was a IV speed freak who was beat up by her "old man", a heroin addict who made jewelry... we gave her "safe harbor". She always had really good, very strong grass that I was sure was laced with something... I loved it... my friend and I would smoke Barb's weed at 2 am and she'd want to hear about romance in the eighth grade. She got a job later posing in a men's magazine. (She's recovered now, BTW). By the time I was in eighth grade I was tripping regularly in school. I would buy hits of Orange Sunshine from a guy named Drifter for two dollars. He hung out down by the Dairy Queen next to the university.

As I entered 9th grade, my father moved us to an even more rural and conservative state, way out in the country... really far... this time it was not a university town and neither of us was ready for each other. My parents had friends who lived nearby, this was a very close friendship, they made lots of noise until all hours when they came to visit. My father's friend worked as a psychologist at a prison and somehow got all sorts of pharmaceutical samples... Ritalin, Desoxyn (Methamphetamine), Vailum.... If it was left out, as it often was, I would help myself and have whole weekends of speeding on meth or blackouts on valium and the whiskey sours which my parents really liked to drink.

We didn't stay in this new state long. My father took me to a rock festival near there and his boss saw us on the evening news standing by the signs that said "grass 15$ a lid". He was fired the next day... While he was unemployed our family took a nose dive. I was so unhappy and miserable there, I would do anything, I mean anything, to get high, or drunk. My friends kind of wanted to have nothing to do with me after I swallowed a couple of qualudes while chugging vodka and later they had to take me home after I had a seizure. They left me on the front porch and rang the doorbell... One day while my father was downstairs I was in my room huffing Pam from an aerosol can... next thing I remember I was in the bathtub with a tooth stuck through the skin of my chin, blood everywhere and the water running... I went downstairs and my father was asleep on the couch...... How did I get into the bathroom? I never found out, though I think it was divine intervention.

Eventually my father got a job in New York City and we lived in the suburbs. My love affair with pot and LSD slowly faded and my new drug of choice was alcohol... While my friends were smoking hash oil in the library I was in a stairwell drinking vodka that a girl brought in from her parents liquor cabinet... I grew to love drinking... Southern Comfort, Vodka, Blackberry Brandy, Beer... I found lots of friends who liked to drink and I played guitar in a Rock and Roll Band. If crystal meth was available I always tried to get some... it really made drinking so much more fun.

My father was traveling all around the country on business... having three martini lunches everyday and my mother was having affairs... well so was my dad. When I graduated high school I went to work as a printer. Somehow I met the woman who was to be my wife and saw that other people and their families lived their lives much differently. Divine intervention number two.

I rebelled... I went to college, I studied and I got straight A's and I went into grad school. I did work study, played guitar and sang in a vegetarian restaurant for tips and got student loans. Sometimes when the loan money ran out I would collect bottles and redeem them. Our idea of a wild night was a six pack of Schlitz lite , popcorn and Saturday Night Live on the black and white TV I fished out of the garbage... Life was good. Better than it ever had been.

Meanwhile my parents divorced after my kid sister graduated high school. My mom went to california and my dad went to AA. He was 24 years sober when he died 10 years ago this weekend at 63 yo. He and I became very close in the years before his death. My brother ended up living in the attic of a friends house before he went to AA and now he is 23 years sober and will give me my one year coin at my Thursday night home group meeting. My sister, she has her tale to tell of living on her own out in California, she is a "normie".

Stay tuned for part two....

Mark