Ferment, p.3
Ferment, page 3
Barely escaping the clutches of the law didn’t stop me. Drinkers often gather with or attract other drinkers. But my drinking wasn’t a social disease. No one I knew drank like I did. My drinking pals and strangers I met drank too slowly for me. They didn’t drink as much. Self-consciousness prevented me from making extra trips to the bar or drinking too frequently from the table’s pitcher of beer. So, I’d excuse myself from a social situation and repair to another tavern or home where I could drink alone at my own pace. When I was with others, I’d develop grandiose schemes and outright lies. I grew loud and sloppy as the evening wore on. To sidestep the embarrassment I felt after such nights, I quit frequenting bars altogether and took to drinking alone in my apartment or while driving Kansas City streets.
Eventually, due to bad conscience and the need to keep a job, I only imbibed evenings and nights after work. It didn’t matter how late I clocked out, I always drank the same way. I’d settle in front of the television or get behind the wheel and demolish a twelve-pack and a pint or two of liquor, or a couple jugs of wine in an hour and a half, often less. I couldn’t get enough fast enough and resorted to pouring beer, wine, and liquor into quart jars, so I could slug without bottlenecks getting in my way. I passed out every night. I woke drunk in the morning and stayed that way well into the afternoon. About the time the shakes set in, it was time to start drinking again. When I wasn’t drinking, I was thinking of drinking.
I denied I had a drinking problem and thought mania and depression were just parts of life. I contorted logic to justify my lifestyle. I kept a job, paid rent, and earned a 3.0 GPA at the university. It never occurred to me that alcoholism and manic impulsiveness kept me bouncing from job to job. I gained a certain moral flexibility. No one ever noticed or confronted me about stealing from employers. Legally, I lucked out. I drove drunk hundreds—thousands—of times but earned only that single citation for careless and imprudent driving. I never went to jail. Car wrecks—mine and others when I was a passenger with a drinking chum—landed me in hospital emergency departments and gave me facial scars and head trauma, but I bounced back quickly.
I’d take a job in a liquor and wine store to reduce my drinking bill and afford me access to better wines, mostly filched. After a while, I devoted myself to wine and experienced the illusion of climbing the enophile ladder. Later, a liquor and wine distributor hired me. I formulated designs on becoming a wine salesman, though my training for that position had me lugging cases and loading trucks in the warehouse. When feeling up, I hefted cases and loaded trucks faster than anyone else. In good cheer, I saw myself variously as a master sommelier, a vineyard owner, and a “somebody” in the wine trade. When depression hit, I dragged around the warehouse, doing enough to get by. I doubted the worth of this effort and often contemplated suicide.
I built the façade of the “wine professional.” I became practiced at the wine game and possessed an acute taste memory. The Kansas City wine crowd fancied themselves sophisticated and urbane. I mimicked their language and mannerisms. I waxed poetically with them about the grape, reciting information I’d memorized from books on grape varieties, regions, vintages, and winemaking methods. They found me charming, and I found acceptance.
Recalling that time now, I see I was deluded. In truth, after the first drink, I couldn’t stop. I might begin a night with other enophiles. Two or three glasses later, I left the proceedings and ensconced myself alone in my apartment with cheap beer and a plastic jug. I enrolled in a college class called Wine and Civilization. On the way home from an off-campus “tasting” one night in March 1984, the friend I’d brought—and talked into driving—ran a stoplight in front of my apartment as he drove me home. I don’t recall the crash that totaled his car and sent the other driver to the hospital. I remember looking down from my window that night at the police lights knowing something awful had occurred. My friend went to jail. The professor nearly lost his position when the local paper caught wind of the incident. I suffered only crippling guilt that more alcohol easily wiped away.
* * *
About a year and a half after that accident in front of my apartment, escalating drinking, out-of-control mania and depression, and a deadend job led me to believe Kansas City was going to be the death of me. The idea to leave the country and life as I knew it started with a phone call after a rough day at the liquor warehouse. My friend Larry, who’d been vagabonding in Germany, had found a broken pay phone on a street corner in Hamburg. He called everyone he knew stateside, but the phone charged him not one pfennig. When he hailed me, my evening bender was under way. Vodka and beer chasers relieved debilitating depression. I was watching reruns on my 12-inch black-and-white portable and was settling in to drink until I passed out.
I lived in the basement of a bare-bulb Midtown Kansas City apartment building. The front room had a kitchenette. A small bedroom stood to one side. During the day, light dribbled through a narrow, filmy, cobwebbed window at the very top of the wall. A sewer pipe hung about a foot and a half below the low ceiling. When I moved from room to room, I bent at the waist to avoid banging my head. I’d suspended a goldfish bowl in a cheap macramé plant hanger from a bend in the pipe. A discarded toilet stood by the door as an umbrella stand, though I had no umbrellas. The place lacked airconditioning during the pounding-hot summer.
Larry’s voice mercifully intruded on that solitary night. “Why don’t you come to Germany and travel for a while?” he asked. “You talk about wanting to learn the wine business. Why not come to where the vineyards are?” In my depressive state, my nerves were dulled, and I was good and drunk. As he spoke, something clicked in my head and said “jump.”
He’d caught me at the right moment. Empty and lonely, I was drinking harder as time unfolded. Fear of homelessness kept me at a job. But the grind had grown too burdensome, the work increasingly dreary and loaded with drudgery. The job’s intense physical labor absorbed the heights of mania and depths of depression but did nothing to stop their onset. I packed box upon box with pints and half pints. I carted and heaved cases of wine and hard liquor. I loaded trucks and unloaded shipping containers, often shoving aside my workmates. Summer descended on the vast open space beneath the warehouse roof with a vengeance. The wastewater treatment plant next door filled the superheated building with sewer stench soon after we opened the loading dock doors in the morning. I always smelled of sweat, stale booze, and the excrement of an entire city. No amount of laundering removed the fug. Dust and shit lingered in my sinuses all the time, at work or not. Everything carried the odor of sewage— food, wine, beer. I mostly gave up food. I came home every night dehydrated and on the edge of heat prostration. I couldn’t imagine a future for myself. Thoughts of suicide plagued me.
Larry made the notion of selling my meager possessions, packing a backpack, and bugging out of Kansas City seem like the best idea I ever had. Germany promised a way out of my miserable state. My depression would be healed forever, and I’d find myself prancing around vineyards in high moods. I put no thought into what a job in a foreign land would entail. I gave not one moment of contemplation to securing work visas or paying tax authorities. Picturing myself laboring in scenic vineyards, I imagined standing in candlelit cellars next to ancient barrels, tasting wines with rotund Kellermeisters.
By the end of the conversation, I’d decided. My trip to become a winemaker wouldn’t resemble the youthful European frolic I’d read about in books or heard about from my acquaintances. No. This would be more important. I’d find a job in a winery and start my splendid career as a respected winemaker. Germany would solve my problems, plain and simple. It would save me without any effort on my part.
* * *
Getting busy eased depression. I quit my job and sold my possessions in a Saturday sale on my street corner. At the end of the day, I tossed what remained into a dumpster behind the building. I bought a oneway ticket to Luxembourg. The sale of my car yielded $400 in cash. My last check, the proceeds from my yard sale, and what I’d saved bought $400 in travelers’ checks. I folded them into the back of a large wallet behind my passport in case the Germany experiment failed and I needed a way back to Kansas City.
Three weeks after my friend suggested I go to Germany, I boarded a plane with backpack and sleeping bag. I was a twenty-two-year-old drunken and mentally unbalanced kid with little self-awareness who had landed on a great, uncertain dream. Fear almost paralyzed me, but anxiety of not undertaking the journey overpowered the fear of doing it. After a month and a half of traveling Germany on trains— and before I went broke or committed suicide—I landed a job at a renowned winery in Trier, a German city west of the Luxembourg border that was ten times older than my country. The winery’s director guided me to a sleeping room in the attic of the vineyard apprentices’ school, where a small breakfast and coffee with some of the students came with the price of rent. I spent the next year learning the language and laboring in one of the most sublime places I’ve ever been.
I loved the country and the work and the people I met. I came back after a year and a half in pursuit of a Kansas City opera singer with whom I’d carried on a fiery affair in Germany. The relationship failed almost immediately on my return due to my severe neediness, mood swings, and dissolution. Again, on impulse, I went back to Germany again to attend the wine school in Geisenheim on the Rhein about eight months after I left the first time. But without means, having not planned at all, and deep into what I found later were the last days of my drinking career, I gave up after a semester and returned to a debauched life in my hometown. I was twenty-six years old.
* * *
By the time I was twenty-seven, drinking had done me in. I was sick, broke, and unemployable. Depression and despair brought me to the very bottom. Bereft of friends and isolated from family, I was alone in my universe. When I stopped drinking in July 1990, I made a new start—a sudden and complete break with the past. I thought, at the time, I’d leave all of the wreckage of my life behind and never look back.
Everything changed instantly and not all for the best. Unbuffered from the effects of manic depression, I cycled through suicidal pain and even greater heights of euphoria. I was immature, having dodged the emotional and life lessons one learns in their teens and twenties. I made poor decisions now not due to alcohol but to ineptitude, inexperience, and mental illness. Running four-square into myself, I didn’t understand me one bit.
In other ways, life vastly improved. The drinker’s physical ailments abated within a matter of weeks and months. My blood pressure dropped from 220/110 to normal. My kidneys stopped hurting, and my swollen liver returned to the size it was supposed to be. Mentally, but for frequent ups and downs, my head cleared. Reenrolling at the university, I earned A grades, and formulated designs on graduate school. I graduated with two degrees in May 1991, ten years after I started college. With manic confidence and determination, I resolved that nothing would hold me back. Even when my girlfriend got pregnant, I was resolute in making something of myself. I sought to become legitimate.
In that process and through dizzying bouts of mania and withering depressions, I denigrated and dismissed much of my old behavior and the person I once was. I made peace with the past and amends for the damage my drinking caused in other people’s lives. For many years, I didn’t worry too much about my former self. I negotiated single-fatherhood ineptly and mostly on intuition. I finished grad school at the University of Wyoming in 1993 and found a solid job. When I was four years sober, in a dysphoric state, I planned a long trip. A year later, in May 1995, I walked to Montana and then canoed home on the Missouri River, starting life all over again on my return. I landed my first writing gig, which turned into a full-time job and then into a career.
As I matured, I looked back into my drinking days and saw a “me” who also possessed positive qualities. I gave myself credit for good intention, thirst for experience, and eyes wide in wonder. My intentions were almost always good, and when not too looped, people considered me a nice guy. I made friends easily. I’d felt bad about stealing, lying, cheating, destroying private and public property, and wrecking my cars and those of others. My drunken “self” engaged freely in conversations and arguments with friends and strangers alike. I stood up for the underdog. I’d give what change and bills I had to anyone who asked. While an irritable workmate and mercurial friend, I tolerated other’s beliefs and ideas and learned from them. My friends, uneducated and young, included strippers and hookers, alcoholics and drug addicts, and many jobless. I questioned everything I’d been told in school, church, and about every book I read. I cast off the religion of my youth and doubted the existence of a loving God. My intellectual universe broadened. Despite the drinking and perhaps because of manic depression, I did well in school and read books, hundreds of books—history, philosophy, classic works of fiction and nonfiction—anything that quenched the thirst for inquiry.
Slowly, I began to reexamine my relationships, and among these were the ones I developed with the friends I made in Germany who survived my entire fiasco of my hitting bottom and sobering up. They’d stuck with me through times of depression and mania, in part, because our friendships spanned continents. They weren’t around for me to alienate or cling to in ways that alienated others. They escaped the worst of my drunken behavior. Their loyalty and kindness were unparalleled. Through phone calls, visits, letters, and then e-mails, I revealed the challenges and behaviors I’d hidden from them. They understood and empathized when I laid bare the nature of my worst offenses. I came to the realization that I was the luckiest person in the world.
CHAPTER THREE
THE OLD COUNTRY
FOR THE INTERNATIONAL flight out of Philadelphia, I was assigned a seat widely separated from Nick and Virginia, next to a window on an empty row. I needed the space. My old journals sat in my shoulder bag and I had pens and a new notebook. Since I cannot sleep on a plane, I’d stretch out with my notebook and journals for the duration of the flight and begin my journey into the past.
Soon, night fell and the blackness of the Atlantic absorbed me. Staring into it, I tried to focus on the fall of 1985 when I first decided to leave for Germany. But memory presented jumbled scenarios. For so many years I’d given myself and others differing accounts of my time in Germany, why I went, and what I did there. I understood my drinking history well. I had yet to discover all the ways manias and depressions affected my thinking and behavior. I sat back with my notebook not knowing what I’d find or if I’d even have the where-withal for the task at hand.
So, I dove in knowing that when I do what’s in front of me, I get something accomplished, even if it’s not very much. After some initial notes, I checked on Virginia and Nick. Both slept soundly. They sprawled across their seats at odd angles, wrapped to their necks with blankets. I envied them. People who couldn’t sit still any longer walked the length of the plane from first class to the tail and back—wraiths shuffling through the dark. The low roar of engines and the rushing of the air outside muffled all but a few coughs and sneezes.
I placed the notebook in the circle of light from the lamp above and began to write about the first time I was in Germany, pinning down memories that had rattled in my head for thirty years. First a series of bullet points arranged, scratched out, and rearranged splayed across the page. As I began to put them in order, the lines grew into blocks of text.
When I was twenty-two, nothing could have prepared me for a moment like this. I never thought I’d have a wife, much less a family. One of my children had already been to Germany three times. My then seven-year-old daughter Sydney went with me to visit our friends in 1998, before Virginia and I were married. She accompanied Virginia and me on Virginia’s first trip to Germany in 2000. Sydney had also spent most of a summer vacation when she turned eighteen working with Udo in his shop and then traveling.
Now, it was Nick’s turn. He came out of an impossible situation. His mother—my sister—shot and smoked meth for decades before she gave birth to Nick in 2002. By 2004, she’d developed severe schizophrenia and fallen into increasingly heavy meth use. One night in a psychotic and screaming fit, she tore up her apartment (again). The police found her scrubbing Nick in the bathtub with a hard-plastic cleaning brush and hydrogen peroxide. She was determined to scour microscopic cameras from beneath her two-year-old’s skin. They took her to treatment. The Nevada Department of Child and Family Services settled Nick with my parents, and my sister signed formal documents giving up her parental rights. Meanwhile, Virginia and I started the lengthy adoption process. After a year of training and a gauntlet of social workers and psychologists, we picked Nick up in Reno in January 2007 and he became our son. He was four and a half years old.
We’d obviously done something right. Nick adapted well to school and felt comfortable at home. Over seven and a half years, he’d grown into his own person. He possessed a self-confidence and self-awareness I didn’t at his age. He anticipated this trip after having met Ivo and Udo on their visit to us in Kansas City in 2012. With all the wide-eyed interest of a kid, he wanted to see where they came from and the many sights I’d told him about over the years.
Thinking these things through, I shifted from recording the moment to remembering that earlier journey. I’d spoken with Josef and Marlies and about their impressions of the man I once was, what I did, and how they perceived how I felt. She remembers me as a seeker who didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. He was thrilled, sometimes like a child, at the cultural and material differences between Germany and his native land. He experienced great hope and expressed high expectations of himself. He was unsure but hopeful. Josef tells me he’d met a young man coming into his own, filled with curiosity and wonder. I scribbled, “Like Nick,” in the margins as the thought came and went.
