Unit 5  Section 1Exercise 1 The experience of addiction Alcoholism
Clinical correlate #1 Alcohol addiction: Brief Interventions
In the previous text, Nick Flynn describes the culture of alcoholism by citing its language—phrase upon phrase. But Nick Flynn’s memoir is a great deal more personal—his own father was an alcoholic and ends up in the homeless shelter where he has taken a job. Just the fact that he works in a homeless shelter says a great deal about the effect of his father’s physical and metaphorical absence. In Scott Russell Sanders’ autobiographical essay, “Under the Influence,” he describes growing up with an alcoholic father and the lifelong pain inflicted by that experience. Read the following excerpts and reflect on the impact on the child, who is, in Wordworth’s words, also “the father of the man.” What has become of Scott Sanders, the man?
From “Under the Influence” by Scott Russell Sanders
The more he drank, the more obsessed Mother became with stopping him. She hunted for bottles, could the cash in his wallet, sniffed at his breath. Without meaning to snoop, we children blundered left and right into damning evidence. On afternoons when he came home from work sober, we flung ourselves at him for hugs, and felt against out ribs the telltale lump in his coat. In the bard we tumbled on the hay and heard beneath our sneakers the crunch of buried glass. We tugged open a drawer in his workbench, looking for screwdrivers or crescent wrenches, and spied a gleaming six-pack among the tools. Playing tag, we darted around the house just in time to see him sway on the rear stoop and heave a finished bottle into the woods. In his good-night kiss we smelled the cloying sweetness of Clorets, the mints he chewed to camouflage his dragon’s breath.
* * *
Our own father never beat us, and I don’t think he ever beat Mother, but he threatened often. The Old Testament Yahweh was not more terrible in his wrath. Eyes blazing, voice booming, Father would pull out his belt and swear to give us a whipping, but he never followed through, never needed to, because we could imagine it so vividly.
* * *
My father, when drunk, was neither funny nor honest; he was pathetic, he poured in booze to keep from draining dry. There seemed to be a leak in him somewhere, and refuses to squeal, he would never admit that he had touched a drop, not even in his last year. When he seemed to be dissolving in alcohol before our very eyes. I never knew him to lie about anything, ever, except about this one ruinous fact. Drowsy, clumsy, unable to fix a bicycle tire, throw a baseball, balance a grocery sack, or walk across the room, he was stripped of his true self by drink. In a matte of minutes, the contents of a bottle could transform a brave man into a coward, a buddy into a bully, a gifted athlete and skilled carpenter and shrewd business man into a bumbler. No dictionary of synonyms for drunk would soften the anguish of watching our prince turn into a frog.
After some health problems, the author’s father quit drinking for years and then one day, took it up again, precipitating his final launch into alcoholism. The son describes his return home as an adult:
I no longer fancied I could reason with the men whose names I found on the bottles—Jim Beam, Jack Daniels---nor did I hope to save my father by burning down a store. I was able now to press the cold statistics about alcoholism against the ache of memory: ten million victims, fifteen million, twenty. And yet, in spite of my age, I reacted in the same blind way as I had in childhood, ignoring biology, forgetting numbers, vainly seeking to erase through my efforts whatever drove him to drink. I worked on their place twelve and sixteen hours a day, in the swelter of Mississippi summers, digging ditches, running electrical wires, planting trees, mowing grass, building sheds, as though what nagged at him was some list of chores, as though by taking his worries on my shoulders I could redeem him. I was flung back into boyhood, acting as though my father would not drink himself to death if only I were perfect.
I failed of perfection; he succeeded in dying. To the end, he considered himself not sick but sinful. “Do you want to kill yourself?” I asked him. “Why not?” he answered. “Why the hell not?” What’s there to save?” to the end, he would not speak about his feelings, would not or could not give a name to the beast that was devouring him.
…Life with him and the loss of him twisted us into shapes that will be familiar to other sons and daughters of alcoholics. My brother became a rebel, my sister retreated into shyness, I played the stalwart and dutiful son who would hold the family together. If my father was unstable, I would be a rock. If he squandered money on drink, I would pinch every penny. If he wept when he was drunk—and only when drink—I would not let myself weep at all. If he roared at the Little League umpire for calling my pitches balls, I would throw nothing but strikes. Watching him flounder and rage, I came to dread the loss of control. I would go through life without making anyone mad. I vowed never to put in my mouth or veins any chemical that would banish my everyday self. I would never make a scene, never lash out at the ones I loved, never hurt a soul. Through hard work, relentless work, I would achieve something dazzling—in the classroom, on the basketball floor, in the science lab, in the pages of books—and my achievement would distract the world’s eyes from his humiliation. I would become a worthy sacrifice, and the smoke of my burning would please God.” 743
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Study Questions
1. The author writes, “No dictionary of synonyms for drunk would soften the anguish of watching our prince turn into a frog.” We read, in Nick Flynn’s chapter, and extensive dictionary of such synonyms. How does that ‘dictionary’ from “Same again” shed light on this statement?
2. The father’s alcoholism has a life-long impact on the son. In its effects it is, even though the father never beat his family, a form of abuse. What reasons does the author find to explain why he needed to develop the reactions, such as perfectionism and hard work, that he did? What kind of father might Sanders be to his own children? Would they detect the damage done to him? Would it affect them?
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