This Lady Here: I'll Drink to That

By Carol Ann Rusch

This book is one person's travels through a catalogue of nightmare experiences. Anyone who has suffered through divorce of any form knows this one!! Abuse of various natures are present in this autobiography. Not so much the cure for, but mostly, the acceptance of and forgiveness ability. The emotional healing process does call for the time element, unfortunately! However, this book tells about different aspects of ways and means to this beautiful end.

This book is not for people looking for a quick fix or a way out. Abstinence from alcohol is a tool which many people have used as a problem solver. This book is only one person's life under both chronic inebriation and total abstinence conditions. There are many adventures where the reader might question the physical influence under which the author was operating. Even without the alcoholic consumption by the author, the behavior, when compared to the behavior of a well adjusted individual are incredibly different!!

People who have loved or been loved by those who are immediately involved with alcohol or drugs may gain a deeper understanding of the total situation. Also, the author hopes that some comfort to the reader will take place upon the realization that they are not alone. The greatest gift the author has received from life, is PEACE ON EARTH.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452020969

Carol Ann Rusch

Carol Ann has one credential to her name! SURVIVAL!!! She has been Baptized to Jesus Christ, which is probably how she lived to the age of 70. The suffering and pain that she experienced in life is not the major complexion of her book. Her happiness and joy of existence today comes from the ability to feel gratitude for what the years had given her, good and bad. She hopes that anyone coming to the turning point of life will benefit from reading her adventures and finding some solutions for themselves. Throughout her life, she had been searching for her home. Through Jesus Christ, she has been living there for some time and didn't know it!! She feels a rest is in store. Not death. People have said, "I wouldn't leave my home for anything." Now she can say that, too. Thank you."

Book preview

This Lady Here

I'll Drink to That

Carol Ann Rusch

missing image file

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

The names in this book are fictitious. The characters are from my memory. If they resemble people in your lives, such are accidental and would be wholly unintentional.

© 2011 Carol Ann Rusch. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 02/10/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4520-2094-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-2096-9 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-2095-2 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010906763

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Acknowledgements

These are the people I carry many thanks for:

GOD, for complete and total forgiveness and a lot of fun!

Father Casey, Father Brinn, Father Gonzalez, Father Kirk.

Hazelden, for an education and direction.

Bill W. and Dr. Bob, for their version of acceptance.

Bob Rusch, my third husband. Thank you, Bob, for your love. Thank you for introducing me to a wonderful way of life, full of happy sobriety, travel, reasonable responsibility and treating me like a Queen. I will always love you, honey.

Sharon Schoener, for her love of her Spanish guitar.

Joe Roach, for taking me in his Cadillac on his daily route.

Christie Rusch Weintraub, for her expertise and opinions.

Hart and Emma Burnett, for teaching me Euchre.

Jimmy Robinson, for his all-night sessions.

Guy Diltz, for his wonderful music.

Bill Wilkinson, for his protection and stories.

State of California, for their disability laws.

Sharon Stoltz, for her story on grandchildren.

Stephanie Van Wyck Clark, for her faithful sponsoring.

Sandy Cash, for her teachings on the church.

Hazel Wadlow, for her example of singing/music.

Vicky Troxell, for her computer genius and help throughout this endeavor.

Eddie, my first husband. Thank you for standing by me through the many drunken years. Thank you for being the great dad you were to the kids. Thank you for being a faithful provider and a good husband.

George, my second husband. Thank you for your help with algebra. Thank you for the contact lenses. Thank you for supporting me during the six times I had to be admitted to the Mental Wards. Most of all, thank you for Patches.

Teresa Burg, for loving her brother, Bob, and for sharing the family secrets about Bob with me.

Chapter 1

I am going to start in the middle of this creation. It is around 1975. The place is the Alano Club in Stillwater, Minnesota. This is where I attended AA meetings. It was around 7:45 in the evening. I had been coming here for about three years, and since my first meeting I had experienced a warmth and acceptance from the other members that I could never find anywhere else. One of the reasons I entered into this new way of living was that previously, only after two or three whiskey highballs I would think I was being, not only accepted, but sought after and even envied by the other patrons of the various establishments that I frequented. However, since entering the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous, this misconception has been removed. I now have the ability to determine the difference between artificial affection and genuine brotherly love.

The main room of the meeting place was beginning to fill with the other alcoholics who had come to attend a meeting. Tommy Henderson, an old timer, was sitting at the piano in the corner of the room. I loved Tommy. He sat up with me many a night, all night long, just talking, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. When I first sobered up I wasn’t used to being at home with my family, and Tommy kept me occupied till I made the adjustment. Each night he would sit at the piano, playing honky-tonk music until it was time for the meeting to begin.

Let me describe this meeting place for you. At one time it had actually been an old mortuary. The smell of formaldehyde could still be experienced on a hot summer day. The place where the mortician had positioned the display casket for the deceased was where we had our podium for the presenters at our speakers meetings. In one room there were some large over-stuffed black leather sofas with matching chairs and nice wall to wall carpeting. Hanging from the high ceilings were about four or five chandeliers and on the walls were various pictures donated by the members together with copies of the Serenity Prayer and the AA slogans. Prominently placed was a picture of Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous. This place was rented to the alcoholic community for their recovery activities for the sum of $1.00 per year. I’m not familiar with the legal aspects of this transaction, however, the membership did purchase the deed and all property to the building about twenty-five years later. A large accomplishment for a group of characters such as these. It still stands there today.

Going back, I was thirty-five years of age and this place was the most meaningful to me of any other on earth. There were two adjoining rooms connected to the large main meeting room. These rooms had tables and chairs where many of us preferred to sit as we had spent long hours getting drunk around kitchen, poker and barroom tables. Here we could play cards or simply spend time with each other. The large meeting room had a more serious feeling about it, but some did prefer it to the table rooms. On this particular evening everyone was standing around greeting each other when my Uncle Butch came walking through the French doors of the main room. My uncle had entered AA about a year earlier, and though I was aware of this, he had never showed any interest in my personal sobriety, and he had never come out to my home group. He lived about forty miles from this place, and I never expected him to come there for a meeting. He and I were the only members of my family to get sober and because of this I was delighted to see him. He was my mother’s brother and she had died about five years previous.

I walked over to him and gave him a big AA hug and said, Uncle Butch! What a surprise! I am so glad you’re here! Did you come for a meeting? He said, Of course!

I took him into one of the adjoining table rooms. With the others who came in with us, we sat down at one of the tables and the meeting started. As usual we took our turns sharing our stories, and when it came to Uncle Butch’s turn he said, I’m Carol’s uncle, and I came out here tonight to tell you all how proud of Carol we all are, in the family. We are all glad she’s sober now. She doesn’t know this, but she was the only one in the family, who at nine months old, could take down a shot of whiskey without wincing. You could feel the disbelief and horror in the air around the table. My uncle laughed as though he were expecting a similar response from the rest of us. This did not happen and so the meeting continued and closed as usual. I could hardly take in what I had heard, and yet I couldn’t question my uncle about it or even mention it for many years. I had heard so many alcoholic stories in the last couple of years that I felt that my story was really not that much different, and so I just minimized it in my mind. I didn’t share it because people’s first drink stories were always remembered by the participants and always involved them consenting to what they were doing. My first drink did not contain these characteristics.

After the meeting my uncle and I chatted for awhile and then he went home. I did not see him again for many years. I wanted to start my book this way for the benefit of the reader who might be wondering about alcohol in his/her life. Sometimes we really don’t know when we had our first drink! We think we do. I certainly thought I did. I shared it many times in meetings and I didn’t change my story just because my uncle announced at a meeting that I was only nine months old. I continued to say I was fifteen years old when I took my first shot of whiskey. It didn’t seem to matter to me one way or the other, and I couldn’t see that such information would be useful to anyone. Well, maybe it is or maybe it isn’t but today I realize that it is my story, and I’m stickin’ to it!

Related to all of this, I will now attempt to give you a description of my babyhood years. When I was about twenty-five years old, at a family gathering, my mother and grandmother were giving an explanation for my having a darker than natural skin coloring. My people were all German and Dutch, blonde and blue-eyed with very white skin. My mother related to them how, when I was three months old, I was outside in the buggy while she was doing some housework. Time passed and she forgot I was out there. By the time she remembered me I was red as a beet. She ran in the house with me and called my grandmother. She came over immediately and they called the doctor. He came over to the house and told them to watch me closely for twenty-four hours. The next day, I had turned brown as a berry. I’ve told people over the years that I attribute my beautifully browned skin to my mother’s housework.

Around this same time period, once more sitting around the kitchen table, the family and I were all looking at family photographs of me when I was nine-months old. Ironically this story takes place in the same time slot as my uncle’s tale concerning my first shot of whiskey. I noticed there were photos of me with my hair shaved off. In others my head was wrapped in a surgical gauze cloth. When the family talked about this event the story was that a boll weevil had bored its way through my skull and had attempted to enter the soft tissue of my brain. Being a microscopic insect, unable to be detected by the human eye, surgery was performed, and I survived with only a surgical scar at the back of my head. They said that what caused them alarm in the first place was my head had swollen to gigantic proportions. The surgery luckily brought it back to its normal size.

Now, I have put both stories together and have come to believe that the whiskey had caused the swelling and the surgery removed the fluid that was created from the alcoholic trauma inside the brain. My uncle’s story would have me believe that all of the nine month old babies in the family got drunk, but I was the only one in our family that I knew of who had to have surgery. I leave the readers with their own conclusions.

Chapter 2

Now, I would like to introduce you to my Mommy and Daddy. My mother insisted we kids call her Mother, and we did. Her family was German and Dutch, and as I said earlier, blonde, blue-eyed and white skinned. My grandfather was an immigrant from Hamburg, Germany. My father’s family was from Hungary, and they were olive-skinned with dark hair and blue eyes. In my opinion, all of my family members were above average as far as good looks are concerned. My father was the best looking of them all, and being a guitar man and singer of country songs, he received a lot of attention from the opposite gender.

In reference to the supposed suntan issue mentioned above, I realized later in life that I probably would have been dark olive-skinned anyway due to the natural inheritance from my father’s side. My mother divorced my father when I was four years old, and I was sixteen before I ever saw him again. We never saw my father’s family or heard his name mentioned again. As far as I knew he might have been dead and gone. I have never had any information about that side of the family except that which I sought after and received through the years. So, this was the real reason I stood out in my mother’s family, but having had any resemblance to my father was unacceptable. Everyone that was involved in my life during those years had known my father and his family. They knew of their skin coloring but chose not to say anything so as to protect my mother’s feelings. I really don’t know why she divorced him, but he told me many years later, after she had died, that he wished she could have waited until he had gotten out of the stage of womanizing and running around. As far as I could tell when he told me this, he was still in that stage!

During the years between the ages of four and sixteen, I knew he wasn’t dead, but I always thought that he was looking for me. There were no cards, letters, or phone calls, so I figured my mother probably knew where he was but wouldn’t tell him where we were. So, in my little mind I accepted and lived by the idea that he was always searching for his little girl, the one he loved so much. I had a brother, Dickey, who was eleven months younger than I. We never discussed any of this so I didn’t have any idea of how he was thinking or feeling. I just knew that I missed him so badly, and because he just disappeared, he became a legend in my mind and always present. When I turned five another gigantic male figure entered my life. His name was Jesus. My mother put me in parochial school for first and second grade, and there I was able to learn more about this wonderful man. I now had two very large and powerful male figures in my life both of whom were always with me. I was never afraid of anything!

We lived at Grandma’s house on 14th Street in the downtown area of St Paul, Minnesota. I heard this area referred to as The Slums. I didn’t know why people called it that. I thought it was a wonderful place to grow up. We kids in that neighborhood had complete freedom. At six years old I was hanging around in the capital building or the museum on most summer days. Our little group of friends consisted of my brother, Dickey, Jimmy Little, Tommy O’Toole, Mary and Tiny Carlson, Little JoJo, Walt Romaine and me. We went everywhere together. I would clean Grandma’s house for a quarter and that was enough for the movies downtown and candy too. The Strand, the Lyceum, the Paramount and the Orpheum were some of the movie theaters we frequented. All the movies were rated the same in those days. Kids were treated the same as adults. We had a blast running around, going to one or two movies in one day, war stories, horror films and sometimes a western.

I remember walking down the street, past the flats. Under the steps of the flats is where all the residents put their trash. It smelled awful!! Awful!! Every time I went past there it smelled awful. One day, I went past there, and said the word, shit. And I thought, oooohh I said the word shit and it felt wonderful so I said it again, and then I said, SHIT SHIT SHIT and it gave me such a feeling of power!! I attribute this to the garbage under the flats.

I remember one time, My brother Dickey, Jimmy and I were running around in the museum. I didn’t know why this was, but whenever we hung around that place there was no one else in sight. Well, Dickey and Jimmy ditched me in the theatre section of the building. I came running around the corner, where the seating was located, and suddenly a man was standing right in front of me. It seemed as though he had been waiting for me. I stopped in my tracks when he said to me, That’s a nice little outfit you have on, little girl. I replied, My mother made it for me. After saying, Let me see it better, he grabbed my arm, swinging and turning me into him and then his other hand went down my pants. I screamed and jumped out of his grasp, running as fast as I could, yelling for my brother and my friend over and over until I reached the sidewalk out in front of the museum. I saw them over on the cement ledge down by the cross street. They had been sitting there waiting for me. I never told them or anyone else what happened that day, mostly because I knew my mother would not let us run the streets anymore. Besides that, I had gotten away without being hurt, so I thought, and figured I would be able to do that again if I had to. However, I never went back to the museum again, ever, not even to this day.

ch2.JPG

Chapter 3

Now let me tell you about my grandma’s house. My mother was born down in Jasper, Minnesota, but her brother, my Uncle Pete, was born in St. Paul. My grandparents gave up farming and moved to the city where Grandpa found employment on the Great Northern Railroad. This was a much better situation