Don't Drink and Go to Meetings: My Journey to Recovery

By Dan F.

Author Dan F. has lived a pretty interesting life, a big part of it spent as a recovering alcoholic. He has made fortunes and, unfortunately lost a lot more than he made. He never seemed to have much trouble making money. Holding on to it was another matter

Dan has been homeless and he has lived in beautiful houses. He has slept in alleyways and he has been the guest of foreign dignitaries and prime ministers. As a recovering alcoholic, the author has been through the extremes of life, both good and bad. He quotes Judy Collins, Ive looked at life from both sides now.

In Don't Drink And Go To Meetings, the author takes you along as he recalls the person he used to be, reconnecting with a painful part of his past. A lot of that life was spent in blackouts as excessive drinking binges left him no memory of what had occurred when he was out cold.

Along the way, he learns some valuable lessons about life, and he hopes to pass them on to others who are attempting their own journey to recovery. Filled with amusing anecdotes and the authors witty storytelling, this book is both entertaining and insightful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462883592

Book preview

MY STORY

How does someone live feeling they are the lowest piece of garbage on earth yet, at the same time, think they are so much better than everyone else? How does one live being afraid of everyone and everything all the time? How does one live with guilt and shame and remorse as their constant companions? For me and millions of other alcoholics, the answer was by picking up a drink. Here’s how I remember it…

Zero to Five

I was born in the Bronx in 1949 at Fordham Hospital, which doesn’t exist anymore. We only lived there for about six months before we moved to Mount Vernon, which borders the Bronx. But I always liked telling people I was from the Bronx (which is historically true) because I thought it made me sound tougher, or something like that. I was never really tough. Although you wouldn’t know that when I was drunk.

I was the only child of four children. In order, we were Daniel, Dennis, Daren, and Brian. Never understood why Brian wasn’t David or Demetrius or some other name starting with D. I was also the oldest, which just added to my sense of always overblown entitlement. We were born in fairly rapid succession. Daren and Brian would qualify as Irish twins. They were eleven months apart. You have to remember this was before cable. In fact, I don’t even think television was on the market when I was born. My mother had a hysterectomy after Brian; otherwise, I’m sure there would have been a few more of us running around. My mother was primarily English and my father primarily Irish, though there is some Dutch, French, and assorted nationalities mixed in. My father was Catholic and my mother Protestant. Of the four kids, two of us were Protestant and the other two Catholic. We could draw a line down the middle of the living room and play civil war. Actually, we didn’t need the line. Seems like there was always someone fighting someone else anyway. Everyone in my family, immediate and extended, had the gene for loving alcohol. If you’re getting the picture that this somehow may have led to some dysfunction, you wouldn’t be completely off base.

My earliest memories are almost nonexistent, so a lot of the early years have been related to me by others. Given the sources, I’m not too sure how much reliability I would place on them. Just a minor example, when I first needed to have a copy of my birth certificate for something (I don’t remember what), I saw that my name, Daniel Raymond F—, had been written in over a name that had been crossed out. The name originally appearing on my birth certificate was Timothy John F—. I wondered a little bit about this and my father had already died by this time (he died when I was eight—I think I was about twelve when this happened), so I asked my mother. She didn’t have a clue, or if she did, she wasn’t going to tell me. I asked her a few more times over the years but never got an answer. I should also mention that my father was also Daniel Raymond, so I was a junior. I’m still wondering who Timothy John was.

My grandmother on my father’s side was born in Belfast and died when I was two. I don’t remember my grandfather on that side at all and always thought he had died before I was born. As it turns out, he was alive and residing in the nuthouse in Wingdale. No one ever talked about him. Later, I was to find out he was an alcoholic who would become physically abusive to my grandmother and was forced into the institution for her protection. A lot of my family is buried at the same cemetery in Eastchester, New York, and I was shocked when I was there in the late seventies to see that he had lived until I was thirteen years old and I never knew it.

I don’t remember much of the first four or five years of my life. I will relate a few of the things I do remember. I don’t think they’re related, but they are the only events I remember from my Mount Vernon years. The first thing is my homosexual experience. I have listened to a lot of fifth steps over the years, and it seems like a lot of the guys’ deep dark secret involves some type of homosexual experience. Now I have sponsored only heterosexual guys, so I wonder if a homosexual’s deep dark secret involves a heterosexual experience. Interesting thought, but I digress. Let’s get back to me.

I was probably four years old. I was playing in the vacant lot next to my house with two of my friends. The older one, who must have been all of five years old, said he had learned a new game and was going to teach it to us. He pulled down his pants and had me get down on my knees, and he put his penis in my mouth. A few seconds later, he started to piss in my mouth. I didn’t like this game. Never played it again. I wonder if that distasteful experience kept me from becoming a homosexual in later years. Experience with women a few years down the road convinced me that I was truly a heterosexual. Anyway, that was my homosexual experience and it wasn’t my deep dark secret, although before writing it in this book, I don’t think I’ve told anyone else about it. Maybe one person.

The second thing I remember is my mother coming home from work and getting frantic. Seems she had put on the kitchen table five dollars that she owed to Jean Galvano, our next-door neighbor, and it was missing. I was home and was obviously the most likely suspect. I was innocent, I tell you; I was innocent.

Despite my repeated protestations, or as much as a four-year-old can verbalize protestations, I was presumed guilty and was forced on my hands and knees to recover that money. I looked everywhere. Then the garrison belt came out, and there were repeated blows to my back and butt. Still no five dollars. A little while later, it was discovered that my little brother Dennis had put the money under a mayonnaise jar in the refrigerator. Don’t ask me how. And I was profusely apologized to by Mom. But I know how to hold on to a good resentment as evidenced by me writing about this some fifty-plus years later.

The third thing is a few remembrances of my father. He built a little wooden sailboat, and he took me to a little pond on the Hutchinson River where he attached it to a string and let me hold the string. I’m not sure why I remember that, but I do. I have only three memories of my father, all good and that being one of them. The other two are of him driving the car for us to visit the Bronx Zoo. I don’t remember the zoo, just him driving the car. The last thing I remember is being at a baseball game, and he was playing first base. I was sitting behind the coach’s box and watching him play. I remember being extremely proud. When he died, I was given two things that I kept and treasured for a very long time: his watch and his first baseman’s baseball glove. It’s strange that I can only remember those three things. According to my mother and a few others, he was an alcoholic and not around all that much. So I’m not sure if I don’t remember because there wasn’t much to remember or because I blocked it out.

There are vague memories of parties going on, fights breaking out, yelling and screaming, police sirens, crying, and the like; but they seemed buried in my subconscious.

One of the things I do remember from this time was spending an inordinate amount of time in bars for a toddler. One especially, the Woodside Tavern in Mount Vernon. I would wind up drinking here when I was in college. When I was a kid, my entire family used to drink there. Mom, Dad, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. Looking back, if it weren’t for my family, this establishment might have gone out of business. The bartender, Dutch, was my godfather, although I don’t ever remember seeing him outside the bar. Never saw him again after my father died. I remember people would always give me sips of their drinks, so this is where I probably had my first drink, but I can’t swear to it. A lot of alcoholics remember their first drink. I was surrounded by it since I was born and don’t have a clue when my first drink was, but I’m pretty sure it was before I was of legal age. I don’t think that the environment I was raised in had anything to do with me being an alcoholic. I think it influenced how and where I drank as I grew older, and it played a big part on who my role models were and what I aspired to become.

When I was about four and a half, we moved to New Rochelle, home of Rob and Laura Petrie from the Dick Van Dyke Show. Somehow we never experienced the same type of family life. Forget about Father Knows Best or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

I think it would be remiss of me if I didn’t acknowledge my great achievement during this time. In fact, for quite a long time. I was voted the most beautiful baby in Westchester two years in a row. I don’t think that’s been achieved since. My grandmother would always proudly bring this up whenever a group was around as I was growing up and make it of a point of telling everyone, including me, that I got her looks.

Five to Ten

The New Rochelle I came to know was a lot different from how I believe most people pictured it back then. Did I mention we were poor? We were, but I didn’t know it. I thought Salvation Army was a designer label. Everyone around us was poor, and even when I went to elementary school, there weren’t any real rich kids there that I knew. It was the South Side, and it was definitely working class. We lived in a two-family rental house on Beechwood Avenue. I always thought I lived in an integrated neighborhood, but as I look back now, I see how it was a really strange integrated segregation. There was an apartment building, located just off Main Street (US 1), separated by a driveway on one side of our house. On the other side of my house were multifamily houses down the rest of the street. These were all also inhabited by white families. On the other side of the street were similar multifamily houses, all inhabited by black families. Even stranger, on Main Street were four—and five-story tenements. One would be inhabited by all blacks, and the next one would be all whites. Right on down the street. The buildings were all basically of the same quality. Just different races residing in them. I never really thought of it then. That’s just the way things were. Being five years old, you don’t know too much about that stuff. I remember one day going to play with my friend Douglas Kenney across the street at his house. Someone must have told my mother, and when she got home from work, she explained that I wasn’t allowed to do that. I don’t remember the reason why. It was all nice and polite, but it was clear I wasn’t supposed to go to their houses. Surprisingly or maybe not so surprisingly, when I saw Douglas the next day, he told me his mom told him the same thing. We all played in the street. Boxball, stickball, kickball, and everything else, and that was okay. We just weren’t allowed to go into each other’s homes.

I remember being in a lot of fear all the time. Usually there was no real basis for it, but it was always there. Even though I was considered by many to be brash and outgoing, it was a defense mechanism. I was afraid of you. I was afraid of everything. I would lie awake at night and be afraid. Pull the covers over my head. I just wanted to be safe. Safe from what, I’m not sure, but I hated being afraid. I isolated myself a lot. In my room. Built model cars. Read a lot. Mythology, sports books.

Over the period I lived on Beechwood Avenue, I saw a lot of tragedy and death. I think a big part of it was the neighborhood. I’m sure I wouldn’t have seen as much in a better one. There was a birthday party across the street where Eddie Austin lived. They were having it in the front yard. I would have liked to go, but as we already established, I wasn’t allowed. A little boy—I think it was his birthday, I think he was four—ran into the street and got hit by a car. He died.

Then there was my friend Johnny, who lived in the apartment building next door and was in my third-grade class. He had just moved there the year before. He was playing on the train tracks at the end of the street and got electrocuted. I saw them take his charred body away.

There was a man; I think he was the super of the big house across the street. This was where my friends Willie and Carl Kitchens lived. It was probably a ten-family three-story job. Anyway, this guy climbed up the roof, the police came, and we all watched as he did a swan dive into the concrete.

There was a big accident on I-95, and we all ran to see what was happening. The I-95 overpass was recently built over Beechwood Avenue, so we could climb up the embankment to access it. There was a pileup, and there was a guy sitting in the driver’s seat of a car with his head almost severed, hanging out the window by a flap of skin.

The apartment building next door to our house went up in flames one night. We had to evacuate our house, but not before I saw Ann, a friend of my mother’s, trying to escape through her third-floor window, which faced across the driveway from my bedroom window. They couldn’t get a ladder there in time, and I watched her catch fire and slip back into the apartment.

Last but certainly not least, I saw my father die when I was eight. He had two previous heart attacks and was just recently accepted into the New Rochelle police force. He felt the third one coming on and wouldn’t let my mother call New Rochelle Hospital, which was only five minutes away. Instead, they took him to Mount Vernon Hospital, which was a lot farther, and he didn’t make it through the night. My last vision of him was of him being taken from the house.

This was probably a lot for anyone to absorb in their formative years. I know it changed me forever. Well, maybe not forever, but certainly for a very long time. Anytime something like this would happen in the future, I would shut down emotionally. Detach completely. In fact, the decapitation incident above was the last of the events I described, and I remember looking at the guy and wondering how that flap of skin was able to keep his head from falling to the ground. Almost completely devoid of emotion.

My father died in June of 1957. He was thirty-two, and although the official cause of death was a heart attack, I have often wondered about that. If someone who has had two previous heart attacks continues to smoke and drink like a fish, what really killed him? Maybe alcoholism. I believe there are millions of these erroneous causes of death listed in the obituaries.

I went to the YMCA day camp that summer. It hadn’t been planned, so I got put into an open slot with the older guys. I loved it. I always gravitated to people who were older than me. When I was a teenager and in my twenties, I loved to drink in old men bars.

Anyway, I made friends with some of the older guys in the neighborhood and really thought I had arrived when, at eight years old, I was standing on the corner of Main and Beechwood with a pack of Camels rolled up in my T-shirt sleeve, taking sips of Reingold Beer that the older guys had. Then we would go into one of the hallways of one of the tenement buildings and sing a cappella. Those high ceilings could make anyone sound good. I didn’t start drinking alcoholically until I was about thirteen or fourteen, but this introductory period helped me make the transition into full-blown alcoholism very easily.

It was around this time that there was a noticeable dichotomy appearing in my life. That is, it would have been noticeable if anyone had been looking, but after Dad died, there wasn’t a lot of attention being paid to me, or my siblings. Not that there was before, but now I felt an even greater sense of freedom. I was a Cub Scout and loved it. We would meet weekly at Mrs. Gaboury’s house, and I always had my uniform on and always eagerly participated in whatever activity we were working on that week. At the same time, I was running numbers in the neighborhood. What better cover than an eight—or nine-year-old kid. I always liked math, and this was math at its most basic. Get a dime from Mr. R., a quarter from Mrs. D., write down their numbers on a pad, and deliver it to Gelb’s Deli on the corner. I also got a shoeshine kit and went into the bars along Main Street plying my trade. Think I charged fifteen cents or a quarter back then. Began shoplifting around this time as well. Used to go to Woolworth’s and slip 45 rpm records between the pages of my notebook after school and walk out the store. Stole a lot of books too. I was a pretty well-read thief.

I also got my first real job at eight. There was an ice cream distributorship behind our house. You entered it through the driveway that separated our house from the apartment building that burned down. One of the owners, Ike, began what would be a twenty-plus—year affair with my mother. He gave me a job as a helper, both in the plant and on the trucks. On weekends, I would go in early and help load the trucks; then I would go out with one of the drivers to make deliveries. Could be Spanish Harlem, Westchester, or New York City. All depended on which driver I was assigned to and where their route was. Made much better money than most eight-year-olds.

Geez, I always thought I had a pretty normal childhood. At least until I wrote this. I don’t want this to become Angela’s Ashes II, but I’m amazed, looking back, at how much I experienced in such a short time.

Here’s one. I remember one last thing about my father. I was five or six, and he was teaching