Does the Sh—— Ever End?: An Inside Look at an Alcoholic

By Richard Swartz

It was certainly not one of the authors primary goals in life to become an alcoholic, but it happened. This book takes you inside the authors head to show the reader how it happened. Alcohol is cunning, baffling, and powerful. This book takes you aboard the authors journey into alcoholism, as the author openly and honestly describes how for many, many years alcohol was the cure to all that ailed him (and there was a lot). But in the end, alcohol became the ailment itself.

The author hopes that this book will help fellow sufferers understand what happened to themthe why and the how. The author also hopes it will provide friends and family of fellow sufferers with some insight as to why their loved ones cant really see whats happening and why they continue down their destructive path.

It was a journey for the author that lasted longer than it should have but does have a happy ending. It is the authors hope that others can achieve a similar happy ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543446982

Richard Swartz

I am an alcoholic. A grateful recovering alcoholic. It took many years (too many) to finally face that fact, but thank god I did. Some twenty-five years now sober, and having subsequently spent fifteen years working in the alcohol abuse prevention arena, I finally understand how that happened. And it wasn’t entirely my fault. It could have been avoided. The choice was mine, and unfortunately, I made some bad choices, not fully realizing the consequences. I’m sharing my journey in hopes that others won’t make the same uninformed bad choices. But if you’ve already made those bad choices, perhaps you too may learn how and why that happened. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. I found it and hope others will too. There are, however, some restrictions.

Book preview

Prelude

Mary had a little lamb,

Its fleece was white as snow,

And everywhere that Mary went,

The lamb was sure to go.

He followed her to school one day

And the teacher had a fit,

’Cause every time he turned his back,

The little damn thing would shit.

Sounds like the story of my life. It seemed like every time I turned around, I’d find another pile of shit. And it just never seemed to end. If I ever needed an excuse for taking a drink, I had plenty of reasons. Just too much shit to deal with, or so I thought. I wish I knew then what I know now.

The Saga Begins

Dateline – Blue Earth, Minnesota – June 13, 1944

Clarence and Elsie Swartz are pleased to announce the arrival of their second child and first son, Richard C. Swartz. He was born today at Blue Earth General Hospital, weighing in at seven pounds and four ounces.

That was about all my parents would admit to. They say all babies are beautiful. Apparently, there are some exceptions to that rule, and I was obviously one of them. Although born in the middle of the summer, my mother never left the house with me unless I was completely covered with a blanket, Mother hoping and praying the whole time that no would ask to see the hideous creation she had hidden in her baby carriage. It was always a real source of comfort to me as a young lad to be told by my own mother that I was, without a doubt, the ugliest baby she had ever seen, bar none. Baby pictures of me are nonexistent. I apparently didn’t become bearable to camera lenses until about the age of five. I still am no prize, but apparently, one can outgrow ugliness—or at least get used to it.

If ugly wasn’t bad enough, there was plenty more shit coming my way. This was merely the beginning.

Early Days in Blue Earth, Minnesota

The population of this flourishing metropolis back in the early 1940s was probably in the neighborhood of a couple thousand. A strange name for a town. The Dakota Indians (the original occupants) named a river in the area the Mahka-to River, which translates to Blue Earth River. It appears that color blindness may have been a problem in that particular tribe. They thought the clay in this particular riverbed was blue, hence, Blue Earth River. Apparently, the new residents didn’t want to piss off the Dakota Indians when they pushed them out, so they named the new town after the color-blind Indians’ river. A peace offering, maybe. But Blue Earth was not without its claims to fame. It had at least two.

Its first claim to fame was that it was the last bank that the infamous Dalton Gang (with Jesse James) successfully robbed before they met their Waterloo trying to rob the bank in nearby Northfield, Minnesota. (There’s another example of the Minnesotans’ inept ability at naming towns. Northfield, Minnesota—Northern Minnesota, right? Wrong. Northfield is about as far south as you can go in Minnesota without turning into one of those, god forbid, Iowans.)

Second claim to fame? Blue Earth had a Jolly Green Giant canning factory. Talk about a big deal. Not too many towns in Minnesota could claim having that kind of industrial plum. We really had a leg up on the rest of the towns around—except, of course, Northfield. Those sons of a bitch just kept bragging about how the Dalton Gang got away with robbing the Blue Earth bank but got their asses kicked in Northfield. Not even the Jolly Green Giant could pull that albatross off Blue Earth’s back.

So, life begins in Blue Earth, Minnesota. A butt-ugly baby was a bad enough for Clarence and Elsie, but there were more problems in store for them in regard to their firstborn son. By the time I was two, everyone was getting a little concerned because I wasn’t doing what normal two-year-old children do, like talk, or at least babble. What’s the matter with this ugly little bastard? The son of a bitch can’t even talk.

As embarrassing as it was, my parents took me to see doctor after doctor to see if I had some kind of problem. Maybe the little bastard can’t hear. Maybe he’s a mute. Maybe he’s retarded. Maybe he’s just dumb. Fortunately, or unfortunately, doctor after doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with me—just that I was ugly. Shortly after all those embarrassing visits and to the relief of my parents, I started talking. But the relief was short-lived. The next horrifying discovery Clarence and Elsie found out about their precious baby boy was that the ugly little bastard did a lot of stuff with his left hand. Well, for Germans (and we were and are 100 percent German), that’s the kiss of death. Left-handed people are a product of the devil. They are dumb and devious. Evil. Useless. A milk cow without tits. A menace to society. Clarence and Elsie were not about to unleash this left-handed thing they had created into the world. They were going to set my ass straight, or should I say, right. If I even thought about using my left hand, the wrath of God, my parents, and all of Germany descended upon me. It was a vicious struggle. Left hand, whomp. Right hand, OK. Left hand, whomp. (No child abuse laws back then. They were just doing God’s work.) But their attempts to correct this left-handed horror was like trying to smooth out a lumpy mattress. You push down one lump, and another one pops up. And the new lump is worse than the first.

It was certainly not a conscious effort on my part, but I apparently rebelled against their attempts to cut off my left arm in a way that was more hideous to Germans than being left-handed. After years of waiting to get me to talk, I converted that late but fluent speaking into stuttering, mumbling gibberish. That left Clarence and Elsie in a real dilemma. Faced with the choice between a right-handed gibbering idiot or a left-handed talking idiot, they reluctantly opted for the later, and the child abuse ceased. But the scars of that battle remain. I succeeded in my desire to eat and write left-handed, but the rest of my physical abilities were forever confused by this concerted effort to remove my left arm. I play baseball right-handed, bowl right-handed, and shoot a rifle left-handed, a bow and arrow right-handed, a pistol left-handed. I play tennis right-handed, ping-pong left-handed. I paint left-handed and use a scissor right-handed. There are some advantages, however. I wipe my ass right-handed and whack off left-handed. And I don’t stutter doing any of it.

Other than the struggles above, as best as I can recollect, life in Blue Earth wasn’t too bad. I had the three Tompkin boys next door to play with. Two of the three Tompkin boys were damned near as ugly as I was, so we got along just fine. We also had the Ubanks across the street. No kids, at least little ones, but they did raise minks in cages. The Tompkin boys and I would occasionally sneak over and terrorize these caged creatures. Mean little bastards, those minks. We would have all shit on the spot if they ever got loose. Fortunately, they never did. Minks may make great fur coats, but believe me, smell their shit one time, and you’ll soon be looking for a nice warm cloth coat.

My dad worked for the Jolly Green Giant plant, and Elsie plucked chickens. We had a little two-bedroom bungalow and an old Plymouth. We were enjoying the luxurious life in Blue Earth. Rich city slickers, that’s what all the relatives thought. All the relatives were scattered in Minnesota and Iowa on farms. I had a lot of cousins, all boys, who constantly harassed me about being a city slicker. To them, city boys didn’t do shit, didn’t know shit, and were about as useless as shit. But along with the obnoxious cousins and the Tompkin boys, I had plenty of other boys to hang around with. Life at five was going just fine. Too fine. It was time for some fresh new shit.

My dad was doing pretty well at Jolly Green Giant. He was a mechanic and a damn good one—too good, I guess. A family friend had made the big, big move to Chicago to work as a mechanic in a canning factory there—the American Can Company. He came back for a visit to Blue Earth with glorious tales of life in Chicago. Streets lined in gold. A good mechanic needed a wheelbarrow to bring home his paycheck. And TV! TV was at least ten years away from Blue Earth in 1949, but in Chicago, it was already there. Yes, sir, Chicago had it all.

So, filled with sugar plums dancing in his head, my father headed off to Chicago to find fame and fortune. The rest of the family—Elsie, myself (age five), Ruth (four), and Myrna (ten)—stayed in Blue Earth until Clarence got a job, got settled, and built our new three-bedroom house. Down the yellow brick road to the magical world of Chicago. Do fairy tales really come true? Maybe in the Land of Oz, but Chicago didn’t exactly turn out to be the Land of Oz.

Still burned in my memory is getting yanked out of my kindergarten class in Blue Earth one afternoon by my uncle. He had parked out front to pick me up and haul me and my sisters to the Land of Oz. As I got into the car, all my classmates had their noses pressed against the windows of the classroom, waving goodbye to a classmate headed for a world they could only dream of. Little did they know. Little did I know what was in store. Gone were my classmates. Gone were my cousins. Gone were the Tompkin boys. Me, my uncle, and my two sisters, off to see the wizard.

Early Years in Chicago

The Land of Oz turned out to be a house on the outskirts of Chicago’s south side, with no other houses around, no other boys around, no interior walls, no interior doors, and very little furniture. The dream house was a shell—four walls, a bathroom, and a kitchen. We slept on the floor as the builders finished the inside of the house one room at a time at what seemed to be one month at a time. No friends, no relatives, no house, no neighbors, no minks, no life. Could things possibly get any worse? You bet!

I was only five by the time we left Blue Earth, so my memories are a little vague about life there. I don’t recall ever seeing my father drink or drunk in Blue Earth. In Chicago, however, he was rarely sober. What happened?

My father spent many, many months in Chicago by himself—getting a job, getting settled, getting the house started, and others. Perhaps lonely, perhaps a little naive about Chicago’s nightlife, perhaps an already budding alcoholic in Blue Earth, my father certainly found a new lifestyle in Chicago. Very early after our arrival in Chicago, he developed a regular routine of coming home late, drunk, and broke. Not a good combination for a happy family life. Booze, gambling, and women—Chicago had them all, and Clarence couldn’t seem to resist any of them. After a short time, Elsie literally had no choice. She had to throw the bum out, divorce him, and start working. So much for dreamland. Father gone, house half done, no money, no car, and Mom working. Nothing good ever comes from a broken home. I certainly believed that. So, you start living in a world of make-believe. You make believe you have father, you make believe you have a real home, you make believe you have a real family, you make believe you have a normal life. Our life was like our house. It looked OK from the outside, but inside, it was missing a lot of stuff, like doors, a father, a car, money, food, clothes, and others.

How we survived those early years in Chicago after my father left is beyond me. He was to provide some child support, but that money only went to further his drinking career—a very long and successful career as the family drunk. Elsie started working at a factory (having no job skills other than chicken plucking). That, however, was not steady employment until years later. She worked probably six months a year, and the other six months, she’d draw some meager unemployment. How do you make it through with all that stacked against you? You live like dogs, that’s how. Our grocery budget for a family of four was like $50 a month. Granted, this was 1952, and a loaf of bread was a quarter, but $50 still didn’t go far. So, how do you do it? You do it by eating this stuff:

Menu – Select One of the Following Gourmet Delights

Dinner

Pancakes

Waffles

Liver and potatoes

Spam and potatoes

Cabbage and potatoes

Some ungodly combination of rice and raisins floating in some form of white liquid manure.

Irish Smoals (That’s what she called them. They were some kind of burnt scrambled pancakes.)

Goulash

Lunch

Brown sugar sandwiches (Bologna in season.)

Breakfast

Toast, toast, or toast on toast

Clothes. Now there’s another thing that further boosted my already-sinking self-esteem. Mom’s brothers and sisters back on the farms in Iowa tried to pitch in and help us where they could. My wardrobe was part of those charitable contributions. Remember all those cousins back on the farms? Well, their old clothes became my treasures. Hand-me-downs straight from the farm. Picture this: New kid in school, doesn’t know a damn soul, ugly as sin, he’s in the big city now, and he’s dressed like some country hick who just finished feeding the chickens. Not exactly the image of someone who’s going to attract a lot of new friends in the city. At least they had the decency not to laugh—at least not in front of me. (Kind of reminds me of Dolly Parton’s hit Coat of Many Colors.)

Grammar school was pure torture. I lived in constant fear that teachers and other kids would find out my deep, dark secret. He comes from a broken home. And it’s a little difficult to pull that one off when you’re sitting there dressed like Little Orphan Annie. But you try. You try to look normal.

Broken homes are no big deal in today’s society. Seems nowadays more kids come from broken homes than normal homes. But in the early 1950s, that wasn’t the case. TV had things like Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Mama, and a little later, Leave It to Beaver. Those programs showed me what real family life was supposed to be like. Compare that to what I came home to. That’s hard to overcome, at least for me. I just kept the pain inside and tried not to show it on the outside.

Being one of the first houses in a new subdivision in the middle of nowhere meant we had no neighbors to speak of, no other kids to play with. But at last, in first grade, I found another boy to play with—Kenny Blake. He was only about three blocks away. Great kid, great friend, and a great family. Life was getting a little more bearable. We were inseparable. His friendship and his house provided an oasis from my own hell at home. The mind apparently has a unique ability to protect itself from pain. My own house was in chaos. My dad was in the throes of his alcoholism. Yelling, screaming, and violence were almost a daily occurrence, or so I’ve been told. But to this day, I have no conscious memory of my father ever being in that house in Chicago, even though he was there for over a year. I guess my mind just turned off the record button. All I remember is no father, no family life, no joy, three kids, and battered wife. But at least I had Kenny—a friend with a real family. It was bearable. Too bearable, I guess.

As I was about to experience over and over again, I just couldn’t ever seem to crawl out of the bucket of shit I was in. Just when I thought I was about to crawl out of one bucket of shit, another one would appear. Unlike other kids that had fathers, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and the Easter Bunny, I had my own personal little shit fairy who visited me on a regular basis and who was more generous to me than most of the other clients on his list. And he never tired and seemed to have a never-ending supply of the stuff for me. It was just one pile after another.

So, what surprise did my little shit fairy have for me this time? Kenny’s father got transferred to a job in another state. Good for him. Not so good for me, as usual. My salvation was gone. Alone, again.

Some of that pain from Kenny’s departure was eased when a new family built a house next door and moved in. They had one son who was about five years older than me. But with no one else around, he started to spend time with me. He became my surrogate father, teaching me baseball, football, basketball—you know, guy stuff. He was a pretty good athlete. He wound up playing baseball and football in high school. He also wound up marrying my older sister. That might explain why he took such an interest in me. Back then, it wasn’t cool to play with boys younger than you. But thank god he did and gave me the basic boy