Sunshine & Shadow

by Larry Writer

  I cried for Alan. He was a brave, decent man, a hard worker and a loyal and loving husband and father.

  I hated my father for what he did to us while under the influence of alcohol, yet I never got a handle on the disease that had its grip on him. With Steve and Alan, I was getting a crash course in what hard drinking can do. Steve and I were approaching a parting of the ways. I loved him to death, and I loved him in our mother’s memory. I hated what he was doing to himself. I was bewildered and at the end of my patience. I was so angry with him. I was sitting in the PCYC and our friend Johnny Lewis strolled over and gave me a hug and said, ‘How’s your brother?’

  I shocked myself with my reply. ‘Johnny, I don’t care how he is … He has treated me like shit for most of my life.’

  Johnny said, ‘No, mate, he’s a good bloke … and he’s your brother.’

  I’m ashamed of how I reacted to Steve’s problem. Until you’ve suffered from alcoholism, and I was lucky enough not to, you can’t know the desperation for alcohol and how you’ll blow off every loved one and mate to wangle the money to satisfy your habit. And then when you’re under the influence, you have no control over what you do. You punch a mate, drive when drunk, gamble every cent you have, commit a crime. I had spent almost a decade trying to love, help and shame Steve into living a good and constructive life. He wasn’t in the hunt, alcohol made sure of that. He needed treatment for his disease, just as you seek treatment if you have cancer or a cold. I gave my brother everything except what he needed most.

  I couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel, like I did, that life was all about hard work, good fun and experiences, love, friendship, and personal and professional satisfaction.

  I regretted what I had said to Johnny Lewis about Steve so much, and was so filled with remorse that I tried one more time to pull him out of his downward spiral. After a sleepless night I called his mobile phone. Down the line came a drunken, slurring English voice: ‘Courthouse Hotel.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ I demanded.

  ‘I’m a friend of Steve.’

  ‘Can I talk to him?’

  ‘Sorry, mate, you can’t. He’s here, but he’s pissed and out cold.’

  I wrote my brother a sad and nasty letter about his behaviour. I did not see or hear from Steve for nearly four years.

  [STEPHEN]

  facing my demons

  There was a popular movie and book of the 1940s about a fellow who went on a monster bender and when he finished he couldn’t remember what he’d done while under the influence. The film and the book on which it was based were called The Lost Weekend. I had a similar experience but my lost weekend lasted nearly a decade.

  My life at age thirty-seven in 2002 comprised drinking to excess, a little law, more drinking, gambling, drinking, some street-sweeping, more drinking, love and heartbreak and even more drinking, always more drinking. I was a pathetic and wretched mess.

  I was drinking myself to death. I can safely say that if I’d continued drinking I would not be here today. I was odds-on to get into a fight and end up stabbed in the gutter, or wrap my car around a pole driving drunk, or contract cirrhosis or another alcohol-exacerbated illness. I couldn’t have cared less. All I cared about was my next drink.

  I’ve beaten most things in my life with my will, but stopping drinking was beyond me.

  I was saved not by myself but by a Higher Power, with a lot of help from James. I’m not talking about the God I learned about at St Joseph’s and St Mary’s, an old bloke with a white beard who sent wrongdoers straight to Hell. If such a God really exists, surely he’d simply flick a celestial switch and put an end to cancer, hunger, addiction, natural disasters and all the other scourges of the world. No, the God I’m talking about is a benign Being who loves us all and makes sure that if we have a shit life this time around then things will be beautiful in the next. That’s what I believe, anyway.

  Well, my Higher Power saved my life by dropping a metaphorical piano on my head from a great height. Two pianos, actually.

  The first came in the form of a savage beating.

  It was April 2002, and I’d won $13,000 betting on horses at the Autumn Carnival at Randwick. I rewarded myself for my good fortune by taking my girlfriend on a massive pub crawl from the Courthouse Hotel in Taylor Square up along Oxford Street, spending big in all the watering holes on the way, and finishing off at the Centennial Hotel opposite Centennial Park. Halfway through, my girlfriend begged off and went home. Wise girl. I carried on alone, getting progressively plastered as I made my way east.

  Some time between midnight and dawn outside the Centennial I came upon four big young blokes bashing a fellow. Although I was just about too drunk to stand or speak I marched up to the melee and demanded that they let him go. The bloke I stuck up for ran away down Oxford Street. Angry that I’d deprived them of a victim, the thugs turned on me. They knocked me to the ground and damn near kicked me to death. A heavy boot to my temple knocked me unconscious and as I lay there they whaled away on my prostrate form. They knocked out my teeth, broke my nose, smashed my left cheekbone so badly that later a steel plate had to be inserted. My left eye was hanging from its socket. They busted my knee by stamping on it again and again. There was not a centimetre of body that was not badly battered. When they were finished with me they took off into the night. Fortunately, a passing motorist saw me lying in a spreading puddle of blood on the footpath and called 000. I was in hospital and in bad shape for a month after that.

  Then came a weird interlude. I had to go to Melbourne to defend an acquaintance who had bitten off part of a fellow’s nose in a blue. The victim required plastic surgery to reattach his beak. The attacker was charged with grievous bodily harm. Before I took his case I asked him if he’d been in trouble before and he swore he had not. This was the first time, he assured me, that he had ever been in strife. He had been attacked and was merely defending himself, which he accomplished by biting his adversary’s nose. I agreed to defend him in court and because I was desperate for the business I said I’d only take a fee if I succeeded in getting him off. Before the judge I pleaded that the defendant be given a second chance because this was an aberration in an unblemished life. The judge ordered me to approach the bench, where he informed me that my client had a police record as long as both our arms. I asked for adjournment for thirty minutes. In the corridor I demanded that my client tell me why he’d lied about prior convictions. ‘Oh, those convictions,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I guess I forgot about them.’ There would be no pay day for me.

  Before I returned to Sydney I went to Crown Casino to drown my sorrows and have a flutter on the tables. Unbelievably for a bloke generally cursed with bad luck, I won $30,000, much more than my fee would have been. For some reason, I didn’t drink or gamble away that money. Quite uncharacteristically, I stashed it away. I had a strange sense I’d be needing it soon.

  God dropped the second piano on my head on a Saturday in early July. Against doctor’s orders because I was still on medication after my beating, I was drinking heavily in a city pub. A friend mentioned that James and his wife Mary were leaving that afternoon for a holiday in Europe. In my addled state a great bubble of animosity and jealousy swelled in me and I caught a taxi to the airport hoping to find James and give him a severe spray. Sure enough, he and Mary were in the departure hall. I went up, got in his face and in front of a hundred or so travellers I called him for everything under the sun. James looked at me as if I was some kind of rodent; Mary was horrified.

  Unrepentant, I caught a cab back to the city, drank some more and then went to the casino at Darling Harbour. I put $2000 on the roulette table and tripled my money. Apart from more alcohol I don’t know what I spent my winnings on, but when I woke up next morning in my seedy hotel room the money had gone, and I was covered in gashes and bruises and I felt so sick I wanted to die.

  Still ill a day later, and suffering deep remorse over abusing James and losing all my money, I listened to my girlfr
iend when she said I should check myself into an intensive two-month live-in rehabilitation program at South Pacific, a clinic that deals with addiction, at Curl Curl on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. She had a friend who was a nurse there, and she had heard that the counsellors could work wonders. To shut her up, a couple of weeks later I went there for a briefing about their program. I met some of the other patients. I tried to tell myself I wasn’t like them, that mine was a minor problem in comparison with theirs, and I couldn’t look them in the eye because I knew in my heart I was exactly like them. To shut her up, I told my counsellor that the South Pacific program sounded exactly like what I needed and arranged with her to move into the clinic two days later. As I departed I said, ‘See you Monday,’ and I left without any intention of keeping my word. I was too thirsty.

  By then, James was back from his trip. He heard that I had checked into South Pacific and checked out again. He came to my place, collared me, bundled me into his car, drove to Curl Curl and frog-marched me into the clinic. If anyone else on Earth had treated me that way – like a pathetic child – I’d have decked him. Only James has ever been able to get away with that. He’ll always be my big brother.

  Fighting Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis and Hitman Harding rolled into one would have been a breeze compared to what I endured at South Pacific. The program is all about making you realise that you are an addict and confronting the damage you have done to yourself and your loved ones. They hold what they call ‘interventions’ in which those who love you tell you to your face how you have hurt them and betrayed their love by your behaviour. James told me that I was destroying him, and that I had trashed the memory of our mother.

  I was overwhelmed with grief and guilt. I wept and screamed and curled up in a ball. The counsellors, as loving as they were tough and demanding, led me to the light. For once in my life I listened. The people at South Pacific helped me face my dark side. They shone a light on me, so I could see myself. They told me if I did not accept that I had a dark side and face it down I would continue to drink. Through the self-knowledge I gained, I was able to acknowledge my past, surrender to it and look to whatever the future would hold, with the certainty that I would never go back to what I had been.

  At the end of my two-month stay I was given strategies for coping with the inevitable temptations I would face when I was out on my own, including a twelve-step program and the addresses of various branches of Alcoholics Anonymous, and allowed to leave.

  James was waiting for me in the foyer, a huge grin on his face. He came with me to the desk where I signed my release papers and took a copy of the bill, around $30,000. James snatched it from my hand and gave it to the person at the desk, saying, ‘Who do I make the cheque out to?’

  I told him, ‘Big Jim, it’s taken care of.’ And it had been. I’d paid my bill with my winnings from Crown Casino.

  James hugged me and kissed me on the top of my head, and said, ‘Brother, I love you. You’re going to be all right.’

  I walked out into the spring sunshine a new man. When I entered South Pacific I’d been shrunken and pale, I had a paunch and bloodshot, haunted eyes and I looked far older than my years. A photo taken of me when I left shows me trim, tanned, and clear-eyed. I have not taken a drink since.

  [JAMES]

  brothers in arms

  I was surprised when I heard that Steve had been to South Pacific, if only briefly. I saw a glimmer of hope that he might beat his alcoholism after all, and grabbed him and admitted him for treatment. I loved him always.

  When we fronted together that first day, I knew this was the last roll of the dice for my little brother. I said to the bloke who ran the place, ‘Mate, if my brother doesn’t beat his addiction, he will die.’ He said he understood and asked questions and took Steve away with him. What Steve endured was unimaginable and to see it through took unimaginable courage. They took him apart and reconstructed him.

  I was there with Steve for much of his treatment, and was front and centre during intervention, when I had to tell him how he had devastated me, and he had to admit to the terrible damage his drinking had done. On ‘family day’ intervention, the confessional session included about fifty people, and we were all witnesses to each other’s most terrible experiences. The thing took hours, it was horrific. Steve was moaning, screaming, the pain that was coming out of his lungs and body was extraordinary. It was like childbirth, that noise: animal, yearning, the sound of humanity in desperate trouble. He squeezed all his pain into a primal scream of rage and sorrow. Everyone in that room was transfixed by Steve as he let it all out. At one stage he apologised to me for things he’d done when he was only ten. It was a cleansing. In the end he was given a gold medal that belongs right up there on his lounge room wall alongside his boxing medal. No, not alongside his boxing medal, but higher.

  [JAMES]

  state of play

  It’s seven years now since Steve walked out of South Pacific. We’re good. I see him socially, and we talk on the phone often. He’s a different man to the person he used to be. He is still practising law but I sense that he’s looking for new experiences. He is seeking more from life. He loves my children Riley and Emily, and I’d like them to see more of him. I say, ‘Brother, you’re welcome in my home any time.’

  The fact is that he still has an inferiority complex. Wouldn’t you, if your father told you that you were nothing? He has no reason to feel inferior about anything. He’s my hero for stopping his drinking. If he never achieves anything else in his life that’s enough for me. For that achievement alone, he is a special man. I’m very thankful he’s still with us.

  I sometimes wonder if Steve will become a father. He’s never been interested and maybe he doesn’t need that pressure. It’s not the worst thing in the world for him not to have kids.

  Life, in the end, has turned out okay for my brother.

  The main reason I’m writing this book, apart from commemorating Mum’s memory, is to offer proof that no matter how rugged life is, it may just turn out all right in the end. If I’d had an easy, privileged life there’d be no book.

  Life has turned out well for me, too. My wife Mary and I have created a life for our children that is safe, secure and filled with love. I talk to my wife three times a day on the phone, and sometimes when I know the kids are playing in Centennial Park, I’ll slip away from the office and drive there and watch them proudly from afar. Mine is now a fortunate life, one that as children, Stephen and Alison and I did not have, because of my father. My family will never know homelessness, poverty, and alcohol-fuelled violence. The kind of life I led in the past made me the man and father I am today. That does not make me grateful for what’s gone before.

  If I could turn back time and change the past, there’s no way I’d opt for the life I had. Forget the book. If I had my way, my mother and father would have brought us up in a stable environment with a roof over our heads and no worries, he would not have been a drunken wife-beater and she would not have died at age fifty-two from cancer. Alison would not have been sexually abused. Steve would never have been an alcoholic. My old man would not have shredded Steve’s self-esteem by making him feel like he was nothing. It’s an old saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I disagree. If they’re very lucky, have determination and if fortune smiles on them, some people can survive. But I know many people who had the same experiences as I had and today they’re drug addicts, in jail or dead. It didn’t make them stronger. It did them in. I hate to see it.

  That’s why I believe that it’s the responsibility of the ones who make it to reach out to their brothers and sisters who are struggling.

  I’m devoted to the City of Sydney PCYC. It will always be my home away from home. I love going down to that club. At forty-eight, I still work out and skip and hit the bag just about every day. The kids down there have been known to give my Mercedes the finger when I pull up outside but when they see it’s me they’re cool.

  That club and I go back
a long way. As a cheeky kid I got my arse kicked there, I boxed and exercised there, I slept there when I didn’t have a home. I was its president for almost a decade and served on the committee. Today my official tag is Patron and Life Governor of the Woolloomooloo PCYC. I have an advisory role there, try to help where I can, talk to the regional co-ordinator of the PCYC movement, the CEO, the head of boxing at the ’Loo. I was proud to receive the Champions For Youth Award because of my work for the club and for helping to raise the money for their renovations, which include new workout areas and equipment, a flat-screen TV, a pool table, computers, places where kids can study. I hope the new PCYC provides a viable alternative to the less wholesome attractions of the street.

  We had a boxing fundraiser. Macquarie Bank and my father-in-law Jack and I donated around a quarter of a million dollars. Steve fought a Macquarie executive. I could see in my father-in-law’s eyes that he was proud to be down there amid the blood and leather, seeing me respected in a hard, tough world so different from the worlds of the family and real estate. Jack was a gypsy in my palace that night.

  The stroppy kid I used to be is still alive and well inside me. He always will be. I keep getting drawn back into the old life. I never want to lose touch. I have very few happy memories of Camperdown, but not long ago, I drove out to the old Housing Commission block in that suburb where I spent my early years. I hadn’t been near the place in thirty-five years. I told an old friend, Paul Kent, a journo from the Daily Telegraph. Later, Paul decided he would write an article on the visit. Here’s his story, which appeared in the Telegraph on 7 February 2009: