Catching the Appletooth (Alcoholism)

Last drink before rehab

Suffering is not word enough. It seems gentle in comparison. There is not a word for the destructive, evil pains which stem from the bottle.
The odour from popping a wine cork quickly fades.
I associated a bottle of alcohol with a vase of flowers, the flowers themselves being the intoxicating spray of bubbles that set me free (free from what I did not yet know as I was only sixteen when I gave myself that poisonous bouquet).
Never have I been so wrong! Flowers don't grow from the bottle, only thorns and getting caught in that thicket is an experience only alcoholics can describe.
When I took my first drink I was unaware of the addictive personality that stalked tiger-like in my system looking for a vulnerability which would bring me down. At sixteen I began the descent into a private hell.
There were parties, drinking with friends, summer holiday binges and teenage curiosity. Alcohol has always been a clever demon with an ace up its gothic sleeve. It can take on various guises, one only has to look at the supermarket shelves with the laced colas and grinning lemonades.
I lost my drinking (L)earner plates at twenty years and by the time I had reached twenty two I was thoroughly addicted to booze. Armed with a hard drinking reputation I could be seen being swallowed every morning by an off licence mouth.
I could not let go of the bottle, it might as well been glued to my lips and fuelled further by endless days of kissing the sun, my alcohol intake was increased and I went hand in hand with oblivion. Thinking that with an iron will I could control the drink but with every glass the iron is rusted and withers away to nothing.
For the first few years my body took the full assault; hangovers, trembling, vertigo, nose bleeds, anxiety, aches and shivers. These alone would have made a rational person quit but alcohol had become a medicine, a solution to life's problems and it was available anywhere. I was not capable of rational thought, I didn't even know if I was human anymore. Everything save alcohol and its beautifully grim hold seemed pointless.
The hangovers got worse and days would be spent bringing up bile and other rainbows of sickly colour. The cure was more booze and in my mind its magic knew no bounds. A three day hangover was instantly topped up with wines and spirits. I was deaf to my own liver screaming.
Days got longer with sleep only occurring between three and seven in the the morning but eventhough the days had lengthened the only things I knew I had done was open a bottle or tin, got drunk and annoyed sensible drinkers in public houses, or sober families in supermarkets.
I was young and standing on lifes crossroad and had already thrown two promising relationships to the wind.
When it had finished ravaging my body it turned on my mind and everything went upside down and fell to pieces. It is the way of poison, the only way the thorn can move is by severing and cutting.
I no longer had friends, pride or respect. There was not even a life outside the frantic, urgent drinking. I needed alcohol everywhere I went; in cars, out walking, in cinemas, at train stations, everywhere. If I was ever without a bottle I'd become soulless, unable to do anything sober.
Simple tasks became mammoth chores with being alcoholically spiked. I walked around in the shadow of 100% drunkeness, envious of care free people around me laughing and talking as they followed their lives. I could never lay my hands on a sane tongue.
Vodka; what a wretched word that is to me now.
The Smirnoff days tuned me into a fantasy world, I substituded real friends for television characters, turning them as real as I could without tripping entirely into the clutches of madness.
One or two episodes of a favourite programme made up a whole day in my life, desperately I clung to bizarre fiction. In hindsight I realise that I must have had one foot inside a breakdown of sorts but nothing else knocked at my door.
With vodka in my hand, supporting my body like a noble gentlemans cane, I hid from life, dreaming of rivers flowing wildly with serpents froth. Vodka binges were comfort to my soul but weighed heavily on money and when all funds have been exhausted by vodka an alcoholic will catch the ruffian wind of the Appletooth. Cider drinking.
Cider is the most available drink of them all to heavy drinkers (barring methylated spirit). Everything about it is cheap; the plastic bottles, the two shilling names, vicious bubbles and its foul scent. Even the bile caused from drinking cider looks different, with its neon green warning choking every breath.
I caught the Appletooth and every miserable copper coin was spent in lousy cider shops with dry tobacco air and shifty tills. From then on my beloved vodka was a luxury and it was the ginger whore who banged my liver.
Every minute rotated around alcohol. For nine years I didn't wake up from sleep, I simply came around as one would from anaesthesia. And booze opens newer vices on its sinister, downward path.
It was alcohol which introduced drugs into my world. Cannabis, lsd, ampthetamine, mushrooms, nitrazepam, temazepam, diazepam, even morphine sulphate and a brush with heroin.
It was dear alcohol that pushed the first morphine filled needle into my arm, giving me Heavenly pleasures and it was alcohol that melted the temazepam and crushed the valium to give it an intavenous kick.
Tablets do not look good in a needle but I wore sunglasses of 8% tint. Blinded from common sense and moderation, I wore iron blinkers which allowed sight in tunnel vision.
Alcohol and occasional drifts of drugs. I enjoyed drugs but the sauce is where I truly fell in Love. It was my devilish trigger, drugs a mere substitue. Life is both tiring and perverse in addiction and soon I lost all control.
I call this the semi-madness stage. Delusions of grandeur, talking to ones self,, obssessive behaviour, severe depression, personality disorder, suicidal tendancies and self mutilation (a fleshy, scarred crucifix still swings from my neck).
When it got to the point of switching the television or radio off to listen out for 'other' voices, I knew for sure that alcohol had become an enemy, one not to be trusted or given consideration.
I had reached the grand old age of twenty five and had been drinking relentlessly for eight years. Eight years of shameful lies and wasted coin. Looking back to the beginning of my drinking career the memory darkens. It had started as an innocent fashion accessory with a few laughs along the way, had I known the final chapter the bottle would have stayed on the shelf.
It no longer gave the warm glow and comfort, it no longer acted as a stimulant. Alcohol became a nagging, tedious aggravation.
The reader should now begin to understand some of the agonies it takes an alcoholic to suffer before admitting any wrongs. The hundred sermons and thousand pleadings from those not cursed with the disease will always fall like Icarus in flames, (a point I cannot stress enough).
A wagging finger and lashing tongue will be ignored by the drinker. He or she wears an armour that will not dent with a simple rebuke because alcohol teaches stern lessons. It discards moderation and common sense and nurtures its tragic followers on excess, self pity, selfishness, anger, frustration and deceit.
The lies which have been told in the name of the glass are countless, along with the pain it inflicts on both drunk and sober. The havoc and violence it creates could fill a battlefield and a bruise just one of the bottles many colours.
A clever thing to be able to shrink away from blame which is what happens because alcoholism is more often judged on the person it afflicts rather than understanding of the illness.
Alcoholics are frequently described as weak willed and hopless yet nothing could be further from the truth in the case of recovering alcoholics throughout the planet. It is harsh, all of it because of the disastrous spell it weaves to those involved.
There is no nobody stronger than someone who successfully beats an addiction but before fighting that addiction one must first face it, and getting an alcoholic to admit having a problem is usually the hardest and highest hurdle of them all.
I was caught in a whilwind romance with the Appletooth and was slowly drinking myself into the grave (or padded cell), but while the sauce was still in my hand I was without ear to the voice of reason.
Nothing seemed quite right without it and I came to believe that life would be that much better if I slept straight through it. Death was always hanging around and whilst the first drink gives courage the last one will always bring cowardice.
To be scared of life and frightened of death is a terrible place to be. For years I slept with a bottle under my pillow and I kissed my cruel 'bride' often, with vigour. It was only when my mind had begun to crack and a breakdown sat on my shoulders that I knew I needed a clean and final split from the demon which had kept me chained.
In the beginning alcohol had handed me freedom. It had given me fantasy in the place of reality, I lived in a cartoon and was king of nonsense. But Life (the one that bites) soon rained down in stone and the cartoon was buried beneath misery and empties.
The first step to recovery as has been previously stated was admitting to myself I was alcoholic (it applies to all addicts of course). Without this all else will fail because like the pulling of a tooth, if the root is not cut out the problen will remain.
I felt no shame in admitting I was alcoholic, it is a disease afterall, and instead I felt relief. After years of torture and self abuse I had finally broken the first shackle of my gothic vine.
The next immediate step was detox in an alcohol rehabilitation clinic where I was introduced to fellow drinkers. At first I didn't think my temperament would allow sobriety and in my first week in the plush clinic I was dogged by constant thoughts of one more binge. I had real doubts and many times I imagined quitting the programme to feed my addiction in a homely bar.
I attended many A.A. meetings and was drilled by group therapy and relaxation techniques. It was at one of the meetings that my doubts on a sober life disappeared and I discovered the true strength and determination of the human soul.
Here was a group of people who had allowed themselves to be whipped by a bottle until even their minds had bled, and allowed dignity and pride to slip from their reach.
With alcohol on their lips they were useless, cowering cripples unable to perfore the simplest task, but without it they stood taller than their previous shadow and sunlight was welcomed on their flesh.
After a month of treatment I went home eager to pick up on a fresh horizon without the sting of drink.
Weeks passed and the clouded days I had waded through prior to my stay in rehab became filled with hope. My bank account started to grow again and I found time to do the things that beer had prevented. Fresh air no longer clogged my lungs like it had with alcohol and confidence came flooding back as I busied myself in work.
Health wise it was thrilling, energy raced in my system and my brain found found sanity from somewhere. But still I lacked the companionship I craved. I had been two months without a drink and not a single knock arrived at my door. The 'friends' with which I had occasionaly shared a drink with disappeared. Can sobriety intimitate some people? I believe it can.
Sober I remained and each day brought more confidence, one of the bottles stickiets traps.
Too much confidence is deadly to alcoholics because it leads them to believe they have conquered their addiction and are able to finally control the booze.
It was that, coupled with emptiness that drove me once again to the off licence shelf and with that first drink the macabre circus started to rev its familiar tune.
Everything I had built and restored in those two sober months were smashed within a week. The first drink (which I tried desperately to control) had its claw into me again. A.A was a million miles away, caught once again like a fish thrashing in gunpowder.
The drinking was even more intense the second time around, I drank at all hours and the hangovers, if they could be described as such, were so severe after binges that for days later I writhed in bed, a wounded animal struggling in its near death throes.
Even personal hygeine was neglected as I sweated out toxins only to be seduced by the bottles charms again and again.
Alcohol has a powerful relationship with the alcoholic and the illness is dismissed by the ignorant who have no understanding at all. Why should they? It doesn't effect them.
They see addicts as either a person who is drunk twenty four hours a day or in the gutter with a duffle bag and little else. The ignorant are both deaf and blind.
Nothing in life has ever affected me as deeply as alcohol and from now until I am in my grave I will only be sober for one day at a time.
I am still alcoholic (that part never dies) and I still have scars from the past, but without booze they need not be re-opened. I know that it would only take ONE DRINK to start the hellish downward spiral yet again so these days I try not to look at the shelf.

Steven Francis May 1997


At rehabs doors