Drink, Drugs, Growing Up and More

I am looking forward to this Christmas. This is the first time I have been able to say this for six years. I won’t provide you with all the gory details as there is enough to fill a book but what I do want to let Connect readers know is that you can reach absolute rock bottom, a place where no one wants to know you any more, and where you barely recognise yourself. And that you can recover.
My life began to seriously fall apart when I was at Uni.. I was 19, living on campus, blowing every penny that came my way on partying and hanging out with the cool dudes. Brand new credit card burning a hole in my pocket, overdraft, student loan …. I was rich and I was free to do as I wanted. A lot of students hammer it in their first year then most realise that if they don’t get down to some work there’ll be no degree, no money and they calm down. I didn’t get that message. Instead in my second year which I had only just managed to scrape in for, I chose to hang out with the new intake who wanted to party, let their hair down and generally have a ball with their new student loans and credit cards. They considered me to be cool, that’s a laugh in itself, but I loved it at the time – it meant free drinks, lots of new faces and some deliriously good parties. Trouble was most guys could take it or leave it. I had to keep on taking it. I gave up my room so I’d have more money to spend on booze and smack, bored a lot of people rigid with my constant rambling and spent a good six months dossing on various floors on and off campus until eventually finding a squat where all I had to worry about was, well, nothing once my few remaining possessions had been nicked.
Everyone in the squat had problems with drink, or smack or their mental health. There were guys who’d been in the army and were completely screwed up, a woman who’d had the sense beaten out of her so many times that she literally lived on gin, two, three bottles a day then she’d black out, wake up with some tramp on top of her and start all over again. There were some real head cases there but they looked out for each other, after a fashion.
It wasn’t a pleasant place to be. It was sordid. It was disgusting. But to me in the state I was getting into back then, it was cool, it was hip, it was a laugh, it was somewhere to crash. I got booted out of Uni, in fact I’m surprised they put up with me for so long. I rarely showed up for lectures and when I did I stank and was out of my head. I got caught breaking into the Union bar one night as well as nicking stuff from one of the flats on campus and raiding the dustbins for food. I was bad news. I wasn’t what they needed there. I moved on up the road to Cardiff where it was easier to find places to hang out and lots more people just like me.
So here I am 21 in Cardiff, no one to tell me what to do. Easy to get enough cash for cheap vodka (any white spirit will do) and smack, easy enough to find somewhere to doss. One parent long since gone – haven’t seen him since I was four, Mum in complete denial – she was still telling the neighbours how well I was doing at Uni even when I pitched up one night eyeballs rolling, stinking of s*** - I had soiled myself for the third or fourth time barely noticing –yes I was that bad. I was only there to demand money. I don’t even know to the day how the hell I got home …. it is well over 200 miles. I surely can’t have got the train ….it remains one of life’s mysteries … Anyway, Mum took me in, cleaned me up, plonked me in my old room …. and when she was out the next morning I repaid her by stealing the money she kept in her drawer, pocketing the whisky in the cabinet and running off again….
It was just after that, back in Cardiff, that a girl I had had a few times at Uni tracked me down and told me that we had a baby son. One look at me must have told her that she hadn’t a hope of getting any kind of help from yours truly and she’d do best to turn on her heels which she did. I can remember being shell-shocked but then, once she’d gone, getting off on a seriously mad bender with one of the guys which ended three days later when we were released from Cardiff nick. Two days on from that I took a serious kicking from a group of “valley boys” who were on a jolly and had seen their ideal sport in me. It didn’t help that I was English. They literally kicked me unconscious and left me for dead in a pool of blood and vomit. I was, I imagine, scraped off the street and taken to hospital – I was in a coma and on the critical list for three days they tell me. I was in hospital for six weeks altogether. My jaw had to be wired back together again, I had plates put into my shattered cheeks and skull, and I lost the sight in one eye. Not a pretty sight. As I drifted in and out of consciousness I felt that someone was constantly poking and prodding at me and telling me to pull myself together for my Mother’s sake. I’d drift off again and there was that voice waking me up, telling me to stop being so damned selfish and take responsibility for my son. When I had been moved onto a normal ward I was told that my heart had stopped beating four times and that the last time no one had expected me to recover. My liver was shot to pieces from all the cheap vodka and whisky I had been drinking every day for the best part of four years. My arms and legs were ulcerated and infected from all those dirty needles and if I had been a dog no doubt they’d have put me down. My hair which had been matted, soaked in blood and crawling with lice was shaved off leaving a skull decorated with bruises and stitch marks. I was nothing but skins and bones. It could have been the body of an eighty year old.
Amazingly my Mum was there throughout and she kept saying that she wasn’t going to leave that hospital without me. She and my cousin took me home when it was time to leave, I was heavily sedated and can scarcely remember the journey. Then the next day they checked me into a rehab clinic which I could, quite literally, have killed Mum for at the time as it was the hardest thing I had ever been through. Not just the physical side but coming to terms with who I was and what had caused me to self-destruct like that. I cried and cried through weeks of intensive therapy. I didn’t realise until much later how much it had cost my Mum to get me into the clinic she had to take out a loan to pay for it. That’s another reason why I cannot fail her. When I came out I had changed. That sounds trite now but I came out of there accepting that I had wasted years of my life punishing myself for having driven my father away … and when Mum told me he had died shortly after leaving us but that she had only found out herself recently, it gave me a freedom and lightness of heart I had never felt before. I think now that it was my Dad at my side in the ICU prodding me and keeping me alive and that he has been there for me all along, I simply hadn’t realised.
The past eighteen months have been hard to deal with. My student loan and credit card debts remain to be settled but I will be tackling them once my new job starts in January. I have been doing all sorts of odd jobs for my Mum and trying to make her life easier. I have started an Open University course as well as taken a string of temporary jobs – some have been a bore, some have been interesting. I still haven’t reached the point of knowing what I really want to do with my life. I have some contact with my son but his mother now has a relationship with someone else who is doing a great job as my boy’s Dad. A better job than I could at this stage, anyway. It has been good to be able to pay something towards his upbringing but I hope to formalise that soon into a regular payment. I am closer now to my Mum and my cousin than ever before and I know they expect great things of me.
My daily struggle is always going to be to leave the alcohol alone, to steer away from drink and drug users, and to try and keep my life on an even keel. All damned hard in reality but I have to be strong. My Dad was an alcoholic, which is another revelation of these past 12 months, perhaps it is hereditary …. and I’d like to think that my Dad was warning me off following in his footsteps, hurting my Mother and wasting my life in the way that he did.