Talk To The Golf Ball

I lost my younger sister in September, 2004, to a combination of drugs and alcohol.

She was an alcoholic who was also addicted to painkillers. She abused vicodin for years, mixing it with bottle after bottle of E&J brandy. Vicodin is a prescription drug, and she did not have her own prescription for it. She abused others' prescriptions for as long as she could get away with it. It cost her at least one friendship.

Ultimately it was our father, 90 years old, who became her unwitting connection. He had a prescription for vicodin, and my sister, as his caregiver and therefore the person responsible for having his prescriptions refilled, was getting all she wanted and then some.

But then we noticed that Dad was getting even more confused, particularly in the late afternoons and early evenings, than he had been before. We reported this to his doctor, who guessed that it might be the vicodin causing this "sundowning," as it's called. Vicodin, the doctor said, sometimes has that effect on elderly people. It should have occurred to me that this probably wasn't the real problem, as my sister was getting most of the vicodin; she was only sharing it with Dad when he was obviously in pain (he suffered from chronic pain in one ankle, the result of having a line-drive bounced off him at one of his grandsons' Little League games.)

The doctor changed Dad's painkiller prescription from vicodin to methadone.

One week later my sister was dead, the result of having taken 15 mg. of methadone (three times my father's dose) and chasing them down with brandy. She was 47. She didn't know, and no one bothered to tell her, that methadone is stronger than vicodin. In this case it was strong enough to make her heart stop beating.

With an experience like that in my recent life, I'm a bit sensitive to the sight of anyone I know wrestling with a substance-abuse problem.

Now, I'm not some teetotaling sniffer: I don't do drugs or pills, but I do drink, and I enjoy it. I've been known to drink too much. But I can tell when someone has obviously developed a problem with alcohol, and I have a friend who has.

He showed up on my doorstep a couple of Fridays ago, around noon. I had invited another friend to lunch and we were out on the patio when the doorbell rang. I answered the door, and there was my pal and onetime blogging partner, teetering a bit as he stood there, with the dopey expression on his face that tells me he's been drinking for at least a couple of hours already. I beckoned him to come on in; instead he looked down at the bushes and pointed. Again I told him to come in. Again he cast his eyes down at the bushes beside the door and pointed.

I stepped out to see what he was trying to call my attention to. It was a 12-pack of Coors Light that he had brought along, and for some reason had stashed in the bushes.

I hauled the beer—and him—into the house, took him out on to the patio to join my luncheon group, tried to get him to eat a sandwich, to get something in his stomach besides alcohol. He showed little interest in food, however, but just kept asking for another beer. He was also babbling incoherently, interrupting the conversation, and in general making a drunken pest of himself.

“Wait a minute!” He said suddenly, as my former editor and I were discussing business. “I’m gonna go get my tape recorder! I want all this on tape!” Laughing mischievously, he left the table and stumbled out the front door.

He returned a few minutes later….with a golf ball. “That’s your tape recorder?” I asked him. “Well, there you have it,” I said to my former editor. “Talk to the golf ball.”

Presently my wife and my former editor’s wife together “ganged up” a bit on my drunken pal, told him point-blank that he has a serious problem and encouraged him to get help. Offended, he got up and left suddenly. I haven’t seen him since.

I know he’s been to Alcoholics Anonymous; his parents forced him to go. But AA doesn’t work if someone has to force you to go. It has to be your idea. He has yet to reach the “rock bottom” point that often drives people to AA. When I suggest to him that he go back, he voices objections. He dislikes AA’s dogmatic approach, he says, by which I assume he means that AA refuses to be open-minded about his drinking. The nerve of them.

I still have the golf ball. My cat plays with it. I have an uneasy feeling that alcohol is playing with my friend the same way my cat plays with his golf ball. Not much you can do with a golf ball. A golf ball is a dead thing; rolling around on the floor or on a fairway are about all it’s good for. To my friend I’d like to say, quit acting like a golf ball. Quit rolling around and get up off the floor. Because you’re not a dead like a golf ball. Yet.