First Posted on NOVEMBER 25, 2008 6:04PM
Earl and his friend, Kathy, Tampa, Christmas, 2003,
two years before Earl died.
Earl, Sue and Monte with three of Earl's 15 motorcycle "toys"
Tampa, Christmas, 2003
Sue with the two bikes we borrowed from Earl
to ride at Tampa Bay, Christmas, 2003
Monte at a beach park, Tampa, Christmas, 2003
There are 10 parts to this motorcycle memoir. Quick links to each are in the Archives side bar on the right.
Part Two of this motorcycle memoir ended:
“It was at about this point where I started spending more time with a mistress that I had started hanging around sporadically since high school. Her name was alcohol. She was sly, forever agreeable, offered no resistance to my advances, and didn’t object to sharing me with either my work or my motorcycling.
Next: Unfortunately Booze, Work and Motorcycling DO mix.”
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Earl helped me rekindle two smoldering passions, one risky and ultimately destructive; the other ultimately good but inherently risky. Both obsessions were already there, and without saying a word all he had to do was let me hang around to watch how he lived. I was free to join him in his life style, or not. That was strictly up to me. To the day he died he had no idea of the influence he had on my bringing to full flower the destructive passion: alcohol. I do not blame him for my decisions. His gun was laying around but I was the one who picked it up and shot it.
I started drinking beer in high school. I didn’t pay any attention to it at the time and I wasn’t in “denial” since nobody called me on it, but I was, from the beginning, incapable of having “a beer” with my buddies. It made no sense to me to stop before the beer was gone. I suppose that I never got to be a heavy drinker in high school simply because nobody in my crowd could afford to buy a lot of booze. But, when I was in college, and it was available in a keg at a party or liquor was free at an open bar, I clung closely to my new love, alcohol.
It always took a lot of alcohol to make me feel even slightly drunk and what I found as I grew older was that I could work quite effectively when moderately sloshed. By college and then graduate school I was routinely drinking cheap vodka and scotch on a daily basis, at home, sipping it as I worked on my school work late into the night.
If it affected my academic performance I never knew it. I graduated college cum laude because I switched schools after the first year, dropped out for a year to earn some money, picked up bad study habits and really didn’t study much at all for the rest of my undergraduate time. But when it became possible to go to graduate school on scholarships and assistantships I decided it was really time to study. So in graduate school I never got a grade below A when studying for my advanced degrees: MA, M Div, and ThD.
Looking back on it now I wonder what I could have accomplished had I been sober all those years, but the truth is that I was a very “functional” alcoholic until toward the very end of my drinking period when I was clearly dysfunctional and about to lose everything I valued. But being able to function for almost 40 years without seeing many the adverse signs of drinking, other than hangovers, and really none that significantly affected my work performance, meant that it took decades to admit that I was an alcoholic. That is a whole other story that I may write about some time, but not now.
Earl enabled the transition from moderate drinking to heavy drinking simply by “showing me the ropes” of how things were done in Washington. And what he showed me about how things were done involved a lot of booze. So we would go to lunch at places where they served the largest and least expensive martinis. And we would meet Earl’s friends from various government departments who also liked to go to places where they served the largest and least expensive martinis. And, since I really didn’t want to ask, perhaps because I didn’t want to hear an answer that I didn’t like, I assumed that “everybody” in DC “did lunch” the way we did. Two or three martinis at lunch made for mellow afternoons.
Then, after work the same floating group, with people drifting in and out of the mix, would meet at a bar or grill where they had an inexpensive “happy hour” and a nice free snack buffet. And I would have a few scotch and sodas before heading home on the motorcycle, a bulging briefcase bungied to the back of the seat. At home I would often have wine with dinner and then sip scotch well into the night as I worked of the pile in the briefcase. After four or five hours of sleep, a quick shower, no breakfast, the grind started over again. If I was a bit hungover I would pop a tranquilizer, which doctors prescribed like candy in those years. The places where we drank rotated, but the pattern was set.
Only after I stopped drinking did it really sink in that the way I was living while in DC was not “normal;” that “everybody” in DC didn’t drink all the time: and that I picked my friends from among those who had the same problem that I did, and avoided people who did not like to drink. And I realized that I routinely turned down social occasions that did not involve drinking and always said “yes” to those that had an open bar.
Having never touched a drink since June, 1990, it is perfectly clear to me now that Earl didn’t “cause” me to drink; he didn’t even encourage me to drink, and in no way is he responsible for my drinking problem. He was, of course, responsible for his own, and it is likely that his drinking was directly related to the fairly rare urinary tract cancer that ultimately killed him. Earl never stopped drinking until the day he died. He never loved anything or anyone enough to find motive to quit. As far as I know he never tried. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to him to think of that.
But he too was successful in his career. He never was as driven as I was and so he did not get to the level I did. In fact, he ended up working for me at the GAO as Administrative Assistant Director for the large division I was in charge of. He had a marvelous ability to unravel the human condition, as long as he wasn’t trying to unravel his own. And he did a great job turning a division that I created out of new hires and cast offs from elsewhere in GAO and other agencies into a model of efficiency and competence.
The second passion that Earl introduced me to was an intense love of all types of motorcycle touring, from day trips to two week long trips covering thousands of miles. I had a glimmer of touring during my college days and liked it. But those tours were by myself and were confined to one or two days at a time, usually going from the college to some relative’s home and back. So there was a certain “utility” to those trips which quite simply reduced the freedom of the tour. The best touring is the kind where the riding itself is the point and the arriving, while fine, is not the point of the trip at all.
By introducing me first to regular, intentional weekend travel on a motorcycle, then to “long weekend” travel – starting on a Friday or coming back to work on a Tuesday, or both, I learned to stretch my riding time and my touring distances. And, I also learned that I could do five or six days work in three or four and still get all the work done. My work didn’t suffer. On the other hand I usually got no more than five hours of sleep a night. But I was young when I started that pattern and I got used to it and kept to it for well over thirty years.
What was exciting for me was that this was the first time that I had a riding buddy who was as passionate about bikes as I was. We had known each other only a short time when it became clear to us that we shared the same deep love of riding motorcycles. And we set about to see as much of the country on our bikes as we could while still keeping our jobs. It was amazing how well that worked out.
Before we started riding together I was averaging about five to 6 thousand miles a year on my bike. Now I was averaging well over 20 thousand miles a year. And that was a pattern I would continue until I started getting old, although until my medical issues this year I have averaged well over 14 thousand miles a year for several years. With my problems I will get in under 5 thousand miles this year. But that, my friends, is far better than no miles at all!
So, my life changed radically in those first two years in the Executive Office and I would continue this newly enjoyed pattern of life for another 25 years, based on three pretty equal passions: work, motorcycles and booze. I now think that it is important for me to remember that for the most part I loved those years. When I first stopped drinking I spent a lot of time beating on myself trying to convince myself that those were “lost years.” I wanted to believe that those were miserable years and therefore, they were what I could expect to relive if I were to start drinking again. Those years, I thought, had to be bad to make sure I stayed sober.
The truth, however, slowly has come to me that those years were mostly very fine years in the living of them. I sowed the seeds of a lot of destruction in those years, including the destruction of my marriage and the estrangement of my children. I sowed the beginnings of an alcohol problem that would come close to killing me. And I neglected to do with my life a lot that I should have done to help others. There were many opportunities to do that and I did not act on the vast majority of them.
So how can I say that “I loved those years’? Its simple really. I loved them as I lived them because they were all about me. Me. Me. Me. So don’t confuse my loving those years with any delusion that I was the best that I could have been as a human being in those years. I was hardly that. Like St. Paul says, “We all are sinners and we all fall short of the glory of God.” I was living my enjoyable life and proving his point at the same time.
Next: Earl and I map out the Grand National Motorcycle Racing Circuit and we follow the stars. And we buy motorcycles from Montgomery Ward (I’m not kidding) and try to assemble them. And, finally, I take a trip from Washington DC to Daytona Beach on the Honda 350, which explains why I sold it when we got back!
Monte
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