Page 40 Chapter Three: Married Life……Page

CHAPTER THREE: Married Life

The shower and the stag party all took place as usual which gave me an opportunity to have lots of drinking. Alcohol was now controlling a lot of my life. Unfortunately, I did a lot of things that caused me much worry and disappointment. But regardless, the arrangements were made and the invitations were sent out and all the plans went ahead very well. There had to be a lot of planning done as a lot of my family and friends had a good four hours drive to get there. Arrangements for accommodations were made. The wedding day came on rather fast now. The priest had to be consulted as the day before the wedding there was a practice for all the wedding party. The day was Friday so all the sandwiches were made and a lot of them had meat in them. Those days meat was forbidden on Friday, but a visit to the parish priest gave us the necessary dispensation and we were allowed to eat meat on this Friday. The church seemed to bend somewhat with the rules for these occasions. The day arrived and after the practice ceremony there was a little reception and I was taken away from Margie’s place to the Motel that had been reserved. Several of the fellows and I were really drinking it up, especially me. I over did it again and in the morning my head hurt and my nose was bleeding and I was a sick man but I was to be married in a couple of hours. Somehow I sobered up enough to get to the church but I was just shaking from within, but because as my bride was

my idol, I managed to live through the ceremony. When you’re young, there is strength available to repair the hangover. Thank God, at the reception a couple of drinks made me feel just great. The marriage ceremony finally took place and that ever so desired wedding song was played. Arm in arm we marched slowly, leading the wedding party to the front door of the church. She was so beautiful as she stood there in all her magnificent splendor. I was pleased and happy. A proud man I was, standing there with my trophy. This was a much greater event than even coming home with a nine-pound pike that I had caught in the Rideau River the summer before. A birthday to remember forever and a gift of unending love stood beside me. I’m sure that if she knew the disasters that lay ahead for her, she never would have made that walk down the aisle. The wedding reception was held in a little village nearby. It had about eighty-five people attending. I was careful about my alcohol consumption for two reasons. One was that I just didn’t want to make an asshole of myself and spoil the wedding. The other reason was that it was honeymoon time and we were going to be driving for a while.

Arrangements were made about the suitcases and the car so not too much tampering would happen. The car had been decorated with ribbons streamers and tin cans trailed behind. They put stones in the hubcaps and wrote with red lipstick on the back window “JUST MARRIED.” We said our good bys to the family, my best man and all our friends. We drove away proudly as Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Sturgeon, into the setting sun towards Ottawa but stopping at Rigault for our first

night sleeping together. I pulled into the motel and we registered as Mr. and Mrs. Sturgeon, two kids playing the big time. A room was allotted at the very end of the motel. The last three rooms were all honeymooners. There is no need to discuss the intimate details of a honeymoon at this point but I will comment like this. Bungee cord sex was over and we didn’t sleep much that night. Somehow the thought of that little Jesuit just didn’t come.

Our first full day of married life was on a Sunday and Sunday would not be complete without first finding a Catholic Church to attend Mass. Somewhere between the motel and Ottawa we found a Catholic Church and attended Mass. Margie was so upset because she had only sandals and no high heels to wear. We drove out through Ottawa to Campbell’s Bay, Quebec, and a short visit with my grandmother. Yes, it was short but not short enough that Margie didn’t see the photo of Aunt Ruby hanging on the wall. This started a series of explanations from me to save my marriage and my life. Aunt Ruby was a black person and a nurse and so very black she was. Why she was called aunt I don’t know. But I do know that my grandparents were very devout Wesleyan Methodists. Ruby was a foster child that they supported each month with a donation to help her through school. Well, Ruby’s photo hung on the wall and it hung in Margie’s mind for many years and I was questioned occasionally just to make sure that there would not be a chance of a snowball in Hell, that there would be black blood show up in the kids. (You must remember that racism loomed very large in North

America in the early 60’s.) We left Grandma’s place and drove to Algonquin Park with my new wife and I in our little 1958 Morris Minor with $1,200 in my pocket. Proud I was. I had it made. My sex life was fulfilled, gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon, and I had two bottles of rum hidden away. This was not a welcome sign for Margie, but it was something that she would live with for the next five years. I feel that if she knew the misery that lay ahead she would have walked away and never returned.

We were happy most of the time and the honeymoon went very well. We visited her two sisters in western Ontario and drove home. Home was a little apartment on Forth Street in Cornwall. It was just what I could afford and not what you would call a splashy mansion. I went back to work and when I came home she was crying at the kitchen table. Holding her little hands together she told me that she had just about lost her fingers because she got them caught in the blender while trying to make me a cake. She was so sweet as the story came through her tearing eyes. My wife, the love of my life and so small and vulnerable she seemed. In about three weeks she gave me some wonderful news. She was pregnant! And yes, it worked, because the love potion connected and she was carrying my child. We were married for real now. It was a big responsibility for both of us. On the weekends we went to her home in Quebec and returned home on Sunday night. Many times we stopped for fries and a steamed hot dog to happy up the trip home. It was a long trip home before the new superhighway was completed, the

four-o-one. We settled into a routine and her pregnancy soon became a table topic and we wondered just what the little package would be. A boy or a girl and names were selected and yes there were many names that came to mind. Also the threat of that picture of aunt Ruby had to be assured safe many, many times.

The church was there and we sometimes would go together to attend mass. I liked to go to an early one so I could get it over with and have a full day together. My priorities now were drinking any chance, Margie complete with child, my job, Church, God, Jesus and the Jesuit. She is to be praised for the way she took on her part of marriage. She learned to cook and she was making me a home to be proud of. I didn’t appreciate her because I was ruled by alcohol and it was destroying me. In our new little home we needed an oil heater, so off we went. We made our purchase along with the new stovepipes. Well, we were one pipe too short so I told Margie to hold the pipes in place and I would rush out and pick up the needed one. True to the form of a heavy drinking man I thought, I’ll just nip in for a quick brew and then hurry home. An hour later I walked into the kitchen and there she was, holding the pipe on the ladder and in tears. Talk about mad. I tell you I had some tough explaining to do. But proudly I tell you I made it good.

Nipper was our first family dog. Spaniel, jet-black, complete with wavy hair. He was one of the many dogs that would be part of our lives. Margie needed a companion. I was out so often Nipper filled my spot.

Pioneers of marriage brought us to making home made bread. It would be set by the space heater on the stairs to rise. First, after Margie setting me straight about what punching down meant, (when I read “punching down” I, thought it meant what it said. Punch down the dough) I started in on the kneading, as it was a man’s job and required strength to perform. Strange happenings began to show with the rising bread. It would rise nicely but the edges seemed to be stringy. We found after a couple of attempts the reason for the stringy edges. It was that little Nipper would get on the stairs and be able to reach up and pull the rising dough for a snack. It was funny for us. It was a real family now, pregnant Margie, Wayne and Nipper. I was a proud man with the makings of a most beautiful life regardless of the pitfalls of our early marriage years.

One day when I got home from work there was a package for me from the church. Margie said that a man had delivered it in the afternoon. I opened it and found that it was two little boxes of Church Offering envelopes. One box had fifty- two envelopes, one for each Sunday of the year. The other one had about fifty or so different colored ones for different special offerings in the year. The church was able to keep in touch and we were designated to be in the same parish as my childhood. It was St. Columban’s Church. We attended regularly except when we would go to Margie’s home in Quebec. There we would go the local church or the one that was in Rawdon where their summer home

was.

The church, a lot of times, had me sitting there with a hangover. Oh, God, how I would hate myself, and sometimes hated going to Mass. There always had to be something put into that little envelope. This always seemed to add to my sickness because most of the money was spent the night before. The confessional now was rare, and communion was also, except when other family members attended.

One Saturday night Margie and I went to church to go to confession. I watched her go into the confessional and in less than a minute she would go back to her seat and kneel in prayer, or so I thought. When I went for the first time after our marriage I found out that there was a whole new list of sins for the married. If there was a dick jerking sin now it became worse because I was married. That little bastard Jesuit now was on the scene again. He was the one that specifically screwed up my life as a mortal. I hated him and the church but I never told Margie about any of it. She was so business like and going to confession like a virgin that never had much to say because she was in pure mind and with our child. It was quite a few years later that she told me. She finally confessed to me. She said that she would go into the confessional and tell the priest that she had a bad headache and return to her seat. And here, I thought she was so nice and pure without much sin or unacceptable sin thoughts. My idol and she had lied. We laughed about it many a time since. We laughed about it because it was so funny. She played the game second to none. She played the same game as the

Church. Was I ever naïve? Sometime around the beginning of March the Church would send out a bulletin with the amount of money contributed by each parishioner. It would have all the names listed by the amounts given. It was always easy to find our name because it was for many years at the bottom. We seemed to be lacking in church contributions. We were told this out loud because everyone had a copy. This was intimidation at its finest. It was the abuse of our freedom to privacy.

One Sunday I remember the priest gave a sermon on giving. It was about the time that King George VI was sick and dying. The priest was telling us that we should be ashamed of the little amount that was in the collection plate. He was trying to be funny by saying that the King was sick because all the people of the parish squeezed their pennies so hard that it caused the King’s illness. He went on to say that envelopes that had a quarter in them were not enough to buy a gallon of gasoline let alone a decent meal. This was just after the war and people did not have money. Those bastards from the pulpit battered us. The ones that lived off our scanty wages intimidated us to death. The church was a business and they were the best at of any business there is. My affection now to the church was being questioned from within. Some of the things did not quite make sense. There were sermons every week or so about our Catholic Faith and how important it was to have faith. Most of us fell for it and we tried to be nice and go to church. But we were being sucked into the biggest swindle on the face of the earth that is

going on to this day. I thought a lot back then and I was interested in many things including my job.

I liked my job as a mechanic and I took every opportunity to learn with any course that was available. I was able to trouble-shoot many problems with engines and I specialized in the tune-up section of the trade. I was liked as a mechanic and had many customers that would request that I did the work on their vehicles. I was proud about this but the ego became inflated and I soon had little control over my drinking. I was rapidly becoming an alcoholic. I refused to believe it. I was too smart for that. Some weeks were very sparse, and my pay check was getting smaller because work was slow. An opportunity comes but once I heard my mom say. She said it many times. An opportunity came to me as well. It was to change my work from the automotive to the industrial mechanics.

I took the opportunity but it required a move to Montreal and some planning was needed. Our first son was now in the cradle. Things were different now. I needed to be more responsible. Thinking back I recall that I had thought all newborn babies looked like little monkeys BUT when I looked on my new son, it’s strange but I had never, ever seen such a beautiful, unique child.

We lived in two places in Cornwall and I was nervous about moving to such a large city as Montreal. The small town atmosphere will now be

gone for quite a while in my life. I was going to be a success and nothing would stop me. The move went very well and was not a costly undertaking at the time as a small truck moved all we had in one day. It was an apartment in Montreal’s north end and the rent was double that of Cornwall. But my wages also took a big jump so financially we were balanced. It brought Margie closer to her two brothers and sister now. She liked the move and I did after a while. Montreal can fit into an alcoholic’s life style very well. My drinking had increased a lot and, with every opportunity now, I was gone. I never knew when I would get home. Margie became pregnant again but I was oblivious to many things in my life. I was like two different people. One was the big time spender when I drank and the other was the dad that was usually hung over from a drinking bout the days before. I would come home to nurse my head. I was not capable of giving out the love that I had so very much wanted to give. That love was exchanged for an alcoholic way of life. I was in love with alcohol and it near destroyed my family and me. It was terrible the things that I did to my wife. Margie was having depressions from my drinking. She was not having the loving husband in her life that she married me for. When I was home, I was miserable and I made her miserable, too. It was a lot worse than I imagined.

Our second child was born now and the house was full of baby equipment with cribs and carriages and bottle sterilizers and all the items that are required for rearing children. I was not even capable of realizing what a beautiful baby girl I had. This all happened around the

time of the starting up of the FLQ in Quebec and the mailbox bombings. It’s strange how one can adjust to fear. To mail a letter, my wife would go past a mailbox with the baby in the stroller, leave the baby and then go back to mail the letter. She was making sure that if it blew up the baby would be safe even if she and our unborn baby died as this happened before our daughter was born. I was able to function at work and fit in very well with a few others that drank very heavy. My supervisor drank and the manager drank also. The men that I worked with also were drinkers. One day I got a call to go home because there was some kind of an emergency. When I got home, the neighbor woman was babysitting the two children. She showed me the empty bottle of pills. They were tranquilizers. Margie had tried to take her own life. She had attempted suicide and at that time I was sure she had become successful. I drove to the hospital and the doctor was there and he said that they pumped her stomach but it was not likely she would survive. I had to go home and attend the children. The doctor said to check out the name of the pills. I called the name into the hospital. I had the neighbor lady baby-sit. She was a good friend of ours. I was going to the hospital but I stopped at the church first. I was crying and tried to go inside the church. It was called Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church.

The big oak doors were so massive. I was crying and pounding at the door. I needed to pray to God or Jesus or someone. I needed help. My wife and my family now were at risk “OPEN THE GOD DAMN DOOR!!” I yelled. It was locked. In a minute a little priest came from a small

building beside the church. He told me to come back in the morning because they locked the church at night. I cried and I went home. I was awake all night but the kids were very young and they didn’t seem to know the seriousness of what was happening. She smiled at me the next morning as I entered her room. She was alive. She was not dead. She would come home now. The doctor called me aside and told me that she must have flushed the pills down the toilet because for some reason nothing showed up in the blood tests. Six of these little pills would have killed her. She went into the hospital on the brink of death and all of a sudden she was all right. This is what I had prayed for the night before when the church was closed and I went home. My prayer was “Oh God, if by some miracle Margie will live I’ll quit drinking”. We came home and I did manage to control my drinking for some time. One day I went to the main office of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was on Sherbrooke St. I talked to one of the members and he gave me the twenty questions and some of the literature that they had. A meeting was in my part of Montreal the following night and two members that took me there.

Actually, I was very impressed with the meeting. I thought that it was a good way for people that had a problem with alcohol to go but it wasn’t for me. I was not drinking now so I did not bother going to the meetings. I was controlling my drinking. Once an alcoholic pattern is set it is very hard to break a drinking habit. A lot of help is needed both with fellowship and within our spiritual makeup. Alcoholics Anonymous is a

spiritual program and it works if you let it. My job was starting to be under fire by times and I continued drinking more. The pattern now was that I would find a job that was different. I changed jobs and worked with another fork truck company in Montreal. I was a good mechanic and I liked the electric vehicles. The company was expanding and asked me if I would transfer to Ottawa. I started to travel each week to the Ottawa area and soon the drinking pattern was there again. It was impossible to control. God, Jesus and the church were now very far from my mind. Mass was not an every Sunday happening. I loved my wife and two children so very much and I was hurting them but I was not able to stop the hurting. The company paid all my moving expenses and we moved to a small town west of Ottawa. It was the village of Stittsville. The drinking now was causing blackouts. Many times I would arrive home and not be aware of where I was earlier. The first thing in the morning I would look out the window and see if my truck was there. That pattern was now just about a daily happening.

I would go to bed late and I would feel the bed shake. Margie would be sobbing and her sobbing shook the bed. I wondered why she cried so much. My God, I hated to see her cry. I must have known deep within that it was my drinking. Yes, I was an alcoholic but didn’t know it. But there were times that were funny, yes hysterically funny.

Many times she threatened me with “If you come home drunk again, I will cut off all your hair.” But so many times I would get home and be

drunk, staggering drunk. One morning I woke up and I was sitting back in a lazy boy chair. This was a common thing, especially on the weekends. This one morning when I awoke, there was something wrong. Yes, something terribly wrong had happened. I couldn’t move my arms; the pain was just too great. I thought that I had gotten Polio or some kind of a disease that restricted my arm movement. The pain was terrible when I tried to lift my arms up. I was in panic and I called out “Margie, Margie Help Me”. I heard her coming down the hall from the bedroom. She sat across the living room from me and crossed her legs and asked me “What’s wrong dear?” I told her something really bad is happening and I may have to go to the hospital. “Yes,” she said, “It looks quite serious. I’ll get dressed and take you down.” She was smiling now and I was having double thoughts about going to the hospital.

I was sure that I heard laughter coming from the bedroom. You know, the kind of laughter that comes with “I got you good, you bastard”. But I had a headache so bad and I needed to go to the bathroom but I could not get out of the lazy boy without my arms. In a couple of minutes she came from the kitchen with a basin and some hot soapy water in it and she started washing around my armpits. She was hysterical with laughter as she washed away the Le Pages Glue from the hair under my arms. This was the unforgivable sin in my books but it has sure brought some laughter in those days, as there was not much to laugh about with my daily drinking. Later on I was telling her brother what had

happened to me. Boy, he said, you must have been so mad at her. I said, “Not that much really. I was just so glad that I didn’t have polio.” We had planned a nice picnic for Saturday to go to the Madawaska River with the two children and do some fishing. This I wanted to do so much, to have a family life with my own family. Saturday morning came with a phone call. It was one of my customers that needed a small job done on his fork truck. I told Margie that I would be back in a couple of hours and we would go to the river. I finished the job and started home anxiously waiting for one of the few family times that I had. The light was red at the corner where the beverage room was. Compulsion made me turn right and I was at the parking lot of that place. I thought one beer and home I go. Alcoholics cannot have just one beer, because they are alcoholics. We cannot control our drinking--period.

This is the start of the most terrifying day of my whole life. I got drunk again and I bought some wine to take with me. I drank all day and I got home at seven that evening. My marriage looked to be over. She told me to get out and threw my clothes at my feet. Well, I was not going to go anywhere without the two children. But I lost out on that one as I blacked out. I came to and was driving somewhere unknown to me until I came to Kemptville then I realized what had happened. I looked back and the car was empty except that pile of my clothes in the back seat. I was beyond drunk and not able to keep my car on the road. I blacked out. I crashed my car quite far done an embankment. I was stoned drunk and partially blacked out. Totally out of control, I threw out the

bottle of wine that I had beside me and I saw these four young men come in front of my car.

One of the men reached in the window and put his hand on my head and said, “You are going to be alright now mister.” The next thing that I remember is that the flat tire had been changed and my car had somehow gotten back up to the highway. It is a mystery to this day. How that happened without a tow truck is impossible to me to this day. The car was setting there in neutral and the engine running. Naturally, I started to drive but the steering was hard. A cop pulled me over and asked me if I had been drinking. I said that I had a couple of beers in the afternoon. I guess that he could smell the alcohol on my breath so he made me get out of the car and walk the white line on the highway. I did this for about thirty feet and turned around. He told me that I could drive to the next town and call a tow truck for my car. Slowly I drove into the next village and went into the hotel beverage room. There was a pay phone in the hall, but I thought that I would just have one more beer. I did and forgot to phone for a tow truck and was going to go home. The flashing beacon of the cruiser blinded me. I was pulled over again and, I ended in jail. I remember what the door sounded like. That clank of metal that only a jail cell has. My heart sank. I had finally arrived. I had hit my bottom and I was starting to become conscious.

Inside the cell I was saying, “God help me.” Yes, if ever there was a time that I needed a God this is it. God help me because I can’t help

myself. I sat on the rubber mat that was on the bed within the cell and held my head with my hands. Wanting to cry out loud was broken by the cop telling me that if I wanted to use the telephone that I could use the one in the office. I assume that the cop thought that I would call a lawyer or for someone to help me out of this mess. They were dealing with a very sick man. I was an alcoholic that was completely out of control and a very dangerous man. He pointed to the telephone and the phone book under it. I called a local Chinese restaurant and ordered Chinese food for six people. Then I was taken back to the cell. There was a hell of a ruckus now at the front of the jail. The order of Chinese food had arrived but no one had ordered it. Boy was the Chinese man ever angry. The noise lowered and then I heard the cop on the front phone. It was a one sided conversation that I heard and it went something like this. “Is this

Margie, Wayne Sturgeon’s wife, pause, would you please come and take him home, pause, I DON’T CARE IF YOU DON’T HAVE A LICENSE, JUST GET HIM OUT OF HERE. He said that you have the truck and the keys were in it”.

About an hour had passed and the cop came in and said that I was going home. He brought me to the office and my brother in-law was there to meet me. It was two thirty in the morning. Margie called him to get me out of jail. This was a friend, and now a relative, that I had from grade school and he had done something similar another time a couple of years before. He drove me home and stayed until he saw that Margie would really let me back in. I am so grateful for having this man as my

friend. When I fell asleep he went home. Sunday morning brought some serious discussion between us. She said that I was going to call AA. I said for her to call them. I was so sick that I wanted to die. I lay on the couch all day. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. At seven thirty that evening a knock came to the front door and two men came in. It would happen that these two men would become powerful friends of mine for many years. I heard Margie questioning them and wanting some kind of a guarantee of me being sober all my life. There are no guarantees with AA. They mostly talked with Margie. They shook my hand. My hand was sweaty as I remember now. Margie made some coffee and she continued to question them about the program of AA.

When they were leaving they said to me, “Wayne, if you want to do something about your drinking problem then meet us at a church in Eastview.”

I had the shakes and I was so sick. My car was damaged in Kemptville and I thought that I had been charged with careless driving. Margie and her silence were deafening, that cold stare and the kids kept away from me. I was an unfit father. I was an alcoholic.