All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [16]
As wonderful as the encouragements were from those like Sister Thomasina and Sister Mary Frances, they paled in comparison to my mother’s dismissive voice in my head—just a dreamer. I don’t like the word just.
There is a scene in the movie Finding Neverland where young Peter Davies is describing Porthos, J. M. Barrie’s dog.
Peter: This is absurd. It’s just a dog.
Barrie: Just a dog? Just?
[to Porthos] Porthos, don’t listen.
[to Peter] Porthos dreams of being a bear, and you want to shatter those dreams by saying he’s just a dog? What a horrible candle-snuffing word. That’s like saying, “He can’t climb that mountain, he’s just a man,” or, “That’s not a diamond, it’s just a rock.”2
So to appease God and the priests and my parents, I went to Mass on Sundays. But any prayers I might have had, I kept to myself. I didn’t want to be a bear; I just wanted to be me, although I wasn’t quite sure who that was.
I wish I could share more specific memories like this from my early childhood, but I can’t. I wish I could remember more words and phrases spoken by my parents or friends or teachers, but I can’t. As I said, the decision to become a good boy effectively cut me off at the roots and that probably stunted my memory as well. I guess a good way to summarize my life from age six to sixteen was that it was a decade of doing what I could to be a good, obedient boy. I’m not particularly proud of that summary, that’s just the way it was. But things would change.
Notes
1 Flannery O’Connor, “The Turkey,” Collected Works (New York: Penguin, 1988), 752.
2 Finding Neverland, directed by Marc Foster, Miramax, 2004.
6
At the age of sixteen, Sunday mornings still looked the same. I still showed up at Sunday-morning Mass and experienced the same distant God. But something different began on Saturday nights. I started drinking.
If someone had shown me a genogram filled with circles and squares denoting the sap of alcohol in my family’s tree, I might have seen it coming. My father had struggled with it, his father had struggled with it, and who knows about the men before them. But no such graphs were around, and my father and grandfather weren’t talking about it, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t interested in listening to them at age sixteen anyway. I was young and horribly insecure and willing to try anything to not feel that way. You should know, however, that from this point on, you’d be wise to consider anything I say about alcohol to be suspect. It’s not that what I’m saying isn’t true; it’s that what I’m saying only scratches the surface.
As I said, I was sixteen. I was working as a delivery boy for one of the local grocery stores, getting paid on Saturdays. Every Saturday night I slipped into a pattern I would follow for years: Get paid and go drink draft beers, one after the other. I don’t remember my first drink or anything like that; it wasn’t a profound moment. I almost wish I could remember it so that I could share the blame with someone or something. What I do remember was the result, the buzz. Drinking gave me a rush of confidence, and for a boy hounded by feelings of inadequacy, the buzz was a welcome relief. What was impossible to realize at the time was that I was shooting myself in the head in some strange time warp where the bullet takes many years to finally reach its target.
At age eighteen I experienced my first alcohol-induced blackout at the hand of Seagram’s. Usually the absolute terror of blacking out stops people in their tracks. As one boozer said, “The feathers on your chin mean you ate the parakeet.” But it didn’t stop me. By the age of twenty I had acquired the nickname Funnel, no doubt because I drank a dozen or so beers every night, five days a week, a pint of rye whiskey every other day, and often a liter of sake once a week. Those were days of sheer volume. My threshold