A chance encounter with an alcoholic stranger sent the mind reeling back to demons closer to home
I WAS rushing along a busy street early last Friday afternoon, lost in thought, with my head down against a bitter wind, when I walked smack into someone. It’s amazing how speedily your mind works in a situation like that.
You don’t so much have thoughts as a mass of mental images, all piling in on top of one another, arriving together in the millisecond it takes to raise your head, but each still separate and distinct. And everything overlaid with panic. Have I hurt someone? Is it a woman; is she carrying a child? Is it an old person? I can smell alcohol. God, it’s bound to be some drunken thug who’ll take great pleasure in slapping a wee man with glasses.
I realised the person I had slammed into was falling over, but I was able to catch on to them as they were going down. The panic left me, for it almost immediately became clear there was no danger of injury, either to them or to me.
I had collided with a street drunk. He was aged somewhere between late 30s and mid-50s, rheumy-eyed, and with a face pock-marked and permanently reddened from burst blood vessels. He never once let go of a white plastic bag that held his precious cargo of a half-dozen or so cans of alcohol.
For an instant we were locked in an awkward embrace. He kept apologising to me, in the resigned voice of a man who has been in the wrong so often that expressing remorse has become second nature – it didn’t even cross his mind that the other person could be at fault.
“No, no, it was my fault,” I said, as I helped straighten him up and, for what it was worth, dusted him down a bit. After spending a minute or two exchanging apologies, we went our separate ways.
As I walked along, I thought about how with age you acquire something of an ability to see people as they must have looked when they were younger. The street drunk I’d bumped into had been quite a good-looking lad at one time, before he had begun the spiral downwards to his current plight – before the alcohol and innumerable related scrapes had taken their toll on body and brain.
What, I wondered, had been his hopes and dreams when he was younger? What were his prospects before the drink had grabbed him, when he had just left school and was setting out on adult life? Thank goodness he didn’t know then what the future held. It’s odds-on there is a partner and maybe a few children somewhere, whose patience and love were overpowered and then finally crushed by the demons that possess him. If there is, they’ll have built a new life now, far away from any prospect of a chance meeting on the street. At most, he’ll be no more than a buried memory of a time they’d rather forget, occasionally brought suddenly unannounced and unwanted to life by a smell, a remark, or a scene on television.
And what of the parents? How had they coped with it all – helpless observers as their child destroyed himself. The child they’d carried proudly from the hospital, had kitted out for his first day at school, and who still smiles impishly out at them from so many family photographs?
How many years of lecturing, pleading, disowning, of heated arguments and broken promises, before they finally realised their beloved son was in the grip of something over which he had no control? Maybe they never did come to accept that he was anything more than wilful, that he was the victim of a terrible disease. Whatever the truth of it, he would have stopped being a child they recognised, but never once stopped being their child, albeit one that came to live only in the photos and the memories.
Perhaps there is a history of alcoholism in the family, and they had in fact spotted the signs early. Dreading the future, knowing only too well what lay in store. Later, on rare bitter-sweet occasions between binges, the real son would have surfaced long enough to be recognisable as the one they reared and loved, but on display too would have been his crippling pain and suffering.
I have at least a second-hand idea of how they felt, sandwiched as I am in my own family between two alcoholics. I have always been acutely conscious of how close a call I had, but I had worries too. I watched silently for years, on tenterhooks – fearful to the pit of my stomach if I dwelt upon it – in case the dreaded early tell-tale signs of alcoholism began to manifest in any of my own children. Again, my wife and I were lucky, and our three children luckier still.
Before I bumped into the street drunk, I had been moping a bit, in the way that we all do at times. Not long afterwards, I was counting my many blessings: his plight was a sobering reminder that there, but for the luck of the draw, go us all.