Addicted Like Me Read Online Free PDF

reintroduced into his life, but when they entered back into the picture they brought the family addictions with them. My bootlegging grandfather left his bottle of whiskey under the bed when he stayed for the wedding at my mom’s house, where her father found the bottle.
    The United States had just entered World War II when my parents were married. They dated only a few months because of the war. My father was due to be sent overseas. Their newlywed months
were spent at an army base in Alabama, where my dad was preparing to be shipped out. I have letters that my mother wrote to her sister during this time about the pending deployment, saying to her that his “orders were coming through, and they weren’t so awfully good.” My mom went back home to Connecticut to be with her family once my dad left for the war. She was pregnant with their first child, my older sister. She was born during the war, and my father did not see her until she was six months old because he had been stationed in Europe and couldn’t return home.
    My brother followed along three years later, after my father had returned home from the war. I was born seven years after that, and as the youngest of the three, I was the one who was most spoiled. Our family lived on the same street as my mother’s relatives, which included my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandmother. It was great having family so close, and I was a very happy child with the exception of my father’s temper, drunken nights, and slurring words. It seemed that he was always giving my brother and sister a hard time, but it didn’t really affect me. I have heard that my father was physically violent toward my sister and brother when they were young, but that stopped before I was born. He hit me the one time only when I was in high school and got caught drinking, but my sister remembers a time he hit her when she was ten years old. He took a belt to her and beat her severely. The next day she planned to tell her teacher at school but got scared and decided not to, because she was afraid that not only would my father be in trouble but that it might also affect my mother.
    I don’t remember my dad being home a lot. I think there were
many nights he stopped off at the bar for a quick drink and never quite made it out the door, back to us. He was a sporting goods salesman and worked for my uncle, traveling to colleges throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts. He was very good at this work. He used Saturday mornings to do his paperwork, and many Saturday afternoons were then freed up for him to spend drinking and gambling. My father was a high-energy guy who was not only a big drinker but also a high roller who liked to play craps for the chance of making money on the rolls of the dice.
    In one of the genealogy searches I have done on my family, I located a newspaper article from 1953 in which the details of a car chase were recounted, describing the way my dad and his friend chased down a man at high speed after he lifted nine hundred dollars off them in a game of craps. My father had been cheated out of his lucky chances because the man was throwing with loaded dice. I was stunned by the amount of money that had been lost, because nine hundred dollars was a small fortune in those days. We were a middle class family and had nice things, but we were not well off enough for my father to be risking that kind of money. He was just that kind of man, though, a big presence. He was an outgoing individual who was the president of several local organizations. When my dad walked into the bar, everyone knew he was there. He was very charming and had a way with people. My father never entered a room; he owned it. His drink was whiskey. He would order a shot and a beer each time he pulled up to the local bar for his almost daily fix. He would down the shot in one gulp and chase it with the glass of beer. It’s called a boilermaker, to drink the two like this.

    My mother was a