Drug addiction – Beeshive

Brothers, by law.

It should go without saying that Scott and I really weren’t close as kids.

Our family was not a family built on love.

As I’ve said before, Richard was in many ways similar to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights in the sense that he carried a grudge for historical slights and anyone even remotely involved with those historical slights was going to pay dearly.

Unlike Heathcliff though, Richard wasn’t the victim of the disdain of others. No, Richard was the architect of his own misfortunes.

Richard carried a massive grudge against his first wife and anyone or anything associated with her was going to pay a very heavy price for her “walking out” on him even though he took advantage of the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations and had his first wife thrown out of the PMQ by the military.

Richard also carried a massive grudge against his mother for her daring to be First Nations, but that’s for another posting.

My father’s buddy from 447 squadron at CFB Namao famously asked Richard “Rick, if these fucking kids are driving you nuts, why don’t you give them back to their fucking mother and let her deal with them”. Richard’s response was “As long as the kids live under my roof, I control the costs. If I sent them to live with their mother I’d have to sign my fucking paycheque over to that bitch, and that’s not going to happen”.

Going through my email interactions with Scott, there was one email in which he noted that even our stepmother Sue had told him that Richard would tell her that Richard kept us because we were good for tax time.

Richard never took us anywhere that would require a modicum of parenting or involvement. And from about 1977 until 1981, Richard had washed his hands of my brother and I by bringing his mother on base to live in the PMQ and raise us.

This is the woman that he described to social services as being “frequently cruel” to his children and that she was frequently intoxicated and refused to admit her alcoholism.

To make matters far worse was the fact that kids from dysfunctional families that were living on Canadian Forces Bases were often shunned.

The Canadian Forces at the time, and even still today, is an extremely patriarchal which meant that the fathers of the families would never been seen to be at fault. Any problem in the household on base was always seen as the fault of the woman or the fault of the children.

So yeah, to say that Scott and I didn’t have a happy childhood would be a gross understatement.

So Scott would go off on his own, and I would go off on my own.

Because of my estrangement from Richard as a child, I never really stayed close to Richard. Scott on the other hand looked up to Richard.

When we moved to Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario in 1983 is when Scott and I started really drifting apart even further.

At that point in time I was so emotionally disturbed that I was supposed to be institutionalized whereas Scott was desperate for friendship. I preferred being left alone, whereas Scott wanted to hang out and be friends with everyone.

This led to Scott hanging out with the wrong crowd.

And Richard, being the incompetent asshole that he was would blame Sue, Grandma, myself, and his first wife for the way Scott was turning out. Not for one minute would Richard turn around and blame himself or accept responsibility for his part in this play.

This of course would stoke a lot of animosity between my brother and I.

Scott would do the crime, and I would get the beating of my life.

I wasn’t raising Scott properly

I wasn’t looking out for Scott

Another wedge that Richard drove between my brother and I was the fact that Richard blamed me for what happened to Scott on Canadian Forces Base Namao at the hands of the babysitter and possibly Captain McRae.

When Scott stole Sue’s Pontiac Acadian, Richard laid a fucking intense beating on me in my basement bedroom of the PMQ. During this beating Richard yelled numerous times at me that Scott was turning out the way he was because I let the babysitter touch him and that if I hadn’t let the babysitter fuck Scott that Scott would be normal.

And of course Scott was becoming resentful towards me because Richard’s insistence that I was supposed to raise Scott and look after Scott meant that I was allowing Scott to get into trouble.

And I know that this was a substantial issue between Scott and I even until just recently. In fact it wasn’t until the Canadian Armed Forces finally released the Court Martial transcripts and the CFSIU investigation paperwork in the summer of 2020 that Scott finally began to come to terms with the fact that Richard lied about the events of 1980 and that Richard obviously knew more about 1980 than what Richard had ever let on.

In the summer of 1984, while Scott and I were spending the summer with our grandmother, Scott said something to our grandmother about the babysitter from CFB Namao. Grandma was furious, yelling at me for allowing Scott to be raped by the babysitter while I was watching.

I moved out of the PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario in early 1988.

By this point in time Scott had been into juvenile detention numerous times and had grown substantially both in height and in mass. Scott’s uncontrolled anger and Richard’s unwillingness to control Scott and protect me from Scott is one of the reasons that I left. And it wasn’t just Scott that I was terrified of. He was hanging out with guys that I’m sure probably ended up becoming enforcers for biker gangs after they finished high school.

In a way I was very envious of Scott. Here I was, barely pushing 100 lbs and Scott had to be at least 160 or 170 even though he was 2 years younger than me. Not only that but Scott was towering over Richard. Richard once tried to backhand Scott, and Scott just caught his hand and scowled at Richard. That was the last time I ever saw Richard try to strike Scott. Me on the other hand, yeah Richard wasn’t afraid of me in the slightest.

In the summer of 1990 Richard got hold of me and invited me to move to Edmonton with him so that we could try to be a family again.

In preparation for the move, I moved back into PMQ 223F on Canadian Forces Base Downsview. But Scott wasn’t there. Scott had been incarcerated during my absence and was serving time at St. John’s in Uxbridge, Ontario.

By the time Scott was released, Sue and Richard had already bought a civilian house in Morinville, AB. I didn’t last too long in that house, and neither did Scott upon his release from juvie in Ontario. I think I lived in the house in Morinville for about a week before I got the boot and had to go rent my own apartment, which was no small feat at the age of 18.

One day at work I got a phone call from Richard telling me that after all he did for us as kids that I had to take Scott in until things calmed down. Scott was unceremoniously dropped off at my apartment. He ate all of my food in three days and he nearly got me evicted by fighting with the neighbours and blasting loud music. I asked Richard for help with groceries, he just laughed and said that maybe I should try hitting up our mother for groceries as he was finally done with us. Our mother ended up taking Scott out to her acreage out by Wabamum Beach.

I was introduced to my mother by my uncle Doug in the summer of 1990 just after we arrived back in Edmonton. I have no doubt that uncle Doug also introduced Scott to our mother after Scott arrived in Edmonton from Ontario after his release.

I happened to stop in to our mother’s house one weekend when she asked me if it was true what Scott said, that I had let Scott get raped numerous times by our babysitter. This was in the summer of 1991 and Scott was still framing it the way that my father had framed the events of 1978 to 1980, that I had allowed and encouraged the babysitter to molest my brother.

Between the winter of 1992 and the summer of 2012 I only saw Scott 3 or 4 times.

In the Summer of 2013 I went to go see Scott. We had some talks, but there was still an intense amount of resentment and condensation in his voice towards me. At the time Scott claimed that he hadn’t spoken to Richard or Sue for the longest time due to the suicide death of Eric Kolsteren.

On the day of my Federal Court application for Judicial Review, Scott had started texting me claiming that I had raped him along with the babysitter and that I should tell this to the judge. I did some quick sleuthing and as it turned out Richard had tracked Scott down via Sue and just the night before Scott’s outburst Richard had paid a visit to Scott and gave Scott a computer, a bunch of computer items, some camera equipment, and possibly paid for a trip to Toronto.

After that, Scott’s attitude towards me soured quite considerably. I have absolutely no doubt that Richard was pumping Scott’s head full of bullshit.

The next time that Scott would have any type of contact with me was in 2019 when he called me to let me know that Richard had died in 2017. Scott requested that if Sue ever asked how I found out Richard was dead that I wasn’t supposed to say that Scott told me.

Things again changed between Scott and myself in 2020 after the release of the Captain McRae’s court martial transcripts, and the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork. Scott began to realize that he had been lied to all of his life by Richard once my class action against the Canadian Armed Forces was initiated.

People have asked me if my brother’s death upsets me.

Not really.

I didn’t know him.

I knew him about as well as I knew my father.

I am disappointed that Scott is dead.

He didn’t live long enough to at least see official acknowledgement for no only what had happened to him on Canadian Forces Base Namao, but the fact that various members of the Canadian Armed Forces failed him such as our father Master Corporal Richard Gill, Captain Totzke, Colonel Daniel Edward Munro.

I know that Scott had been struggling with mental health issues for the longest time as when we did have email conversations early after 2012 he did say that he was seeing counsellors to try to work out his anger issues.

Drug wise, I don’t know when he started to be honest with you.

I know that he drank when we lived on Canadian Forces Base Downsview. Back then it wasn’t uncommon, even for the Goodie-Two-Shoes brats, to drink and smoke weed on base.

When Scott came for a visit in the summer of 2021 both him and his girlfriend at the time were doing mushrooms and weed.

When Scott started doing K is something I’ll never know.

If he was doing anything harder than weed, ‘shrooms, and K is also something that I’ll never know.

If we were closer together, would I have known?

I don’t know.

I work at a hospital in Vancouver that is basically THE hospital for Canada’s poorest postal code, the DTES. Drugs can take over anyone at anytime. The number of fresh faces coming in for treatment is astounding. Everyone seems to think that they can try the hard drugs once or twice and they’ll be okay.

I haven’t quite figured out what to do with Scott’s ashes at this point in time.

Maybe I’ll get them mixed into little cement middle fingers and have one delivered to the Chief of Defence Staff, one delivered to the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal, one delivered CFNIS Western Region, one delivered to CFNIS Pacific Region, and one delivered to RCMP K division HQ.

Inscription would say
-Fuck You –
Kids from CFB Namao
(human remain, do not dispose)

Slipping through the cracks.

Looking back on my life it has become readily apparent that the one thing that I am extremely accomplished at is slipping through the cracks.

And this has made me realize that there are actually a lot of people on this planet that have slipped through the cracks for all of their lives.

In 2011, in an attempt to bolster my complaint against P.S. after the case manger with the CFNIS told me that they couldn’t find any evidence against P.S. I started tracking down all of my personal information from any place that my father had been stationed.

The first crack that I seemed to have slipped through was in Halifax.

CFB Shearwater – Nova Scotia.

I had sent off a request to the Nova Scotia government for any medical or social service records that the government had from my childhood when my father was stationed at Canadian Forces Base Shearwater.

I was surprised that they had the detailed records that they did. They had my birth records that included my mother’s admission records. They also had all of my admission records from just after I was born all the way up until we moved from CFB Shearwater to CFB Summerside on PEI.

The records were notable for a few things.

First, the records identified an issue that I had with anything that contained beef fats like dairy.

The records also indicated that my mother was an extremely anxious person.

The records also indicate that my father had to be returned to port by the Canadian Forces due to “emotional issues”.

I had been admitted to the hospital on a couple of occasions as a “boarder”.

The longest I spent in hospital was 31 days.

Just before my father’s posting to CFB Summerside in Prince Edward Island the doctors at the IWK Children’s hospital had reached the opinion that my frequent admissions to the hospital were due to “societal problems” in the household and that social services should be notified.

Around 2015 I would make the acquaintance of Pat Longmore. She had been in the Canadian Forces along with her husband Bob back in the 1970s at CFB Shearwater. Pat knew both Richard and Marie. Pat was the first person ever to have confirmed the existence of a “battered wives club” on CFB Shearwater and that my mother had used it a couple of time when she needed to get us away from Richard when Richard was in the midsts of a meltdown.

How would things have turned out if Richard had not been able to escape the involvement of our family with Nova Scotia Social Services by obtaining a posting to CFB Summerside.
What would life had been like had Richard faced any real serious consequences for his alcoholism and his violent outbursts.
What would life had been like had the Canadian Forces offered Richard treatment for his PTSD and his Depression instead of encouraging him to self medicate his problems away with alcohol.

CFB Summerside – Prince Edward Island

I remember being in a bicycle accident while we were stationed at CFB Summerside. I didn’t remember too much about the accident, but I figured that I would submit a request anyways.

Turns out that someone had found me laying face down in the middle of the road unconscious with no description of what had happened.

The person who admitted to hospital was not my grandmother. To this day I still don’t recognize the name. When I tracked down my mother in 2013 and showed her the paperwork she said that she didn’t recognize the name. At the top of the admission paper it says “Father in Iceland with airforce, will return this evening”.

In 2013 I had to examine my father for a Federal Court application for judicial review. One of the questions I asked my father was what provinces other than Alberta were we involved with social services. His response was PEI for child custody.

I filed a request from the PEI Govt for these records. All the government would confirm is that my father had applied for custody, but that the matter was never settled by the court, the government had never granted Richard sole custody.

In 2013 I tracked my mother down to ask her about this. She said that the Canadian Forces Judge Advocate General had granted Richard sole custody of my brother and I and that she had been ordered to leave the PMQ by the Canadian Forces.

Behaviours such as this were confirmed in a report that was commissioned by the Canadian Armed Forces in 1996 and released in May of 2000. The report stated that because of the existence of the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations military dependents such as spouses and children had no legal right to live on military bases. Military dependents are there at the pleasure of the serving member. If there was a breakdown in the marital home the serving member could have the military police eject the spouse from the base. This would prevent the ejected spouse from serving court papers on the serving spouse. Also, the serving spouse enjoyed free transportation provided by the Canadian Forces which would often cause the ejected spouse to be disadvantaged by travel distance from seeing her children.

How would things have turned out in the long run if Richard wasn’t able to have Marie ejected from the PMQ?
What would have happened had social services become involved when I was admitted to hospital with no next of kin.

CFB Namao / CFB Griesbach – Edmonton, AB

The most egregious cracks that I slipped through here were related to my mental health.

As I’ve said in other posts, I fully believe that my long term mental health was willingly sacrificed to allow the Canadian Armed Forces to keep their damn secrets about the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse sex scandal under wraps and out of the public eye.

I had no idea of how bad things were until I received my foster care records from the Alberta Government. The fact that I had foster care records was the most stunning aspect of this.

In October of 1980 my family arrived at CFB Griesbach. This was 6 months after the events on CFB Namao. My teacher and my brother’s teacher brought us to the attention of military social worker Captain Terry Totzke. A psychiatrist hired by the Canadian Armed Forces to evaluate my family and I found that I was well past the point of despair and depression and that I was extremely anxious and fearful of men. I was also found to hate being touched. Oh, and I was terrified of my father and I was convinced that he was going to drown me in a toilet. It’s obvious that by this point in time Richard had been informed of what had transpired on CFB Namao.

For an added bonus my results from the Wechsler IQ test that I had been administered showed that I had an IQ of 136 +/- 6.

This same psychiatrist found that my father accepted no responsibility for his family, he expected others to solve his problems for him, he blamed his mother for the problems my brother and I were exhibiting.

I remember this time of my life as being full of confusion. I couldn’t make friends. The other kids on base were constantly beating the daylights out of me. I also started to be able to run my hands through my hair and pull clumps of hair out of my head. My father was angry with me no matter what I did. My stepmother started echoing my father’s anger towards me. No matter what I did I was a complete fuck-up. There was no pleasing anyone. I started frequently wetting the bed. To teach me a lesson and to get me to stop wetting the bed I was often sent to school without a shower which just amplified the attacks at school. The kids would often call me “onion head”. As a foot note, I didn’t stop wetting the bed until just after I had turned 16 and had moved out of the house.

Various follow-ups between October 1980 and November 1981 didn’t go anywhere. No matter what Captain Totzke was being told I was never medicated nor was I ever sent for therapy.

In November of 1981 my teacher, my brother’s teacher, and our principal contacted Alberta Social Services as Captain Totzke didn’t seem to be able to get my brother’s and my “odd and strange behaviours” under control. It wasn’t that Totzke couldn’t get our behaviours under control. It’s more than likely that the Canadian Forces didn’t want to risk either me or my brother talking to civilian therapists because there was the obvious risk that we’d start talking about the babysitter from CFB Namao which in turn would lead to the discovery of the true extent of what Captain Father Angus McRae had done on CFB Namao from 1978 until 1980.

Alberta Social Services sent me for testing and found that I was so emotionally disturbed that I would never be able to function properly in any school unless I received treatment. By the time I was supposed to be placed in a “special school” I had devolved so bad that I was supposed to be institutionalized. As Captain Totzke was my primary caregiver he would have to agree to this. Which he never seemed to. So a compromise was reached, I would attend a school program for emotionally disturbed children until further arrangements could be made.

Being in this program required two things. First my father had to sign my foster care admission paperwork. Second, me father was supposed to attend family counselling.

In December of 1982 a letter was sent to Captain Totzke and my father inviting them to a conference with my civilian social workers on January 26th, 1983.

The meeting occurred on January 26th, 1983. Captain Totzke was there but my father wasn’t. Captain Totzke said that my father was happy with my improvement from being in the Westfield program. My father was so happy that Captain Totzke said that he recently helped my father turn down a posting to Nova Scotia because my father wanted me to stay in the program.

My civilian counsellors informed Captain Totzke that my father was not attending family counselling and that unless my father attended family counselling that my behaviour and my emotional state would continue to deteriorate. My civilian case worker told Captain Totzke that in order to apply duress to Richard to make him comply that I would be removed from the home and placed into foster care or residential care. Remember the part about my father signing the foster care admission paperwork? My civilian counsellors told Captain Totzke to inform my father and my father’s commanding officer forthwith that Richard was to attend every scheduled family counselling session that was upcoming or Alberta Social Services would take action.

On January 28th, 1983 my civilian case worker called Captain Totzke for an update. Apparently my father lost his shit. He didn’t understand what the program was all about. He claimed that my counsellors were harassing Richard and Sue. Totzke also informed my civilian case worker that my father has just received a posting to Ontario. Remember Totzke claiming he helped my father turn down a posting? I wonder what changed in the span of two days, don’t you?

In closing the file Alberta Social Services noted that my father often changed his story from one meeting to the next, and that my father often told people in positions of authority what he thought they wanted to hear. Basically Richard was a pathological liar who could manipulate people to get what he wanted.

It destroys me to know that the Canadian Armed Forces and my father knew that I was experiencing severe psychological trauma brought on no doubt by the sexual abuse from CFB Namao, but also from my father’s issues, and they chose to do nothing.

What type of life would I have been able to enjoy had I received proper therapy and treatments back then?

What would have happened if my father had to prove that he had sole custody of my brother and I and that it turned out that he didn’t.

How would life have been for me had I been removed from both Richard and Marie and placed with a normal family.

If I had remained in Alberta after my father fled to Ontario and had I remained in the foster care program what type of assistance would I have received with obtaining higher education?

I slipped through far too many cracks to count here.

How would my life have turned out had I received therapy for my major depression?
How would my life have turned out had I received therapy for my severe anxiety?
How would things have turned out for me if Captain Terry Totzke was less concerned about my apparent homosexuality and had been more concerned about my mental health and wellbeing.?
How would things have turned out for me had I been institutionalized and received the proper care?
How would things have turned out for me if I had been placed into foster care or residential care and then felt safe enough to talk about what had happened on Canadian Forces Base Namao?
If I had been removed from the home and placed with a family that cared, would I have finished grade 12? Would I have gone on to college? University? Would I have been able to take proper trades training?
If I was removed from Richard’s house and placed into either residential care or foster care, would I have been free to develop a proper sexual identity?
Given a chance, what would I have parlayed my IQ of 136 +/- 6 into?

CFB Downsview

I obtained my social service paperwork from the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto as they were mentioned in my Alberta Social Services paperwork.

CAST tried to locate the contact information for my family from the Canadian Armed Forces, but the Canadian Forces wouldn’t comply.

CAST ended up tracking down my brother and I through the North York Board of Education.

CAST wasn’t able to get too involved with my family as my father didn’t want to participate and CAST was facing budget cuts. CAST said that they would keep the file open none the less and that if they received any complaints from the neighbours they wouldn’t hesitate to get involved.

I don’t ever remember being involved with CAST. Is this why Richard and Sue always insisted that my brother and I get out of the house in the morning and not come back until supper time? That way we’d never be home when CAST showed up for a house visit?

If I had been placed at the Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto for psychiatric treatment, instead of being forced to grow up with major depression, severe anxiety, and gender confusion, what would my future have been like?
What would have happened if the Canadian Forces Military Police on CFB Downsview had reported Richard’s violent domestic fight to CAST in the summer of 1985? Is this why when the military police came to talk to my brother and I about Richard’s violent breakdown that they told us to never call 9-1-1, that we were to call base switchboard and summon the military police?
When I moved out of the house in the winter of 1988 the CAST file on my family was still open. I didn’t have to go to work or rent a room in a house. Had I known that my family was involved with CAST I could have asked CAST for emergency shelter and emergency funding to allow me to attend school without having to work.
In 1989 when I attempted to finish off my schooling at A.I.S.P., I could have also received emergency funding and emergency shelter had I applied for it after Richard blew a gasket because he didn’t understand what the name “Alternative and Independent School Program” meant.
If I had known about my family’s involvement with CAST, would CAST have assisted me with extracurricular music lessons?
Would CAST have assisted me with getting into the National Science Fair if they had learnt about my father’s refusal because I was “showing off”?

CFNIS 2011

If I had known the truth about the period from October of 1980 until January 1988, would I have been better able to prevent the CFNIS, the Provost Marshal, the VCDS, and the Minister of National Defence from concocting a wildly inaccurate story about the period of August 1978 though to July of 1980.

The CFNIS in 2011 had access to the Canadian Forces court martial records relating to Captain Father Angus McRae. The CFNIS knew that P.S. had been molesting numerous children on the base and it was this abusive behaviour that attracted the attention of the base military police which eventually led to the CFSIU investigating Captain McRae for having committed “acts of homosexuality” with young boys on the base.
Alberta Social Services was of the opinion that my father was a liar and often told people he perceived to be in positions of authority what he thought they wanted to hear. Would the CFNIS had been able to place much emphasis on Richard’s statement in which he said that there was never a babysitter in our house?
If I had my social service records during my initial interview with the CFNIS in March of 2011, would I have been able to introduce enough evidence to show the CFNIS that my father was fully aware of what had occurred on CFB Namao but that due to his own issues he was refusing to allow me to receive treatment for the various mental illnesses that I was suffering through as a result of the abuse on CFB Namao?

So many cracks.

I’ve slipped through so many cracks that it’s not funny. It’s actually quite maddening.

To see that I was so close to receiving help with my issues, but that my father and the Canadian Forces were so hell bent on keeping a lid on the Captain McRae fiasco that I was kept from receiving the help that I so rightfully deserved.

You might say to yourself that maybe it would have been better if I had never found these records and documents. You’d be very wrong.

Prior to obtaining these records I had always viewed myself as a worthless fuckup who had screwed up his own life because as my father would often say that I was fucking insane like my mother and that I was a selfish crybaby who fucked with his military career.

The records allowed me to see that I wasn’t a fuck-up. That I was just a kid being crushed by forces far more powerful than I could have ever imagined.

I had been sacrificed in order to keep a secret.

The Canadian Armed Forces sacrificed me to keep the lid on a horrific secret.

My father, having his own demons and lacking his own backbone was more than willing to go along with this.

My father was obviously an unfit parent, so was my mother but I didn’t grow up with her, how would my life had turned out if I hadn’t grown up in an environment where secrets needed to be kept?

People keep telling me “Bobbie, you’re so smart, what are you wasting your life for”, or “Bobbie, you’re so smart, why didn’t you get into such-n-such a trade”, or my favourite “Bobbie, the guys in the shop are afraid of you because you know too much”.

The last point I’m not kidding about. When I took on the position of Chief Engineer at St. Paul’s I got brought into the plant manager’s office for a little one-on-one. Seems that there was a little mutiny of sorts brewing in the power engineering section. I was too smart and the other engineers were feeling intimidated. And this isn’t the first employer that has brought this up.

And it’s true. I love to read. I love reading service manuals. I love to understand. If I didn’t then I wouldn’t have made so many changes at St. Paul’s. And this is something that I am sick and tired of apologizing for. Yes, I should be in more technical employment. But that wasn’t in the cards for me. And I’m not about to play stupid. Why should I? I didn’t ask to have my potential pulled out from under me.

I really despise it when people accuse me of having been lazy or having wasted all the opportunities that a person like me should have had. When I was younger this used to anger me quite a bit. “Bobbie, you must have partied too hard instead of going to trade school”, or “Maybe home life was too good and you just never learnt the value of hard work”.

Where would I have gone in life had I not had to drag along the diagnosed but untreated depression, anxiety, and other issues that were gifted to me?

No, the discovery of all of these records tells me that short of a fucking miracle I ended up exactly where the trajectory of my early life aimed me for. I think I did pretty good for a grade 9 dropout with a grade 12 G.E.D..

No drug dependency, no criminal record, a pretty solid employment history.

Sure, going to college, or university, or even trade school would have probably opened up a world of opportunity for me, but those things were never to be.

So I’m not upset and saddened by the opportunities that were taken away from me.

I’m just disgusted at the people and organizations that took those opportunities away from me.

You seem so normal……..

One of my curses if you will is that I seem “so normal”. Facial piercings and tattoos aside. This was especially truer back in my teens and twenties when I really had to appear “normal” in order to gain and keep employment.

I have never once in my life stuck a needle in my arm nor have I ever snorted anything up my nose. I don’t even like weed.

I can honestly remember the handful of times that I did drink. And not surprising these events often went way out of control. I honestly believe that alcoholism is genetic. My grandmother was an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. And I more than like was destined to be an alcoholic.

Outside of the wine that I had been given in the rectory of the chapel on Canadian Forces Base Namao, and outside of the occasional sips of Baby Duck or my father’s rum & coke mixes, the first time I had alcohol as a kid was in the summer of 1984 when I was staying with my grandmother over the summer. Grandma and her friend Hazel were drinking. Grandma asked me to get her and Hazel another beer each out of the fridge. I took two beers out and popped the caps off. I sucked the foam off the top like I would always do when getting grandma a beer. This time though she told me to get her another beer out of the fridge, and this time I wasn’t to drink any of it. So I got her the beer, I popped the cap off, and I let the foam run down the side of the bottle. I put the bottle on the table in front of grandma. Grandma slid the other bottle over towards an empty chair and told me to sit down and drink my beer. This was cool I thought. I’m drinking beer with my grandmother. What twelve year old boy doesn’t want to hang out with his sixty-one-year-old grandmother and get drunk with her. I finished two bottles and then it was time for me to go pass out in the bedroom.

I didn’t drink again until I was about 15.
I know “drink again” isn’t something you want to hear somebody brag about when discussing their childhood, but in my household, the fact that I wasn’t a raging alcoholic by the time I was 18 was a miracle.

Bob Becker, a man that I was working for on the weekends at the time, had given me a small bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label to give to my father as a present. When I got home my father took one look at the bottle and said that he wouldn’t drink that horrid piss. Richard was a Lamb’s Navy and a Pilsner kind of guy. Anyways, Richard told me to put the bottle on a shelf in my bedroom and that he didn’t want to see me drink it until I was 19.

A friend from cadets happened to be over at my house for lunch one school day. We went downstairs to my bedroom. He spied the bottle. He saw my father’s shot glasses over by my father’s computer desk. Peter grabbed a pair of shot glasses and challenged me to drink more shots than he did before we returned to school. After about four shots each I grabbed the bottle from Peter’s hand and chugged it until it was empty. I don’t remember how long I stayed upright for. But I woke up the next day on the floor of my bedroom laying in a copious puddle of vomit.

My bedroom in the basement didn’t have a door. Richard said that military housing rules didn’t allow bedrooms in the basement and the military housing authority agreed that as long as there was no door on the bedroom that it wouldn’t be considered a bedroom. But I don’t think this was the housing rules were the true reason. My bedroom door was off for most of the time on CFB Griesbach, and the door was off for most of the time that I lived in the upstairs bedroom on CFB Downsview before giving my bedroom over to Sue’s son in early 1986.

Richard’s computer workstation where he played with his computers, sometimes until 02:30, had a view right into my bedroom. So there was absolutely no way that Richard didn’t see me laying on the floor with all that vomit and the bottle of Johnny Walker laying beside me.

All I got from Richard was a warning that he was going to start locking up his rum in his desk and that if his rum ever went missing that he was going to make sure that I knew there was a price to be paid.

The next time I had a drink of alcohol was in the spring of 1990 when I was on the road with Canshare Cabling. Michael and I had stopped at a hotel in Gagetown, New Brunswick. This was the first time that I had ever joined Michael for dinner. We had both stopped at the bank earlier in the day and I had pulled out about $300.00 for the week. Mike invited me to the bar at the hotel after. He encouraged me to keep up with him. I was 18 at the time but no one asked me for I.D. as I honestly looked like I was in my early 30s with my moustache and the grey hair that was peppered though my hair. I remember making it back to the hotel room that we were sharing. As soon as I laid down on the bed to room started spinning. No matter how tightly I gripped the mattress the room would just start spinning. And once it started spinning it wouldn’t stop. I spent the night going between the bed and the bathroom throwing up. I vowed to never drink again after that.

The next time I would ever go drinking was in August of 2005. I had just gotten my new job at St. Paul’s. And to reward me for the previous 5 years of employment, the Board of Directors with Equitable agreed to allow me to celebrate at the Lion’s Pub with some coworkers from Equitable and some other workers that I had previously worked with at a previous employer. We ran up a tab of about $3k for I think 8 people, most of it was for steaks and other foods. I’m also sure that other engineers from other buildings started showing up too. I didn’t get pissed drunk this time, but still I knew that something was wrong as the depression started to get out of control. I spent most of the evening crying to Harry about what had happened on CFB Namao. This was the first time that I had ever, and I mean ever, talked to anyone about this. This was supposed to be a happy day for me and it turned into a disaster.

I wouldn’t drink again until I took a short leave in 2010 from work to go to a job in Surrey. At my going away party a bunch of the boys from the plant took me out for drinks. I only had a glass or two. No problem this time.

On July 18th, 2011 I had gone downtown to pick up a MIDI cable for my new Yamaha keyboard that I had at the time. I figured that with the CFNIS finally going to hold P.S. responsible for what he had done all those years ago, I was going to start trying to learn some of the things my father had denied to me as punishment for my involvement with P.S.. I missed the Tom Lee store by about 20 minutes. On my way home I stopped at a bar. This was a bar that I had gone to a couple of times recently with the chief engineer and the steam fitter from work. They’d have beer and I’d drink Ice Tea. So, I was gonna grab an ice tea and maybe an order of fish and chips before heading home. As I was sitting there I started to realize that I hadn’t heard any case updates from the CFNIS lately and I was curious. So I called the case manager. We had a couple of back and forth calls. Basically his response to me was that he had been transferred and wasn’t really involved with my case anyways anymore. But he also said that the CFNIS couldn’t find anything about P.S. that would indicate that P.S. had ever been suspected of abusing children. (Remember, at this point in time the Canadian Forces had the court martial transcripts which indicated that P.S. was the star witness against Captain McRae and that Captain McRae’s defence counsel was trying to discredit P.S. because the military police knew in 1980 that P.S. had been sexually assaulting younger children on the base).

I ordered a beer to calm my nerves. But here’s the thing. When you suffer from major depression and severe anxiety, and alcoholism runs in your family, alcohol doesn’t calm you down. It just drives you further down into maddening depression.

I had a few more drinks. And because I didn’t really drink at the time, 3 or 4 beers would hit me a lot harder than let’s say someone who had been drinking a beer a day for 10 years. I think I had about 6 beers, each one driving me down deeper into despair.

I called the CFNIS case manager back and asked him what the point of living was if assholes like P.S. don’t get held responsible for what they’ve done in life. Again he started off with the “Mr. Bees, we can’t find any evidence against P.S.”. So I said fine, fuck it, I was going to go home and kill myself. How he asked. I said either jump out the window or slice my femoral arteries. After I got off the phone with him I realized that I was too drunk, and that I was now very depressed and angry. I also realized that I was probably going to hurt myself if I went home. I decided to go get checked out at a safe place. Work. I went in and started talking to the staff in the Emergency Dept at St. Paul’s. As I was in there, the CFNIS case manager called me back and asked me where I was. I told him I was at St. Paul’s and that I was going to get myself checked out. Fine, sure, okay. So I got admitted to the psych unit for observation.

I had a talk with a psychiatrist the next morning. I explained to him what had transpired between me and the CFNIS case manager. I explained to him what had happened on CFB Namao almost 30 years previous. He said that it was understandable that I had the reaction that I did. He asked me if I had ever wanted to harm myself previously, I told him that I had, but that I was never able to act upon it. He asked me if I still wanted to harm myself. I looked at him and said no.

So he released me that morning. Basically told me that with what had transpired 30 years previously and the previous evening that my reaction was to be expected. His discharge summary said “Adjustment Disorder with depressed mood”. It also listed “Alcohol Intoxication” as the pre-admission diagnoses. In his summary the psychiatrist mentioned that the police showed up after I had self-admitted. This is important as the CFNIS case manager in his account of the evening indicated that he literally saved my life by putting out an alert to the VPD and that the VPD had picked me up and brought me in to the hospital.

When I was released from the Comox unit I was setting in the waiting area. One of the porters came over and sat down beside me. He said ” So I see you spent the night”. I replied “Yep”. He said ” Don’t worry, you’d be surprised at how many staff members have actually spent a day or two in the psychiatric units”.

I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since then. That’s ten years and two months. Unlike my grandmother, I didn’t require a stint in A-A to quit. I think the fact that I drank so infrequently had a lot to do with this. Wasn’t hooked on the stuff so quitting something that I wasn’t addicted to was very easy.

Which brings me to the million dollar question.

WHY?

WHY AM I NOT AN ADDICT?

A counsellor that I was seeing in 2011 agreed with me that it was very surprising that I wasn’t an addict pushing a shopping cart up and down the alleys collecting cans to feed my drug habits considering my history of neglect, abuse, sexual abuse, and the fact that alcoholism is so prominent in my family.

As mentioned at the start of this entry I’ve never done heroin, I’ve never done coke, crack, meth, crystal meth, LSD, Special K, or any of the other multitude of drugs. I don’t smoke weed, I don’t eat mushrooms. I can’t stand prescription pain killers. And I can remember each and every time that I’ve had alcohol.

My childhood, all of the physical, mental, and sexual abuse, my untreated mental illnesses, these all should have put me on the streets.

When I first arrived in Vancouver back in 1992 I spent time living at some of the rooming houses in the DTES. I spent time staying at the Catholic Charities Hostel for Men on Cambie Street. I was in the prime habitat for starting a drug infused spiral into oblivion.

But I didn’t.

Even when my anxiety and my depression would keep me from sleeping and I’d wake up with horrific night terrors, I never once felt the need to self medicate.

And let’s face it. Not being an addict is a double edge sword.

On one hand I’ve had a clean life.

But on the other hand medical and psychiatric professionals are very doubtful of my stories when I tell them about my past because research shows that a high percentage of drug addicts were sexually abused as children and came from dysfunctional homes as children and had substance abuse problems in their genetic lineage.

And yet here I am, the only needle marks I have are from my tattoos or piercings.

So, did I really suffer that abuse?

And that’s when the self doubt sets in.

Maybe I wasn’t sexually abused for 1-1/2 years by P.S.

Maybe I was given wine in the rectory at the chapel because Captain McRae was a really nice guy and he just wanted me to enjoy a cup of wine.

Maybe I misunderstood Captain Totzke when he told me that I was a homosexual.

Maybe Richard really wasn’t that abusive, maybe he was a fun loving parent that spent every waking moment doting on his children, and maybe social services in three different provinces were really just good for nothing do-gooders that liked to stick their noses into other people’s business.

And you can see how the self doubt can start to be just as bad as the major depression and the severe anxiety.

Is there something special in my brain that makes me resilient to drug addiction or even the desire to try drugs?

That I don’t know.

Was it my exposure to my father’s alcoholism and my grandmother’s alcoholism that made me generally steer away from alcohol and illicit drugs?

I don’t know.

Was it my father’s abusive behaviour and rage anger that scared me away from ever taking drugs?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

But what I do know is that if anyone wants to study my brain to see what’s up, it’s available. At the moment it’s attached to a set of vocal cords and a pair of lungs and it can answer any questions you have. You’re even welcome to do fMRIs on it.

And if I do proceed with M.A.i.D. it’s yours to pop out of my skull and slice up and pickle with formalin and study to your little heart’s content.

Maybe my brain will help understand why some people from traumatic backgrounds never go on to have drug dependencies and why others who have had less traumatic experiences turn to drugs without a second thought.