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Alcohol
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rather than as a means of having fun.
"If you don't know how to deal with
the stress of independence, missing
your family, not knowing what you
want to do with your life, and you've
been used to dealing with stress by
drinking, then it's likely you'd drink
more," Tulin-Silver says.
On the surface, alcoholics may seem
to be very responsible drinkers.
"People who say they hold their liquor,
they don't have a problem-they're the
ones who have the problem," she says.
"People who get sick and vomit after
1,2, or 3 drinks-they don't have a
problem."
Students may only be in the early
stages of alcoholism. But counselors
say that because of denial, few seek
help until their academic work suffers,
they have serious problems with their
family, friends or lovers, or they
discover alcohol-related illnesses. Of-
ten, students come in for treatment for
one of the side-effects of alcoholism
without recognizing the link.
Dr. Robert Winfield, assistant director
tor for clinical affairs at University
Health Services, recalls a fifth year
senior who complained of upper
stomach pains. The 22-year-old had
been drinking a case of beer a day for
five or six years.
This individual realized his alcohol
abuse might be causing his physical
discomfort. "He came in and he said he
thought his stomach pains might be
from drinking problems right off the
bat," Winfield says.
But the student declined treatment
until he convinced a friend, another
heavy drinker, to quit cold turkey with
him. "One of his problems was that all
of his friends-his whole social
life-revolved round bars" Winfield
says. - "He had nothing if he didn't
drink."
Tulin-Silver says it may be even more
difficult for a woman to face up to
alcoholism. Women tend to bury them-
selves in extra layers of denial-and
guilt-because of the social stigma at-
tached to a woman who cannot control
how much she drinks.
"A guy can go out and get trashed,,
destroy a dorm, do other things and
people say that's okay. It's kind of a
'boys will be boys' attitude," she says,
adding that as a result women are
more likely to be solitary drinkers.
vations of her classmates by telling
herself that anyone who had endured all
of the family problems she had would
certainly turn to liquor too. Her favorite
uncle had been diagnosed as an
alcoholic; her brother had been
hospitalized for alcoholism, drug addic-
tion, and mental illness; her mother
was in and out of hospitals for mental
depression as well.
But as she drowned her family
problems in alcohol, she began to won-
'I kept telling myself I knew too much to be
an addict. I' grew up in Detroit. I knew
junkies - they wore overcoats, they stunk,
hung out in alleys, had runny noses.'
-anonymous student,
School of Natural Resources
ANN, who asks that her real name
not be used, says she tried to cure
the guilt she felt about her alcoholism
and addiction to pot by feverishly
baking and cleaning the apartment she
shared with her boyfriend.
"I could make myself feel better by
doing what women are supposed to do,
being submissive," she recalls, her
steely blue eyes gazing into the distance
as she puffs on a cigarette. "I didn't
like myself. I didn't have a picture of
myself as someone who sat around and
got drunk."
Earlier that school year she had
moved in with a group of women who
were also drug users to avoid
classmates who disapproved of her ex-
cessive drinking and pot smoking,
habits she says she never consciously
chose to practice.
At first, she dismissed the obser-
der if changes in her behavior signaled
that she too was mentally ill. She didn't
acknowledge that it was only
alcoholism that plagued her.
"I thought there was something that
was really wrong with me mentally,
that any day now it would be my turn."
STEVE, who describes himself as
one of the most polite, reserved
students in his Wayne State University
freshman class, couldn't see himself as
an alcoholic and a drug addict either.
"I kept telling myself I knew too
much to be an addict," he remembers,
now a senior in the School of Natural
Resources. "I grew up in Detroit. I
knew junkies-they wore overcoats,
they stunk, hung out in alleys, had run-
ny noses."
Those conflicting images kept him
from admitting he was addicted to
drugs and alcohol for a long time. Those
uncontrollable habits began when he
was 11 or 12, he says, when he started
stealing drugs from his father's
medicine cabinet. His father, a dentist,
had died when he was six. Steve, whose
name has been changed to protect his
privacy, says the drugs took away
loneliness and compensated for the lack
of attention he felt he deserved as a
child.
In college, alcohol and drugs helped
ease the fright he experienced at the
sight of so many students whom he
thought had their goals set and were
headed straight toward them. When he
scored well on a paper or an exam, he
rewarded himself by getting drunk. But
by the end of his sophomore year, the
reward became more important than
the task.
"It wasn't so much I wanted the
drugs to stop," he says slowly, "I wan-
ted the pain to stop, the guilt to stop."
He lied to his mother about the cost of
tuition so that he would have extra
money to buy drugs. When the spare
tuition money ran out, he found himself
doing things for cash that he told him-
self he would never do. He stole his
mother's silver, then her china and
paintings for money. Later, he would
get a job in a Detroit hospital so that he
could persuade doctors to write him,
prescriptions for narcotics. At one point
he even stole a prescription pad and
phoned in orders to the pharmacist
himself.
When he was sober, Steve couldn't
stand to think about all of those things.
As a result, he would tell himself it was
fine to have one or two drinks to forget.
But he always had more than two and
the memories came back when he woke
up sober a week later.
He had been in and out of several
detoxification programs without ever
kicking the habit when years later his
mother and relatives stormed into his
Ann Arbor apartment and confronted
him with his addiction. Again he
enrolled in a treatment program. And.
this time it worked.
THOUGH the direct confrontation of.
friends helped Ted and Steve
recognize and seek help for their
alcoholism, many alcoholics will deny
their friends' or spouse's observations.
They may admit they 'drink too much,
but they will say they've got their con-
sumption under control. Or they may
simply walk out of the room.
Friends and family members who are
frustrated by the alcoholic's failure to
seek help may begin to shoulder
responsibility for the other'ssactions,
often to the point where they believe
their spouse's problem is their own.
June, who spoke on the condition that
her real name be withheld, says her
husband gives her plethora of examples
to show drinking and pot aren't
unhealthy. She says he quotes a pro-
marijuana book published in the 1970s
that advocates pot smoking as har-
mless recreation. According to the
book she says he quotes, George
Washington smoked hemp everyday.
(More recent research has been unable
to substantiate that claim).
Being from a family that drank very
little, June thought her husband's
drinking was excessive but she wasn't
sure what was moderate. When she
suggested he cut back, June says his
response was: "If I'm an alcoholic,
then 80 percent of Americans are
alcoholic."
Thinking that she was the one with
the problem, June tried smoking pot to
identify with her husband but gave it up
because she didn't like its effects.
June then tried taking her husband to
special lectures on alcoholism. But -af-
ter three sessions he left, saying the
speakers didn't know what they were
talking about. Every couple of months
she suggested he enroll in a treatment
program. He always refuses.
"I'm not sure I will live with it the
rest of my life, but I don't see divorce
as an easy thing," she says as tears
well up in her eyes. .
His addiction is making her
miserable, yet June knows that he will
probably never change.
Not everyone who lives with an
alcoholic confronts his friend or
lover. By not speaking up, some unwit-
tingly feed the alcoholic's craving for
booze and ease his or her guilt. Experts
call such people "enablers."
Before Steve's family intervened, his
wife threatened to leave with their baby
unless he sought help for his addiction.
But more often, she was an enabler.
She would call in to Steve's boss and
explain that Steve was ill and wouldn't
be in to work, when actually he was so
drugged out he couldn't get up from
bed. She also wouldn't question where
the money went that was earmarked
solid Stoneage Romeos LP. Less slick
but similar in approach are the first two
bands to be released on Big Time
America, the Lime Spiders and the
Beasts of Bourbon. Both have gleefully
loud and unaesthetic two-color
(lime/navy and tangerine/violent,
respectively) album covers and pure Z-
movie mentalities; given these discs
and the Hoodoo Gurus', one has to won-
der what culture there can be for poor
Australian youth beyond old E.C.
Comix and Roger Corman pics on the
late show.
The Beasts' Axeman's Jazz album is
the more entertaining of the two, a
sustained werewolf howl of garage
cheesiness that spreads the blood 'n'
guts narratives as thick as the guitar
fuzz. Particularly colorful is the
touching backwards social-misfit gore-
a-rama tale of "Psycho," and on the
confessional side there's "(I'm a) Drop
Out." These songs would sound perfec-
tly appropriate (ditto the cheap-booze-
cracked vocals by Tex Perkins) at
thrashing pace, but one appreciates the
Neanderthal can't-think-that-fast men-
tality that keeps them a bit on the slow
side-just at the point where a
regurgitory collapse might logically
intrude at any moment.
Cajun queens, murder, graveyards
and assorted other air-plane-glue
hallucinations frolic through the
toughguy territory of The Axeman's
Jazz, wreaking havoc everywhere you
turn. I screamed through The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre just once, you can
bet these guys are what they call
'heavy repeater' viewers in the move
trade mags. I wouldn't want to meet
'em, but it's big fun to deal with them
from the comfortable distance of
several thousand miles. Yee-hah.
Not quite so inspiring is the Lime
Spiders' six song Slave Girl EP. Con-
taining three tracks from the band's
'81-'82 assemblage and three more from
the considerably different '83 lineup,
the disc is more than decent garage
purism. The only problem is that we've
been so glutted with this kind of indie
Shadows of Knight/Seeds revivalism of
late that the Lime Spiders can only
sound redundant, though one ap-
preciates the fact that they were doing
this stuff a couple of years before
everybody else. A punky tough tautness
of attack and occasional near-metal in-
tensity of din distinguishes the Lime
Spiders from generic spirit-of-'65
revivalists like the Outta Place and the
Pandoras. Unfortunately, the minor-
The Beasts of Bourbon: A picture says a thousand words
classic status the record earns is unfor-
tunately buried for the moment by the
current glut of garage sad saledom on
the market. The people who would be
most easily turned on to the record
have probably already been desen-
sitized and oversaturated by the scads
of similar stateside efforts by bands on
Pink Dust, Voxx, Midnight...
Still, both these records are pretty
exciting stuff, and one expects further
swellness from Big Time Records.
Estonian composer Avro Part is in-
troduced to larger American
audiences in the ECM release Tabula
Rasa, which has strong potential to ap-
peal to classical audiences, progressive
jazz fans and the abient/tasteful-Muzak
tastes of the Windham Hill crowd, as
well as to 20th-century music en-
thusiastics. Exquisitely emotional, the
four pieces here seem strongly
reminiscent of the Romantic Era in
their effect, yet they're very much of the
20th century in their barely discernable
'structure,' in their willingness to
follow the vaguaries of the composer's
whim rather than any strict form.
Inexplicably moving, the opening
"Fratres" pairs simple repeated piano
patterns (performed by Keith Jarret)
with Gidon Kremer's often wrenchingly
sentimental violin theatrics, the latter
spiralling like smoke rings around the
tender melodic base of the former. The
result is a gorgeous, stately melancholy
that is riveting and strangely calming
at the same time. "Cantus in memory
of Benjamin Britten" has the fugue-like
effect of Eno's Discreet Music
meltdown of Pachelbel themes, with
the Staatsorchester Stuttgart strings
overlapping slow downscale patterns in
a manner that gradually takes on the
beatific gravity of a funeral dirge, or
perhaps a song of spiritual ascendance.
The 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philhar-
monic lend their interpretation to an
arrangement of "Fratres," one less
emotionally powerful than the violin-
and-piano version but equally as haun-
ting. Here, the
shifting melod:
emergent son
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Counselor Leonard Scott: Educating students to care
4 Weekend/Friday, April.l, 1985
Weekend/Friday