Rubicon Heart: Introduction

INTRODUCTION: “Alea iacta est...”

Ru•bi•con (rōō'bĭ-kŏn')
n. A limit that when passed or exceeded permits of no return and typically results in irrevocable commitment.

My heart is like that. I’ve come to realize this over the years. I may not pass that limit very often, but when I do there is no turning back. I become immersed with it, to the point where nothing else matters. I have a Rubicon Heart, and once I commit to loving someone, I have passed the point of no return. I am in it for the long haul.

The word derives from a river in northern Italy that Julius Caesar crossed with his army, in violation of the orders of the leaders in Rome, who feared his power. A civil war followed, in which Caesar emerged as ruler of Rome. Caesar is supposed to have said, “Alea iacta est” (The die is cast), as he crossed the river.

I crossed that river in 1990. I cast my dice, and came up empty handed. I have yet to get back to the other side of that river… the river which divides a happy place and a place of despair.

I committed my heart to fall in love again, two years ago. I picked up my dice and cast it again, for the second time in my life… and I’ve come up empty again. The gamble of love is not my game… in this I am a loser, and I’ve lost belief, hope and years of my life committing to this one bet I placed in 1990. My second bet is still on the table, but the cards I’ve been dealt are not looking good. I fear what will happen when I lay my cards out on the table. What do I have left to lose? How am I going to pay the price of losing yet again?

This is the story of how I got here. This is the story of my love life, or of my lack thereof. But, before we begin you need to understand a few things about me. You need to know where I come from, and what shaped me as an emotional human being.

Growing up was never easy. I didn’t suffer tremendously or anything – there are people out there with far worse fates than mine. I do not feel sorry for myself, nor do I want others to pity me for the things I went through growing up. What happened shaped me – made me the man I am today. Some of who I’ve become is good, while other things have seriously damaged my ability to live the life I wanted to live.

This story – the “Rubicon Heart” story – is not about my childhood, or about the abuse and alcoholism I witnessed, so I will not be going into great detail about these things. I will give you an overview, a quick and to-the-point look into this part of my life, as I believe it is imperative that you know these things in order to understand the workings of my heart. If I didn’t go through the things I am about to tell you about, I would not have had such a bleeding heart… and I would not have felt so lonely and insecure about myself.

My father was an alcoholic. He was never a physical drunk, and he never laid a hand on my mother. He never laid a hand on me. But, he drank much of his life away. He drove my mother away from him, because she could not live with him. He could never hold a job for a long time, and he couldn’t bring in the money to our house.

When I was six, my mother decided to divorce him. She was from Europe, and she took me and my sister and moved across the pond… miles and miles away from my father. A year later he came over to Europe, looking to get his life back together – but things didn’t work out that way, and he returned to the States after only a couple of weeks.

I didn’t hear from him in seven years after that. Neither did my mother. He had succumbed to heavy alcoholism, and was basically just pissing his life away at the time. I don’t know much about what he went through during these years.

What my mother didn’t know when she made the decision to move back to Europe was that she was headed for a far worse existence than what she had suffered through with my father.

My sister was 20 at the time, and my mother already knew that she was experimenting with drugs. As we came to Europe, she got her own place in another city… and she quickly became more and more dependent on the drugs. It wasn’t long before she was addicted to heroin, and her life became sinister and dark.

My mother sought comfort in a new man. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but he too had a drinking problem. And, unlike my father, he had a tendency for violence when he was drunk. His drinking habits were far worse than my father’s had ever been, and the days of sobriety were few and far between.

I was eight at the time, and my life consisted of going to school, coming home to a drunken mother and step-father, and wondering how my sister was doing. I still remember those days… not wanting to come home, because I didn’t know what I would be coming home to. But, having to come home, because maybe I was needed there to protect my mother from this man.

It was a good day when I came home to see my mother and her New Man sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of cheap booze between them, and they were talking and laughing. But, every so often, that talking and laughing would become screaming and shouting before bed time arrived.

Of course, I didn’t want my friends coming over. Of course, I didn’t want to go out with my friends all of the time, because even though I was just a child, I knew I needed to be home to protect my mother. I was the one who had to call the police when he started slapping her around. I will never forget the time she came crawling on her hands and knees into my room, bleeding profusely from the back of her head after he had pushed her to the floor and she’d banged her head against the sharp corner of the kitchen table.

“Please… call the police”, she begged me. “He’s going to kill me”.

My mother was weak. She suffered from severe depression, and she could not take care of herself. She drank because she had to in order to survive the hellish environment that was home.

I never had the chance to be a “normal” kid in school. I never had confidence. What little money my step-father brought into the household was spent on booze. I never had nice clothes, and I never had the confidence to stand up to the kids who bullied and mocked me on account of my old rags – while they confidently sported designer clothing and looked fresh and rested. I didn’t have the strength to fight back, and I became an easy target for those kids’ evil deeds.

I committed whole heartedly to protecting my mother. It was the only thing I could do. My childhood blew by, and this is what I did. In the meantime, I sat in my room – mostly by myself – and I took up writing as an avenue of freedom. I needed this to find a place where I could escape reality – a place where I could block out the screaming and shouting that was overheard from the kitchen… God I hated the kitchen. My room was my safe haven. My type-writer was my communication device.

At the age of fourteen I lost my sister. She had tried so hard to become clean, and she even moved to the town we lived in, so that she could be close to her mother. As you can understand, my mother could not give her the support that my sister needed. The drunk she was with, would also constantly put down my sister – to him she was a fucking druggie, while he was only an alcoholic, which made him that much more worthy as a human being.

My sister and he once got into a big fight when she stayed at our place one night. I loved my sister, and she kicked his ass that time. She wasn’t going to take any abuse from him, and she wasn’t going to put up with him calling her names and degrade her for being a drug-addict. She was always a good and loving person, but she was trapped in the pits of darkness that Heroin is.

She married a man who was an addict since his thirteenth birthday. He too was the kindest and most caring man that I have ever met. When my sister OD’d in the train-station restrooms, and never woke up again, he vowed to take his own life and follow her to the other side. He called us two days after my sister died, having stolen enough frozen meat to last a year.

“Would you please buy it. It will be enough so I can get some heroin and booze, so I can overdose and disappear from this world. I have no reason to be here any more”.

My mother told him that we were here for him. He was part of our family, and we still love him like one of our own. We were not going to buy the meat from him – we were not going to help him commit suicide.

The next day, they found his body on the floor of their apartment. He had taken an overdose of Heroin. He is buried next to my sister in our family grave… he never had a family of his own, as he was thrown out on the streets by his mother at the age of thirteen.

It wasn’t until I was nineteen that I could stand up against the abuse my mother suffered through. A friend of mine was over at my place that day, and we plotted to rid ourselves of my step-father once and for all. It went down like this:

My mother deliberately got on his nerves, and pushed him into starting a fight with her. Me and my friend came into the kitchen and protected her as she was being hit by him. We kicked his butt good and hard – called the police and had them take him away. We got the keys to the apartment from him, and told him never to return.

That part had been done several times before. The taking of the keys and telling him he’s out for good. This time was the one time that stuck, and my mother found the strength to stand by that decision as well.

But, the damage was already done, of course. And even without him in the house, my mother slipped deeper and deeper into her own case of alcoholism. This I had no power to do anything about.

My father… my real life father had gotten his life together back in the States. He’d found a new woman whom he married, and she was very strict and demanded of him to quit drinking. For the most part that worked, and he was building up a good life for himself with her on his side. I am forever thankful for what she did for my father – whom I never stopped loving despite not having seen much of him.

They moved to Florida, and I wanted so badly to establish a relationship with him. I decided to take the big step and move out to Florida with him at the age of 20.

This didn’t work out so well for me. I felt terrible for having left my mother behind, knowing she was probably drinking more now that I was not there. I was everything she had left in her life, and she will never get over the loss of her first child – my sister. She will never forgive herself for not having done everything she could to protect her. I am sure, however, that my sister – just like I myself – always could feel our mother’s love.

It was also during this time that my own life went down the drain. It was here that my First True Love took that Rubicon Heart of mine and crushed it beyond repair.

This is who I am, and this is what shaped me as a human being. Things are much better these days. My mother kicked the bottle out of the house 12 years ago, and has not had a drink ever since. I can’t even begin to tell you what a wonderful feeling it is not to have to worry about her having drunk herself into oblivion, and maybe even to death.

It was Christmas 12 years ago when she hit rock bottom. She’s always loved Christmas time and spending time with the family. Many Christmases up to this one, she’d spent alone at home either hung over too bad to come with us, or being flat out drunk. Her mother (my grandmother) never drank in her life, and our family does not traditionally drink together. Our family gatherings are devoid of alcohol, and cursing on account of a religious background. My Grandmother often cried and prayed to God on behalf of my mother and my Uncle’s alcoholism. Still, she never knew just how bad it was for either one of them.

This one Christmas, my mother drank consistently for 2 weeks. The day before Christmas Eve she passed out on the bedroom floor, and I had to call her sister (my Aunt, of course). My mother was already a member of the AA at this time, and she had tried really hard to straighten herself out. My aunt and I called her sponsor at the AA, and then took her to the hospital where she was admitted to detox. She went kicking and screaming, promising us that she was going to quit – she just needed one more drink and that would be it. Just one more!

She never had that one more drink. Not to this day, and I’m so proud of her. I love her with that Rubicon Heart of mine, and she is the only one to have never broken it. She is the only one to have loved me back with everything that she has to offer, and for that I am grateful. I don’t know where I would have been today without her.

Maybe without her – that time when I contemplated suicide, I would have gone through with it.

So, with this background I have prepared you for that journey. The journey through my love life. I have cried a couple of tears writing this just now. I had promised myself I would be honest with this story, and that I would not shy away from parts that are painful. So again, I crossed the Rubicon and by writing this I have passed the point of no return, and I have committed myself irrevocably to taking this journey and sharing it with you.

Alea iacta est…

The dice is cast.