By 1998, I was at the end of my tether with Steve. I had given him love and money (even though he didn’t even have a bank account) and a job, I’d bought him clothes and hired a personal trainer to stop him going to seed. I did his laundry and fed him. I put a roof over his head. I gave him thousands of dollars. I got him off the hook when he bashed people. I didn’t realise that material things were not going to cut it. He was an alcoholic and he needed professional help to beat his addiction. I was always one who had no trouble putting down my glass and going home when I felt I’d had enough to drink. With Steve, as he was fond of saying, one drink was too many and too many were never enough. He was the victim of a disease and I couldn’t, at that time, get that fact through my head. It was like saying to someone with cancer, ‘Come on, snap out of it, get over your cancer.’ As if cancer sufferers – or alcoholics – have a choice.
Steve threw everything I gave him back in my face. His drinking was out of control. He seemed intent on killing himself. Not a week went by when I didn’t hear from a friend of some new drunken event. A fight, a car smash, unpaid loans, good friends let down. There were whispers of drugs.
Steve’s behaviour was giving a whole bunch of his friends, a lot of whom were old buddies from Woolloomooloo, the opportunity to ring me and gloat about his various crimes and misdemeanours. ‘Guess what Stevie’s done now …’ they’d say with undisguised glee. Some people were genuinely concerned for his welfare; a lot were not. They were revelling in somebody being in worse shape than themselves – the same ones who no matter what Steve achieved in rugby league and boxing and the law always tried to pull him down to their level. It gave them a thrill to be able to call me at work and give me the latest instalment about my brother. They were not only dragging Steve into the muck, they were dragging me down, too, and revealing something about themselves into the bargain.
Every time my phone rang I shivered with fear, sure it would be someone with another tale of something terrible Steve had done.
I owned three apartments in a block in Edgecliff Road, Woollahra, and I was letting Steve stay in one. There was a call from a resident of the block: ‘James, your brother is throwing things out of the window and making loud noise all night. He’s always drunk and aggressive. There are violent arguments going on there. This used to be a peaceful place until he moved in.’ I evicted Steve and sold all three apartments.
One day I answered the phone and recognised the voice of a good friend on the line. ‘Mate, you’d better sit down because I’ve got some bad news.’
My immediate thought was, ‘Steve’s dead.’ I’d been expecting such a call for a long time. But I said to the caller, ‘Mate, I’m not going to sit down. You tell me what you’ve got to tell me.’
In fact, Steve wasn’t dead. My mate Alan Ferguson was. Alan, the kid whose rugby league skills had blown me away, who’d stuck up for me when I was being bullied at school, who made my spirits soar every time we were together. In a way, my initial fear was kind of correct. Alan wasn’t a blood brother, but he was a brother. He’d died of a heart attack, brought on by years of drinking.
I went straight around to his home and comforted his wife and their two children and his parents. I tried to do for the Fergusons what John Ireland had done for me when Mum died.
I thought back to the last time I saw Alan, a month or so before his death. We’d both been invited to a friend’s fortieth birthday party, and I turned up late, around ten-thirty. By this time, Alan had had too much to drink. My despair for him and my anger over what Steve was doing to himself boiled up in me. I grabbed Alan by the collar and put my face right in his. ‘Listen, mate, you’re going to fucking die if you don’t stop doing this to yourself. You’ve got a gorgeous wife and two beautiful kids. Wake up!’ I bundled him into my car and drove him to his house. I helped him inside and he assured me he was going to have a shower and go to bed. He did have a shower, but he didn’t go to bed. He returned to the party and continued drinking. I learned he was still at it at seven-thirty the next morning.
I cried for Alan. He was a brave, decent man, a hard worker and a loyal and loving husband and father.
I hated my father for what he did to us while under the influence of alcohol, yet I never got a handle on the disease that had its grip on him. With Steve and Alan, I was getting a crash course in what hard drinking can do. Steve and I were approaching a parting of the ways. I loved him to death, and I loved him in our mother’s memory. I hated what he was doing to himself. I was bewildered and at the end of my patience. I was so angry with him. I was sitting in the PCYC and our friend Johnny Lewis strolled over and gave me a hug and said, ‘How’s your brother?’
I shocked myself with my reply. ‘Johnny, I don’t care how he is … He has treated me like shit for most of my life.’
Johnny said, ‘No, mate, he’s a good bloke … and he’s your brother.’
I’m ashamed of how I reacted to Steve’s problem. Until you’ve suffered from alcoholism, and I was lucky enough not to, you can’t know the desperation for alcohol and how you’ll blow off every loved one and mate to wangle the money to satisfy your habit. And then when you’re under the influence, you have no control over what you do. You punch a mate, drive when drunk, gamble every cent you have, commit a crime. I had spent almost a decade trying to love, help and shame Steve into living a good and constructive life. He wasn’t in the hunt, alcohol made sure of that. He needed treatment for his disease, just as you seek treatment if you have cancer or a cold. I gave my brother everything except what he needed most.
I couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel, like I did, that life was all about hard work, good fun and experiences, love, friendship, and personal and professional satisfaction.
I regretted what I had said to Johnny Lewis about Steve so much, and was so filled with remorse that I tried one more time to pull him out of his downward spiral. After a sleepless night I called his mobile phone. Down the line came a drunken, slurring English voice: ‘Courthouse Hotel.’
‘Who’s this?’ I demanded.
‘I’m a friend of Steve.’
‘Can I talk to him?’
‘Sorry, mate, you can’t. He’s here, but he’s pissed and out cold.’
I wrote my brother a sad and nasty letter about his behaviour. I did not see or hear from Steve for nearly four years.