From the tone of his voice, it’s evident that John doesn’t like to talk about that night. It was twelve years ago and the details are sparse; he had been out drinking, he had done something stupid, his friend burst through his front door telling him to run, but he sat still. Rock bottom was finally here. This game, this way of life, it had gone on too long.
John sat there defeated, refusing to run as blaring red and white sirens shone through the front window of his home. The police dragged him into the back of the cruiser without a fight. It was a complete and total surrender.
Years later he remembers that night, sitting in the back of the squad car, hands locked behind his back. He chuckles.
“Those were the cushiest pair of handcuffs I’d ever felt.”
***
The door of the home opens and out billows a cloud, part tobacco, part sawdust. Behind it stands a skinny man, darkly tanned, his arms colored with tattoos. A cigarette hangs out his mouth, his spiky black hair and lean physique lead him to appear young, maybe early forties at most.
“Hey man, how ya doin’?”, he greets. John reaches out to shake my hand. “Sorry, you’re gonna have to deal with the smoke.”
He leads me back into the foyer where three guys are hammering, sawing and jimmying away at various parts of the infrastructure, the incessant wine of the buzzsaw blaring in the background. Coffee thermoses and empty Dunkin’ Donuts cups are strewn across the window sill, a pack of Marlboros to the side. As John begins to lead me around, a ring comes from the kitchen and he apologizes then dashes off to answer the call.
“The man can’t go five minutes without that thing ringing off,” says one guy as he looks up from the socket he’s installing into the drywall. He’s got a mustache and Marine Corps do- rag. Later, he’s introduced as Bill. After ten years of working for John, the constant bouncing of his boss around has become much more of a routine. John doesn’t like to sit still.
In the other room, John answers the call. “What’s going on dude?” he says.
A pause.
“Quit yelling at your wife!”
A chuckle.
“Good shit!”
Twenty minutes later, there’s a noise at the front door. In walks a man with a paint-stained shirt and cigarette hanging on his lip. It’s Kirk, the guy from the phone. He’s greeted with a sarcastic round of applause from his fellow construction guys. From the opposite end of the foyer, John yells over the rock music blaring through the industrial speaker.
“What’s up fucker!?”
Kirk cracks a half-grin.
“Good morning to you too.” The whole crew busts out laughing. Once again, Bill pulls me aside for a word of advice.
“If you work construction, you’ve got to be able to bust balls.”
***
Originally from Villa Park, John wasn’t given much of a shot at sobriety from a young age. His father was an alcoholic and lifelong member of AA, and according to the National Association for Children of Alcoholics, children raised in alcoholic environments are four times more likely than non-COAs to develop alcoholism.
“I struggled with a lot of stuff from junior high all the way through my twenties,” John recounts. “It was drugs and alcohol. I spent lots of years in and out of jail and treatment centers really, until my early forties. I would clean up every time I got in trouble, but only for a while.”
Through this stretch, John bounced around, doing random construction jobs here and there. Right after high school, his parents sent him out to Wyoming Tech for diesel school, a hands-on program that includes work with oil rigs, power plants, hydraulic pumps and more. But while he may have had a knack for the technical professions, John insists is was more an effort on his parents part to get out of town.
“I screwed up there too,” he says.
Woodworking, however, was something that he could do well at and enjoy. Before high school, John remembers his brother coming home from Vietnam and taking him around the neighborhood, doing small jobs here and there. It led him into carpentry, where he eventually became a union carpenter, still bobbing in and out of addiction. At one point, he worked as a house general for a phone company, designing custom framing for cable installation. In his own words, “I messed that up too.”
But the day the police came, John found the end of the road.
“God works through other people, and those police were my angels,” he said. “For me, it had to do with growing up, I decided I didn’t want to live that way anymore”.
John went off to jail with one goal in mind. It was time to get himself back together.
***
The job John and his guys are currently working on is a single family home in a subdivision of Oak Brook, one of Chicagoland’s western suburbs. It's already been six weeks of demolition and renovation, or as Dom, one of the crew guys would say “six weeks of finding more shit to fix”. The project is a complete overhaul: new wiring, new light fixtures, new heating system, new electrical guts. Some of the guys are even trying to figure out how to reconfigure the Ethernet router so that the homeowner, an avid computer guy, can get a wifi signal that’s not blocked by the brick fireplace in the middle of his living room.
“We ripped out the sconces, we’ve got hot water pipes running through the ceiling,” John explains. “You may have noticed the garage is down. Don’t tell anyone, but that’s because we don’t have a permit.”
Because the home is unlivable while under construction, the owners are renting a place for a couple months. That means one thing: you can smoke indoors. Tucked in the pocket of John’s black shirt is a pack of cigarettes, half empty halfway through a day’s work. If the guys aren’t smoking or stamping out a cigarette butt with their boot toes, then another is being lit, occasionally by the random blowtorch if it's lying around. Even at meals, smoking has become a part of the routine. Over half of AA members across the nation (56.7%) smoke cigarettes, much in part due to the curved effects of alcoholism, and John is no exception. But it’s not just John that is smoking, it’s everybody else as well. With the air, a foggy gray, beams of light shine through the windows of the back porch. On the surface, it may appear like a construction thing, but it’s not. Because John isn’t the only renewed man in the room.
***
In jail, John resolved, this time, would be different. For years he had dipped in and out of AA meetings, staying for longer periods of time before falling off the bandwagon. He now committed to becoming a dedicated member of what the AA guys affectionately dub “the club”.
“I completely changed the people I hung with,” he says. “I surrounded myself 100% with the program and the people within it. Now we’re all doing it, we’ve done the same thing.”
As he began to get back on his feet, he rented a small apartment above a pizza shop in downtown Hinsdale, another western suburb of Chicago. From there he began handing out business cards advertising for small handiwork jobs in the home. For about a year and a half, he worked on odd jobs as he got “mentally and spiritually back together”. But soon the business began to grow.
“At AA, I started grabbing guys that needed something to do,”John says. “Most of them had some sort of construction background already, and we kinda learned the rest.”
There was Kirk, then Kent, then Steve and Bill, then Patrick, the list goes on. Over the years, some have fallen off or moved on, but a single principle remains the same: every single one of them is a recovered alcoholic.
“We’re like our own little church group,” he says laughing. And they do everything together.
They go out, hang with the same group of girls (John isn’t married but has lived with the same woman for years. He says he “tried the whole married thing twice, but it's not for me”), go on service trips together, or go scuba diving, one of John’s favorite pastimes.
“We went to Cozumel last March on a dive trip,” he says. “I’m getting old, but the adrenaline rush is still awesome.”
Together they conquer the world after their struggles, together they understand what it is like to live in recovery today, to live as a family.
***
Tonight is a Tuesday night, so John is going to visit his grandchildren. Dylan, 5, and Kyle, 2, live with their mother just eight blocks down the road from his residence, his childhood home he bought from the estate when his mother passed away last year. Every Tuesday, John leaves work and drives straight to their house to have dinner with the kids. It’s the highlight of his week.
“There are maybe fourteen, fifteen days total in the past three years where I haven’t seen them,” he says, beaming.
Being a grandfather, he explains, is unlike anything else. “It’s the best experience in the whole world. Those kids, they’re like...my life.”
***
Somewhere from another room comes a voice, blared out by the heavy rock and roll music playing from an industrial stereo. Likely Dom, or Bill, yelling that they screwed something up with the electrical breaker or the thrusting pipe.
“You know, you’ve done some dumb shit,” John calls back. And he laughs.
Because he knows he has too, they all have. But it doesn't matter now. As the next AC/DC song comes on through the speakers, John lights another smoke and takes a puff. Now it's off to see how he can help his buddy fix what’s been broken.
