I love this café, I really do.  I’m an honorable member of this place.

Mike wears kindness like a well-worn coat, and I almost don’t believe him when he tells me he gets into fights when he drinks.  But I do believe those honest brown eyes.   Born in 1947, in Great Falls Montana, Mike’s great great grandfather came from Ireland through Ellis Island.  He was a bartender.

I come from a long line of bartenders, Mike says,  I thought that was gonna be me, I was gonna be a bartender.

But life took a different tack for Mike.  He was three years old when his mother left his father due to a drinking problem, and Mike spent the next few years with aunts in Sunburst, Montana, starting school late--this bothers Mike--I should have started at six.  He doesn’t’ remember these years with fondness:  he was left alone to watch soap operas and smoke Pall Malls while his aunt went to the bars.  He was in second grade.

Eventually Mike reunited with his mother when his stepdad became a grain elevator manager in Montana.  They skipped from place to place.  I never got to be friends with no kids.  This is a wound Mike holds in his trunk along with starting school late.

With resignation, he continues his story, tells me he flunked the third grade.

They kept me back.  My mother always got me tutors, cause I was never the smart kid in school, I was the kid that got the “F’s.”  If I got an “A” on my report card, there’d be an “F” on there somewhere.  And that was it.  My stepfather would beat us with a belt.  

The beatings didn’t happen all the time, Mike tells me--he wants his story to be accurate.  The only time I’d get beatings is a bad grade or I’d walk in the house with muddy shoes.  If I didn’t take my shoes off at the door, then I’d get a fist in the face.

He was twelve or thirteen when he found some beer in the creek at a picnic.  I liked it, he says with an honest grin.  From then on I would drink on the weekend, whenever I could.

And here begins the pattern of his life.  He knew how to work.  His stepfather taught him that, he tells me.   You know I’d get money, and I’d go to the bar, all the time, my first instinct is go to the bar.  I’d get a check and go to the bar and cash my check and spend it there.

But he would always return to his mother in Montana.   

I’d always come back home, for some reason, Mike says wistfully, no matter where I went my mother would send for me.  If I said I needed to come home she’d send me the bus ticket, or send me the money to get the bus ticket.  And there was a few of those times, I might be like in Nebraska, and I’d say I wanna come home, and she’d send the bus ticket and the money--or she sent the money FOR the bus ticket, and I’d spend the money, and end up hitchhiking home anyway.  I needed to go home and get fixed up cause this staying out, and staying in a jail for the night just to get some sleep and then get up and move on the next day didn’t work all the time for me.

The pattern continued.

In 67, 68, I came to Seattle.  I was a 21 year old kid, and I was homeless here, too!  Mike leans his forearms on the table as he says this,  as if he has to wrench the word “homeless” out of himself.  This wound is packed in his trunk, tightly.

Still,  he found work on the Minutemen Missile silos, learned how to pull green chain and planar chain in a sawmill, pulled choker in logging camps.

Those are things I loved doing,  Mike says.  He nods.  Yeah.

But when I was working at the sawmill I was drinking all the time and I was forgetting about the job, and making a fool of myself and wanting to beat everybody up.   And getting beat up.  And going to jail for being drunk in public.  The paddy wagon used to pick me up a lot.  They’re padded in the back, you know.  Ninety times in one year I made the jail in Tacoma, and when I was in jail that year the people from AA used to come in, and I’d get out and I’d go to these meetings.  And I’d say well, maybe, just maybe I might have a problem with alcohol.  I looked at my track record:   I’d get into jail, I’d get in trouble, I’d break into places.  And so when I got out of jail that time I was doing 90 days I thought I’d go to a meeting.  It was up on Market.  The same people that were in the (prison) meeting got a hold of me, they took me around, and I got this job back at the sawmill.  You know everything was going okay, I had five months clean and sober, I was staying at a hotel.  I was doing good, and the boss comes in and says we don’t need you no more.

And I told myself I’m not going to drink today.  I’m not going to drink.  And as I walk into the hotel to go to my room there’s a little bar in that hotel.  I went in there to have a soda, and the soda became a rum and coke, and it started all over again.

Back in Montana, Mike fell in love and married a woman twenty years older than he was, and found a job at a laundry he stayed with for two decades.  During that time he left his first wife, married a  woman twelve years younger than he was.  He chuckles when he tells me this.  He paid her way to Minnesota to see her kids and never saw her again.  The next woman he stayed with from ’87 - ’92 died of alcoholism.

Seattle is in the pattern again.  So in 95 and 96 I got hooked up with some people from my first wife--her kids, her nieces and nephews, and we came back here.  My stepdaughters and her three girls.  I didn’t know at the time that she was putting them on the streets.  Youngest was 12 or 13.  I didn’t know at the time why they hated her so much.  I hadn’t been to Seattle for 30 dang years.  . . we came to Seattle and there again, people selling drugs on the street.  I’m all into this. And I didn’t want to miss out on anything.

But in 2000, Mike says tenderly, I went back to see my mother in Montana.  She was dying.  You know I got to see my mother for the last time, and she was waiting for me to come home.  There’s my son, she said.  And she let me stay at her house.  And she’d NEVER let me stay at her house when I was doing what I was doing, cuz you know I’d steal from my own family.  I really would.  And I seen her that next day in the hospital.  She had already had one leg amputated, and they thought she would need to have the other one amputated.  She said she’d rather die.  And when she’s dying I’m in the bars drinking.  He sighs.

We got to see her take her last breath.  And I really felt that.  She left each one of her children $32,000.  My brothers and my sisters, they did right with the money.  I don’t know what my other brother did, cause he’s like me.   I came to Seattle and blew it all within a couple months.

In 2002 Mike was homeless again.  People on the streets, they told me one day you know what, you need food stamps, you should apply for food stamps.  I told em (DSHS) what they told me to say-- I have an alcohol and drug problem and I need help.  I need a place to stay and I need food stamps.  My address was under the bridge.

I go talk to this dotsa counselor.

“Well you thinking about treatment?”  This guy says.
No, not really.
“Tell you what, you like living outside?”
No I don’t.
“Let’s talk about what goes on in your mind.  Are you working?”
Yeah, I’m working at the millionaire’s club.
“Let’s give treatment a try.  Just give it a try.”

Okay.  I thought this would give me a chance to get some shelter, get some food, gain some weight back.  I been to treatment before.   I had to wait for a bed.   I called every day.  Every day.  I’d be calling, borrowing someone’s phone.  And so I called one day and it was June.  They told me they would have a bed on the 21st, up on Massachusetts, detox, you know.  I said okay.  I took my last drink on the 19th, but on the 20, I couldn’t find a drink that day.  No one would loan me any money.  So that’s my recovery date, June 20, 2002.

Mike went to Cedar Hills Treatment Center for three months.  I said at a meeting one time, you know I’m in denial, I really don’t know if I’m gonna stay sober.  I can’t promise this, cause all the times I promised, I didn’t live up to it.  I wanted to stay sober, but  I didn’t know if I could.

St. Vincent de Paul helped Mike with rent, and after six months he was sleeping under a bridge again, but he didn’t start drinking.  He lived with his niece who was using, but in a few months found a job at Metropolitan Improvement and got into his own apartment.  One of the Recovery Café cofounders told him about the Café and he got involved.

Put myself into service here.  Used to walk into the kitchen and do dishes.  I got to be part of the Transformation Class.  I was one of the first people in this internship program, 2004 or 2005.  We were part of this group that Killian said --we’ll try you guys out.

You’re gonna work with staff, you’re gonna work in the kitchen, you’re gonna do dinner announcements, and we’re doing classes. He is silent as he thinks back.

I love this café, I really do.  I’m an honorable member of this place.  Yeah.  He chuckles.

And honestly, life is good, today, even with my ups and downs.  My niece is getting married in Pasco.  I’d really like to go to that.  I’ll have to wear a suit.

And then, I might go back to Montana.  I have brothers and sisters there.

Some patterns have changed.  But the best ones have stayed.