Alcohol still a constant companion

CHICAGO —  Bill Hetland can’t escape the effects of alcohol, though he has been sober 27 years.

His job takes him into an Illinois courtroom, where he provides a judge with evaluations of people caught drinking and driving. Some arrive smelling of booze, while others sob as they apologize for a first-time offense.

At night, Hetland returns home to care for his life partner, who was paralyzed in a 2001 drunken-driving accident.

Hetland tries to make sense of it by reaching for a recovering alcoholic’s creed:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

“Sometimes I am screaming the Serenity Prayer while driving,” says Hetland, who lets off steam in his 2004 Ford Taurus. “Sometimes the stuff seems unrelenting.”

Hetland, 63, is a longtime spokesman and court liaison for Nicasa, formerly called the Northern Illinois Council on Alcoholism and Substance Abuse. His frank, assuring presence inspires others.

Few would guess the story behind the man who honed his self-deprecating sense of humor over years of personal tragedy.

On one recent day in court, Hetland sat next to Judge Charles Johnson, shuffling through DUI evaluation papers that rank the defendants by their level of risk to the community. Despite the seriousness of the crimes, the proceedings were lightened by the good humor of Hetland and the judge.

Within 15 minutes, Johnson had seen half a dozen defendants, including a man who was operating a boat at 3 a.m. under the influence, a woman who bowed her head as she pleaded guilty to driving drunk and a man scheduled to enter a residential treatment center.

More than 4,000 people are arrested in Lake County, just north of Chicago, annually for driving while intoxicated, and Hetland said having a sense of humor was invaluable amid such misery.

He recalled a defendant named Johnny Walker, and how one attorney muttered under his breath, “I bet his lawyer is Jack Daniel.”

Hetland considers himself fortunate when he thinks about his own drinking days.

“I always rationalized that I couldn’t be an alcoholic because I didn’t get sick,” said Hetland, who was a small-town newspaper editor when he checked himself into treatment on April Fool’s Day 1981. “I didn’t get physically violent. I didn’t miss work.”

He did have blackouts.

One day, he had a dim memory of standing in front of a department store window late the night before. Then he read a newspaper account in which a woman said she saw a man knocking out a department store’s glass window.

Cold dread settled in. He believed he was that man.

But it wasn’t until Hetland wrote a series of articles about alcoholism for the Mesabi Daily News in Virginia, Minn., that he recognized that he had the disease. Shortly afterward, he asked friends to drive him to an addiction center.

Three newspaper jobs later, he left the business to join Nicasa.

Hetland’s personal experience with alcohol helps him relate to clients, said Judy Fried, the agency’s executive officer. She hired him as communications coordinator 18 years ago because of his experience -- he had worked at eight newspapers in six states -- as well as his recovery.

“He’s very passionate about what he does and why he does it,” Fried said. “He enjoys working with the public very much. He loves going out in the community and doing presentations.”

For more than a decade, Hetland relied on his knowledge of alcoholism to help others see the damage they were doing to their lives. Then he experienced the effects of alcohol abuse from a new angle:

In February 2001, his partner, Phillip Anderson, left a bar, drove his Saturn around a corner too fast and hit a tree five miles from the couple’s Kenosha, Wis., home. He broke his neck, paralyzing him from the waist down. His blood alcohol level tested at .23, nearly three times the state’s legal limit.

Since then, Anderson, 52, has suffered a stroke and had multiple surgeries. He takes 62 pills a day and requires around-the-clock care, provided by Hetland at night and a health aide by day.

“It is ironic, to say the least, that [Hetland’s] relationship essentially changed forever due to a drunk-driving accident,” said Kevin Thomsen, a social worker at the Milwaukee VA Medical Center, where Anderson gets outpatient therapy.

Still, Thomsen said, “I’ve never met a more genuinely happy and positive person.”

Hetland and Anderson now share a comfortable wood-frame home that friends have helped renovate to accommodate Anderson’s disabilities. Hetland awakens at 4 a.m. every day, reads three newspapers, works out at the YMCA and returns to help Anderson with his medical needs before he leaves for work.

“I’m a daily routine,” said Anderson, who sleeps in a first-floor sunroom. “It doesn’t stop.”

The fact that Anderson was legally drunk when the wreck occurred no longer matters, Hetland tells his partner.

Longtime friends aren’t surprised by the way Hetland handled the tragedy.

John “Jedwin” Smith, 62, of Atlanta recalled that when the two worked together at a Belvidere, Ill., paper, the publisher wanted to give Hetland a $50 raise, but Hetland declined.

“Bill said, ‘What I’d really like you to do is give me a $20 raise and give the rest to John Smith,’ because he knew I had two daughters,” said Smith, who was earning $150 a week at the time.

Smith said that when most people were trying to get out of duty in Vietnam, Hetland lost weight so that he would be allowed to serve.

Before the stroke three years ago, Anderson could wheel himself down the road to a nearby coffeehouse. Today, he remains largely incapacitated, passing time smoking, watching his “fighting fish” in an aquarium and hanging out with the couple’s dog, Boss.

Household repairs often fall behind, as Anderson was the handier of the two and can no longer fix things.

The couple recalled a time when Anderson was in bed and water dripped on him from a leak overhead. He held up a cup to catch the water while Hetland ran for a mop. All they could do was laugh.

Said Hetland: “When it rains, it pours.”