JEH: Good morning, Jim.
JIM: Good morning, Jim.
JEH: Can You tell me your full name?
JIM: James Francis Albanese, A-L-B-A-N-E-S-E.
JEH: How old are you?
JIM: Sixty-three years young.
JEH: How many siblings do you have?
JIM: Let’s see, there’s still three alive.
JEH: How many were there growing up, I mean, how many in total?
JIM: Five.
JEH: Okay and where do you fall in, in the pecking order?
JIM: I’m the third.
JEH: Where were you born?
JIM: Newark, New Jersey.
JEH: Are you a Giant’s fan?
JIM: Actually I’m a Viking’s fan, I’m all messed up.
JEH: That’s fine, we’ll continue.
JIM: All right.
JEH: Tell me about your mom and dad?
JIM: Mom, good woman, hard worker, took care of us. Dad, captain in the mafia, in and out of jail a lot. When he was out, he would spend time with us, but a lot of times we were going to Rahway, or wherever he was, to visit. We were raised with the iron hand. You don’t say anything to anybody about what’s in the family, mafia style. And if you get in a fight, you don’t cry over it, or I’m going to give you a reason to cry, and it wasn’t a slap on the rearend, it was usually a pretty good whooping, belts, you know. It was the way they were brought up, so it was the way they raised us.
JEH: Was this all in New Jersey?
JIM: No, I’ve got to say, probably when I was around twelve, we moved from New Jersey. Mom had a cousin that lived in Cumberland, he was a physician, she wanted to get us out of that environment, her and dad. He was with whomever and she said, “You know what, we’re not living like this, I’m getting out of there.” So, we moved up here when I was around twelve.
JEH: Culture shock?
JIM: Oh, yeah, absolutely, that was in ‘73/’74. And moving up here was like moving into the country, compared to living in the inner city in Newark, New Jersey. I mean, I can remember when Martin Luther Kind was assassinated, there were bodies lying in the gutters, manholes flipped over, people thrown in them, I mean, it was, it was brutal, there was real rioting going on, you know, that was the environment. And if you didn’t stick up for yourself, you better be ready to fight everyday pretty much. Not out of necessity, but out of fear too, because if they saw that you weren’t going to fight, they would be on you constantly.
JEH: Especially being a boy.
JIM: Yeah, exactly, I mean, I was the runt of the litter. Even when we moved up here, just for an example, when I was in the 10th grade, I was all of 5’2”, maybe about 100 lbs. So, growing up that small, everything would that they can, so you had to be tough, you know, I grew some really tough skin out of necessity.
JEH: So, now you’re in Woonsocket at around twelve, thirteen?
JIM: At around twelve, thirteen, yeah. I went to Holy Family for a year, and then I went to the Woonsocket Middle School, and then I went to Woonsocket High School. I would say that when we first moved up here, my sister, we were Irish twins, I was born on the 11th of November, and on the 14th of November she turned 1. She was born with severe brain damage, had to be fed, she really couldn’t function at all, she passed away when we moved up here, and that’s when things kind of fell apart for mom, she started drinking a lot and our life changed a lot.
JEH: Was it at that point that you no longer had contact with your dad?
JIM: Rarely, it was very rare. He would come home once in a blue moon to give her some money, you know, whatever life he was leading down there.
JEH: Was he still in the mob?
JIM: Oh yeah, yeah, until he died.
JEH: Was he a member of one of the five families?
JIM: Yes.
JEH: Okay, I don’t need to know anymore.
JIM: Yeah, and he grew up, he was thrown out when he was twelve or thirteen years old, he lived on the streets. There were family members that were involved in that, they took him in, and that’s what he learned, this is how I survive. We’re a product of our environment, I mean, every generation that you go back.
JEH: So, now what do you do, do you graduate from high school?
JIM: I ended up quitting high school, mom was struggling and even though I was a straight A student, I really didn’t have to read a lot, I wasn’t a big reader, but whatever was taught in the class I absorbed, and once it was in this head it was like, I remembered everything, but I wish I would forget some things.
Also, by that time, I was introduced to alcohol and drugs, so the grades were dropping, I wasn’t going to school a lot, and it was just, it was dwindling away, you know.
JEH: Were you hanging with older kids?
JIM: Not at first, kids I hung around with at school, but as that branched out, I started hanging out with some older guys, yeah, and that was my life. I can remember being sixteen/seventeen, drunk, drugged out, or both, already a black-out drunk. And going into church on a Saturday night, pretty regularly for a while, and asking God, where are you?
I knew about Jesus, we went to a Roman Catholic School for a while, down there, we were in church a lot, and we had a punishing God, but I also knew that salvation came through Jesus. And I’d go to church, saying; I’d go there for the service, and I’d be like, where are you? I knew I was broken, and I knew I had a problem, and I wasn’t hearing an answer, and I finally gave up on that. And from sixteen, it took me another twenty years to get sober, I was thirty-six when I, right before I turned thirty-six, I got sober.
And not knowing the bible the way I know it now, I would read the book, revelation, and that book was telling me that damnation was coming down on my life, and whatever was happening was pretty much because I opened the door to it, and I deserved it. That’s how we were taught, so when I would read that it was like, I just gave up on myself.
JEH: So, what were you doing, you were out of high school, did you have a job, what did you do?
JIM: Mom wouldn’t let me quit school unless I had a job. So, I was working, I was living at home, I was giving her money towards the house, but the rest of it I just floundered it away on partying. I partied, because even before I ever put a drink to my lips, or a drug in my body, I always lived, because where we lived it was fear based, I felt less than, I felt that I was all on my own, and alcohol and drugs took that feeling away for a while, and I fit in. Until there’s a point where the alcohol and the drugs didn’t take that way anymore.
That’s why I think I was in church at sixteen, because it took it away for a short period of time, and then I was like, I need your help, because this isn’t working anymore, and I have nowhere else to turn. And turning to you, but I’m not hearing you, and I’m not feeling you. And it was like, so for those twenty years I just kept on trying to chase that feeling of that I had originally felt when I started drinking and drugging, it took away those empty, nasty feelings that were in my life, it wasn’t doing it anymore, so I drank more and I drugged more hoping to get that, so I was on a run for twenty years trying to get rid of those feelings, and it wasn’t happening.
JEH: So, when did you venture out on your own?
JIM: I would say probably in my mid-twenties I was with a woman. She got pregnant with Ange, and she was born with hydrocephalus. So, there was a new battle in my life, because when she was born her head was so much bigger than her body from the fluid build-up. So, she had a shunt put in her head at three days old. She came home, and it was all doom and gloom that she wasn’t going to walk, she wasn’t going to talk, and I was having flashbacks of, this is my sister, and the guilt was on me, what did I do for this to happen to her.
JEH: What’s in my DNA that caused it?
JIM: Yeah, exactly. But then, she could see and hear, and then she was able to walk. The Lord, my mother by that time had gotten sober and she had so much faith in the Lord, she was a true prayer warrior. She kept on praying, and I gave up on praying, because it’s time to even drink more, look at what I’ve been handed, I’m glad you heard me. And then I wound up getting married, Ange was two when I got married.
JEH: To a different woman?
JIM: No, to Ange’s mother. We were together about eleven years, and in the meantime, I saw the grace of God, coming in by Angela being able to do those things that we were told were not going to happen, you know. I mean, it was like the right side of her body had a stroke, her arm was bent up, and so we did a lot of therapy. I got my life together a little bit, I wasn’t the everyday partier, I would go out on a binge here and there, but I was there a lot more, because I just said, I’m not losing, I’m going to fight, and fight until the end, and I was truly blessed in that area.
But the wife didn’t like that I was still going out here and there. As she was smoking weed all the time, and I was too. I went to AA, I quit drinking, I quit doing drugs, I went to counselling for three years, I invited her to counselling, because it wasn’t just all me, “I have no issues, I have no problems.” I couldn’t be in the house anymore because she was smoking dope, and it was like, I’m trying to stay sober.
And she wouldn’t, and I tried working with her, “I have no problems, it’s all you.” And one day, I packed up and I said, I can’t do this anymore, and I left. And I even told her, go for counselling, I’m leaving the door open. I left the door open for a year, she wouldn’t do anything, and I finally filed for divorce.
JEH: No other children?
JIM: No, just the one, just Ange.
JEH: How old is Ange now?
JIM: Ange will be thirty-eight in April. She’s very happy, it’s very rare that she’s not happy.
JEH: I want to go back to how you got clean, and the struggle that it took.
JIM: I went from this mindset of, of course my mother was in recovery, and she would say, “You really need to go,” and I used to tell her, only weak-willed people go to AA, I can stop anytime I want, I just choose not to. And then she left me alone, and the power of prayer, because she just prayed for me constantly, and one day I just hit my knees and said, I can’t do this anymore and I started going to meetings.
And I would sit there by myself, but I was going, and I was hearing stuff, and I was finding out, you know what, I’m not dealing with this alone, there are a lot people suffering through whatever they went through, what road they had to go down, and I know my road was the worst because I had to live it. And I didn’t want to live like that anymore, and it was just like, you know what, there has to be a better way.
JEH: Alcohol or beer?
JIM: I was a garbage can, whatever you put in front of me. I’ll tell you a story, I used to drink so much Jack Daniels, I had a closet filled with empty bottles, because this was the alcoholic derangement, that one day I’m going to have my own place and I’m going to take all them bottles and put them altogether and make a bar out of them. And when they cleaned the closet out, there were four huge trash bags of empty bottles, and I was just drinking myself to death, and I really didn’t care at the time when I was doing it, because I had no hope, I had no hope. There’s a saying in AA, “One is too many, and a thousand is not enough,” and that’s the way I lived my life. I’d have that first one, and I’d just be on a tear all over again.
JEH: So, now, you got a divorce, and Ange is with you?
JIM: Ange was with me, it was probably about maybe three years after the divorce, because when I divorced her, she wasn’t in the midst of the crack cocaine, and bills were being paid, and there was food in the fridge, and I paid my child support every week, so things were being maintained. It was when the neighbor downstairs that really informed me to what was going on upstairs. When I was finally able to build up enough evidence and support to go in there, that’s when I did it, and that’s when I took her.
JEH: So, what did you do for work, what kind of work?
JIM: I was a painter by trade. Actually, I broke my back when I was twenty-nine, and the pills became more of an issue with the drinking too for the pain. And then I worked myself back into going to work. I was on disability because I really couldn’t do anything. And that was the turning point of my life though, because I turned around and I said, I don’t want to receive a check from the government every month. I’m too young, I’m going to go back to work.
Even though I was still drinking, there was sometimes where I didn’t drink for months or weeks or whatever, because it made me deathly ill, and I was trying to do it without going into a program; I had no support though. And I went back to painting for myself for a while, and Cindy was working at EMC in Hopkinton, Mass, and that had a company called Standard Parking, doing their shuttle service, and they were looking for somebody. I would drive limousines part-time for George Roster, Destiny Limousine.
So, I had done some painting for him, and then he asked me to start driving, and the back was doing good, and she was like, “They’re looking for a driver,” and I went up there and they fell in love with me, and I fell in love with .” So, I was in the corporate world for almost fifteen years. So, it was shortly after I started working there that I had gotten Ange back.
JEH: Things started coming together.
JIM: Everything came together. The hand of God was working in my life even though I knew it, I wasn’t acknowledging it to the point of saying, thank you for all this. In my head, it was like, I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, and this is what I’m reaping.
I had a boss — because I live in Glendale near Spring Lake Beach, and Ange was going to school here, and my ex-wife lived in Woonsocket, she could stay in the school. But now what I had to do is, before I went to work, was bring her down, get her on the bus, go to work, drive back down, and my ex-mother-in-law and my mom would take care of her until I got out of work. What my boss was doing, was saying, “Work through your breaks so you can leave earlier, so you can get paid.”
And I did that for a year and a half. He really liked Ange, because I brought her in work a few times. He saw what I was doing, he was like, you know, “I’m going to help you out.” I did that, and then I got her enrolled in Seven Hills, a day program, and then the van would pick her up and drop her off. And she smart enough go out, lock the door, and get on the van, and then had a key to get back in the house. I mean, most of the time, when she was home before me, she wasn’t at home for long, because of the way I worked my hours, and it just kept on gelling together.
And knowing what I know now, because I’ve been back, between ministry on TV, and then going to church, and then coming to Harvest, it’s probably been close to ten years that I’ve really reunited with the Lord. And I give Him all the praise and all the glory for every step that I took through every dark alley that I was in, and every dark road that I went down, that I’m still here, and it was all because He had a plan for me. And He was working in me, He was in the storm with me from almost twenty-five years of drinking and drugging, and He got me through it, and I came out of the other side, and He kept on feeding me until I opened up my eyes totally, and I said, you know what, this wasn’t me, this was God.
JEH: Was there a moment you realized that God was in everything in your life?
JIM: I would say it was when I was working the steps of AA, and then they had this program called AWOL, an Alcoholic Way of Life. And it was a very structured 12 step program that took close to thirty weeks to do the 12 steps, it’s a little red book. And we would read that literature, and the big book, and the 12 and 12 was all combined together, and it was still God, because they didn’t talk about Jesus in AA, but I knew it was God, it wasn’t a light bulb, it wasn’t, go hug a tree, you know.
And I would talk to people, you need to wake up and realized that it’s God, it’s not a higher power, it’s God. And then as I opened up more to God, knowing Jesus from when I was growing up, there was a couple of years in Catholic School. And I opened up, and I had that feeling of — I know people will think I’m, but in the midst of all that, when I first was partying, I used to love listening to the album and watching the movie, Jesus Christ Superstar. I knew what Jesus, even though it was their opera way of showing it; I knew what Jesus had done; I knew what he did.
And I woke up to Jesus, and I’m going to say, that was probably about twelve or thirteen years ago. Because my mother was dying, my mother was on oxygen for fifteen years, the last year and a half, she was in and out of hospitals and rehab.
JEH: How old was she when she passed away?
JIM: Seventy-one. I got fired from my job up at EMC, and it was not of my doing, and I had talked to my boss. The boss that loved me and let me do everything was totally against me, and coming after me all the time, because I was in an accident there, and I injured my back, and I was out of work for like nine or ten months, and I went back to work, and he thought I was faking it just to get a settlement. And then as the years were going on, and he would see me getting out of the van, “You know, I always thought you were faking it.” He was just fighting against me because he thought I scammed the whole thing, so we were not copacetic, compatible the way we were.
And he called me on a Saturday morning, yelling and screaming at me, and when I went in that Monday, he fired me for no reason. And I told him, I said, that call you made at Norton, he kept on calling, and I let the machine pick up. So, I saved all the messages; I took pictures on my TV screen, where it showed that he called. I said, I’m going to HR, you fired me for no reason. I said, all I want is to be able to collect, the reason that you let me go, there is no reason.
So, I was allowed to collect unemployment, and I just let it go. I knew God was working through me then, instead of being angry and resentful. And mom had started getting really, really sick, and for that year and a half I collected, and for that year and a half I was coming down here, sometimes two or three times a day, and I would sit with her in the rehab or the hospital. We would talk, and it was like she was so upbeat and positive, and it was like, how are you doing this, I don’t get it. I knew about God; I knew about Jesus, but I only had God in my life at that time. And she said, “Because I have Jesus here in my head; I have Jesus in my heart, and I know it’s going to be alright.”
JEH: How do you fight that?
JIM: I was just blown away; I was like, this is what I’ve been missing. I did; I hustled on the streets; I did some things that, you know, would have got me arrested and probably put away for a while. I saw how often my dad was in jail for things, and I just kept on saying, I don’t want to do this anymore because I don’t want to end up like him in and out of jail all the time, and there were some close calls, and the Lord got me through that too. I believe divine intervention; I believe the hand of God was with me; I know he was. I’ve been in the midst of more than one gunfight and I’m still here.
Even growing up in New Jersy, we lived for the first seven years or so in Pennington Court. I was watching Scared Straight on TV one time, and there was this guy in jail for a double murder, and they brought up Pennington Court, and here’s a guy that was in jail for a double murder, and he said, “I wouldn’t have even walked through that project.” Where I was, and where I am today, please, that’s the hand of God, that’s the hand of God.
JEH: Now, I want to get to eventually how you came to Harvest, but I also want to back it up a little; when did you meet Cindy, and how did that all happen?
JIM: I remember Cindy when I was still partying, she used to bartend at a place called the Ice House in Blackstone, and I thought she was really pretty, and I would leave big tips, and she could have cared less. And I said, I’m giving up on this one; I’m just going to go and drink and have fun. And I even tell her now, I remember you used to wear that blouse with the ruffles. She said, “I don’t remember you, but yeah, I had a blouse like that.” She was on her journey too.
So, I go to AA, and I’m sitting there all crouched down at the table, and after the meeting this woman comes up to me, and she knows my mother from the program, and she’s like, “You’re Pat’s son, right?” And I looked up, and I was like, yeah, I am, how are you doing? “I’m doing all right.” And that was it. She was like, “Well, I’m glad you’re here.” And it was her.
So, I started going out with the group to meetings, and we would talk, you know, and we became friends, and I was going through the hard time with the divorce, and everybody else was too busy for me, and she went through a divorce, so she understood, and she was part of the glue that helped keep the pieces together at that time, and I was able to be part of the glue that helped her keep it together. God said, “You’re not ready for this woman back then, but you’re ready for this woman today.”
JEH: Now, when you guys met, did either one of you have a church?
JIM: No, I wasn’t going to church at the time.
JEH: How did you guys get to Harvest?
JIM: This is how we got to Harvest; we were with each other quite a few years, engaged for quite a few years, and we were having that spiritual upheaval, and we were surfing through the TV one day, and Charles Stanley was on. And we started watching him, and then we found Joseph Prince and a few others, and we started watching ministry and the spirit was being awoken big time. Pastor Bacon came to our church, and he did a little presentation on the homeless shelter, and that they were looking for volunteers to go down and spend time with the guys down there, and I was involved with that.
So, I got to know Pastor Bacon a little bit, and then once a month Berean was making meals, and Cindy and I would bring them down to him. And we walked out of Harvest after hearing Pastor Gene’s passion, and the truth being spoken, not what man says, but what the word of God says. And it was like, I think we found a home. So, it’s been an amazing journey since we’ve gone there.
JEH: I don’t have any more questions for you.
JIM: I think we’re good, that was really cool.
JEH: Thanks, Jim.