“The most intolerable pain is caused by prolonging the keenest pleasure.” -George Bernard Shaw
“My name is Chris, I’m a drug addict and an alcoholic and today I’m feeling…hopeful.”
I don’t know if I’m really feeling hopeful but I say that I am. I say it because I need to say something when the group leader calls on me. It’s required by the treatment center. I say it, because I am too exhausted to go into how I am really feeling. I say it because the truth is, I don’t know how I am feeling. I choose this pre-packaged ‘feeling word’ because it will be written down next to my name and it will look good, like I’m making progress.
This morning’s check-in begins and ends with a prayer. I don’t pray, but I say the words. I’m not sure why I even bother saying them, they don’t mean much to me. We’ve all heard the saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” and I can see why that is, but I still don’t believe. It’s tough to be a non-believer in a “God-based program,” but something must be working because I’m still sober and sure, it’s only been a couple months but that is the longest I’ve ever been clean in my adult life. So, I “keep coming back,” as these people always say. I join in on the prayer because I don’t lose anything in saying it. I join them in the prayer because it feels nice to stand in a circle holding hands with all these other sick people. It feels good to have my hand held. It feels good to hold someone’s hand.
A very round, red-faced man with a baseball cap and a fishing hook on the bill begins to talk. The room settles down to listen. Who knew addicts could be so respectful?
“I got sober when I was 45 years old…I was an alcoholic of the hopeless variety for decades. I couldn’t be honest with anyone and I didn’t know how to reach out. I didn’t know how to be honest with myself. I didn’t know how to ask anyone for help. I didn’t know, because at that point, at my worst…I didn’t really believe that help existed.”
It’s a speaker meeting today. The small auditorium on the bottom floor of this renowned Texas rehab is full. It is a speaker meeting today, but the subject is supposed to be meditation, which hopefully means that after the speaker guy cuts his diatribe they will roll out the Yoga mats and play some ethereal music and turn the lights down low. Finally, I might get a moment’s reprieve from all this recovery. I eat, breathe, and shit ‘the program’ as it is basically force-fed to us our every waking moment. Dreams, on the other hand, dreams still belong to my addiction. Every night I have these vivid dreams of using, of preparing my shot and the smell of dope cooking in a spoon…every morning I wake up drenched in cold sweat and shivering to the sound of an orderly knocking on my door saying, “Group time! Come on, let’s get moving! Group time everybody!”
I have been in treatment around two months. Today, I am moving into a sober living house, kind of a halfway house off the highway, in Houston’s Chinatown district. I’m nervous about this next step, as it comes with a greater freedom and therefore greater risk of relapse. I remind myself that’s why I made the choice to live there. I will still be eating and breathing recovery 24/7…I will be living with other dope-fiend alcoholics like myself to whom I will have to be accountable. I might have been able to bullshit my family, friends, and employers…but there’s no pulling one over on other addicts. The old cliche, “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter,” is true in this case.
I just need more time. The rehab is like a bubble…a bright pink cloud, it’s safe and its fun and I’ve made good friends. I have to leave the bubble and on the one hand I’m excited because two months is a long time, but on the other I am scared shitless and I’m just not ready.
This is the first meeting of the day, but it won’t be the last. During this early period of recovery it is suggested we do at least 90 meetings in as many days, but while we are in treatment we attend as many as three 12-step meetings a day. Alcoholics Anonymous around noon, then Narcotics Anonymous (My personal favorite) in the afternoons, and Cocaine Anonymous just before lights out. On the weekends there are Pills Anonymous meetings, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and probably a few other meetings I haven’t even been made aware of yet. There is a whole universe of addictions out there and the funny thing, well not the funny thing but what has come to fascinate me, is that the end result of all of them is basically the same. Junky, drunk, or compulsive eater…we’re all here because we are broken. It got so bad, our asses were so thoroughly kicked that we dragged ourselves in through the front doors of the treatment center and here we are fighting to get better, together. I suppose that is what is working for me. I have come to care about this little rehab litter of friends. Their stories are my story. All one universal story: we’re fucked and it was fun for a while but now everything is shit and we just want to get off the carousel.
“When the fuck are they going to bring in the Yoga mats? I thought this was supposed to be a Meditation session?” my buddy Russel sits next to me, his hair sticking up off his head where a pillow only recently enveloped his face. Russel squints his eyes down out our meeting’s schedule, “Yep, it says so right here…meditation.”
Russel is a heroin addict, like me. He is about six years younger than I am, but fond of wearing old-man shirts with nautical themes. Marlins jumping out of water, that kind of thing. His eyes still have dark rings beneath them, but he’s looking better too. Sometimes it’s easier to see the progress in others, and you just hope that they can see the progress in you because the way things feel, it sure is hard to tell yourself you are getting any better. Not with those dreams, and not with those terrible night-sweats always so cold and shivering when you wake up.
“I need a good meditation session today,” Russel says, sipping from a foam cup of coffee, “Because I know I look calm and collected on the outside, but let me tell you pal,” he points to his head and crosses his eyes, “Up here, its loco baby!”
Our counselors, the staff, everyone wants to get us in the swing of things, so when we are discharged we keep up with our program, go to meetings, volunteer, get a sponsor…all that crap. It can all feel a little overwhelming. I hear a pair of people discussing “The Big Book” a few rows behind us. Recovery…it’s always there. I suppose that’s what they are going for, replacing the way drugs and alcohol were always present in our lives by bombarding us with recovery but it is almost creepy some times. Some people call AA a cult, and sure I can see why they would say that, but it is a pretty tolerant group of people who seem to genuinely care about each other and want to help and right now, I can’t afford my usual superiority and over-intellectualization.
So I guess they are alright, not so bad, especially as far as cults go.
Inside my head, I am little more than a whimpering wretch. Everything hurts. I wouldn’t have been able to do this even a year or two ago, but now…I have nowhere else to go, and when I really think about it, nowhere else I would rather be. God, I don’t even know who I am anymore, how can I criticize these jolly ex-drunks for seeming loony after all the shit I’ve done? How dare I be superior after all I’ve been through? I think of my girlfriend Karen. She seems so proud of me. I love the way it makes me feel to hear her say it: “I’m so proud of you.” I love it more than the best shot of dope. Because it’s real and lasting and I worked for it and I can’t say that about much of anything else in my life so I shut up and get myself another coffee.
Rows and rows of chairs are filled with other addicts shifting uneasily as they listen, each just as uncomfortable in their seat as I am in mine. Now the speaker has finished and we’ve moved on to the meditation. He plays a CD-ROM about ‘letting go of negativity.’ The voice playing over the loudspeakers is a young Australian man, going on now about heightened awareness of the heart (Which sounds like ‘harr’ when he says it). I stand up and walk to the back of the room. I let the coffee machine piss more black liquid into my cup. I need a shave. My eyes won’t stay open no matter how much coffee I pour into myself. The Australian voice just keeps on going…I wonder, will we even get to use the Yoga mats today? I just want to lay down for a little bit…just a few more minutes of sweet repose, and I should be fine. I steal a glance at the clock…ten minutes until cigarette break. It isn’t even worth laying down so I take a sip and the coffee burns my tongue. You can see the dope-fiends beginning to stir. They can instinctively feel the time for their next cigarette. You can take dope away from an addict, but never fully relieve us of our addictive behavior. At least at the point I’m at, I just can’t imagine that being possible. “The Promises” assure us that one day we will be free, but that just seems impossible from where I’m sitting. We are all twitching and squirming, waiting for that next nicotine fix and at this point I doubt anyone is paying attention to the Australian voice anymore.
“Lord, make me a channel of thy peace…” the ruddy faced speaker says, taking off his cap and his head is shiny and bald and bowed in prayer. I bow my head along with him, and I notice that my shoe is untied. I need to learn that prayer, the only ones I have memorized are ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and of course, the ever-popular ‘Serenity Prayer.’ I always liked that line, “Lord, make me a channel of thy peace…” it is utterly meaningless to me spiritually, but it has a poetic quality. The room stands up and everyone locks hands. I join in on the parts of the prayer I do remember because it feels nice to speak out loud, because in so many ways I have been speechless for a long time. I used to talk incessantly…but I never really said anything…nothing that mattered, anyway. Ten more minutes, then a cigarette. Russel gazes at the meetings schedule clutched in his trembling hands. He looks into it for a long time, as if somehow he could discern our nebulous future there.
Outside, by the “Serenity Pond” we addicts gather for a smoke in a little gazebo famous for “war stories.” Our counselors tell us to avoid the gazebo. We are constantly reminded not to take part in war stories, but what the hell else is there really to talk about? We’re all thinking the same thing, we might as well speak our minds. It’s not like hearing about the ‘bad old days’ is going to make me scale the fence and run to the nearest corner to score. Besides, Doug is talking and Doug is always fun to listen to. He’s a fentanyl addict who used to smoke the gel from inside the patches on aluminum foil. He got popped selling fenced goods and after a stint in County the courts finally gave him probation and sent him here to dry out. Of course, he’d already gone through the hell of detox inside his cell. I think that’s why we became friends. All these other fiends got cushy beds and nurses to look over them while they kicked. They were given controlled doses of subutex and valuum to help with delirium tremens and withdrawal symptoms, and most of them still complained the whole time. Doug and I were given a dog-blanket and a steel cot. We shivered and sweat, kicked, begged, through the two weeks of hell it took for the poison to leak out our pores. Doug still felt half-dead when the judge said “rehab,” as if he were doing him some great favor. “Gee, thanks your honor.” But the truth is, he had only managed to get over the physical symptoms. I understood how he felt. You could get through the physical dependence but still remain a dope fiend through and through. We were still sick and all we wanted was to go get high again the moment we were released. And as for me, I sure would have, but that judge pulled a fast one and I was basically transported from jail to the rehab with little to no time in-between. Doug, on the other hand looked like an old grey skeleton when they first wheeled him in. He only had 24 hours between his release from county and his intake at the rehab, but he managed to go out and get tits-up in that short span of time anyway.
Two months into treatment and it is beginning to dawn on both Doug and I that we might just not be able to handle all this on our own. Now his eyes are sparkling once again. He chain smokes and drinks coffee with me in the mornings before “Goal’s Group,” and we talk about jail, which is a recent memory in both our minds.
“Can you believe some of these little sissies complaining about the cafeteria here?” Doug said to me that morning.
“They should eat that county slop, see if they think the chicken here is still ‘too dry’ after a couple months of stomaching that!” he says with a chuckle.
“Did y’all get Johnny Sacks while you were in there?” I asked him. Johnny sacks were like, school-lunch type brown paper bags with a sandwich, an orange, and a little carton of milk. They were only distributed to prisoners on special occasions.
“Only if we were on lock-down or something, or if the kitchen fucked up. So, only once or twice…never thought a turkey sandwich could taste so damn good.”
“We got peanut butter and jelly once in our Johnny sacks…well, maybe not jelly, but it was delicious. And real milk, in a little carton. Only taste of milk I had in four months, all the rest was that powdered shit…”
I say. The smoking pit is hopping. The sound of laughter might trick you into forgetting where you are, for a moment anyway. Everyone seems to have snapped awake now, the tedium of that meditation group dissolving in the Houston summer sun. I see Suzie hopping over to Jimbo and leaping on his back, he runs with her bouncing there like some tiny blonde lamprey attached to his body. “Is everyone fucking someone but me? What the hell, how do I get laid in here?” Russel asks.
The two of us light up and walk to the gazebo, and there’s a little gathering of dope fiends and drunks all sitting around Doug, with him perched dead-center like junky Jesus in some maligned version of the last supper. “I remember going to buy crack once,” he’s saying between puffs on his Pall Mall cigarette. “I get there and there’s this guy I’ve never seen before sitting on the couch. He’s all tatted up, covered in penitentiary ink. You know you can always tell a prison tattoo by its cloudy kind of faded color. And this guy, he’s just sitting there all thwacked-out and he’s got a fucking gun in his hand. My first impulse is to like, run you know? But I couldn’t find any junk that day and I was coming off the opiates hard and the only one of my guys who picked up his phone was my crack guy so I went into the hood to score. I wasn’t going to leave empty handed so I ask this crazy looking dude, ‘Hey, is Kenny here?’ and this hombre looks up at me all scared like he didn’t even know I was standing there until I spoke up. ‘What!? Who!? Fucking…WHO are you looking for, motherfucker!?’ he says and like holds the gun up but not exactly pointed at me but shit, he’s so fucking cracked out I really thought he was going to just start shooting. Then Kenny comes out of the bathroom, adjusting his pants, I guess he was taking a shit. ‘Calm down Joe,’ Kenny says to the jailhouse guy, and then to me he adds, ‘that’s my cousin Joe. He just got out. He’s been locked up 12 years and he finally made parole. He hasn’t had a taste in a while so it’s just getting to his head. Don’t mind him. How much you want?’ And now I’m shaking you know, and I’m just wishing I had waited for my pill-guy or the other dope-man and I’m thinking, I don’t even really like crack what the hell am I doing here?”
All around the gazebo are nodding heads, plumes of white smoke rising out of reddened nostrils and from between dry lips. We all know. We’ve all been in fucked situations like that. And most of the time, we didn’t really like the shit we went through all that hell to get either. We just did it, because we had to. Or, we thought we had to at the time.
“So Kenny gets the money from me and walks into his room, and I’m left with crazy prison Joe again. And now he’s got the gun pointed to his temple kind of rubbing it against his head and these ridiculous beads of sweat just pouring out and dripping off his face. ‘Man, I’m such a piece of shit! My life’s so fucked! I should just end it all right fucking now!’ he screams and I’m thinking, holy hell what is about to happen here! I’m trying not to look at the guy but I’m thinking, should I say something? What the hell do I say? Should I say, oh no man, life is not so bad…you can do all those things you dreamed of doing in prison! You can fall in love! You can get a job, a car, whatever you want! Everything is possible! It’s all fucking rainbows and unicorns out here, buddy! Or at least, please wait till I’m gone to blow your brains out…but I don’t say anything. Well, actually, I remember saying ‘Kenny…what the fuck is going on here!? I think your cousin needs you!’ and Kenny comes out with the stuff and he’s got a little pipe and some brillo in his hand which means he wants to hang out and smoke which I know I shouldn’t do but I also know I am going to stay if he asks. He never lets me smoke my own stuff, the stuff I just bought, so if I stay around with Kenny and crazy-ass Joe, that means I get a couple rocks on the house. Hell, I might get shot in the face or have to watch a guy commit suicide, but if I get some free dope out of it I’m game, you know?” Another volley of knowing smiles crackles over our faces. Of course we know. “So, anyway Kenny just sort of glances over at Joe and says, ‘He’s fine, he always gets like that after smoking. He ain’t gonna do nothing. Want to get high?’ and of course, I did, so we smoke for a little bit and as soon as Joe hears that rock crackling he puts down the gun and scoots over nearer to us. ‘When’s Bridgett bringing Combo by?’ Joe says, and now I’m thinking, Christ who in the hell is Combo? What new flavor of freak is about to walk into this dopehouse and terrify me further?”
Doug stamps out his cigarette and doubles over with a harrowing cough. The years have not been kind to Doug. They haven’t been kind to any of us really. Maybe some of the younger addicts might be alright, if they quit right now but we all know they won’t. We didn’t. And all of us, well, we’re only here because somehow or another we have been forced into this. Either by the courts, or some survival kick that finally jump-started after years of inactivity. We know that we just can’t keep on going the way we have been. The party’s over.
Doug lets out a long sigh and lights his next cigarette, as if that phlegmy cough were just some bad dream. “Well, as it turns out, Combo was Joe’s dog. One of the first things he did when he was released and back in the hood was buy a pit-bull that some other crackheads had trained as a fighting dog by feeding the thing food mixed up with gunpowder and a little meth. God knows what else they do to those dogs, but Joe was going to fight it in the backyard with some other dog that evening. They invited me to stay for the big event and although every fiber of my being was disgusted by dog-fights I was flying so high at that point I said ‘yes’ before I could even think about it. So, cut to about five hours later of pretty much continuous crack-smoking. The backyard is full of all these thugs screaming as the two gladiatorial canines wage bloody hell on each other. The guys are all bug-eyed and sweating, clutching wads of money in their fists and screaming at these two…these two huge fucking dogs just tearing each other to shreds. Combo won the fight, and Joe was so proud that I guess he decided not to kill himself for another day. That dog was a mess…at least he was still on his feet. The other dog looked like a wet towel as his owner carried him away, cursing under his breath. I remember the smell. The smell of sweat, crack, and dog’s blood…it never left me. It probably never will.”
One of the counselors comes out and I can tell by the way she’s waving her arms at us that smoke break is over and we’re due for another group. Doug’s story left a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t know if those old sensations will ever leave us. I don’t know. But I hope, for our sake, that they do. We don’t stand much of a chance when the stink of the past is still lingering…
This is going to be a long, drawn-out war, not a couple of skirmishes followed by an armistice. We must gird ourselves and sail forth to defeat all manner of dragons and beasts. We will pull at our hair as we clash against maddening legal systems and surreal bureaucracies that are so baffling that our encounters with them will feel like something right out of Kafka. We will choke down cravings and impulses to destroy ourselves that are generated in the recesses of our own drug-addled brains. We will, like Atlas, balance a world’s worth of weight on our backs. But we will survive, and every moment that we do, we heal just a little bit more.
One day, we are told, we will wake up and be glad we were in this fight. Honored that we had the guts to fight it, and better off for having done so.
