by Eric Blehm
Says Kenny, “During outreach, Adam really connected with the kids, and he’d use that to impart some wisdom: ‘Stay on the basketball court—stay off the drugs,’ that kind of thing.”
Two weeks into Teen Challenge, Adam sent his parents a letter, which they put on their refrigerator door to read and reread in the months that followed.
Dear Mom and Dad,
We’re having quiet time at 9:30 p.m. I don’t think we have to go to work tomorrow. Everyone is going on pass or something. I think every third Saturday in a month we’re up for an eight-hour pass.
A man graduated tonight. It was a wonderful thing. He spoke for a while then his mom got up and asked to say something. She said, “I am so proud of you.” I got chills that ran all through my body and a tear fell down my cheek. I wiped it away and realized the day that happens to me will absolutely be the greatest day I have ever had. I know it is sad that graduating from a drug rehab is your greatest goal, but it is more than that. It is the first day I will be able to look at you with no shame. It is a new chance at life. It is a new beginning for all my family and friends. It is a day I will be totally living for Christ and not ashamed and thankful. I don’t want to hear you say one time you are proud of me until that day because that day I will be able to respect it. Praise God. Dad, you remember how you always just wanted me to finish one thing I started? Well here it is, not because I can do it, but because God is going to do it for me, for you dad, you mom and for everyone that ever believed in me. Read Luke 15:11 (parable of the lost son). That is how I will come to you and I know that is how y’all will rejoice.
Only 352 days to go.
Lights out and God Bless you. I’m doing fine.
Love, Adam
In August 1997, after nearly eleven months in the program, Adam was granted a special leave—a two-day visit home to attend Manda’s wedding to Jeremy Atkinson, whom she had begun dating in college.
At the ceremony Adam and Shawn escorted Janice into the church and seated her, then together they lit the candles. At the reception Janice was impressed by Adam’s poise when he graciously deflected any focus that came his way from relatives and friends aware of his recovery and sobriety. “Thank you, but this is Manda’s time,” Adam would say. “We’ll talk about it later.” All had been forgiven in the Brown family. “The past is the past,” Larry had told both Shawn and Manda. Shawn agreed but was still wary and cordial at best when he was one on one with his brother.
On the last Saturday in September, Adam celebrated a year of sobriety by returning to Hot Springs for good. The next morning, he stood before his parents and the congregation at Second Baptist Church. Although he had been sharing his testimony publicly for months back in Florida, he was especially nervous to thank the people who had been praying for him since his parents began attending the church.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had such beads of sweat rolling off me before I tell this story to people I know have loved me and prayed for me and been such a determining factor in changing my life,” he began. Adam then told how he got off track in life and ultimately became an addict. “You never know what hopelessness means until you get there, and I got there,” he said through tears.
He talked about how he ended up stealing from his parents, others in his family, and friends so he could buy drugs. Finally, he reached rock bottom with his arrest for eleven felonies.
“I got on my knees in jail, and I accepted Jesus Christ back into my heart, and God has changed my life. It was a little over a year ago that I accepted the Lord back into my life. I went to a program called Teen Challenge, a safe haven away from the world where you can learn the Word of God, and how much God loves you, and how God will never leave you or forsake you. I have true confidence now, not in me, but in the One who lives in me.”
“Amen,” the congregation said.
“My paths are straight now in Jesus Christ. I just praise God and thank you all so much for your prayer. There is a purpose for it all, and I just try and encourage you to remember this, and all of you who prayed for me. What you have done for me was not idle. It changed my life.”
7
Kelley
WHILE ADAM SPIRALED TOWARD DRUG ADDICTION in Hot Springs, a young woman a year and a half younger named Kelley Tippy was living a life somewhat paralleling his, though not as dark or wild.
Born in Georgia and raised in Little Rock, Kelley was an A and B student through high school, a cheerleader who was active in her church, barely drank, and never smoked. She attended the University of Central Arkansas in Conway but dropped out after one semester because she “lacked direction,” she says. She moved to an apartment back in Little Rock, where her life revolved around work and partying, which continued heavily when she and some girlfriends road tripped to Panama City Beach, Florida, for spring break. “You know what?” one of her friends said after a week. “Wouldn’t it be great to move here for the summer—really have some fun?”
That’s just what Kelley did right after school let out, renting an apartment, finding a waitressing job, and diving into a carefree lifestyle that almost always called for a miniskirt or a bikini. She would wait tables in the evening, dance and party the rest of the night away, sleep until afternoon if she slept at all, hang out at the beach, and repeat the process seven days a week. It was so much fun she didn’t want the summer to end. Occasionally she felt a twinge of guilt for not returning to college, but for the most part she was content in the now, with nothing on the horizon but good times.
The thought of home was particularly dreary. Though Kelley’s childhood had been wonderful, everything had changed at age thirteen when her parents began fighting. Kelley’s mother would leave for days and even weeks at a time, and her father would shoulder the responsibility of raising Kelley and her younger brother. Arguments were nearly constant whenever Kelley’s mother returned, and Kelley was no longer relaxed in her own home. Family had become a source of anxiety, not comfort.
Kelley Tippy in Little Rock shortly after returning from Florida.
One Sunday well into September, Kelley woke up in the middle of the day, looked around the dirty apartment her father was helping her rent in Panama City Beach—piles of laundry on the floor and party fliers taped to a fridge holding more alcohol than food—and thought, This isn’t normal. This isn’t right. I’m going nowhere. “I felt pathetic,” she says.
The next week she was out with friends when a fight broke out and a male friend was badly beaten. That jolted her. I don’t hang around people like this, she thought. Where am I? What am I doing here? Only days later another friend, a “very GQ, Mr. Muscle, flashy, super cocky” type, was shot during a drug deal gone bad. Kelley visited him in the hospital, and he was “so scared and humbled,” she says. “I could almost see the innocent boy he used to be before he got all wrapped up in this seedy world.”
Late for work, Kelley hurried home to her apartment to change. As she fumbled through her closet for a pair of matching shoes amidst the disarray, she happened upon her Bible—the one book she’d brought with her from home. She picked it up, brushed off the sand and dust, sat on the bed with it on her lap, and said out loud, “Lord, it’s time for me to get out of here, isn’t it?”
Hurricane Opal slammed into the Florida coast on October 4, 1995, with hundred-mile-an-hour wind gusts and a massive storm surge. That morning Kelley packed up her belongings and joined the evacuating throngs heading west through torrential rain and howling wind on gridlocked highways. She didn’t stop driving until she’d reached Little Rock fifteen hours later.
After moving back in with her father, Kelley mended her relationship with her mother over long talks and reconnected with her spirituality. She began attending Otter Creek Assembly of God. She read her Bible. She searched for direction. “God,” she prayed, “what is my path?”
Kelley took a job as a travel agent in early 1996 and enrolled in college courses at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, but she didn’t finish her classe
s. Her heart just wasn’t in it. Occasionally, she’d go out clubbing with friends but drank little, always volunteered to be the designated driver, and never again watched the sun come up after partying all night.
On October 17, 1997, two years after Kelley returned home, she and her friend Stephanie headed to the hippest nightspot in Little Rock to meet up with Heath Vance, whom Stephanie had gone to college with. Inside the smoky building, where an act reminiscent of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was being performed on the stage, Kelley and Stephanie located Heath Vance standing with several buddies.
Kelley was instantly enamored with one of Heath’s friends, a young man he introduced as Adam. Leaning toward Kelley, Stephanie quietly said, “You can have any of them you want, but stay away from that one. He’s crazy. Stay away from him.”
“Ooh,” said Kelley, “but he’s the one I like.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Stephanie said. “He’s trouble.”
Adam chose that moment to take his shirt off and begin whirling it over his head, hooting at the transvestite act onstage. Who is this guy? wondered Kelley. He’s hilarious. She kept staring at his crooked smile and deep blue eyes, smitten. What she didn’t know was that Adam had been home from Teen Challenge for only three weeks. He had been clean and sober for just over a year. “I still question the wisdom,” says Heath. “What in the world compelled me to bring Adam to a bar in Little Rock a couple of weeks out of drug rehab?”
Likewise, Adam couldn’t take his eyes off Kelley, a tall brunette with a girl-next-door face. Eventually, he walked over and stood near her. “Y’all havin’ a good time?” she asked him.
“Sure am,” said Adam. “I don’t get out much.”
Kelley laughed. Yeah, right, she thought.
They talked for a while, then out of the blue Adam said, “You smell so good, Kelley. What kind of perfume are you wearing?”
Overhearing the question, Stephanie rolled her eyes at what sounded like an obvious pickup line, but Kelley replied, “That’s funny. I have on three types of perfume tonight.”
“Yeah? What are they?”
“Heaven, Pleasures, and Forever.”
Without missing a beat Adam said, “Hmm. That is funny. That’s exactly how I picture us: heaven, pleasures, and forever.”
Adam went home that night with Kelley’s number.
The phone rang the following afternoon at Kelley’s home.
“Hello,” said Adam. “May I speak with Kelley, please?”
“This is Kelley.”
“I thought so! Hey, this is Adam. Adam Brown—we met last night? What are ya doin’?”
“Oh, I just got home.”
“Ah. Where you been?”
Kelley wanted to be honest and say that she’d just returned from teaching Sunday school, but she was nervous. She’d met this guy at a place that was, well, not where you’d expect a God-fearing Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher to be hanging out—and giving out her phone number, no less.
“Well, Adam, I just got home from church.”
There was quiet, then a gigantic sigh of relief. “I am so glad to hear you say that,” Adam said. “I’m a Christian and I go to church too. And that’s super important to my life. Figured I’d get that out in the open right off the bat.”
Kelley had been on a handful of dates with Adam and never experienced an awkward moment of silence or boredom. He was quirky, funny, and silly, but at the same time a perfect gentleman who saw to her every need—from opening the car door to making sure her popcorn had enough salt at the movies. She went to church with him too, and met Janice and Larry.
Then one night they were to meet for dinner at the Waffle House in Benton and Adam didn’t appear. He finally showed up forty minutes late, apologized as he grabbed a menu, and wouldn’t meet her eye. It took Kelley only a minute to clue in.
“Are you on something?” she asked.
“Funny story about that,” he said, looking up at her with disappointed eyes. “I actually am.”
While Kelley made him eat waffles and drink coffee, Adam explained how he had finished a drug treatment program only two months earlier. “This is the first time I’ve done it in over a year. I drove through this part of town on the way here, and I parked in front of this house I used to go to. I got tempted and couldn’t fight it. I went in, smoked some, and now I feel horrible. It will not happen again.”
He was talking so fast and so oddly that Kelley became worried—not for her safety but for his. He was acting “weird, crazy weird,” she remembers. Just what Stephanie had warned her about. When his behavior hadn’t changed after two hours, she made a decision.
From the start, Adam was smitten and comfortably goofy with Kelley.
“You aren’t going home like this,” she said, then drove them to a nearby hotel.
“I’m so sorry,” he said at least a dozen times. In the room he wrote a check to cover its cost but she wouldn’t accept it, so he shoved it in her purse.
Kelley kept Adam talking into early morning, telling him about her parents’ fighting and their recent divorce, and Panama City Beach and how she’d come home and made amends with her mother and thanked her dad for being there for her. Adam choked up when he told her about his own mother and father, how much they loved each other and everything they had done for him, how awesome his older brother was, and what a great friend and supporter his twin sister had always been. He broke down and cried as he admitted he’d already let his family down and now he was doing it again.
“This isn’t you,” Kelley said. “It’s the drug. You have so much more to offer than this, Adam Brown. You know what? I’m going to pray for you.”
“That sounds like I won’t be seeing you again,” he said.
After hugging him for a long time, she wiped his tears and said, “You just have to fight this.”
At four in the morning, she drove them back to the Waffle House, fed Adam breakfast, and dropped him off at home. As she backed out of the driveway, he ran up beside the car and she rolled down the window. “I love you,” he said.
“You know, it’s funny, but I love you too,” she said, all the while thinking, What in the world are you doing, Kelley Tippy?
She prayed for guidance as well as for Adam, but she knew her heart belonged to him and nothing told her to run from the situation. The moment she’d laid eyes on him, she had fallen in love. It simply didn’t matter that he came with baggage. Major baggage.
When Kelley got home, she retrieved Adam’s check from her purse and laughed because it was made out in pencil. Then she sighed heavily as she read the memo line where Adam had written, “I’m very sorry I disappointed you.”
For the next few weeks, Adam was on time for every date, which included taking Kelley’s dog, a chocolate Lab named Sidney, to swim at the lake, attending church, and holding hands on long walks. Says Kelley, “He’d just do sweet little things,” like adjusting her car’s air vents so the heat would blow on her when it was cold. “But the sweetest was how he’d make me feel important. He’d stare at me and I’d catch him, and he’d smile and tell me I was beautiful. He’d tell me over and over again how lucky he was.”
One day she arrived at work to find a rose on her desk, with a note: I love you—and am always thanking God for placing an angel in my heart. Adam. On another day a gigantic box of a dozen Jungle Roses arrived, overnighted from the Amazon. When Kelley chastised Adam for spending that kind of money, he told her, “You deserve the best.”
Then, in early December, Adam stood Kelley up. “It was the second time he’d relapsed,” she says. “And I was thinking, But wait! You’re so sweet and perfect! Why? It’s like two personalities.”
Adam resurfaced two days later, as remorseful and apologetic as before: “a moment of weakness,” he explained. Like he’d done with Ryan Whited nearly two years earlier, he drove Kelley by the crackhouses where she could look for him if he disappeared again.
“But it’s not going to happen
again,” she said to him. A statement, not a question.
He nodded, his head hung low.
It did happen again, the week before Christmas, and Kelley found him in one of the drug houses. He was “dirty, disheveled, and gross,” she says. “He smelled, and I told him, ‘You have so much more to offer than this, and you know it. You are so much better than this.’ ”
The third time it happened, “it was as if he was cheating on me,” she explains. “It almost felt like a girl.”
“I’m getting jealous over this drug because it’s taking my place,” she told him.
“I’m sorry!” Adam pleaded with her. “I don’t want to do it, I really don’t. It calls my name. I just start driving, and then I’m there—and it’s too late.”
The fourth time, Kelley was beside herself. “How can I do this?” she cried to Adam. “How can I stay with you?”
“Please don’t,” he said. “Really. I’m only going to bring you down.”
At the beginning of 1998, Kelley informed Janice and Larry of the relapses and they told her to break up with Adam. “He’s lost, and you don’t need that in your life. We’re going to keep praying for a miracle, but we just don’t know what’s going to happen with Adam. We don’t want him to drag you down with him.”
“But I love him,” Kelley said.
The three of them put their heads together and decided to encourage Adam to return to Teen Challenge for the six-month voluntary cap to the yearlong program, a segment that helps individuals assimilate back into society. They had an intervention dinner with Adam, and he agreed he needed the help. “I don’t want to lose you,” he told Kelley while he packed. He left for Teen Challenge that week.
“I will be here waiting for you when you’re done,” Kelley assured him. “Six months is nothing.”
Adam stayed in Florida less than a month.