Recovered

by Robby Gallaty

  Chapter 11

  Get Out of Town

  By the middle of May 2001, my head was spinning. But at least I was conscious of it. Maybe it’s just that I was using my head for the first time in months.

  Between last Thanksgiving and the end of spring, I’d walked a dark, terrible road through the world of addiction. I hadn’t just taken drugs, but I’d sold them. I’d sold myself. I’d hurt my family. And I’d been right on the edge of having a criminal record—or something worse.

  But May had come. In many cultures, the first of May is celebrated as the end of the winter. For us, it meant my grandfather’s birthday, but it also marked the end of the coldest, most unforgiving winter of my life. I was feeling better and thinking about the future for the first time in a good while.

  I truly believed I’d been set free, but that wasn’t completely true. Dr. Hitt had mentioned the need not just for physical recovery but mental renewal. Now I know there’s another component still—the spiritual component. And I still had no spiritual understanding of who I was or what my life should be. There was a deeper, even more serious addiction I still needed to break—a sin addiction—but at this point in my journey, I was deeply grateful just to be clean. I figured the worst was behind me.

  Paula, my counselor, had helped me realize I had no idea who I was. I had spent my life trying to create an identity—trying different ones on like new clothes. But none of them had worked. I still needed to discover who I was.

  Paula had one other strong recommendation: Get out of town. Start over somewhere else. Most addicts are tempted by one of three things: people, places, or things. I was tempted by all of them.

  I wasn’t sure what to think about the idea of leaving town. Why was everybody always trying to make me leave New Orleans? Rodney and Paula, for very different reasons, believed I needed new places, new faces. I think Paula understood how much of a chameleon I was, changing my colors to match the environment. I’d lived with Christians and gotten into a Christian band. I’d hung out in bars and become a DJ. I needed to be in the proper environment for healing.

  She said, “Your enablers are all there in New Orleans. It will be far too easy to fall back into old patterns. It’s like an alcoholic living upstairs from a bar.”

  “Yeah, I know. They’re already calling me.”

  “Robby, what does the side view mirror on your car say? Ever read that little warning?”

  “I think it says, ‘Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.’”

  “That’s the one. Good advice. You need to put some distance between you and what’s in your mirror. Because they’re going to follow you. That’s why you need to move. You can come back home in the future, but find a safe, quiet place for the present.”

  The only place I could think of was Mobile, Alabama, where my sister was attending college. Who better to keep an eye on me? And Lori said, to me and to our parents, “There are no drugs in Mobile. I haven’t heard of anyone doing them. This place just doesn’t have a lot of crime. You can move in with me on campus, then find a job somewhere around town.”

  I had no better ideas, so I packed the few things I needed and moved to Mobile for the summer of 2001. I slept on an air mattress on the floor of Lori’s one-bedroom dorm room, on the South Alabama campus.

  Mobile is a nice town with a lot of charm. It’s on the Gulf, just like New Orleans, but the resemblance ends there. Nothing like Bourbon Street is to be found.

  The first night I was in town, we unpacked my stuff and decided to go out and get a bite to eat. We walked into TGI Friday’s to watch the NBA playoffs and took a seat at the bar. I wasn’t about to order a drink; my instructions were to stay away from cigarettes and alcohol, because they were triggers for the old patterns I was leaving behind. Addicts often believe they can handle it, but stimulants like those provide a small spike to the nervous system, just enough to leave us wanting more. You don’t want to awaken the beast.

  I focused on the game on TV and chatted with the bartender. He seemed like a nice guy. I told him I was new in the area and looking for work. Toward the end of our meal, the bartender leaned across the bar and said, “I’m about to be on break. I’m gonna go smoke a joint. Want to come?”

  “Um, I’ll pass, but thanks.”

  I looked over at Lori, whose eyes were as wide as the plate in front of her. I worried she might start screaming at the guy, but he had walked away.

  When we got to the car, I kidded her. “So, like you said, no drugs in Mobile, huh?”

  “I think you’re actually a magnet for drugs,” she said. “You must be. I’ve been here three years, and nothing like that has ever happened to me. Nothing like that.”

  It was pretty strange. Was some invitation written on my forehead in ink visible only to other users, or what?

  No, but later I learned that things are happening in the spiritual world, every moment of our lives. It’s all on a frequency our senses don’t pick up, but the Bible describes it clearly: spiritual warfare. As a nonbeliever, I had no clue about any of that. I did know that over the last few months, there had been times when I had somehow dodged disaster, against all odds. Other times, I’d been tugged toward the darkness by circumstances I dismissed as random. We all live on the front lines of a life-or-death conflict between good and evil. We’re soldiers at war, all the while believing we’re civilians. Some are cognizant of this battle. Most are not.

  As we drove home, I talked with Lori about my future. I had to look for a job, and the pickings would be slim in Mobile. Most of my recent experiences were out of the question, including DJing in nightclubs—did this town even have any?

  What Mobile did have was a few gyms, and it seemed it would be that, sell cars, or repair them. I ended up getting hired by Powerhouse Gym. With my size, of course, I was a pretty decent billboard for workouts, even being more than a little out of shape as I was by this time. But the manager at Powerhouse saw that I had good people skills, and he made me a sales consultant—the guy with the clipboard who takes you into the office and sells you on a membership. And of course I could work out for free. It wasn’t a bad gig.

  For several months, I lived quietly, staying busy, greeting people at the gym, restoring my own body, coming home, staying clean. Sometimes I’d shift my body on that hard floor, lying on an air mattress, and think about recent days, when I’d had the nice apartment uptown, the finest clothing, and everybody knew my name. I was the hit of the club scene. Now here I was, hustling memberships at the workout joint, living on the floor of a one-bedroom dorm room. Life has a way of humiliating you. Back at square one, once again, but at least I was in the game. I couldn’t say the same for Rodney and a few other friends. Eight passed away from drug- or alcohol-related deaths. Six went to jail.

  The summer passed, September began, and I remember one morning especially. It was the eleventh of the month. I drove in early, opened the gym for the morning shift, and greeted some of the regulars. We turned on the TV sets in front of the treadmills and bikes. The morning programs were interrupted with a report from New York City about a plane flying into a building—just awful. The World Trade Center. We turned up the volume and watched. I climbed on a treadmill and stared at the screen with everyone else as it happened again.

  That second plane and second crash, of course, was the gut-punch to every American—the affirmation that we were actually under attack. No one in the gym spoke. You could just hear the whir of the machines, as people ran on the treadmills, pedaled their bikes, or worked the elliptical trainers.

  A terrible day—one that turned life upside down in Mobile and everywhere else. What a reminder that there are bigger things going on in this world than my issues. Was war on the horizon? Could there be more attacks? For the first time in my memory, nobody knew what lay in our immediate future.

  More and more I focused on the weight room, my latest all-out,
ninety-to-nothing pursuit. When I worked out, I got into a zone. My past didn’t exist. My body had the best, healthiest stimulation. Sweat was my new drug. There was nothing but the pure effort and exertion of getting stronger and fitter. The worst time of my life had come out of that accident and the injury to my back. The cure to the pain turned out to be worse than the disease. Now I was going to heal my aching back the right way—by exercising it.

  I made friends with a guy who was a bodybuilder. “Listen, big guy,” he said. “How’d you like to train with me? I can move you to the next level, lifting heavy. I could make you the powerhouse of Powerhouse Gym.”

  “Sounds good to me. Let’s do it.”

  Bodybuilders focus on three exercises: the squat, the bench press, and the dead lift. The coach or trainer motivates, assists, checks your technique, and hopefully keeps you from killing yourself. There are plenty of other, more multifaceted forms of weight training, but muscle building is simple: put as many pounds into the air as you can.

  One day in December, I was at the squat rack. In the squat, the barbell is below your traps and across your upper back. The movement is to get under the bar and push up. It trains most of the major muscle groups in the body, from the back, down to the hips, abdominals, and thighs. It’s high reward, but like all weight training, high risk. I tweaked my back, and I felt it immediately, easing the weights down and groaning.

  After the Mustang accident, which had hurt my back so badly, I’d now spent months building it back up, only to blow it out on one bad lift. I was beyond discouraged.

  I talked with Lori about it. “I don’t know any doctors here,” I said. “The ones I know, in New Orleans, have got to be better than here.”

  “And they’ll give you pain meds.”

  “Well, they may, but I won’t take anything unless I have to. Then I’ll just sell them. Don’t you think I’ve learned my lesson by now? I’m not getting hooked on that stuff again.”

  She gave me a doubtful look. “Are you going to talk with Paula about this? What do you think she’ll say?”

  I dodged that one. “No need for this to be a big deal. I’ll just go for a checkup. We’ll see what happens. Like I said, I’ll sell the pills.”

  “To all your old buddies,” Lori said. “Just great.” She pulled out a cigarette. When she was nervous, she smoked. “If you get back into that life, Robby, I’ll go ahead and kill you myself, get it over with.”

  This was the addiction talking, of course. No matter how clean you get, the beast is still somewhere inside you, clawing to get out. It speaks through your bravado. It tells you, hey, you’ve got this. You’re indestructible. You can dip your toe in the water and pull it right back out, man.

  And of course, none of that is true.

  I really believed I wasn’t going to “start back.” But it doesn’t work that way; you never “start back”; you pick up where you left off. There’s a huge difference. Picking up where you left off isn’t gradual. You take the same dosage of drugs that you were taking before you got clean. You don’t ease your way back into it. You suddenly find you’re in completely over your head, right where you were drowning the last time. Just as helpless.

  With substance abuse, there’s no “dipping a toe in the water.” That metaphor doesn’t apply. If you’re in at all, you’re in deep.

  I didn’t know any of that, somehow. I headed to the doctor, whom I hadn’t seen in eight months. He did the X-rays, checked out my back, and of course, sent me home with Oxycontin, Valium, Percocet, and Soma. I went to the pharmacy, filled my prescription, and stared for a moment at the innocuous little pill container. An old, familiar friend.

  I had every intention of keeping the pills just in case, then selling them. But then I thought, I might as well take one. Just one. See how I do.

  Which is always how it starts. Toe in the water, then you’re drowning.

  I took the pill, closed my eyes, and the effects slowly began to set in—wonderful and terrible. There was the surge I’d secretly craved for months. I’d forgotten how good it felt. I think I knew, whether I admitted to myself or not, that there was no turning back.

  Nor did my back improve. It only got worse. In March 2002, I was scheduled for discectomy surgery on L5-S1 in my lower back, to shave away the part of the disk causing the pain. This diagnosis had a dramatic effect on my still pending legal complaint. Facing surgery, and all those months of pain—I had quite the case now: personal injury, pain, and suffering, with all the evidence on my side.

  The lawyer advised me to go ahead with the surgery. My case had moved from a small claim to a $300,000 lawsuit. “Robby, the company is going to pay for your surgery, rehab, and some compensation for everything they’ve put you through.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I figured my days of sleeping on the floor were over. If I was careful with that money, after my surgery, I’d have a head start on a brand-new life. I’d have to wait for the company to come up with a settlement, but in the meantime, I would receive $3,000 advance checks monthly.

  The first check arrived just before I went into the hospital, and of course my addiction reared its ugly head immediately. I blew the whole thing on drugs. I told myself I needed relief from the pain, but it was all about the addiction. I realized it, but I didn’t have much time to think about it when the surgery happened—the operation was like having a ton of bricks dumped on me.

  After I came out, I couldn’t feel my legs at first, so I couldn’t walk. I had to wear a body brace and do lots of painful therapy. I began supplementing my drugs with hard liquor, which I could find in the house; I was back with my parents, sleeping in a rollaway bed in their living room. I was told to stay put, rather than going to the doctor for personal therapy.

  I don’t like lying around, particularly when I’m in pain. My spirits were pretty low, but some of my old friends, my partying buddies, were there to cheer me up. They were really glad to have me back in town.

  I gave my friend Elliot a call. He said, “Robby! Hear you’re back in the game again.”

  “Not completely. I’m laid up after a back operation, trying to get on my feet.”

  “So I hear. You’ll be needing some party time to get your mind off things . . .”

  “Yes, I will. And I’ve got a little money. Or I’m about to have some. That’s why I need your help.”

  “Oh, yeah! I’m on it.”

  “My next check is due—three-K. You think you could go grab it for me?”

  “I’m your guy.” I could imagine him all but drooling over the thought of all that money for drugs. I told him where to go, but he called me back and told me the lawyer wouldn’t release the check to just anyone. I had to sign for it. I told him to come pick me up, we’d get the check, and then we could stop off at The Pimp’s place and stock up.

  That’s how he was known: The Pimp. He lived in the heart of New Orleans, and he was very careful about his business associates. He had to know you pretty well to build some trust, then he would supply cocaine and heroin, or “boy and girl,” as we called it on the streets. The coke came in plastic bags. The heroin in tin foil, rolled into tiny squares.

  Elliot helped me into his grandfather’s single cab S10 pickup truck, body brace and all. It wasn’t comfortable, but relief was a cashed check away. We drove past Canal Street to my lawyer’s office, and I picked up my check. I cashed it at the Regions Bank around the corner as quickly as possible, then we paged the Pimp to let him know we were set. He met us on a side street. Elliot, as he always did, jumped out of the truck. Five minutes later, we were cruising back home with an eight ball of coke and two hundred dollars’ worth of heroin foils. I figured if it was up to me, I’d feel no pain during my recovery. And with my current income, it would be up to me for the foreseeable future.

  This became my ritual once a month, when I’d snort my way through three thousand dollars. We
wouldn’t even wait until we arrived somewhere—we’d start the party right there in the truck, dumping out the powder on CD cases, cutting lines of coke with a credit card before snorting.

  We headed home down Canal Street toward St. Claude Avenue. As we sat at a traffic light, I looked out the window at a police station on Rampart Avenue as we passed it on our way back to Chalmette. Elliot was driving his grandfather’s truck, while my bulky frame, still in the brace, was stuffed into the passenger side, and I was holding four hundred dollars’ worth of drugs, ready for consumption. Right behind us, a car lit up like a Christmas tree: unmarked squad car.

  “Where in the world did he come from?” I blurted out.

  “No idea,” said Elliot.

  We pulled immediately over to the curb. I intended to stuff the baggies into my sock, but two officers yanked open our doors and ripped us out of the truck before Elliot could put the vehicle in park. At the very last second, as my door was flung open, I tossed the drugs under my seat.

  The officer threw me against the side of the vehicle, body brace and all. As I was held there, his companion began searching the vehicle. He looked under the driver’s seat, he went through the compartments in the door, and he checked in the glove compartment. Elliot and I were thinking, Here it is—Possession with Intent to Distribute.

  What would my sentence look like? I had a clean record and came from a good family, but I’d still be looking at several years. I could cut the sentence down by flipping on some of our suppliers, of course. And never live in New Orleans again. I thought about my parents. They believed I was at home laid up in bed right now.

  Suddenly, without more than a quick thought, I lifted my shirt and showed where I’d had surgery. “Please don’t hurt me,” I shouted. “I’ve just had surgery, I’m in the midst of a lawsuit, and my friend here is taking me home.”

  The officer walked up to me, looked me over carefully, nodded, and said, “You guys can go.”

  What? It worked?

  We nodded, climbed back into the truck, and watched the unmarked car pull around us and drive away. I took a deep breath, but neither of us could speak for a few minutes. We were trembling. I looked at my feet and saw the drugs poking out beneath the seat, in plain sight. How could an experienced officer miss them?