The Big Fix

by Tracey Helton Mitchell

A hush fell as he said, “Look around the room. To your right and left.” He paused for effect. “Of everyone here, only two of you are going to make it.”

  Under the fluorescent lights, I felt people all around me lose confidence. Each of us was wondering, How am I ever going to make it? Instead of uplifting broken people, the pep talk planted the seed of doubt. It turned out the facilitator himself did not make it. A few years later, he died of a crack-induced heart attack.

  I knew I would have to fight to keep from becoming a statistic. I later learned that in rehab made-up statements about recovery were often passed off as facts. More than once I heard people throw around the “statistic” that only 1 percent of heroin addicts get clean and stay clean. This was not very comforting to a person trying to stay clean. On top of that, my options were limited. If I failed to complete the program, I was going to prison for three and a half years. More than that, I was motivated by the fact that if I failed, I would die with a needle hanging out of my arm.

  I told myself: Of the eighty people in this room, seventy-nine will be fighting for that last spot, because I am going to be one who stayed clean. Period. I was not returning to alleyways. I was not going back to pushing my belongings in a shopping cart. I was not returning to injecting myself ten times a day. In my mind, I almost felt lucky that I had hit such a low bottom. It made it that much easier to commit to a program. I was willing to try anything not to use drugs: meetings, groups, keeping a journal, talking about my feelings. I was tired and I was done with that life. DONE. I ran that car until the wheels fell off. Drugs held no more illusions for me.

  In early recovery, life was an effort. One second I felt happy. The next I wanted to scream at someone for accidentally brushing against me. Then I would feel the need to apologize not only to that person but also to every single person I had ever wronged. I had no idea how to live. I felt like crying, but the tears did not come. I didn’t feel like using. In fact, on many days I didn’t feel anything at all. My life was gray and overcast.

  What I needed was a distraction, and for that I went to the second and third floors, where the men lived. Walking down the hallway, I slowed down for a good look. After two and a half months in jail, I craved the presence of men, even if they brought out things I didn’t like about myself. I admit my view of men was warped. For example, there was something so sweet about a man escorting you back to your apartment after you have taken too many drugs. He would get bonus points if he didn’t press for sex. That to me was romance. But when a boyfriend brought me flowers, I threw them on the ground. “I wanted to do something special,” one boyfriend had said. I was homeless at the time. What the fuck was I going to do with flowers? He should have brought me some tissues instead, since he had given me a bloody nose and a black eye.

  On the way to breakfast one morning, I caught a man looking at me as I crossed the cafeteria. I quickly looked away but when I saw him later in the hallway, I didn’t flinch. Women and men sat together at mealtimes on the third floor. The management there tried to make it a family atmosphere, but with the “brothers” trying to sleep with the “sisters,” it was more like every man for himself.

  When I finally earned enough trust for an afternoon away from the program, I quickly abused it. The man I had spotted and I both knew the rules: no sex between residents. Yet my first pass involved forty-five minutes in a hotel room with him. Never mind that he spoke almost no English and I spoke only halting Spanish. I had fooled myself into believing he cared for me. My first sober kiss since high school led to hurried sex. As I pulled my clothes from the floor, I saw the moment for what it was: two people using each other for an escape. When I returned to the treatment center, they were surprised to see me back so soon. With no explanation, I went to the women’s floor and took a long shower. Instead of tamping down my feelings as I would normally do, I let my emotions flow as I put my head against the tiles, water running down the back of my neck, trying to wash away my regret.

  Getting off drugs was just a small part of staying clean. After the chemicals left my body, I was flooded with a lifetime of memories I had tried to stuff down. Underneath my hard exterior was a person drowning in fear. Thinking about my childhood, I realized I had been hooked all along. I remembered getting my wisdom teeth pulled and the warm fuzzy bubble of the Vicodin I was given. I had vowed not to become an alcoholic like my father, but this seemed okay because a doctor had prescribed it. The Vicodin relieved me of the burden of my thoughts. Everything I needed was in one place. I did not need food, I did not need to worry, and I did not need anything but the feeling of the drug. I felt totally comfortable with the numbness. Life seemed like a breeze while I was on Vicodin. I was so naïve that I truly believed I could control any drug I took, unlike “weak” people. I quickly learned that drugs do not discriminate. They prey on your weakest instincts and insecurities, of which I had plenty.

  Listening to the other people talk during “share” time at the rehab center, I realized much of what people said was lies and half-truths for the benefit of attracting the opposite sex. Being in the program was a lot like being back in high school. People would stand up to “confess” to the things they missed from their addiction—the apartment, women, money, fame—rather than the reasons they were really here. No one said, “I’m a loser,” “I hate myself,” or any of the things that were really in their heads. I felt as if no one there understood me, as if I was unique among addicts. In reality, I think I was leaving myself room for the chance of relapse by staying isolated. When Mike sent a message through one of the residents to meet him to play video games, I jumped at the chance. I needed a break. While I was in jail, I learned Mike had started using heavily again. But the last time I saw him I was being hauled away by the police. I wanted to reconnect.

  As I walked up the hill to Mike’s apartment, I heard a voice in my mind: No. I felt it as concretely as the hard bed I slept in each night. Was I really going to just sit there while he got high? Maybe I was developing a sense of right and wrong choices, because my inner compass pointed me in a different direction. Or maybe I was just scared. I tucked my tail between my legs and ran back to the center.

  I called Mike that night from the pay phone in the hallway.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  He was pissed. “We can’t hang out, Tracey.”

  “Maybe I can try to get away next week,” I said half-heartedly.

  “No, you won’t,” he said. “Because I am doing this and you are doing that.”

  He was right. I needed to stay on the sobriety path with no distractions. The question was whether I could stay the course. When I emerged from the program later, I would feel like an alien who had been dropped onto a different planet. Not only did I have no contact with the outside world for the ninety days of my court-ordered rehab, but I had lost years to my addiction. The world had moved on to email, pagers, and mobile phones while I still carried crumpled phone numbers and dimes for the phone booth.

  I finally got up the nerve to call home after the foolish sex incident. I wanted my mother to believe that everything was going well in treatment. How could I explain that I had fucked up again? She would know something was wrong in my voice. I used the phone right outside the women’s lounge. The receiver was stained with sweat and tears. In general, this phone only seemed to deliver bad advice and bad news from home. I was determined to reach my mother. I had called her from the holding cell the night I was arrested to tell her I was going to get into a program, and from that moment she had been my staunchest supporter. Unfortunately, this time my father answered the phone. This was the man who, when he was a teenager and the family horse died, was hooked up to the plow in its stead. This was the man who brought his prom date home to meet his parents, and she asked to use the bathroom, walked out, and never came back. I didn’t expect my father to talk about his feelings on the phone, but I braced myself for the disappointment that I knew he must have felt. We had become estranged since I left Ohio, and I had
rarely spoken to him in the past few years. I am sure he received progress reports from my mother. I had spent all those years judging him for his drinking. Now here I was, a twenty-eight-year-old heroin addict who had achieved nothing in life.

  It wasn’t so long before then that I had been telling him I wanted to apply to Princeton. I’d had stellar grades and started out my freshman year at the University of Cincinnati almost a year ahead of my peers. The admissions counselor had told me in my interview, “You’re a one-of-a-kind student.” Little did she know how true that would turn out to be.

  On the phone, my dad characteristically did not provide me with comfort. Nevertheless, he told me what I needed to hear. “All your friends are in the cemetery or penitentiary,” he said. I am sure he told me that because he loved me. He had some insight into my struggle.

  If I faltered from this path, I knew I was headed for the grave. After I completed my time at the treatment facility, I moved to a transitional house. I wasn’t ready to be released into the world completely raw. I didn’t know if I ever would be. Recovery was not a soft pillow to land on after a hard fall. All I knew was that I wanted to be able to look at myself in the mirror. I wanted my body to be my own. I wanted to be free.

  Chapter 4

  WALK A DAY IN MY SHOES

  I have no luck with shoes. That’s what I was thinking as I stood in front of the ATM fiddling with the ankle strap of my left shoe. Between the permanent damage from shooting up in the soles of my feet and the extra weight I was now carrying, finding a decent pair was nearly impossible. I still had a mile left to walk home. Distracted by the expectation of my shoe turning into a slow torture device, I didn’t notice the man approaching the ATM until I caught his round face out of the corner of my eye. He was close to six feet tall, well dressed and well groomed. He looked like a professional man. His eyes were an unusual color of gray with corners that crinkled as he smiled widely at me; his smile was one of recognition. I saw the flicker of his gold bracelet as he placed his hand on the wall close to me—too close—as if to engage me in a conversation.

  Can’t he see I’m using this damn machine? I concentrated on pushing the right buttons to take out money. Forty dollars to be exact. It will need to get me through the weekend. I felt him staring at me, and I turned my body to block my PIN number. Some people are so rude, I thought. What kind of asshole invaded the sacred space between a woman and her money machine?

  He interrupted my irritation. “I see you really have changed,” he said.

  I quickly slipped the bills into my wallet and pretended I didn’t hear him.

  As I walked away, the images started to click: the man, the face, the voice, the bracelet. They were too familiar. My past, like the San Francisco fog I walked through on my way to work every morning, was murky yet inescapable. Where did this man fit? Was the memory a positive one or a deep regret I had buried inside myself to forget? I started on my mile-walk home, my irritation giving way to uneasiness and then shame with every step. I knew who this man was—how could I forget? He used to give me $40 if I would give him a blow job without using a condom. This was during the AIDS era, and I was adamant about using condoms with tricks. But a few times he convinced me to skip it with him. That day at the ATM I had taken out $40. The irony was not lost on me, or on him, I’m sure.

  Home for me at this point was a single room in an old hotel that had been converted into a sober living facility by the Salvation Army, where I could be required to submit to urinalysis at any time to prove I was clean. I had rolled up to the place one year ago, fresh from the treatment center, with two garbage bags of possessions that were either donated or paid for with my small income. For the first time in my life, I was attempting to be self-sufficient. My mother, of course, wanted to find some way to help me. My demonstrating that I was actually clean made her more determined to find ways to insert herself back into my life. She didn’t need to give me anything in order to do that, though—I wanted her there. In that first year of recovery, I learned so much about my own dysfunctional relationships through the way she and I interacted. There was a fine line between providing someone with support and creating an unhealthy dependence. In feeling my way through recovery, I was trying to distinguish what that meant.

  People discouraged me from moving back to the Tenderloin, but I had no choice—rents were lower there. Still, my rent was $360, which ate up almost all the money I earned at a call center doing phone surveys. I had found the job in the paper with the help of the rehab’s job coach. I am not sure what the qualifications were to be the job coach, but there were rumors he was sleeping with male residents. The job paid $7 an hour. It was more than minimum wage and just enough to pay all my bills. It took twenty-nine years, but I was finally finding some independence.

  I was surprised at how easy it was to get my job, even as a convicted felon. I was hired on the spot in my first interview. At first, my ego led me to believe I was so charming they just had to hire me. The reality was quite different. They simply needed bodies. The turnover rate became apparent as I watched people walk out in the middle of a shift on a daily basis. Well, I figured, the bar is so low that I can excel here. I reminded myself that I had convinced junkies to buy heroin from me despite the fact that I looked like an extra from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. Therefore, I must be capable of finding a way to get people to complete these surveys. I could be very convincing when I needed something. I turned that survival tactic into a workplace asset. In fact, it wasn’t long before I was made a manager.

  The other major benefit of the job was that it gave me enough downtime to work on learning my positive affirmations. I needed those, since I still felt as if my grip on my new life was precarious at best. The rehab center had sent me through a program designed specifically for criminal offenders. This week-long course showed me that I needed to learn to modify my behavior or I would end up back in jail or prison. When I completed the class, I was handed a set of four flashcards in a waterproof holder that fit in my pocket. Fake it till you make it was a catchphrase that chimed in my head. Okay, yes. I was willing to try it. I had flashcards with these phrases tucked away in my pocket (I was not yet confident enough in my femininity to carry a purse). I spent hours upon hours flipping through these cards between calls. I was hoping that changing the way I thought about myself would change the way I lived my life. I was back living in the Tenderloin; the steps of recovery needed to be inside me.

  I enjoy my clean and sober lifestyle.

  I enjoy being clean and sober.

  I am a good person.

  I wanted these things to be true.

  My cravings for drugs were very sporadic, but they were still there. Since I had spent the bulk of my recovery in a controlled environment, I had gotten over that early phase of obsessing over drugs in a relatively safe place. But out on my own, my cravings would appear out of nowhere. They didn’t come from what some might consider typical sources. The emotions that surfaced made for triggers I could not easily identify. Feelings were something that had always made me uncomfortable in my own skin, and they came up so unpredictably. Seeing people using drugs on the street did not give me cravings. Old places did not make me crave heroin either. I found that my triggers were more nuanced. The smell of vinegar, the scent of cheap coffee, or an alcohol smell could make my stomach flip in the same way it had when I was waiting for a hit. These are smells connected with the injection of cheap, adulterated tar heroin—the drug itself has a vinegary smell, coffee is often used to cut the dirtiest street-level version, and I would use alcohol pads to wipe up the blood that ran down my arms and legs after removing the needle. Living in this area was more of a blessing for me than a curse, though, because of the instant visual reminders of where I would return if I decided to use again.

  I unlocked the deadbolt and stepped into my sparsely furnished room. It was nice that when I moved in it was semi-furnished. The guy who used to live there didn’t bother to clean out the drawers of the onl
y dresser. It contained his recovery books and journals. As soon as I got settled that first night out of treatment, I rocked back and forth on the bed. I was bugging out. I wanted to use so badly or at least go hang out in the usual spots that were just fifty feet outside my window, but I knew I would have ended up with a needle in my arm. How was I going to live? Like the addict I was, I ticked off my options: I could sell drugs and not use them. I could find a dealer to take care of me. I could find a trick and keep the money since now I was not on drugs. I was lonely and afraid of what I would do that night. I read in one of the recovery books left behind that “an addict alone is in bad company.” I got out of my head and went to the nearest meeting, an atheist twelve-step meeting.

  The meeting broke all the traditional twelve-step rules. It was perfect for me. People cross-talked, they spoke more than once, and there was more silence than I had experienced the entire time I was in residential treatment. I learned that night that it wasn’t necessary to fill up a silence with words. Sometimes, the best response to a problem is to reflect on it in silence. I did not need to have an answer for everything. There was a young man there who talked about being four years clean. He was in his early twenties and beautiful to me. Not just because of his physical features, but because he was kind to me in ways I had not experienced from a man in years. After the meeting, he asked me if I wanted him to wait with me at the bus stop. When I waved goodbye to him that night, I knew that at least for that day I was not going to use. It broke my heart when he relapsed a few months later. Then I was told by the meeting leader that he had killed himself in his mother’s house. In my moment of grief, I had resolved yet again that this would not be me.

  A year later, here I was rubbing my sore feet in my dimly lit room, unable to shake the image of the man by the ATM. He’d looked at me like I was someone who allowed herself to be intimate with a stranger. By this point, I was attempting to come to terms with many of the things I had done to support my drug habit. I had tried to keep them buried as I stuffed my feelings down with food. My weight was my camouflage. It hid me from the men in my past who could no longer recognize my larger frame. When I thought about the man at the ATM, I knew I could not hide from what his smug entitlement meant. When I was actively using, heroin took the place of everything. It was my food, my sex, my love. I had no desire to be with any man, but my habit required me to perform. A drug-addicted prostitute is part acrobat, part actress, and part corpse. I was fully aware that I had done these things, yet it was hard to come to terms with the fact that the person who had sold herself—for the same amount I had taken out of the ATM that day—was me. Sooner or later, I would have to come to terms with the fact that I had exchanged sex for money.