I smelled the flesh of my deliciously fried chicken smothered in fatty goodness. I wanted to stuff my face and go to sleep. I wanted to forget my past just long enough to catch my breath. I wished I could pause that moment to sort out what was happening.
Mr. Persistent interrupted my thoughts. “Don’t worry. I’ll buy.” This never happened in real life, but it was happening to me now. I turned to look him in the face. Someone was offering to get me high for free, and he didn’t look half bad either.
My mind started to go over the logistics. I couldn’t bring him to my place at the transitional house because they would clock him right away as a junkie. I didn’t have any syringes. How would I make it to work tomorrow? Would everyone know? These are the kinds of inconsequential things that rush through your mind before you make a bad decision that can change your entire life. My sobriety was just a small piece of the picture. I could lose the trust of others, my job, my housing, or even my life—but I was not thinking of those things. I would not be the first person to be dragged out of sober living in a body bag, all because of a split-second decision.
He reached out to me. I recoiled at the slight brush of the back of his hand. I can never predict what will set off a bad memory. It may be the smell of a certain cologne or the texture of day-old stubble. He touched me like he knew. He thought he could touch me like I was merchandise.
This snapped me out of my daze. Did I want to get high? Hell no. I did not want to get fucking high.
“Are you fucking serious, dude?” I said, brushing past him. “You got the wrong person.”
Yes, I’m Tracey. But he had the wrong Tracey. I was not the person he thought he knew. In fact, I was not the Tracey I was at the beginning of 1998. I no longer was the Tracey who went anywhere and did anything to get high. I was stronger than my urges. As much as I wanted to use, I wanted to live even more.
As I jumped off the bus on Market Street, it was a long walk past the rocks at the Civic Center. The ghost of junkies past blew through like cold sea air. I decided I was going to file a police report about my rape. It would be symbolic at this point, but I was tired of having flashbacks and nightmares. I was not going to be silent. I was going to be active in my recovery. I was taking charge of my own self-determination. Yes, that’s him. That’s the motherfucker right there. I had my voice back, and I was not going to stop talking about my truth. However, at that moment, all I wanted was my fried chicken, damn it. I wanted to eat it at my little table in my room with no bathroom, where I could sit and be myself. I wanted to take off my clothes, which were a sham. I was not scrambling from one high to the next one. I was a woman in recovery. I did not need to be afraid anymore. I just needed to learn how to live.
Chapter 5
THE QUICK FIX
As the months of sobriety passed, I developed a deep sense of gratitude that I had survived eight years of active addiction. The more distance I put between myself and my last hit, the less I wanted to remember. I saw survivors of that life, the few who made it out. I collected their phone numbers knowing I would never use them. I was slowly building new friendships. I wanted to feel as if it was possible for me to start over completely.
One night I was out with some of my new friends. There was a group of four of us. We packed into the corner booth so we could have a space by the window. I loved to people watch in my neighborhood. The best part of the Tenderloin was the intersection of different cultures. I had never noticed when I was buying drugs. There were so many languages, so many different kinds of food. It was like I could be transported to a different place every night. We were enjoying Indian food after our weekly meeting, a young people’s group that met on Saturdays in a music space.
I bounced around to different meetings until I found a few that made me feel comfortable. It was just like how I had tried dope from different dealers to find the best stuff; I decided to apply this same principle to recovery. I would often hear complaints from people that they didn’t like this meeting or that meeting. They had wanted to give up. The feedback I would give them was simple. If a dealer told you he was sold out, you certainly wouldn’t turn around and go home. You would find what you need. Use some of that same determination in recovery. A meeting or support group is only as good as the members. There are some that are better than others. Find what works.
I was feeling confident about this new social circle. I isolated myself most of the time, but I emerged from my protective cocoon a few times a month. I had been slowly opening up over the course of six months. I had almost given up on the idea of friends. It was hard to trust anyone. I had been betrayed so many times before, and I wanted to find a group of people who could just let me be myself. My mother had always said, “In life, you can count all your true friends on one hand.” I was working on covering a few fingers. It was nice to feel a part of something outside of work.
One new friend from my clean and sober circle was a few years younger than I. She had more clean time than I, which was part of the attraction. As we talked and laughed, the conversation changed to the neighborhood. She started cracking jokes about a few of the homeless people who shuffled by the window.
I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach when her attention turned to me.
“Have you heard of that new restaurant for the homeless?” she asked.
The others at the table smiled and waited for her response.
She answered, “It’s called Tracey-in-the-Box.”
Some nervous laughter followed. I was not laughing. My jaw dropped in complete embarrassment. I could not believe what I had just heard. Was she seriously making fun of the fact that I used to be homeless? She was—she really is making a joke of my experience. I didn’t know whether I should throw my Diet Coke can at her head or cry. I wanted to be invisible.
As I slid down in the booth, she tried to apologize. But the damage was done. Even among people in recovery I am a fucking freak, I thought. Time to find a new meeting.
Instead of trying to escape my past, I decided I should find someone who could relate to me. At different points in my recovery, I have searched for different things. As my recovery matured, I became less interested in how I appeared to other people and more concerned with how I saw myself. I had done a considerable amount of damage. I needed to find out where my fellow former low-bottom users hung out. Those who had worked their way up from the very bottom and gotten their lives together. I would have to find a way to make it work.
I hadn’t seen Cat for a few months. I used to go to a meeting where she was a regular, but my schedule had changed since I took on a few shifts a month teaching overdose prevention to anyone who would listen to me. This was in addition to my full-time job at an outpatient program. In the way I had become addicted to so many other things in my life, I was finding myself becoming addicted to work. I would take on any additional shifts or tiresome projects, and even agreed to out-of-town travel. I hated spending too much time alone in my room. It gave me too much time to think about things I did not want to remember. Staying busy was my new fix. Between work, more work, meetings, and weekly dental appointments to get my teeth fixed, I felt the safety of a routine. The Saturday meeting was perfect for my schedule, but after the incident at the restaurant, I needed a break. Unfortunately, the Wednesday meeting, the meeting where I would see Cat, had been bumped from the schedule.
I would not describe Cat as a close friend. We were happy to see one another, for sure, but we never went out on social excursions. We had more of a mutual appreciation society. During the two years when I had lived on the street with all my belongings in a shopping cart, Cat and her former boyfriend were frequent campmates of mine. She had known “Tracey-in-the-Box” and still liked me. Her boyfriend was much older, much more seasoned, and frequently abusive to her. He would sway back and forth. We could see that the meth made him more and more agitated to the point he would sometimes literally foam at the mouth in the middle of one of his rages. He hated me. I hated him even more. When he
smacked her, it was generally away from anyone who could intervene, not that anyone would have stopped him. We all had our own problems.
I was dealing with abuse in my own relationship at the time, one that drove me to attempt suicide. I tried to kill myself one afternoon by throwing myself into the ocean. As I was feeling the dark pull of the icy water, I suddenly came to the realization that the thing I wanted most in the entire world was to keep breathing. I wanted to live. I eventually got myself to shore, as strangers circled me to help. I didn’t want them to touch me. I accepted a ride back to my encampment, shoeless, shivering, and afraid my boyfriend would be angry at what I had done. Cat was the first person to wrap a blanket around me. She helped me as I returned to the edge of the alley, and she didn’t ask me a bunch of questions. As she pulled a spare pair of socks from her backpack, I could tell by the look in her eyes reflected in the streetlight that she had been in the same place. She did not know what exactly had happened that day. She didn’t need to know all the details. She understood the pain I was in and that was enough: the pain of a life of misery that never seemed to end. Now, when I would see her in the meetings, she would touch my leg and smile. She held the same strength it took for both of us to finally break free. That feeling of quiet connection without judgment was what I needed.
The next time I heard from her, I knew the news was not good. I was curled up on my bed with my big fluffy green alien pillow and my detective shows. The phone rang behind my head, breaking my concentration.
“Hi, this is Tracey,” I answered, as if I was still chained to my desk at work. I was irritated by the interruption. I loved my forensic files. I kept waiting to see people I knew on this show. In some ways, it was a manifestation of vicarious trauma, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“Hey, Tracey,” I heard a familiar voice on the other end. “This is Cat.”
An unexpected call from another person in recovery is rarely a good thing. I had learned these calls only mean one thing.
She continued. “I’m calling about Jake.”
She didn’t need to finish the sentence—I knew. Jake was dead. Fuck.
Jake had been in the documentary with me, and one of the few friends Cat and I had had in common. The last I knew, he had gotten out of perhaps an even worse place than where we had been. He was the type of person who could make friends easily and lose them quickly. His desire for friends made him generous with his time, his space, and his drugs. I had needed that in my life. I remembered many afternoons sitting in the warm sun nodding off with Jake next to me. I knew he’d had some type of crush on me at some point. Then on other days he hated me. That was just the way we were together. One night at the corner store, he asked to take a picture of me. He wanted to hang it up in his room. He wanted to keep some part of me with him.
He was the only person I knew who could remain stable enough to keep an address. He was nice enough to let me use it for a court release program. Sometimes I came over and slept on his floor. Other times, we sat silently together in the doorway while we were both between hustles. More than anyone I knew in my many years of using, Jake had wanted to be loved. On one of the many occasions we had been out in the elements waiting for money to appear in the form of a “date,” the song “Creep” by Radiohead was playing next to us. As Jake sang along, I felt a chill go up my spine. It was as if the words fit him perfectly; the words still echo in my mind whenever I think of him.
Things had changed so dramatically for Jake since the last time I had passed him in one of our alleys. We had drifted apart during the last year of my using, each of us dealing with the fallout of the HBO movie in our own way. I saw some of the others from the film here and there. Life after it came out was much harder for some of them than what I had experienced. No one was hounding me or looking down on me because of my HIV status, like what happened to another woman in the film. The distance between me and the Tracey in the movie was much more pronounced.
One day I’d been casually flipping through a message pad at the outpatient program at my day job when a name caught my eye. There was a message that read: “Looking for a job—Jacob B.” That seemed so odd to me. I had to follow up with one of my coworkers. Yes, she confirmed, not only was Jake clean, he was looking for work. To see his name on that notepad, looking for a job, made me feel like maybe there really was hope for all of us.
I didn’t call him that day. But it made me feel better knowing he was around and looking for work. It made me feel like some part of my past had resolved itself. I saw him a few months later when he was volunteering. He was a doorman at Gilman, an all-ages club in Berkeley. It was a shock to see him. He had put on weight. His face was round and healthy. There was a twinkle in his eyes. It was easy for him to smile and laugh, not like the Jake I had known. He was healthy. It was like a dream.
“You live with roommates?” I asked as he stamped my hand as proof of payment.
He spoke with a southern twang from his years in Alabama.
“Yep, I finished treatment,” he told me. “I got a place.”
He checked in a few other customers and stamped their hands. These people coming here looked like babies compared to the way Jake and I had looked in our early twenties. We had already been hardened by the world at that point. These twenty-somethings were sneaking in bottles of booze shoved down their pants so they could go swill it in the bathroom. By the time Jake and I were twenty-one, we were already junkies. We smiled at each other with the knowledge that they would never be like us. They looked too fucking happy just to be here.
“I got a girlfriend, too,” he said casually, “and I’m finally getting off that methadone.”
That seemed odd. If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it, I thought. If the methadone was helping him maintain some stability for the first time in his adult life, why go off it? I thought of my own precariousness during those crucial first weeks and months of recovery, how I was terrified to change anything for fear I’d relapse. It scared me that Jake was about to make a big change to his routine.
He explained, “Everyone says I am not really clean because I am on methadone. I go to meetings here. I am almost off.”
Well, who the fuck was “everyone”? Certainly not people who knew Jake. They may have met him since he had left treatment, but they didn’t know where he came from. They never shared a blanket with him curled up in a ball in a freezing parking garage, trying to dodge leaks from the ceiling. They never saw him cry because someone had abused him. What did “everyone” know? My heart sank. So many things I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue and promised to see him inside. We didn’t have time for the things I wanted to say to him. We didn’t have time for me to shake him by the shoulders. I wanted to tell him, “Fuck what everyone else thinks. You are clean. You are in recovery. You are a living example of recovery if I ever saw one.” We didn’t have time for me to tell him, “Hey, this is the best you have ever done since you started using so long ago. Please don’t fuck this up.” But we just ran out of time.
I understood how he felt to a certain extent. From the day I moved back to the Tenderloin and into the sober living environment, I had received an endless stream of opinions about my living situation. “You should move out of there” seemed to be the consensus among anyone and everyone I came across who heard about my living situation. The problem was that I never asked them for their opinion. They felt free to offer their advice without knowing anything about my situation. I knew I was in the right living situation for me. My decision was personal. I had sponged off my parents for so long, my self-esteem increased exponentially with each day I was self-sufficient. I needed to stay within my means, keep my world small, and focus on getting better. I had seen too many of my peers fall into the trap of moving too quickly. The pattern went like this: move out of treatment, move in with roommate, roommate relapses, they relapse. Or they found a partner and the partner relapsed. The End. My path was my own, and I was just fine.
Jake heard the same kind of advice. He
was like me, except he did not know when to tune people out. It is hard for people who are in the early stages of recovery. We want to believe that these people in the meetings want the best for us. They certainly hug us and tell us that they care for us. But in my heart, at that moment, on that day at Gilman, I just knew this was wrong for him. I just couldn’t articulate my feelings. Not only was it not my place, but I wanted him to be right. I wanted him to have the type of recovery that he idolized—abstinence-based recovery, the type found in twelve-step, without medications. I just didn’t believe it could work for him. There is no quick fix for people like us. We need years to recover, not months. As they say in the clichés, some people are just sicker than others.
About a month or so after seeing Jake at Gilman, I was walking down Market Street in the center of the San Francisco shopping district when I saw a familiar figure on the sidewalk. For whatever reason, I recognized those feet. Jake was the only person to wear sandals in any kind of weather. He had been picking at his skin as if he was doing stimulants, and he had red scabs all over. He was wearing the same sweatshirt from the last time I saw him at Gilman, except now it was dirty and cut up at the neck.
“I fucking relapsed,” he told me.
A few weeks after he had gotten off methadone, he had started using again.
“Just go back to the clinic, Jake,” I told him with urgency. I tried to be supportive. The people swirling around us gave us cold stares. They didn’t know the story behind the faces. They just had somewhere to go. And so did I—I was rushing to get to another work site. Never, for one second, did I believe this would be the last time I would talk to him. He closed his eyes to feel the sun on his face. I encouraged him to get off the street, one last time.
As I listened to Cat go over all the details of Jake’s death, I got angrier and angrier. Jake had been dead for a few days in the room that he had rented before some people from the program asked the police to kick in the door. The people who knew him from his using days struggled over why this had happened. I personally believed it was much more than the “disease of addiction.” This was something far more manmade. Why had people meddled in his life? Why did it matter to them if he was “clean” according to their standards? I had known this man. I had known his struggles. Why did they take someone who was so impressionable, someone who wanted so much to be liked, and make him believe there was something wrong with his recovery?
The Big Fix Page 8