Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  After I calmed down a little they took me out to the main area where all the other residents were milling around. I found out later that they were collecting their meds. I immediately started calling them inmates but the big male nurse escorting me made it clear I should stop, and quick.

  I felt like I had gone to sleep and woken up as an extra in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Some of the patients looked worse than I felt. The centre was mixed, filled with both guys and girls. I was surprised we were all in the same area. Apparently some volunteered to be there; others were sent by the courts as a last stop before jail. I could tell who was who just by looking. ‘He’s a junkie. Look at his eyes. That one without the teeth is definitely a speed freak.’

  They were probably doing the same thing to me. We all looked strung out. I was taken to a hut. There were eight men to a hut. This was where I would stay for the next twenty-eight days, and I was told I would not be alone for a minute while I was there.

  ‘This is Les. He’s going to be your buddy for the next few days. Just until you get used to the place.’

  I looked at Les. He was somewhere in his mid to late seventies as far as I could tell, and he wasn’t happy to be stuck with me. What the fuck could a guy his age be in here for?

  ‘Just throw your fucking bags down over there and come here. I’ll tell you the fucking rules,’ he snapped at me. I didn’t care how old he was, he’d better watch his tone of voice when he spoke to me or else. He ran me through everything I would need to know to survive my stay. As he spoke his tone softened. I could tell he didn’t want to be in there anymore than I did. And he certainly didn’t want to have to hold my hand while I whined and cried like a baby for the next few days.

  ‘Just man up and keep your nose out of trouble, son. And believe me, there is trouble to be found in here.’ He didn’t come across like a very happy person.

  ‘What are you in for?’ I asked him as he walked away from me.

  ‘What? What did you say?’ He turned towards me again.

  ‘I said what are you in here for? What’s your poison?’

  He didn’t get what I was saying.

  ‘What’s your drug of choice? Why are you in here?’

  I knew straightaway he didn’t want to talk about it but he did. I was surprised.

  ‘I have anger issues. My wife said this is my last chance to sort it out or she’ll leave me for good.’ He looked at the ground. He was ashamed.

  ‘I should have guessed,’ I said off the cuff, trying to break the ice.

  ‘Don’t be a fucking smartass, because I haven’t got them under control yet. I may be old but I could still give you a fucking hiding. Do you understand me?’

  I tried not to smile. I could see it was going to be a long twenty-odd days until I got free from this hell.

  DETOXING WAS DIFFICULT BUT dealing with everything sober, straight, and in that facility in America alone, was frightening. I would go for walks inside the wall that encircled the centre. There was a path called the Serenity Trail, a place to find some peace and calm within your heart. I would walk alone, occasionally joined by the odd rattlesnake basking in the sun or one of the many giant tarantulas, the size of dinner plates, that patrolled the perimeter of the compound, moving like death itself in search of company. My heart would pound hard in my chest as I snuck past, almost hoping one of them would wake up and put an end to it all. One bite and it could have been over. But it never happened. The heat made them slow to react and I guess, when it all came down to it, I didn’t really want to die. I had a life of pain to make up for with my wife and children and I couldn’t get away that easily. This was going to take work and I wanted nothing more than a chance to make it all better. Somehow.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  everybody in this place was crazy

  REHAB, ARIZONA, 2003

  IN REHAB I GOT clean but not really serene. My life had never been serene. It was always like being tossed and turned upside down by the ocean, hoping you would find which way was up. Fighting for breath, never knowing if you would ever make it through the storm. But in Arizona, there were times when the storm seemed to pass, at least for a little while. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I was clear headed. Still wounded, but present. The surface wounds had healed. I was sober and I knew there were still festering sores deep inside me. But I would have to deal with them at some point in the future.

  I remember standing on the wall that surrounded the centre, scanning the horizon for Jane. Waiting for her to come and save me. Everybody in this place was crazy, and I was on the verge of insanity. It was a plague that ran through the whole rehab centre. And then to top things off, they wanted to put me in Trauma Group.

  ‘Why would you possibly think I need to be in Trauma Group?’ I asked the doctor. Were they fucking serious?

  ‘I’m feeling a little aggression in your voice at the moment. Do you need a minute to breathe, Jimmy?’

  All I could feel was a weight on my chest. Maybe I did need a minute to breathe.

  ‘No, I don’t need a fucking minute to breathe. I want to know why you think I’ve suffered trauma. I haven’t. I’m a fucking drug addict. That’s all.’

  Their voices were all too condescending and far too musical. ‘Everybody has suffered some trauma, Jimmy. Just relax. We’re here to help.’ They thought we were all the same.

  ‘Fuck you.’ I tried to hold it all together. But the more I tried the more I fell apart. The pain of looking at my life was unbearable. I did need Trauma Group.

  ‘OKAY, LET’S START WITH Sally. Come on Sally, tell us your story.’

  Sally had been taken captive by her plastic surgeon and locked in a dungeon for months. Every day he came down to the dungeon and injected her with heroin and then he raped her. When she was found she was covered in her own faeces. A dribbling mess. The plastic surgeon was gone, but until she came into the centre, he still found ways to contact her, threatening to kill her. Her story was gut-wrenching. This was fucking trauma.

  ‘Okay, Donald, why don’t you tell us all your story?’ The therapist sounded like she was auditioning for Play School.

  Donald’s story was different. He was a young, well-dressed guy. Neat and well groomed. ‘My dad hated me. At sixteen years old, when all my friends got automatic BMWs, my dad gave me a stick shift. I hated it. Why did he do that to me?’ He broke down and cried.

  ‘You fucking idiot.’ I was up out of my seat, heading across the room towards Donald. ‘Did you hear Sally? What the fuck are you talking about, you stupid fucking rich twat? I want to fucking punch you until you grow fucking up.’

  I was dragged out of Trauma Group. I wanted to kill him. Maybe I did need help, but if I had got my hands on this guy he would have needed real help. Fuck. I was a basket case.

  THE DOCTORS KEPT DIGGING deeper and deeper into my past, uncovering it as if they were removing bandages, and leaving the sores weeping. I had hypnotherapy. Group therapy. Private therapy. Craniosacral therapy. Electromagnetic pulse therapy. Gestalt therapy. I even had acu-detox therapy. I don’t know if that’s what they called it, but they sent us to a room where a guy who looked like he should have been a resident stuck acupuncture needles into our ears and then we sat for an hour and meditated. He played a cassette of Buddhist monks chanting ‘Ohm’. This was the closest thing I got to music the whole time I was there, so I loved it. Eventually they stopped the acu-detox sessions because they found out the acupuncturist was on heroin. The chanting tape lasted for a whole hour. It probably gave him time to hit up and then get a little sleep. But at least, while it lasted, no one spoke to me. The room was quiet. No one asked, ‘What are you feeling?’ in their Mr Fucking Rogers voice.

  ‘I’m fucking tired, that’s what I’m feeling. Stop fucking asking me stupid fucking questions.’ I sounded like a cross between Oscar the Grouch, Angry Anderson and Billy Connolly.

  ‘No, not those feelings. Remember to go to your core feelings, Jimmy.’

&n
bsp; I would look around the walls, searching for a chart or a sign that told me how to say, ‘I feel alone, empty, helpless, hopeless, worthless, inadequate, insignificant. Oh yeah, and I feel like killing you,’ without extending my stay. Signs reminding us of these feelings were plastered on every wall, in case we needed them at short notice.

  I had done enough work to admit that I had major problems but I would have needed to stay there for another year to work through them. So by the end of the third week I would stand alone on the wall, whenever I could, waiting for the only one who had ever taken away my pain, even for a minute. My Jane.

  THERE WERE MAFIA HIT men, models, rock stars and socialites mingling with jailbirds and desperadoes. It was weird. Some blokes in there should have been behind bars. I didn’t know who to trust, so for a while I didn’t trust any of them. I was alone.

  Eventually I connected with some of the other crazy people I met in there. There were good souls struggling to get by and there were a few people who shone so bright that they were worn out by their own inner light that never dimmed and burned in their eyes like spotlights. I didn’t like everybody in the place though. Some people are just fucked, with or without drugs. There were a few guys who kept bragging about nailing chicks out back on the basketball court. Not just girls, but fragile, wounded people who should have been safe inside these walls but were targets for predators. I heard them brag to each other over lunch and it made me ill. I wanted to kill them, fucking smash their faces to bits, but I would have been thrown out, and I needed to be in there.

  LIKE I SAID, MUSIC wasn’t allowed inside the centre, but I would walk around singing to myself wherever I went. Every day, someone would graduate. We would all stand around and cry, hugging whoever was leaving and promising to stay in touch. We had shared too much to be separated. I would sing ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ to everyone who left. Don’t ask me why. No one was supposed to know I was a singer. But they fucking did. And none of us, in reality, could see anything clearly. We could only just focus, for the first time in years, and most of the time what we were seeing wasn’t pretty. But I didn’t mind singing, that was all I had to give. Then they would leave and I never saw them again.

  Some people sent messages back to those of us left behind. One of the carers would read them out to the group. ‘Guys. Guys. Come on. Keep it down. Gather round. We have a letter from one of our dear alumni.’

  Dear family. That’s what you guys are. My family. It’s tough out here without you all. I can’t seem to talk to people out here. They don’t understand. But I am trying to keep it all together. I am attending meetings every day, sometimes twice a day. I must have said the serenity prayer a thousand times since I left you guys. Stay strong. I will see you on the outside.

  Peace and Love

  Everyone would clap and cheer and say good things about whoever wrote the letter, even if we didn’t like them. Maybe they would write again and tell us the truth about how hard life had become out in the real world? But they never did. We would hear nothing else. The silence was deafening. I know that a few people made it through, but even before I left we got notice that one of the graduates, a particularly fragile soul who we all loved, couldn’t take it outside. Without the drugs to mask the pain, it was all too much to bear. He ended it by throwing himself under a train. No one spoke about it. A little of each of us died along with him.

  I’ve said the serenity prayer a million times.

  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

  The courage to change the things I can,

  And the wisdom to know the difference.

  Sometimes it helps, I don’t know why. Then there are other times when nothing can help.

  I would see the car coming through the gate and wipe away the tears and try to look happy. I didn’t want Jane to think I had gone completely nuts and leave me there. But she didn’t leave me, even though there must have been times when she felt like walking away.

  I lasted twenty-eight days. Not a minute more or a minute less.

  TOWARDS THE END OF rehab, there was family week. This was when the family got a chance to tell you how they felt. Mahalia, EJ and Elly-May came over and had to sit in front of me and tell me everything I’d done wrong. It hurt them as much as it hurt me. We had a lot of work to do.

  When we left Arizona, Jane and the girls told me they wanted to go across the border from Los Angeles to Tijuana in Mexico. This was the place Californians went to go crazy. In Tijuana you could buy drugs, booze or anything that was your poison or floated your boat on every street corner. I thought this must be a test. My nerves were shot and I felt like I was walking on broken glass with every step I took as we crossed the border. At night the sound of cheap fireworks echoed through the city, and as each one shattered the silence, my heart pounded louder in my chest. Should I get up and just fuck up like I was supposed to? No, I would fight the urges and stay in bed and cry. I hated it. It was one of the seediest parts of the world I had ever been in. But I must have passed the test. Jane took me home.

  I CAME OUT OF rehab without my skin. That’s what it felt like. David, my son, said this to Jane one day when I wasn’t around. ‘It’s like he has no skin. He’s raw and in pain all the time.’ That was me. There was nothing between me and the world. I was the skinless guy who needed help.

  My memories of the first few days back in Sydney are scattered. Fear and anxiety are all I remember. I was going back to the world I had left behind, only now I was sober and straight and every sight and sound reminded me of something else I had fucked up.

  The first day home I was walking down the street and I bumped into someone I’d known in my old life. I was still fragile and lost. Before I knew what was happening, I was drunk, my head spinning from the drugs that had been pumped into me by this old friend. I didn’t need friends like this anymore. I was ashamed.

  I started to go to AA meetings and NA meetings, but even there I felt uncomfortable. The meetings seemed to be full of desperate people like me, trying to cling on to something, anything that might offer a second chance at life. There were good people there, people who genuinely wanted to help. But there were also people I knew from my old life, the life I had run around the world to distance myself from. And here they were, at the meetings, pretending to be something that they weren’t. Maybe they weren’t using drugs anymore but I knew they were still selling them. They offered them to me. They were there in the meetings looking for prey, young girls trying desperately to keep clean. I could see the girls being groomed for future use by these animals. I didn’t like it at all. So I found meetings where the clientele were more like me, trying to make it in the world, one day at a time. There were a lot of them. Meetings and people. I just had to look for them. I know the meetings helped me, and I know they saved the lives of some good people with no one else to turn to.

  ‘My name is Jimmy and I’m an addict. I’ve been straight for a month now and it’s hard. Not to stay straight. It’s hard to stay calm. I don’t know how long I can do this. Sometimes I feel like I really do want to kill somebody. Sometimes I just want to kill me. I don’t like who I am. I don’t want to see the real me. I hate him. Thanks for letting me share.’

  Then I would run from the meeting before anyone spoke to me. I didn’t want their help. Except for that first day home, I managed to stay straight for years. For a long time, I tried to be strong. I tried to be someone else. But, except for a few meetings, I didn’t get any help. I tried to deal with a lifetime of trauma, sober and straight, all by myself. I was too ashamed to tell anybody about the things I had seen and that had been done to me. Or the person I had become. It was just a matter of time before it all fell apart.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  I’d been nobbling myself for years

  SOBER, 2003

  WALKING BACK ON STAGE for the first time since rehab was scary. I had done only a handful of shows in my life sober or straight. Never both. I didn’t think I could do it. I walke
d around backstage, even more nervous than when I was having trouble standing up in the past. I found a space to be ALONE and sat down and tried to settle myself.

  I said the serenity prayer. I didn’t know if it would help. It had worked while I was in rehab, maybe it would help outside too? I hadn’t suddenly taken to believing in God by the way. It was just meditation. I was asking anyone or anything that was out there to give me help. I wasn’t fussy. I just needed all the help I could get. There was something about looking inside for strength that I liked too. I had always told people I could do anything I put my mind to, even when I didn’t really believe it myself. If I said it enough times, someone would believe it. Hopefully it would be me. I needed it to be true.

  I walked on stage. It was a small pub in Melbourne and the first thing I noticed was how close the audience was. The stage was only about one-foot high so I was looking straight into their eyes. How did I let things go so far downhill? Now I was sober, I could see that I had driven my career into the ground. I was playing in a pub with a few hundred people in it. I was glad I was sober now. I had work to do. No matter what state I was in, I would have to dig deep and work my way back up into the light. I knew how to work, it didn’t scare me.

  ‘Yeah, fucking Barnesy! You twat. Let’s go!’

  I could smell the booze on their collective breath and the sweat dripping down their backs. I tried not to gag but I did at first. I was off to a great start because I hadn’t really smelled anything for years. It was a good sign. But I could see how pissed they were and it worried me.

  ‘It’s a pub show for fuck sake, that’s exactly why people go to them. They can get pissed and see the band,’ I told myself. I didn’t look into any one person’s eyes for the first half of the show. I kept mine shut and tried to feel what I was doing. The first thing I noticed was that it was easier to breathe, which meant it was easier to sing. I had done a thousand gigs with a head full of coke, struggling to get air into my lungs. With all this newfound air coming past my vocal cords they worked the way they were designed to. I could sing really well. I was getting a spring in my step. I would not throw in the towel again. Things slipped into automatic pilot. I didn’t have to worry. I could stop panicking and allow myself to be in the moment and just sing. It was easy. The show finished and I walked off with a towel over my head and I sat in the corner of my dressing room. I wasn’t worn out. I wasn’t gasping for air like I had been lately. What was happening? My sound guy ran into the dressing room.