Not long ago one could have up to four or five DUIs and still have a driving license in the state. Wisconsin was actually the last state to adopt the federally mandated drinking age of twenty-one. Rumor has it that state officials agreed to do so only after Uncle Sam threatened to cut funding to the state in a big way. Now though it’s clear that drug abuse is working its way in as a big problem too.
The fact that everyone at the facility who is around my age is addicted to heroin doesn’t surprise me. What alarms me, though, is that all of them started using opioids exactly the same way I did, with OxyContin abuse, ultimately leading each of us to heroin. Also scary is that each one of the people around my age has had at least one person close to him or her die from a heroin overdose.
The older alcoholics are the first to open up and they reveal that they first used alcohol to have a good time, but then it became a crutch, and later a huge coping mechanism that they felt they couldn’t live without. Some alcoholics, after drinking heavily for a few years, develop a sort of social anxiety disorder and find that they can’t go grocery shopping or really anywhere in public without having a few drinks first. Then it progresses to the point where they can’t mow the lawn or get the mail or even leave their house without being buzzed, and later on completely drunk. There are also denial points along the way, the first time they begin to deny being drunk, for example. Their drug of choice is different than ours, but the progression of the addiction is pretty similar, so we get it.
At one point, we start to debate what may have caused the spike in opioid use across the country, but we find this to be such a difficult undertaking that we decide instead to focus on our individual recoveries and taking it one day at a time.
I like my thirty-day stay at the rehab facility, but the monotonous routine does begin to wear on me; sometimes a day is only broken up by three Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I know the facility values and encourages structure, but sometimes I struggle with this. I also desperately want to know, confidently, that I won’t need other addicts or meetings each and every day in order to move on and live a good life. I’ve been scared off heroin and I am focused on getting clean, willing to subject myself to the program and the parameters set by the administration in order to not only ensure my sobriety, but also to truly better myself. A changed life is what I want most and I keep my eye on the prize unlike some of the other young people, who are forced or mandated to be in rehab, as I was in the past. They’re not set on getting clean and mock the experience.
Beating strongly in my heart is the hope that if I become a happy person who lives a full, abundant life, I won’t feel the need to fill an empty emotional void and kill the incessant, constant pain which has become my everyday experience. An addict needs to be free of his former lifestyle and the people, places, and situations that came with it, and I am determined to make this happen once I’m back in the real world.
In the program, they require that a drug addict or alcoholic acknowledge that there must be a higher power that exists and agree that it can’t hurt to at least try and reach out to it and request help. What’s the worst that could happen? “Nothing,” is what we are told. This process is one of the twelve steps.
The pride of some of the people in the house is staggering though. While I find the courage to step out and confess my faith in Jesus as my higher power, some middle-aged prick will listen intently, thank me, then stand up and profess his belief that invisible power ranger sky ninjas will magically heal his alcoholism if he just performs karate moves every morning while singing the national anthem. He thanks the administrators for this because it frees him from having to invest in the program and put forth any effort whatsoever. He defends his religious belief vigorously.
After my thirty days in rehab are up, my mother, father, and brother come to pick me up and bring me home, true to their word. Everything seems okay until we go back to our summer cabin, which is when my dad calls the police on me because during my rehabilitation, I’d admitted to stealing their jewelry years earlier. The deal we struck, that they would help me get back on my feet, is instantly forsaken, and now here I am, right back where it all started. I was tricked.
When the police come to arrest me, I don’t even protest. I am handcuffed in the living room and as my parents look on, they promise to pick me up from jail once I am prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I am too exhausted from the overdose, the two weeks in the hospital, and the thirty days spent in intensive treatment to protest the arrest. I am too appalled that material items mean more to them than their own son, to voice any kind of protest. I am shocked into silence, and I’m not alone. The police are so dumbstruck by my parents’ decision that they hold me in the police car for about an hour, thoroughly talking the situation over with me and with each other before taking me in.
“So let me get this straight . . . you stole jewelry from your parents when you were eighteen in order to get back at them, and now that you’ve admitted to it to wipe the slate clean, they want you prosecuted . . . at twenty-three?”
“Yeah,” I shake my head, “I can’t believe it either.”
The officers are good, meticulous, and thorough, and continue to ask me questions to sort it all out, and I answer them honestly and openly. They pay close attention to detail, talk things over out of my earshot, and then come back. At first they are convinced that this is some kind of scare tactic being made by my parents, but when they realize my parents are absolutely serious, the officers take pity on me and promise that I won’t be charged with any felonies and will be released from jail in about a week. Sure enough, I get out on a signature bond for misdemeanor theft and about five days later I’m placed on probation for the second time.
In the wake of the arrest and its aftermath, I focus on hanging onto my newly found faith. I have decided that I will continue on my path to recovery even without my family’s support.
One of the first things I do is visit a gastroenterologist to assess treatment options for the hepatitis C I contracted. The doctor, a liver expert who knows his stuff and specializes in hepatitis, takes one look at my medical record and says, “Your blood contains the antibody that shows you fought the disease, but your liver does not contain any sign of the virus . . . there is nothing to treat.” This confuses the doctor and he asks what I did to treat my body. I tell him nothing and ask if it could have been a false positive, but he waves away the suggestion. He says my blood was tested every day I was in the ICU and every day it showed positive for hep C. I suggest to the doctor that maybe I was healed by the chaplain.
I am in complete awe at this sudden turn of events, the hep C episode and the release from jail, but my parents don’t show enthusiasm for my catching a break. Somehow, rather than celebrating that I did not receive a long sentence in jail and that I’m free from a deadly disease, they are frustrated, as if I’m getting off lightly, so they resort to their old tactics. They demand that I find a job immediately or face being locked out of the home again for twelve hours each day. I try to talk some sense into them, openly sharing my concerns about my criminal record, telling them that I’m on the right track and asking them to cut me some slack, but it’s to no avail.
I’ve always been shocked by the level of torment I’ve had to endure under their roof, and at the impossibility of getting others to see it for what it was. I’ll never understand why they had me arrested right after I stepped out of rehab, but I’m not surprised by it. No one sees through them like I do.
After a few weeks with no job in sight, and not for a lack of trying, my parents decide to intervene. My mother notifies a judge of my situation and asks if I can do community service and earn a recommendation from the civil authorities in my county in order to obtain employment. The judge, an old friend of my mom’s, not only agrees, but she takes all the marijuana charges, as well as several others, off my criminal record.
For the second six months of my bizarre life as a t
wenty-three year old I am hired and fired from more than twenty jobs. I’m able to keep myself off heroin, but I’m still an addict and to help deal with the hardships, I cave in to my desire to smoke weed. I try my best as a cashier, for example, but before long I steal some money from the till and buy pot. No matter how hard I try, I am late, I mess up, and I do something that makes my boss angry enough to fire me. I try everything, but nothing sticks.
Eventually, because this time I refuse to give up on the job search, I land a steady, full-time, forty-plus hours a week job that fits me well. It’s with a moving company and my job is to deliver household appliances and furniture. To fill my free time, I join a boxing gym and then a rugby club. The one thing I ever excelled at was sports and it feels good to be active again. It also releases aggression.
Out of rehab, I don’t continue going to AA meetings, but I’m still committed to staying clean from heroin, and keeping a busy schedule really helps with this. I also reach out to an old friend I used to party with and haven’t seen since high school, whom I’ve heard has become a bit of a Jesus freak. Kurt had also been a heroin addict after high school, but he got clean many years back and joined a Christian missionary organization, traveling around the world with them. I don’t understand why somebody would drop everything and make his life completely about following Jesus—what is clear, though, is that he’s really gotten his shit together. When we meet up, he tells me about how he recently returned from his third trip to Thailand and has since gotten married. He tells me about how he’s now settling down with his wife, Christa. Because it’s been so long since we’ve seen each other, there is a lot of catching up to do. He’s easy to talk with and I share my whole story too.
From this catch-up session onward, Kurt and I stay in touch. We hang out on the weekends and I even start going to church with him and his wife and attending their Bible study session during the week. Kurt and Christa become closer to me than anyone I’ve ever known. With them I feel loved, special, trusted, worthy, precious, cared for, invested in. I could go on and on about these amazing people because of what they have done to help me and how they make me feel. I can’t believe Kurt is the same person I knew during high school. This is a guy who used to hang around with Giovanni and me, party, do drugs, sell drugs, you name it—and now he’s a changed man, genuinely caring for me and, together with his wonderful wife, showing me what love truly is by constantly making time for me and making me a priority in their lives. It’s as if they know that all I really need is someone to have faith in me, and a place where I feel like I belong.
I know others have tried to do this for me in the past, but with Kurt and Christa it is so different because they are filled with a supernaturally positive and loving outlook instead of a dark and toxic one. These people, these dear friends of mine, want to help me change my life, and they become instrumental in the process, pulling me out of sheer darkness and placing me on the narrow path that leads to the light of life.
As my journey with these old yet newfound friends takes off, so does my invisible battle between good and evil. My entire being is committed to being clean from dope, but while one foot of mine is taking steps in the right direction, the other is stuck in my old life and that old life isn’t done with me yet.
I still have ties to the Russo family. They checked in on me after my close encounter with death and although they have largely left me alone since, the things they said then and in the few times they’ve checked in since stick with me and leave a bad taste. In short, they’re always making subtle comments that suggest that once I have my life fully under control, having learned my lessons once and for all, I will be more capable and more cunning as a dealer than ever before. Sometimes Greta says things like, “So when are you going to come back to us? Nick, we miss you, and I miss our talks.” Or, “Just come for dinner, it can be the two of us, the two of us together, together, Nick . . . ” It’s hard, but I keep my distance.
I begin dating a girl I meet at the Bible study sessions, and for the first time in my life, I get into a committed relationship. The clincher: she is a recovering alcoholic, so we get each other’s struggle with addiction. Kurt asks me not to date her because she and I are both still in recovery mode and I listen respectfully, but I see her anyway. It’s an amazing feeling to have somebody to be intimate with and she and I see each other almost every day.
So now I’m busy with work, a serious girlfriend, boxing, and my newly discovered life of faith. One day, though, some of my brother’s friends who have remained in the area after graduating high school and know who I was back in the day, reach out to me for drugs. When I tell them I’m not dealing, they ask if I’d be willing to buy them beer and insist that I at least come out to party with them. Except for smoking weed, I have been on the straight and narrow since returning from rehab, about six months now, with weekends consisting of going to the gym in the morning, helping my trainer with chores after, having lunch together, and attending church on Sunday, and spending the rest of my time with my girlfriend. It’s the polar opposite of what my life was like less than a year before. On the particular Friday night when they call, I’m sitting at home bored out of my wits. I agree to buy them beer since this seems harmless.
When I get to the young couple’s apartment where the party is, beer in hand, it hits me that there is a golden opportunity in front of me. I tell the guests that I have become a Christian and am in the process of giving up the party lifestyle for good. Coincidentally, the couple, Hunter and Brittany, whose apartment we’re in, also claims to be new to the faith. They say they desperately want to stop having parties in their home, but their roommate refuses to quit the party life and they’re always giving in to her.
Over the following few weeks, I stay in touch with them and I try to talk some sense into their roommate, as well as several of their regular partygoers. Only the couple listens to me and in the end, they decide to kick out the roommate, who isn’t on the lease, and ask me to take her place. The three of us decide to walk the straight and narrow together.
One night, at what the couple says will be the last party they’ll host, a kid who has just turned twenty-one asks me to ride with him to the gas station; I get the feeling he just wants to escape the party and have someone to talk to for a bit. I agree, and we get to talking while riding together. The kid, Devin, and I exchange life stories and I encourage him to seek a better life than the one he’s living. He begins to weep when I say this. He’s the son of a single mom, has never met his father, and has a stepdad who is in and out of the picture. I begin to understand how lonely his life has been and I try to encourage him, “Man, I wish I didn’t have a dad, literally wish I never met that motherfucker, my mom too. You just be thankful you have a father figure who comes by every now and again and is halfway decent. And you’ve got a good mom, right?” When we get back to the parking lot in front of the apartment, he tells me about how he and his girlfriend are hooked on OxyContin. This strikes me as another golden opportunity to help someone and we end up talking in his car for several hours.
In the weeks that follow this meeting with Devin, I move into the couple’s apartment. I get to know Hunter and Brittany pretty well, and the friends of theirs who pop in and out, but Devin never swings by again. When I ask Hunter and Brittany about him, I learn that he died from a heroin overdose. Less than two months after, his girlfriend commits suicide by way of heroin, leaving a note.
Having seen his well-intentioned heart with my own eyes, knowing that he truly wanted to stop but couldn’t, and after hearing about his sudden death and then his girlfriend’s suicide, I begin to understand that the scale and scope of the problem of opioid addiction and death in Green Bay is much larger than I ever imagined. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how terrible it must be in places where the drug is more readily accessible.
During the following months, I continue to do my best to stick to the straight and narrow path—I even enroll
in an emergency medical technician course because I’m interested and it’s a good skill set to have if I one day want to try to reenter the medical world—but I find myself once again caught up in a living nightmare. I begin to receive strange phone calls and voicemails on a daily basis; they’re from anonymous local detectives, and the voice on the other end always tells me to turn myself in to the police. The detectives imply that they know I’m guilty of a crime, but they don’t tell me what it is; each time, I tell them I have nothing to say to them and hang up.
Soon I realize that police are following me several times a day. When I see their cars staking me out each time I go to the EMT course, I drop out. Sometimes they leave notes on my car. Eventually, I get so creeped out and annoyed that I stop going outside during daylight hours, unless it’s for work or an important errand. I also get rid of my phone and buy a new one with a new number. I even learn that both my parents were called at work and instructed to call the police if they saw me, which they did.
One day the cops visit me at my probation officer’s office, and bring me into the station for questioning. They imply that they are very close to obtaining enough probable cause, enough evidence, to convince a judge that it would be worthwhile to have me arrested for felonies I committed during the year or so that I was hopelessly addicted to heroin, and brought to trial. I believe them, but I say nothing. When they keep pushing me to cooperate, I tell them I’m invoking my Fifth Amendment right and to leave me alone. What becomes very clear is that the pressure is on and I am once again being besieged by my past while trying desperately to get my life on track and leave it all behind.
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