Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. I don’t plan on being here too long,” I said, hoping I had time for a cigarette before whatever I had to go sit through next. I was too sick to participate in much of anything, but they made me sit through all the bullshit anyway.

  A FEW DAYS LATER I had my one-on-one therapy session with Jan. Despite his misguided attempts to lure me into AA, he seemed like an all right guy. If he was really clean, I was certainly intrigued by how he managed to seem as though he were high all the time. I desperately wanted to figure out that trick.

  “Did you see Barry’s intake diagnosis of you?” he asked as I sat down.

  “No. You mean the thing he brought to the staff meeting?” He nodded and handed me the file.

  It looked like any other medical chart, with different boxes filled in with my blood pressure and heart rate, but at the bottom, next to Diagnosis, it simply said “Terminal Assholism.”

  “Is this a fucking joke?” I asked. Barry had claimed to be a real doctor.

  “That’s what I thought, too, but it’s not a joke. That’s his official diagnosis. He was very serious about it,” Jan said, also trying to be very serious. “What do you think about it?”

  “Well, it’s pretty funny actually, but honestly I had the same opinion of him. Maybe his isn’t terminal, but he is a fucking asshole.”

  Jan smirked as I handed the chart back to him. “So you know you can never go back to the Mission, right? That your old life is over? If you want to stay clean, you’re going to have to say good-bye to all that,” he told me.

  It was as if he had punched me in the gut. I had let my defenses down and my voice cracked as I tried to tell him that my music and my friends were my life, that I didn’t have any reason to stay clean without them.

  He seemed sympathetic, but his only concession was “at least during early sobriety, and by early sobriety I mean the first five years.” I was too stunned by this suggestion to say anything, not that I had any plans of following it. “You know, I was in the record industry for twelve years, so I know what it’s like,” he continued. “That lifestyle is no place for someone trying to stay clean.”

  Maybe Jan knew what the industry was like, but I didn’t. In the seven years I had been playing music, I don’t think I had met one person in the record industry, and it didn’t appear as if Jan had spent much time playing shows in front of ten people and sleeping on hardwood floors. I did heroin by myself in my room, and, except for that horrific Caroliner tour, I rarely had more than a couple of drinks when I performed. I was no closer to the lifestyle he was referring to than anyone who goes out to see music.

  “What do you think about masturbation?” he asked, taking me off guard.

  “What?” I couldn’t imagine where he was going with that question.

  “Do you like it, not like it? Does it make you feel ashamed?”

  Since I couldn’t tell how this possibly related to the AA stuff, I decided to be honest with him.

  “Well, I do it, but…I certainly don’t feel good about it,” I admitted, feeling very uncomfortable.

  “Good. Because I would know you were a liar if you said you didn’t. But what I want to know is, why you would feel bad about it?” he asked. “Are you Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “Well, give it some thought, and in the meantime keep doing it. We’re strong believers in masturbation here. Addiction is a disease of self-hate. You have got to learn to love yourself if you want to get through this.” His delivery was so deadpan I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I conjured up a fake laugh, but the part about loving yourself turned my stomach. It sounded like my dad’s Chicken Soup bullshit. I didn’t want anything to do with it.

  “I’m not joking,” he said, as I got up to go to the afternoon yoga session. “Loving anyone else will get you kicked out of here.”

  There was one cute girl at the rehab, but I was such a pathetic, shivering, nauseated, cold-sweating, skin-crawling wreck that anyone who saw anything in me would have to be in even worse shape than I was, at least mentally. But I did intend to go set up my yoga mat behind her.

  IT WAS DURING FAMILY session that I decided I had to get the fuck out of there soon. Mom, or rather Dr. Canfield, as she had introduced herself to the room, was going around the group giving everyone advice.

  “You know, Ted has told me before that he would go to meetings and stay sober, and within days he comes home drunk. I just don’t know why I should trust him this time,” some woman was saying about her husband, a classic San Jose computer programmer, who hadn’t uttered a word during my time there.

  “Um, excuse me. Can I say something?” Mom asked Eileen, the facilitator. Before Eileen could answer, Mom looked at the woman and said, “Are you crazy? You need to leave that guy. If he’s done it before, he’s going to do it again. I mean, who would put up with that?” Mom punctuated this with one of her condescending laughs.

  Kyle and I rolled our eyes at each other. That was just the beginning; she had something to say to everyone in the room. I wanted to walk out right then, but I was still too sick to trust myself. When it came my turn to speak, I announced my intention of leaving as soon as I felt better.

  “Okay. Does anyone have any feelings about that,” Eileen asked the group. At least ten hands shot up immediately.

  “I wish you could see yourself from where I’m sitting. I wasted forty years of my life drinking, and you’ve got your whole life in front of you,” said one of the patients.

  “I came to my first rehab when I was your age, and I didn’t listen to anyone either. Now look at me, this is my tenth rehab, and believe me it gets harder every time I come back. You don’t have to go through what I did if you can hang on and give this a shot,” another guy said.

  “Look at your mom and brother. Look at them,” added the previous guy’s wife. “Can you imagine how devastated, how heartbroken they would be if they got a call that you were dead? I’ve been going to Al-Anon ever since Steve went to his first rehab, and I see it all the time: mothers who’ve lost their kids, husbands who’ve lost their wives. There’s nothing like the look on someone’s face who’s lost a loved one to this disease. And that pain never goes away. Look at them. Could you live with that?”

  It seemed inappropriate to point out that I would be dead at that point, so I just sat in silence, doing my best to tune out the rest of them.

  When everyone was done, Eileen asked me if what I heard had changed my mind.

  “No. I mean, thanks for all the concern, but seriously. If I wanted to go out and use, I would do it right now. That’s why I’m staying until I get better. Believe me, I have no intention of ever using again.”

  People started talking all at once after that, until Eileen said, “Oran. We all care about you. So can you at least agree to stick around till the next family session?”

  “Jesus Christ. If it means we can move on to the next person, I will agree to stay till next week,” I answered.

  It was a dumb thing to agree to. The following week, family session was spent solely discussing why I should stay at that place. They tried everything. People I had never seen before cried over my decision. More people testified that they had thrown away their chances of sobriety when they were young and were still struggling with addiction, and others told me I would die. Defending myself against all that was a drag to say the least. Luckily, I was over being dope sick and had finally gotten a few hours of sleep, which helped me get through it.

  When it was finally over, Mom refused to give me a ride home. Fortunately, a landscaper-turned-speed freak from Gilroy had insisted that I borrow forty dollars from him when we had gone on a group outing to the grocery store.

  “Don’t worry about it, I can get home,” I told my mom.

  I said good-bye to a few people and walked to the train station.

  fifteen

  Presents evidence that extracurricular activities lead to communism

  MOM AND I VISITED three boarding scho
ols, all of which promoted various forms of alternative education in their brochures. The first one we checked out was a Quaker school in California, which looked appealing because it didn’t use a grading system. One of the students took me on a tour, showing me the various places in the woods where kids went to smoke pot and have sex. The tour ended when we found a group of kids in a tree house who were passing a joint around. I had a feeling that joining them was a bad idea, but not wanting to come across as uncool, I took a hit when it was passed to me.

  “What’d you think?” Mom asked during the two-and-a-half-hour drive home.

  “I want to see the other ones,” I said, trying to hide my overwhelming anxiety and paranoia. Although it had a beautiful campus nestled in the woods of central California, those kids in the tree house bummed me out.

  We then visited a school in Colorado. I spent the night on campus to get a feel for the place, and somehow ended up in the backseat of a car with three other kids, driving around the suburbs looking for a beer truck. They found one stopped at a red light, and two of the kids jumped out, lifted the roll gate, and grabbed a case of beer. I decided this time that it was okay to be uncool since I had no intention of ever seeing them again. They weren’t having it, though, and I ended up drinking half a beer just to prove I wouldn’t tell on them.

  “What’d you do last night?” Mom asked when she came to pick me up the next morning.

  “Played video games,” I lied, hoping she would cross this one off the list for me.

  “Yeah, I didn’t really like that place,” she said.

  Our next stop was Sedona, Arizona, where I toured the most beautiful campus I had ever seen. Awe-inspiring red rocks surrounded the school on all four sides, and aside from one modern dormitory, nothing appeared to have been built after the 1960s. The white walls and red-tile roofs of the buildings gave the appearance of a Spanish villa. I knew this was the place before I even got out of the car, and I still felt the same way after going to a full day of classes with a kid named Eli, who volunteered to show me around.

  There were a few hurdles to get over though. One was that tuition was sixteen thousand dollars a year, and the other was that I still had a year left of junior high. My grades didn’t paint the picture of a kid who was smart enough to skip ahead, but Mom kept saying, “Don’t worry, there are ways.” I wasn’t convinced, but somehow I got accepted, and they gave me thirteen thousand dollars in financial aid. It was cheaper than keeping me at home, especially after Jack agreed to pay for it.

  I was happy to be getting out of Berkeley. I pictured my new school as an environment of enlightened kids who were socially conscious, politically active, creative, and misunderstood by the outside world but accepted and loved by one another.

  That fantasy was smashed before I even got there. On the shuttle bus from the Phoenix airport to Sedona, a kid sitting next to me said, “I hate niggers.” I had never heard anyone say that in my life and was so shocked I couldn’t open my mouth for the rest of the trip.

  I was hoping this was an isolated incident, but after getting my crappy stereo system in the mail, two other kids came into my room, without knocking, and told me to “turn off that nigger music.” I turned it off, locked the door behind them, and turned it back on as loud as I could to cover up the racket they were making by pounding on the walls. I’d never thought of myself as having lived a sheltered life, but then again I had never really been subjected to the cruelty of white kids. A few days later almost all my music was gone. The only things left were an Art of Noise cassette, David Byrne and Brian Eno LPs, and my Beastie Boys record. I wanted to cry. Music had always been one of the only things that made me feel human…that there were other people out there who understood me. Even though I would probably never meet them, it helped to know they existed.

  When I put on Licensed to Ill at a low volume, the same two guys, who were now going by the nicknames Nipple and Head, appeared at the door within minutes, saying, “What’d we tell you about playing that nigger music?”

  “Fuck you…and anyway these guys are white,” I said, showing them the inside foldout of the Beastie Boys album.

  “It’s still nigger music,” said Nipple, clutching me in a bear hug while Head took the record. They were meatheads, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. Having no use for the record jacket anymore, I pinned it up on my wall. The cover was an illustration of a 747 crashing into a red rock, and it seemed appropriately insignificant facing my roommate Aaron’s life-size Yngwie Malmsteen poster. As usual, I didn’t feel like I fit in at all, but this time I had zero interest in making friends with these assholes.

  Aaron and I had actually been at Camp Winnarainbow together, and I thought it would be a good idea to see if we could be roommates. He sounded hesitant when I asked him, but he agreed to it. It turned out to be a terrible idea. Aaron was a few years older than I was and seemed to resent me. We had never even been friends at camp, and it became clear that he didn’t want to have anything to do with me at school either. He was nice enough not to harass me too much in person, but I suspected he had something to do with my music disappearing. A few times a week, I would wake up in the middle of the night with my body being slammed against the wall from my bed being flipped over. I never saw the culprits, as they would be gone by the time I was able to crawl out from under the bed, but Aaron was a logical suspect since he was never in his own bed at the time. Without proof of his involvement or any experience in dealing with this kind of shit, I would flip my bed back over and seethe myself back to sleep. I was the youngest and smallest guy at the school, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.

  That changed after an unfortunate incident over Parents Weekend. Mom and Kyle flew out to visit me, and I learned firsthand how Aaron felt about me when I was given the task of hanging out with my little brother for three days. I begrudgingly took him to classes, and he even spent the weekend in my dorm to consider the possibility of going there himself.

  The answer to that question was a definitive no when he woke up the second morning on top of Aaron’s bunk bed and found his ears full of toothpaste. Totally disoriented, he climbed off the bed and put on his sneakers, which had been filled with liquid laundry detergent. I couldn’t remember ever being so angry as I led Kyle—humiliated and crying—to the shower. He tried to get the toothpaste out of his ears, while I washed the detergent out of his shoes. Kyle was pissed and spent the rest of the day walking around in wet sneakers, saying, “What?”

  I couldn’t forgive Aaron for that one and called him a fucking asshole. He didn’t confirm or deny my appraisal of him, but he adamantly denied putting toothpaste in Kyle’s ears.

  “I tried to get them to stop, but there was nothing I could do,” he said.

  “Then who the fuck did it?” I screamed.

  “I’m sorry, man. Really. I tried to get them to stop.”

  Aaron did sound extremely apologetic, and a few days later he made arrangements to find another room.

  IN AN ATTEMPT to prove to the school that the thirteen thousand dollars they had given me in financial aid was a good investment, I volunteered to be the freshman representative in the student senate and joined the Model UN. Joining the senate seemed like a good idea at the time, but it didn’t really work out the way I wanted it to. The other kids didn’t hold us in very high regard, and we were all so ashamed of our involvement that we never associated with one another outside of our weekly half-hour meetings. The Model UN met only once because our teacher, Steve, was always leaving school for mysterious reasons.

  Between class, work jobs, dorm jobs, sports, and study hall, we were left with only about four free hours a day, but that was four more free hours than I had ever had before. Feeling awkward, angry, and nervous around the other kids, I spent my extra time in the ceramics studio. In ceramics class, we were told that throwing pots was a kind of spiritual exercise—that centering the clay was an act of centering oneself—but it just made me frustrated. I was more
at war with the clay than one with it. I spent four hours a day, and often ten hours on weekends, hunched over a spinning lump of clay that I couldn’t center for the life of me. As difficult as it was, it allowed me to be by myself. My back hurt like hell whenever I stood up from the wheel, and when I closed my eyes—even to blink—all I could see was a slightly lopsided lump of brown mud spinning around in my head. But like the early days of my juggling career, throwing pots gave the impression that I was passionate and driven, rather than antisocial.

  I started smoking cigarettes as a remedy for my back problems. My cravings were like an alarm clock that reminded me to stretch my body and take a walk every hour or so. Cigarettes however, quickly began eating up two-thirds of my fifteen-dollar-a-week allowance.

  I HAD ALL BUT forgotten about the Model UN when I found a note in my mailbox saying that we would be meeting to prepare for our upcoming trip to the Model UN Convention in Tucson.

  We met up at our teacher Steve’s house. As always, he was dressed in military fatigues and a red beret. Over cookies and milk, he announced that, through some kind of back-room deal, he had arranged for us to represent Nicaragua at the upcoming convention. I was psyched because I had been to many United-States-out-of-Nicaragua protests back in Berkeley, and had seen more than a few documentaries about the conflict with my mom. Steve was also extremely excited and was in the middle of a speech about the evils of capitalism and the virtues of the Sandinistas when one of the students interrupted him.

  “When is the convention?” a girl named Tara asked. This was her second year taking part.

  “It’s in a week,” said Steve.

  “So, don’t we need to prepare? I mean, I’ve been there before and I don’t even understand how it works.”

  “Don’t worry about any of that. I’ve got a plan. You see, we’re not going to play by the establishment’s rules. Che didn’t play by the rules, Lenin, Mao, Trotsky, Castro…They didn’t play by the rules either. Revolutionaries, by definition, don’t play by the rules, and that is the big lesson here. I’m willing to bet that, even though we’re going to be the most important country there this year, the United States will use all of its power to keep us from being heard. The whole system is designed to keep the United States on top and everyone else in their place. So don’t worry about that. I’m preparing you by giving you a history lesson in revolution.”