When it’s my turn, I take a deep breath, unfold the strip of paper in my hands, and start to read: “Mr. MacIndoe—Manipulation. My name is Mr. MacIndoe and I manipulated the phone by not signing out. A manipulative person is viewed as sneaky, self-serving and uncaring. This is proof that I am trapped in the cycle of addictive thinking patterns. Until I show that I can leave the manipulative ways of my past behind, I cannot expect others to take my recovery seriously. Being that I am in the Freedom Program looking for change, I will take an honest look at where my manipulative behavior has gotten me.”
I refold the paper and put my hands behind my back as the guy next to me chants about how he enabled someone else on the program by not addressing their irresponsibility—leaving a coffee cup on the table.
Addressing other people’s negative behaviors—or snitching, as the rest of the prison calls it—is a big part of the Freedom Program. At first I wasn’t comfortable doing it. I felt like I was turning people in for stupid shit. But after a while, I realized that the point was to help people become more aware of the rules and break down the way addicts enable each other—by turning a blind eye. So that’s why I’m lined up reading a chant about my manipulative behavior, because someone addressed me for not signing out on the phone sheet.
I’ve been in the program for almost three weeks now and I’m starting to get it, but sometimes it’s still really stressful. If you’re not careful, little mistakes can snowball, and before you know it you’ve been addressed so many times you get kicked out. That thought terrifies me—not just because I want to prove I can do this, but also because of how it would look to the judge.
When everyone’s done and we sit down for breakfast, I tell Walker he’s got to stop trying to fuck with me when I’m chanting. “If you get kicked out of the program it just means you lose some of your good time. If I get kicked out I could lose my case.”
“Oh, relax,” he says. “You’re going to sail through this and be back in New York before you know it. Then the next time The National plays there you’re gonna get me tickets and introduce me to them.”
That was how we first bonded—over music. He was listening to his radio and handed me his earphones, saying, “I love this band.”
“I know these guys,” I told him, instantly recognizing the singer’s voice. “I took pictures of them before they were famous—I went to the bass player’s wedding years ago.”
Walker didn’t believe me at first, but I finally convinced him that I wasn’t bullshitting. Ever since then we’ve become really good friends. Even though he’s a lot younger than me, he’s sort of guided me through the program. He’s smart and sincere but doesn’t take it all too seriously—like he keeps drawing dicks on my assignments that I don’t notice until I’m meeting with one of the counselors and have to shuffle papers to cover them up.
After breakfast we break into groups for a workshop called STAR, which stands for Stop Think Act Review—everything in this program has some quirky name. It’s all about what to do when you’re caught up in the heat of the moment so you don’t make rash decisions. We’re talking about how to step back and deescalate the situation when a guy called Mr. Hammond gets up and says, “Stop and breathe.” We all look up at him as he puts his hands behind his back and shares what he’s learned.
“I get angry way too easily, especially when I’ve been drinking,” he says. “I make irrational decisions that always have bad outcomes. That makes me ashamed so I get even more angry and end up taking it out on my family. Now I realize I have the ability to take a deep breath and think about the consequences of my actions—weigh it up first and avoid my usual pattern.”
What he says stops me in my tracks. Mr. Hammond isn’t the type of person you’d expect to find in prison—a middle-aged white guy who’s been locked up a couple times for DUIs. He’s pretty quiet, but everything that comes out of his mouth in group is so enlightening he almost always gets a round of applause. Supposedly when he first got here he couldn’t communicate a word about how he felt—he just looked angry all the time. Now that he’s about to graduate from the program, he’s the go-to guy for anyone who’s feeling down or needs advice. I hope I can make changes the way he has, but it still feels like a lot to take in.
The other day I was meeting with my counselor, Mr. Dean, to talk about my progress. We were going over a paper I wrote about the “fishbowl technique.”
“If I step back, slow down and think of the situation as if I’m looking at myself from the outside, I’ll be able to hold back on the words and actions I use and also I’ll be able to deal better with whatever the other person is saying or doing to provoke me,” I’d written.
Mr. Dean explained how that relates to the ABCs—another recovery acronym we’ve been working on. There’s an “actuating event,” like an argument, you have a “belief” about what happened—thinking the other person insulted you—and then that belief has an emotional “consequence,” like getting angry or depressed. You’re supposed to step back, challenge your irrational thoughts, and change your behavior so you don’t overreact.
“It’s not about going from one extreme to another—you’re not going to suddenly be happy,” Mr. Dean told me. “It’s about lowering your emotional state so instead of being angry, you’re annoyed or you feel a bit down instead of depressed.”
It made me realize I did that a lot—overreact. Someone would say something, I’d misinterpret it, and that would set me off. That kept me trapped in a cycle of feeling the same anger or disappointment over and over, so I’d drink or use drugs to make myself feel better, incapable of seeing how self-destructive that was.
That’s what the Freedom Program is all about—being aware of yourself and others and thinking about the consequences of your actions before you act. I never would’ve expected to learn so much in this environment, but the way the other guys have opened up has been totally inspirational. Once I saw how they were making changes for the better, I started to want that for myself. It’s the first time I’ve understood how recovery could work for me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
November 2010
Cobble Hill, Brooklyn
After Graham told me he’d been accepted into the Freedom Program, I remember looking up at the ceiling and mouthing, “Thank you.” It wasn’t just that doing a rehab program would help his immigration case, or that it would give him a much better shot at staying clean. I was mostly relieved that for the next sixteen weeks he’d have a support system to rely on—besides me.
Graham had been struggling to stay afloat in a sea of emotions, as he reconnected with Liam and his family, dealt with the stress of being in prison, and coped with all the ups and downs of his case. So far I was the main person he was leaning on and I wasn’t sure I could handle that much longer—especially since our relationship was becoming part of the mix.
A few days before he got into the program, Graham had blurted out “I love you” when we were talking, just after the prison recording announced our time was up. At first I was glad our call got cut off before I could answer, but I knew I couldn’t leave those three words dangling without a response. I didn’t want to get into another “She loves me, she loves me not” scenario, but it was too soon to be opening that door.
“I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t feel,” I wrote him later. “I’ve learned by now (I hope) to let people be who they are. But I also know you well enough to wonder if you’re already stewing about what I say back, and honestly, I’m not ready to take on that question right now. This is all incredibly intense, after having very little contact for a long time, and on top of that I’m surrounded by reminders of the life you’ve been living and that’s like having a big caution sign flashing all the time.
“It’s not that I don’t think about what’s going to happen when you get out—I do, and I actually find it kind of exciting that you’re going to get this chance to reinvent yourself. But what I’m trying to say is that I’m OK with not k
nowing what’s going to happen between us, and I hope you can be too—especially since you’re in a situation with a lot of question marks surrounding your future.”
Maybe I was overreacting to what Graham had said—later, he’d tell me he had no expectations about how I’d respond. At the same time, I was probably underestimating how much my own feelings had evolved. As I got to know the clean and sober version of Graham, I was falling for him again, but I didn’t know if we’d have that same spark in person—we hadn’t seen each other in more than a year. Graham had discouraged me from visiting him, saying the trip wasn’t worth it for a half-hour visit, just to talk on the phone separated by a Plexiglas window.
But with each week that passed, I was becoming more and more invested in the outcome of his case. And with each setback, I was less confident that he’d actually win.
After Michael quit, the partner who handled Graham’s hearing had warned me, “This is a winnable case, but it’s weak.” I flipped out, asking why Michael had said it was a “good case” when I hired the firm—and told Graham it was worth the fight.
“Immigration law is extremely complicated,” he answered. “If you get twelve lawyers in a room, they may all give you different opinions about a case.”
I didn’t share the exact details of that conversation with Graham, which I was glad about later, when yet another lawyer took over and offered a more optimistic take on his odds.
“I think this will be a very good case,” Armen, our third and final lawyer told me the first time we spoke on the phone. I liked him—he clearly cared about his clients, but he could also be calculating. In that sense, he was a bit like me.
“Graham’s got multiple arrests for drug possession,” he said, laying out how he saw the scales of justice align. “Even though they’re all misdemeanors, they’re recent. But we can argue that he’s committed to turning his life around. He’s in a rehab program, he’s motivated to restart his photography career, and he has good relationships with his girlfriend and his son.”
“Ex-girlfriend,” I interrupted. “I know this seems strange, but we actually broke up a few years ago.”
“Look, obviously you love the guy,” Armen said, adding quite pointedly, “Having a support system is very important to this judge.”
I got the message, so I didn’t argue with him, especially since my feelings about Graham were all over the map at that point, bouncing between exasperation, worry, compassion, and affection, carried along by an undeniable undercurrent of love.
“I’ve been feeling the hum of that connection again,” I wrote in my notebook in early November, confessing something I wasn’t ready to admit out loud. “Graham’s softer side is coming back, that sensitivity I fell in love with—such a rare pairing with his tougher front. It really does seem like he’s changing by the day. I’ve been talking to the people he’s asked to write letters on his behalf, so that’s helped confirm that I’m not crazy for believing he has a ‘good heart,’ as one of them put it. Clearly a lot of people would go out of their way for him.”
Over the past few weeks, I had contacted some of Graham’s friends to get their addresses for him, and explain why they’d be getting a letter from prison. Since I hadn’t met most of these people, it was a bit awkward at first—being the bearer of bad news, and then answering their questions about how he was doing.
“Is he okay in there?” one of his clients asked. “He’s thin and not very muscular.”
I tried to reassure her that Graham had bulked up since she last saw him, now that he was off drugs and eating again, and that this prison seemed much less violent than Rikers.
“Well, he’s lucky to have you,” she told me—a phrase I heard a lot from his friends, which was strangely gratifying to hear. Usually when someone said that, I wondered if the subtext was “He doesn’t deserve you,” but these were people who thought highly of Graham. That came through quite clearly in their letters to the judge, which they sent me before mailing them to Armen.
“Generous is a word that is particularly appropriate to describe Graham,” one friend wrote, crediting Graham with helping launch his career. Another friend captured his love for Liam especially well: “One of my first memories of Graham is of him pushing his son around London in his baby stroller, with little Liam eating plums on the train. This memory sits beside one from recent years of Graham on his patio asking his teenage son for a kiss on the cheek, a tender father and son moment—and coming from a Scot all the more telling, with Scottish men not renowned for outwardly showing physical affection.”
That anecdote reminded me of the first time I saw Liam in 2005, a few nights after Graham took my photo. I still remembered him as a carefree boy in a bathing suit in Montauk, so I was surprised when this tall teenager greeted me with a polite kiss on the cheek—this time, unprompted by his dad.
As I got to know Graham’s functional friends, and finally connected with his family, I realized I never really knew the guy a lot of them talked about: the big brother, the earnest art student, the doting dad, the up-and-coming photographer. Addiction had spoiled maybe a decade of Graham’s forty-seven years, but it didn’t define him. Even I was guilty of seeing him mostly through that lens.
“I know this is hellish for him,” Graham’s sister emailed me. “But I hope it’s the catalyst he needs to get his life back. We all really miss the man he used to be.”
Thinking about that gave me hope that there might be yet another version of Graham: not the person he was (that guy wasn’t coming back), not who I wanted him to be (that wasn’t up to me), but someone none of us knew he could be—maybe not even him.
—
BY MID-NOVEMBER, GRAHAM had been in the Freedom Program for a month, and it seemed like he had wholeheartedly embraced it.
“I went to a brilliant AA meeting tonight,” he told me, after a particularly good day (there were still plenty of bad ones). “Everyone came up to me afterwards and said they really liked what I shared.”
“What was that?” I asked, always curious about his progress—but not wanting to seem too eager.
“Just that we’ve been talking a lot about pride in the program—the AA meetings are open to anyone in the prison—so I was saying how much the bad kind of pride kept me from accepting help. I always thought I could deal with things on my own. But I also had low self-esteem, so I was actually really down on myself a lot of the time. That’s another reason I pushed people away—I didn’t want anyone to see the real me.”
“Well, you’d better brace yourself for my next letter because I wrote it when you were being a pain in the ass. I told you to stop feeling sorry for yourself and be grateful that you’re getting free rehab while I’m out here doing your taxes.”
“I already got it,” Graham said. “Your letters make me laugh even when you’re pissed off.”
“Really? Sometimes I wonder if you get them and just want to rip them up after you read them.”
“No, I really think about what you write. I mean, it’s not always easy to hear about all of my failings, but you didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already learned about myself the last few weeks.”
Lately, Graham’s letters to me had taken a more introspective turn—looking inward more than just looking back at the past.
It’s really important for me to come to terms with who I’ve been & what I’ve done—good & bad—and see how that’s moulded me as a person & what I need to change & what I need to hold onto & let enhance me. I know it’s all a process & I’m sure that these last 6 months of sobriety & clearheadedness combined with this program will get me a long way on the path to true recovery. Coz to be honest, I’m tired of being an addict. It’s not something I ever thought I would be & it surprises, angers & sadens me to see how it got me & where it took me. I had no idea that it was so powerful.
Given how much the program seemed to focus on negative behaviors, I was glad to hear that Graham was also thinking about some of his positive traits. When I wrote him back
, I mentioned a few things I admired about him.
Your strength and your adaptability and the fact that you’ve even managed to pull off a few jokes recently are all things I’d put on the keepers list. I think you’ve handled this situation better than most people could, so I hope you recognize that, even as you’re examining lots of things you might not like about yourself.
Sometimes it felt like we were communicating along parallel tracks: these thoughtful, heartfelt letters, and then our frantic phone calls, which were mostly about Graham’s case or his taxes. I always had a long list of questions I rushed to get through before our twenty-minute time limit was up: “How much rent did your tenant pay? Where are your divorce papers? Who has the closing statement from your house sale?”
Digging through Graham’s storage unit for clues was a forensic nightmare—one of the chores I sometimes resented. I didn’t sign up for this, I’d think, pulling a heavy box marked ACCOUNTS down from a high stack—only to find copies of old design magazines instead. Or I’d take a break to look at one of his photography books and an empty dope bag would flutter to the floor, marked with a stamp saying KISS OF DEATH. I’d already thrown away a needle and a crack pipe, scared that I’d get busted with drug paraphernalia as I carried them out to the trash. Each new discovery wasn’t surprising; it was all just depressing, imagining Graham hanging out in that lonely lair.
But at least I’d found an accountant who deserves much of the credit for saving Graham’s ass. The first time I went by his office, he calmly sorted through the mess of paperwork I handed him, making neat piles of invoices and bloodstained bills on his desk. Then over the next few weeks, he patiently made calls to the IRS, trying to sort out Graham’s taxes. It helped that Graham didn’t have much income during those missing years, but it complicated my life that his phone privileges could be taken away—when I needed answers to the accountant’s questions.
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