I'm Just Happy to Be Here

by Janelle Hanchett

  Nobody was in that place because life was spinning out of control in success. No, we were there because we were failing, for whatever reason, and probably miserably. And yet, every one of our egos remained miraculously intact. But since we couldn’t battle each other for top position of highest achiever or smartest—clearly, that ship had sailed—we focused instead on a one-upping contest I liked to call “Who’s the sickest in the room?”

  In rehab, we fought for the bottom. We shuffled and scooted for the lowest rung. Everybody in that place believed he or she was the most desperate case: the most addicted, the most fucked-up, the most shocking. We wore our catastrophe like shimmering medals.

  The heroin addicts were royalty—not only because sticking a needle in your vein is terrifying, but also because shooting heroin has that screw-it-all suicide vibe that most of us found “just too far.” I would watch Danny like a character out of Trainspotting. She and the other junkies had a sort of stoic, matter-of-fact approach to addiction that awed the rest of us. When Danny spoke, we stopped muttering to neighbors and listened, in deep regard. I thought I was hard, very tough, but soon realized I hadn’t done “addiction” until I’d lived like a junkie. Everyone’s just trying to keep them from dying and off the streets, to “reduce harm.”

  Heroin is the most fucked-up drug to be fucked up on, but the meth addicts never stopped talking about theirs. Shelly and her gang called themselves “dope fiends” while the rest of us looked at them and thought, Oh, come on. You’re just another white trash methhead.

  The goddamn tweakers. They walked into morning art therapy all pockmarked, toothless, and talking talking talking, with wiry, frizzy hair and perpetually black-smeared eyeliner, telling us how they lived in a hollowed-out redwood with their baby daddy and two kids, turning tricks in the back of a van and dismantling microwaves in their free time until CPS closed the adoption case on the first six kids they lost but now they are going to change for sure!

  I would look at them and think, Bitch, you can’t even form a sentence. What do you know about getting well? Maybe stop smoking battery acid and see how that goes.

  And then I would lean back in sweet superiority because I always chose cocaine, the rich man’s drug, and hated meth, the white trash drug. Admittedly, I had tried meth once with Mac in some man’s converted garage, because there was nothing else available. I felt like I had consumed ninety million cups of coffee and lit my brain on fire: a lot of action, no thought. I could not find the fun there. I wanted my brain to think excellent, comforting things, at least for a few seconds until it started wailing about the next line, or, even worse, grappling with the inevitable end of the line.

  I had always hated tweakers. First, they never shut up. Second, they were dumb. Whether they started dumb or became dumb on account of all the cold medicine they smoked was a mystery, but the result was the same. Third, they hurt people. In the news and among my addict friends, I would hear stories of what the tweakers had done. I heard about one near my town who passed out alongside a river in winter with her baby tucked next to her, a baby wearing nothing but a cotton shirt and wet diaper, until the baby froze to death. I read about another one spinning out for six days and raping a nine-year-old girl while the girl’s mother smoked meth in the garage.

  To me, tweakers were the addicts without standards, the druggies without a single code of basic decency. If we were all Mafia members, meth addicts were the mob bosses who killed wives and children. The rest of us were Don Corleone.

  Upon returning to my room after that first day, I met my new roommate, Alice, a woman in her fifties who I imagined had been smoking cigarettes for thirty-five years. She looked seventy-five, with deep lines around her jaw, which jerked to one side or the other at the end of sentences, and eyes beneath drooping lids—eyes that darted arbitrarily from one spot to the next. Her smile revealed missing teeth on the upper right and left side of her mouth and one missing tooth on the bottom. Her gums were yellowed.

  Meth mouth, I thought.

  Her laugh was cavernous and burly, and her voice was like sandpaper, rough and grating through years of smoke snaking through her throat. I forced a “hello” and shook her limp, tiny hand, then said, “Oh, I have to go get something,” and left to gather myself outside. I wanted to figure out what sort of physical ailment would convince the house manager I needed a new room. Some sort of inarguable disease that required isolation. Maybe I should tell her I have asthma and can’t be around smokers. As I took a drag of my cigarette, the fault in my plan dawned on me.

  I heard the sliding door open, and Alice emerged onto the back porch. She sat down at the table across from me, pulled out a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, and retrieved a half-smoked one from the pack. I offered her a light, out of habit mostly. She glanced at me, inhaled deeply, and looked around the yard. I found myself chattering.

  “So how’s it going?” I asked, adding, “Well, I guess that’s a stupid question.”

  She cackled and said, “I’m better than I was a week ago. Guess that’s something. Shit.”

  “That’s the truth,” I said. “I can’t believe how weird this place is.” I felt like a fraud, chatting with a woman I had just scrambled to avoid. But I couldn’t find it in me to snub her. I could only judge from afar.

  “Yeah, I don’t know why I’m here,” she said flatly.

  “Really?” I sputtered sarcastically. It was rude, and I knew it, because what I was really saying was, “Lady, I can tell just looking at you why you’re here.”

  “This is a waste of fuckin’ time,” she said. “I won’t stay clean.”

  She talked less than most tweakers I had known, less than Shelly in group, less than the addicts I had met at various houses over the years. She was reserved, even shy.

  “Then why come?” I asked.

  “I’m here for my daughter. She won’t let me see my grandkids anymore.”

  I told her that must be rough, and she asked me if I had children.

  “Yes,” I said, brightening. “Two.”

  “Are they still with you?”

  My smile faded and a wave of humiliated rage poured over me when I realized Alice and I had both been relieved of the children in our lives. This fucking tweaker and me. We had the same result.

  I stamped my smoke in the ashtray and mumbled, “I see them a lot,” and left.

  • • •

  During one-on-one therapy, Ned tried to claim I hated tweakers because of what they represented in me, that somewhere I knew I was no better than them, and could have done any one of those things had I gotten hooked on a drug that turned my brain into soup as fast as methamphetamines do. I explained to Ned that I was in fact better than them because I didn’t choose a drug that turned my brain into soup.

  “You know, Janelle,” he said during our third therapy session. “We hate the traits in others that mirror ourselves.”

  What kind of madness is this, I thought. “A mirror to what I hate about myself.” That was the kind of bumbling nonsense Ned used to throw at me during “sessions,” but I knew he simply didn’t understand my position.

  In group over the next four weeks, I met all the other addicts and categorized them based on how much they irritated me. I met the pill poppers, who seemed less sick than the rest of us merely on account of their failure to shoot, snort, or smoke anything. The psychedelic drug types, who I didn’t understand because acid is a thing you do in high school and then abandon, and the potheads, who everyone felt sorry for, because truly, how do you need rehab for weed?

  Next to the tweakers, the most insufferable humans were the “dual-diagnosis” people, because they thought they were very special. I wondered how they felt so special when almost everyone in the room had in fact been dually diagnosed with a mental illness as well as addiction. We all had depression and addiction, or bipolar and addiction. We were all self-medicating. We were all super sick. We were all very sad. But they wore their mental illness like letters at the end of their names
.

  By the end of my time in rehab, the people who fascinated me the most were the straight alcoholics. The drunks. The boozers. The men and women who didn’t shoot, smoke, eat, or snort drugs, and who possibly never had. The ones who woke in the morning at four a.m. to take a shot of whiskey from a bottle in the hall closet simply to kill the shakes and sleep again, only to shuffle to the shower at eight a.m. after a quick swig of vodka (because it’s “odorless”) and make it to work red-faced and sweaty, to sit in a cubicle or run a business or sell a car, to run across the street and have another shot at lunch, to smoke hasty cigarettes behind the garage, to scream at their kids and beat their husbands and wives, to swear tomorrow they will quit, to carry on for ten or twenty or thirty years. And end up here, in group, with Ned and me, mumbling, “Oh, I never did any of the crazy things you all are talking about. I just drank.”

  At night, I’d wonder if they were perhaps the sickest people in the room, people who would die under the radar of “functioning alcoholism,” lacking the flash to get noticed, failing to pose sufficient threat to society to get locked up, dying by a rope in a closet one day, or a car smashed into a tree, or down the road in the ER after liver failure, or old, tired, and miserable, in the park with a bag. Shuffling down the sidewalk, still sure they aren’t that sick.

  I loved them, every damn one of them, though I didn’t know why.

  When it was my turn with the talking stick, I either spoke in short, withholding sentences with my arms crossed defiantly in front of me, or dumped the most shocking version of my story into the room. I was always playing “Who’s the sickest in the room?” I was so sick I was raging and cold and disengaged. I was so sick I would tell you about my diagnosis of borderline personality disorder—a diagnosis with an unofficial prognosis of “you are trash and there is no hope for you.” After my first diagnosis of the disorder many months before, I learned that borderlines are so impossible many therapists flatly refuse to work with them. Borderlines ruin children through sick and twisted rage, harm themselves, generally exploding the lives around them plus their own. And the worst part was I actually did, in fact, feel borderline. When I read the collection of symptoms making up “my kind,” I felt I read the first accurate description of the way I had felt since childhood.

  I split. I saw people as all good or all bad, and sometimes that changed within an hour. I cut my arms to watch the blood rise. I cheated, lied, and manipulated. I raged. Oh, God, the rage. Psychiatrists had also diagnosed me with bipolar II, but that was nonsense, because the doctor would ask, “Do you have mood swings?” And I’d say, “Yes, yes I do. I am a cocaine addict. Of course I have mood swings.” But nobody explained how they differentiated between the two.

  Then he’d ask if I went on drug binges, which I explained was affirmative. And then he’d ask if I went on spending binges, which was obviously a yes as well. In fact, I used to fill whole carts in stores like Marshalls and Ross Dress for Less and Target, but then I’d look around the store and at the cart and realize I couldn’t handle the gravity of the situation. The cart. Checking out. Continuing to push it. So I would make sure no employees were watching, and I would leave, walking away from the whole damn fiasco, to sit alone in an aisle somewhere. Sometimes I would obsess over one item in particular, like gift bags or candles or embroidery thread. I would buy fifty. They thought this was “manic.” I thought it was simply “confused.”

  Then the doctors diagnosed chronic depression, which seemed accurate. I mean, wouldn’t you be depressed if you couldn’t stop buying gift bags? They also diagnosed me with PTSD but never explained the trauma that damaged me, which made me wonder if they simply drew diagnoses out of large, expensive wool hats.

  No matter what they said, I knew the depression and mood swings and binges and erratic behavior were somehow related to the drinking and drugs. The borderline, though? That was me to my bones. That was me before I started drinking, and in the dark when nobody was looking. My doctors talked about borderlines having so sense of self. No sense of identity. They were shells of people.

  I felt like that. I could never figure out if I actually loved anyone.

  Do I care if you live or die? Why do I hurt everyone? Why am I not showing up again? Why am I slicing my arms with little blades? Why am I so afraid you’ll leave when I’m not even sure I want you here? Why am I devastated you are suffering? Do I want to die for you? Does your pain erase me? Can I fix it? Why am I screaming “I hate you?” Why am I shoving you away when I wanted you here? Why do you not see what I see? Why am I still drinking? Why can’t I cry?

  I studied that bulleted list of borderline symptoms and found inarguable evidence that I was, in fact, born without a moral compass. At least I was right about that.

  • • •

  I don’t think Alice moved when she slept, and she made almost no sound when she walked. It was as if she were trying to take up as little space in the world as she possibly could. She only talked if you engaged her first. Well, except one night at dinner when Shelly the chattering tweaker was complaining about her kids. Alice stood up, shoved her chair in, and said, “You shouldn’t let those babies go.”

  We became friends, Alice and I, and we’d laugh at Ned’s endless positivity, and theorize who was going to sleep with whom and get kicked out. She told me about her Chihuahua, and we spoke of ridiculous, simple things like pizza and swimming pools.

  When Alice was twelve, she was traded to a fifty-year-old man by her mother for a bag of heroin and a case of beer. She escaped him when she was fourteen, and survived on the streets until age eighteen, when she met a man who would “take care of her.” She had six children, all of them taken by child protective services, and got sober for the first time when the man died and she went to prison, where she birthed her daughter.

  When her daughter was nineteen, Alice relapsed, and couldn’t afford heroin, so she landed on meth. She lost her teeth and face and mind, but probably not her heart, because when I asked her what her favorite song was she said, “Boots of Spanish Leather” by Bob Dylan, and I thought, Well, damn. I had been singing that song for as long as I could remember.

  She had given up. She had not a single thought of change in her mind, not a shred of power at her fingertips, but she loved a song like that. She still flipped over a single cigarette as a “lucky.” I teased her, saying, “Alice, nobody does that past the age of fifteen.”

  She flipped me off and said, “They would if they had my luck.”

  She ruined everything I knew about tweakers.

  Two weeks after she arrived, Alice left, because her daughter could only afford two weeks. I was glad to have given her my Buddha statue, because it was a little thing I could remember her by.

  • • •

  On my twenty-seventh day in rehab, I received calls from my father, mother, and mother-in-law, all letting me know Mac hadn’t been seen in three days.

  Their voices were urgent and severe. “Do you have any idea where he is? Can you guess? This is just insane!”

  I was unconcerned, irritated, and marginally jealous. He’s fine, people. Just on a drug run. Calm the fuck down.

  “Not exactly,” I told my mother-in-law. “But he’s probably somewhere near Charlie, the drug addict who is not actually named Charlie and likes to spray paint kitchens.” I tried to think of the street where Charlie lived but only recalled the alley where we used to park. I told her about that and the coffee shop a couple of blocks down from his hovel.

  She paused, and asked slowly, “Well, what is his actual name, Janelle?”

  “I have no idea, but you don’t need his name. Just go see if Mac’s truck is in the alley, then wait, and if he isn’t there, he’s probably around there somewhere.”

  So Mac’s older sister went looking for him, and found him wandering the streets of downtown Sacramento, just where I said he’d be. She found him at five a.m., walking barefoot, without his wallet or keys.

  The next day, on day twenty-eight, two d
ays before my scheduled rehab departure, Mac and I spoke on the phone. It turned out he was sitting alone one night in the adorable country house we had just rented to begin our life anew, and in a flash of brilliance remembered the abandoned cocaine baggie from the day God spoke to me. So he took it, and drank a bottle of rum, and got lost on the streets of Sacramento after hanging out with Charlie.

  While I could relate from a past life, I was healed now in rehab and therefore outraged at his poor choices.

  “WHERE WERE THE KIDS, MAC?” I screamed into the phone, sitting on the couch beneath a watercolor of a snow leopard. My privileges had been upgraded to use of the portable house phone as opposed to the pay phone, but we weren’t allowed to use it in our rooms. Consequently, everybody squealed at their spouses in common areas, and absolutely nobody cared. “WERE YOU FUCKING SOME BROAD, TOO?” I thought of that night in the Thai restaurant parking lot.

  He was quiet and sounded tired, with a shade of guilt and the slightest wash of shame. “What? No. What? What are you talking about? They were at my parents’. I’m sorry, Janelle.”

  “And now you’re going to rehab for ninety days on a goddamn beach in Southern California to find your inner child while I come back to pick up the pieces of our family?” In twenty-eight days, I had transformed from mentally ill cocaine addict to doting savior.

  “Janelle, aren’t you just coming back from a rehab?” He was growing irritated.

  “Mine was only thirty days, Mac!” I hung up to call my mother and tell her she needed to come get me, right then, so I could go home and clean up the mess my cosmic disaster of a husband made.

  When I heard Mac and I would be in rehab at the same time, I decided my in-laws and parents were going to try to steal my children. I envisioned long, drawn-out, vicious court battles between them. I had no evidence of grandparents or anybody else for that matter vying for possession of our kids; in fact, I had no evidence of anything but support from all of them, but I felt untethered. I was convinced that if I stayed the last two days of my program, I would lose them. One of us has to be with them, I thought.