by Tom Macher
They categorized the family tree—addict, hero, mascot, lost child, scapegoat, enabler—explaining each member’s contribution, warned how they’d rotate and shift, bat-shit crazy, all.
You are not alone. Don’t have to be. The road to hell is paved with bricks of goodness, whatever. You are each other’s family now. Be your brother’s keeper. You can count on each other to do right by each other, except when you can’t. Stick with the winners! Secrets keep you sick. Resentments are the number one offenders. Think, don’t think!
Our thinking got us here, led us down dark streets, found us outside crack houses at three a.m., knocking on doors, looking to borrow eggs, sugar, and everyday condiments, for this is how our mind works: It’s late, I want to bake some cookies, except I’m out of sugar (poor me!). There’s sugar in the office, but I don’t want to wake the night tech. I can see lights in the crack house across the way. I bet they got sugar in that house, I bet they have eggs!
Stop thinking! No one thinks their way into right behavior. You can’t think up a hot dog when you’re hungry. It takes action. You must act. The first act is being here. The second is staying.
That’s cool, I said, glad y’all found something to help. I’m happy for y’all, truly. Now, no disrespect and all, but I am way, way better than this. Tell me, how long am I supposed to be here again?
* * *
WE WERE ALL MALE, age seventeen and up, all loiterers, contributors, delinquents, petty thieves, dropouts, strong-arm men, traffickers, pimps, rip-off artists, pretty-boy hustlers, on loan from correctional facilities, the state and judicial system, referred by thirty- and ninety-day TCs or psych wards, annexed by family, workplace, the military, all of us collected, quarantined, pushed in, fucked.
Guys arrived rough and haggard, nails chewed to the quick, stringy hair greasy or thinned through, wearing threadbare shirts and jeans too long, too loose, or too short, with tattered cuffs or holey asses, and, like me with my goatee, were forced to shave, tuck their shirts in, sew hems, or discard ripped clothing altogether. It didn’t matter style, flair, education, or pedigree. Everything became practice in following direction, humility, right action leads to right thinking. Seventeen-year-olds had two options: high school or GED. For anyone not in school, a shit job was mandatory. We flipped burgers, bagged groceries, loaded lumber, cleaned toilets, and dusted shelves, installed carpet and roofing, dug and then built forms, poured concrete, framed and finished houses, changed brake pads and oil, answered phones, hauled furniture from storeroom to showroom and showroom to car, bused tables, washed dishes, mowed lawns, laid sod, shoveled manure, climbed telephone poles, greeted customers at Walmart and retirement homes, or inspected barges on the river. The best jobs of all paid $4.75 an hour.
In total, we were young, old, ragtag, miscollected. If you saw us off Property all at once in a mandatory all-House activity, called a Group Funk, like going to the Circle K or a meeting, on foot and bike, circling each other, clumping up, going lone wolf, straggler, follow the leader, playing grab-ass, fuckaround-fuckaround, pantsing motherfuckers, wedgie-ing bitches, dry-humping fools into lampposts, and wrestling each other to the ground, all of us dissimilar, infinitely specific, terminally unique, and yet fitting together so perfectly hip, slick, and cool, you’d know immediately our situation. My, my, you’d say, look at these halfway motherfuckers.
And yet there was confusion in town, straight mockery: people called it a spin-dry, a group-home, or treatment center. Program didn’t buy this talk. You men are in a halfway house, he’d tell us. That means no silver lining, only the inevitable.
We called it the House. Brothers who’d left but remained in or near town were said to be in the area, which was different than your area, which referred to a part of the Property you were responsible for cleaning during Checks. Always, as long as we hung around, these words would mean these things. Even after being released, when we rented and owned homes, if we said, Meet me at the House, it meant here.
Of course it was not a house at all but six ordinary two/one apartments lined perpendicular to West Road. It looked like a kind of extended-stay motel where practicing drunks go to die. Dilapidated, with faded shingles, a long and cracked parking lot, and a bent basketball rim in front of Room One, it sat a half mile from Main, and all day and night we watched crackheads twitter down the road. We’d find them wired in our kitchens or rocking in our bathtubs or see them roll from the pines behind our apartments or pull themselves from the gulley, always with that awful look on their face of More. I want more. Give me more. I need more. Our bedroom windows were ground-level, and sometimes when the monsoons came, baseheads pulled our windows open and we’d wake to find ourselves holding them, their bare bellies pressed close for warmth.
A walkway ran the length of these apartments. This was the front porch, an area we were responsible for cleaning. At the end of this walkway, the group room formed an L. Aphorisms and posters covered its walls. A stick figure at a ravine’s edge: “When you think you can’t, you must.” The elusive “Think, don’t think.” An airbrushed photo of sand, a pair of footprints leading to one: God carrying you. The Twelve Steps. The Twelve Traditions. “Come, come to/O, come to believe.” A feelings chart with smiley faces—big-eyed, frowning, no mouth, yawn, labeled alarmed, sad, bored, exhausted, and so on—staff referenced after asking how we felt so we’d say something other than fine, which we all knew stood for fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional, which, as they many times explained, isn’t a feeling. A dry-erase board gridded with names, admit date, Phase, Hours, Tasks. Drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, a linoleum floor, hard chairs.
The bathroom had crapper, vanity, toilet paper so thin it tore our assholes. A sign-in-sign-out sheet sat on a clipboard on a bookshelf holding coffeemaker, sugar/sugar substitute, nondairy cream, foam cups, A.A. literature. On the bottom shelf were spiral notebooks, our journals. They encouraged us to write in them and read one another’s, but we always wrote the same thing: Dear Diary: I am having a good day!
Behind the group room was a four-by-five slab where we sat and talked shit while dudes pumped iron on the rusted weight bench beside it. There was an acre of mowed grass where we played kickball. Beyond it the grass turned scraggly and wild, stretching many acres to a stand of pines beyond which was a field of prairie grass beyond which were more pines beyond which was another field beyond which were more pines, each field sectioned perfectly, cleared but not developed, hopes unrealized of subdivisions and commercial centers, until the pattern stopped and you’d find broke-down cars, rusted swing sets, old basketball courts, a tin-sided liquor store, the projects. Like West Road, these projects were not white or black but a mix, merely poor, bleak, home of the single mother, spinster, drifter, and out-on-bail dad. Finally, there was an industrial park with machine shops fabricating glass, aluminum siding, and steel. Then cow pastures. Trailers. The Waffle House. A few cheap motels. A Shoney’s. The Red-Man Truck Stop & Casino. The intersection of I-10, which led to Los Angeles, and Highway 30, which intersected I-10 again near River Road in Baton Rouge. An outlet mall. Chemical plants. The river.
* * *
STAFF CONSISTED OF a few primary counselors, a cook, a couple psychologists, some night techs, and Vic. No one knew Vic’s title, not even Program—driver, maybe, mascot. Like the disease itself, he was ubiquitous, foundational. Even when they fired him, he just kept showing up, driving us places, and confronting us until they hired him back. Except the cook, staff were all recovering and claimed they weren’t any different from us, only they’d been at it longer—each morning they still had to get on their knees and ask for another day. With them it was always the same: no one is different, you won’t make it, your brothers won’t, you will all die, one day, even me.
Program, who could be blunt, spoke of five levels: dead, using, dry, clean, sober. Sober offered serenity, a spiritual outlook. It means happy anywhere. It’s not a reflection of absence, like clean or dry, but a state of mind. Sober, you can get thr
ough anything. Dry was the worst. Dry, you might as well be using. It’s all torment, no relief. At least using, there’s relief. Even dead, you don’t have to feel, he’d say. Dry drunks beat their wives and children. They kill people. Last thing you want to be is dry, he’d say. If you’re dry, do the right thing—kill yourself.
Yet for all his rah-rah and bluster, sometimes he’d flip, his black eyes sad, soul bubbling from his chest, and get emotional, ask to lay hands. Palming our arm or shoulder, he’d hover, his three hundred pounds comforting. How are you? he’d ask. How do you feel about thing X? And poof—
Calmness.
None of my answers mattered, all my answers were lies. I was what he said I was. Touching me—I know it sounds gross; it wasn’t—holding me, he felt what I felt, for his hand entered my body and attached itself to my heart. I know you, he’d say, I am you. His dark gaze suggested he knew from our behavior how tomorrow would play out yet he offered no condescension, not a smidgen of pity, just calm, flat sadness: this is how it is, nothing you or I can do to stop it. Measured, sincere, supremely confident, he would’ve made a good politician—he had that kind of self-belief—but his unshakable vision saw only the tragic: all of you will die. He’d randomly select us in group. Tommy, Bill, Ray, Chad, Donny, stand. Here’s how many make a year. Tommy, Bill, Ray, sit. Here’s who makes two. Look to your left, look to your right. In five years, both those brothers will be dead. I thought, Yeah, okay, these nuts, one out of blah-blah, statistics, what bullshit, in light of my post-Vietnam cynicism, where I see everything as PR, sales, and marketing, let me get this, let me get that, give me your motherfucking money, and so on—
But, man. When he laid hands, it was impossible not to trust, even if I didn’t know how. I’d twist it. Like Okay, maybe, for someone else, I get it, you’re warning me, but I know you think I’m different. I know it.
He was the first guy I heard say “I’m just as sick as you” who actually seemed to believe it. And he’d tell us. He didn’t care. He trusted no one more than us. Not his wife or sponsor. Just us. In this room. And he’d get down to it, offer tales of his old life playing music in Buffalo or Yuma, how he’d walk into roughneck dives dressed as Elvis, his big body rhinestoned and tasseled, a fat show pony, find the biggest and meanest, punch him right in the mouth just to start a conversation. He’d punch the next guy, go right down the bar, like little bunny foo-foo. He’d grab a dude’s nuts and twist, kick the back of someone’s knees out. He had short, choking arms, powerful hands, and he’d pick men up by their windpipe, watch the lights begin to dim.
Once I found him on the back slab, a far-off look in his eyes, a sliver of wood in his mouth. He asked me if Brother X was using a nicotine patch, and I told him Brother X was quitting smoking. Huh, he said. Have you seen him smoke?
Come to think of it, I had.
He had this way of lifting his eyebrows without lifting them at all.
In subtle glances or brutal honesty, he wanted understanding without prodding. He spoke incessantly of the itch—it covers everything, let it guide you; know, understand, come to love it—and good days and bad, said be wary of both, raged against comfort, feeling comfortable, how stuck we get in ourselves. He’d done and would do horrible things and later was accused of still more horrible shit, allegations that pestered and plagued him to the road once more, but from each infraction he resurfaced roachlike and undead, patiently waiting yet never passive, and though I spent most of these months only half hearing, always with that generational shaking of my hand in front of my nuts—save it, fuck off—I’d come to understand he had too much heart to work a job like that thinking any junkie different. It would’ve killed him.
* * *
NO ONE COULD SAY HOW LONG I was supposed to be here. It depends, they said. There’s no rule book, no set thing. Just fluidity within certain parameters. Common sense governed our behavior, as did consequence. Ignorance was never an excuse. The only hard and fast: don’t drink; go to meetings; change your whole life. Everything else was open to interpretation, yet mostly, our interpretations were wrong, and wrong behavior brought consequence, like Stricts, or worse, a form of House-wide Stricts called Flats, where we had to be within three feet of another brother at all times, couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t leave the Property except for work or during Group Funks, couldn’t use the phone, shoot hoops, play cards, lift weights, listen to music, nap, read, etc., etc., etc., and Majors were performed weekly instead of once a month. During Majors, we cleaned obsessively—unplugging appliances, unscrewing their housing, even, pulling them from a wall—using Q-tips, a toothbrush, or our pinkie, detailing hard-to-reach areas; we broke down beds, removed drop-ceiling tiles, pressure-washed everything. Unlike regular cleaning, called Checks, which were monitored by Big Brother Group, staff checked Majors. Any dirt or dust, any gunk or grease, any pine straw, any dead roach or beetle, any anthill, any feather, required us to begin again. If Majors began on Sunday morning, they often didn’t end until Monday afternoon. Fuck up on Flats and we got Super Flats, where every brother had to be within three feet of another and Majors were performed every day. You’d see fifteen guys outside a crapper, or one guy shoving a push mower across the backyard while twelve guys trailed behind him.
We got put on Scribes and Ice—no contact, both—and had to stay in the group room corner. The only way off Scribes was to write our way off; we essayed on self-will, sex, powerlessness, resentment, acceptance, etc. Ice meant you were leaving soon, and you just sat there, bags packed, not allowed to talk, read, write, nothing. God help us if we spoke to someone on Ice, for in speaking, we enabled and supported his disease; we, too, would be gone soon. Despite the awfulness of being cut off from our brothers in that corner, we all looked forward to Program tearing ass from the office, eyes black as the Grim Reaper’s dick, our sickness evident, hard on the drama, always spitting the same phrase: take two brothers and pack your shit.
The two brothers walked you to your room, ripped your mattress from its bedspring, watched you pack. Is that your shit? they’d ask. Are you sure? It doesn’t look like yours. Let me ask—Hey, dick, this your shit? Just making sure. And weird but true, they loved you now more than your mom, kneeling on your floor offering wisdom, strength, hope, or a hug, some advice—The bus station is farther than you think, or A dude I know can take you to New Orleans or Jackson, wherever you need to go—but then, always, once you finished packing, they’d drag your mattress, linens, and pillow to the group room, toss them in the corner, give one last affirmative look before repairing to the front porch, where, dusting their hands, they gathered with the others and their cold drinks and cigarettes and spouted the same old same old: It works if you work it, you can lead a horse to water, Vic, hang around a barbershop long enough, you will get a haircut, any time you point a finger, there’s two pointing back at you.
All this, of course, was voluntary up to the point we quit volunteering. Then the police or sheriff or some federal agency showed up and hauled us away.
We got Dress Nice Task, where we had to tuck our shirts into our slacks, couldn’t wear jeans or tees, have any tears or frays, or Dress Down Task, where we had to wear jeans and tees. Sloppy guys, on Garbageman Task, dragged their belongings around the Property in a trash bag. Whiners got Crybaby Task and sucked their thumbs. Guys got Sum It Up Task, and Speak Only When Spoken To, everyone had to take the cotton out of their ears and put it in their mouth. Nonconfrontational or overly confrontational brothers got Sheriff Task. Sheriffs wore a gun belt, carried a cap gun and a small notebook, and wrote tickets for shitty behavior such as talking back to staff, swearing, war-storying, anything. Tickets brought fines, a quarter or fifty cents, we deposited in the Confo jar. This was me. I was Sheriff.
We were drama queens, dilettantes, psycho- and sociopaths, head cases, grandiose, delusional, bipolar, suffering from depression, anxiety, ADHD, schizophrenia. We were fatally hip, King Baby all, habitual, practiced, cool. Dudes blew O’s when they exhaled. Everyone smoke
d. Except in group, swearing was prohibited, a ticketable offense—naturally, every goddamn thing was a motherfucking bitch. Failure to make three meetings a week led to Hours. More than three Hours meant Stricts until Saturday Work Detail. Hours and Hours, Hours for everything—too much beard in your goatee, sideburns past your earholes, leaving off a.m. or p.m. when signing out even when clear as day, ashes on the slab, shoes untied in group—no one had zero Hours. We had to belong to home groups, have sponsors, know the steps, be working a step, employed or in school, maintain said job or school, or we got Stricts, no hope of getting out soon.
We needed permission for everything and nothing. No one said you can only carry X amount cash, but carry more than X amount cash and there’d be a conversation. Paychecks were signed over to staff and doled out as needed for cigarettes, cold drinks, snack foods, what have you. Weekend passes were unusual, family days rare, visitors less than never. If a female came onto the Property, it was by mistake or someone had fucked up and was gone and she’d never find him now, anyway. Sorry about that, sweetie, Program would say, hands dangling over the porch railing, no idea where he is.
Areas rotated daily: living room, kitchen, bathroom, porch. Four brothers lived in each apartment, but on Flats, beds emptied, and empty beds meant multiple areas. Every pubic hair, piece of lint, dead fly in light fixture, gook on stove or crust in microwave, anything in the trash, got you a Mark. Four Marks equaled an Hour. After three Hours, we got Stricts.
There was no lights-out.
At seven a.m., Ranking Brother performed Bed Busts. If asleep (determined by body, not eyes: one foot in bed meant sleeping), we got Hours. Checker came at eight. Our beds had to be made top sheet folded under then over pillow, bed skirt unwrinkled. Nothing allowed on floors, dressers, nightstands, or headboards. A Walkman, a CD player, anything pawnable needed locking up. They opened drawers and closets—were our clothes folded neatly? Did shirts hang from hangers? What about shoes? Were they orderly? Any infraction, a booger or fingernail clipping, a dust mote, wrinkle, or hair, got a Mark.