My Life, Deleted

by Scott Bolzan

  I walked her to the garage door and held her longingly, as if I wouldn’t see her for ten years. “Have a good day at work, and don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll be fine here by myself.”

  She sighed. “I know you’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m just concerned about leaving you alone.”

  I watched her back out of the driveway and head down the street before I walked into the house and closed the garage door. After Taylor left for school, the house was all mine, and it was oh so quiet.

  I walked around the house, looking for some magical sign telling me what to do next. The house had never seemed so big. No one was there to stop me from getting into trouble or to tell me how to do things. I knew Joan was only a phone call away, but I was determined not to bug her. She had enough going on in her world, getting used to a new job and dealing with new people.

  When she called around 11:00 A.M. to check on me, I was happy to hear from her.

  “I’m okay, but I miss you,” I said.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be working yet,” she said, sounding worried. “Maybe I should be home, taking care of you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I told her again. “I need to learn on my own, and you need to be with other people so you don’t go crazy.”

  That seemed to calm her down. “What are you up to?” she asked.

  I told her I’d been reading news articles on the computer and going through my desk, scanning through documents and brochures to learn more about what I used to do for a living. I also felt it was important to learn as much as I could about the changing economy, the automakers’ bailout, and the ongoing controversy over CEOs’ use of private planes. I was trying to determine whether I would ever be able to make money again by managing private jets amid all this negative media coverage.

  We ended the conversation with the usual “I love you,” and she said she’d be home around 6:00 because of the traffic.

  As a way to show her that I had everything under control in her absence, I decided to make a nice dinner of chicken parmesan with steamed vegetables and garlic bread.

  After a trip to the grocery story, my headache was getting bad, so I took some pain medicine and relaxed in my chair until Taylor got home. I must have dozed off because the next thing I remembered was Taylor opening the door around 3:00 P.M.

  “I’m home. How was your day, Dad?” she asked in her usual teasing tone. “What did you do all day by yourself?”

  “It was fine,” I said. “I didn’t hurt myself or get lost.”

  “Well, that’s a good day then,” she said, laughing.

  I asked if she would be home for dinner, and she said no, she had to work. After I told her what I was making, she replied, “You better save me some leftovers.”

  I cleaned up around the house, opened the mail, and read the paper until 5:00 P.M., then started on dinner. I’d already made this meal once since my accident after Joan ordered it for dinner in Oceanside, and I felt comfortable trying it without the recipe. Cutting the chicken in thin slices, I pounded it with a meat hammer, soaked it in eggs, coated it with Italian bread crumbs, then sautéed it with olive oil, garlic, and pepper.

  While that was cooking, I boiled water for the rotini noodles and cut fresh zucchini and carrots, which I steamed and sautéed. While the bread was in the oven, Joan popped in around 6:00, just as she’d planned.

  I ran over to welcome her with a hug and kiss. “Wow, what smells so good in here?” she asked.

  “I’m making one of your favorite dishes, chicken parm.”

  “Yum.”

  “How was your first day?”

  “It was fun. I think I’m going to like this job,” she said, barely missing a beat before asking about me. “So tell me what you did all day.”

  I told her I worked, went to the grocery store, got rid of a headache, and watched a lot of TV. “We’re going to switch to Geico insurance because we can save up to 15 percent,” I said, proudly quoting the little green lizard.

  “Scott,” she said, laughing, “we already have good insurance, and we don’t need to switch.”

  I was a little upset, not understanding the humor in what I was saying. I was seriously trying to cut our costs. “Look, if we can save money, why not do it?”

  “Why don’t you concentrate on learning the important things, such as current events, past history, things like that?” she replied.

  Now I really felt insulted. She was telling me what was important? Everything seemed important to me. “So, I guess the ShamWow! is out of the question then,” I snapped sarcastically, hoping to convey my hurt feelings.

  Joan looked at me as if she couldn’t tell if I was kidding, but, well aware of my limitations, she softened her tone. “Not everything on television is a good choice,” she said.

  As we sat down to eat the meal, which turned out quite well, I might add, she told me about her job, her co-workers, and how much she still had to learn. Then it was my turn. I had a new job as well.

  “It’s difficult not having you here to keep me on track and show me what I need to know,” I told her, explaining that it was lonely not having her to talk to whenever I wanted. “I found it very distracting.”

  I wasn’t trying to upset her; I could see that she felt torn. I knew she wanted to take care of me, but she also felt it was important to go to work. I wanted to reinforce that I was all right with that and that I would benefit from struggling on my own.

  In the coming days I developed a routine: I read the paper over breakfast, played with Mocha to exercise her, straightened up the house, took out the garbage, or did laundry. I tried to learn more about my previous life and current events by going through files and boxes, Googling issues of interest I’d seen in the newspaper, and watching the History Channel and Fox News. Mocha soon switched her allegiance from Joan to me, nudging me to be petted and napping at my feet in my office. I enjoyed the company.

  It could have been because of my headaches, my healing brain, or the pain medication I was still taking, but my attention span didn’t seem to be expanding. I found myself needing to shift tasks every fifteen minutes or so, frustrated when I didn’t understand something or when I’d reached a saturation point in learning the issue at hand.

  When I tried to read a brochure from my business, for example, I could understand what it said, but I had no context or experience to comprehend its purpose or to know when I would present the pamphlet during a sales pitch. Was it a compilation of marketing approaches that had worked in the past, I wondered, or had an attorney drawn it up for me? Such unanswerable questions could drive me so crazy I’d have to switch gears.

  As increasingly self-sufficient as I was becoming, I didn’t want Joan to feel that I didn’t need her, because I did. The more she was away, the more I wanted to be around her. I so hated being without her that I would wait by my computer as dusk descended, watching the cars approaching on our closed-circuit security system. As soon as her car pulled onto our street, I opened the garage and greeted her with open arms.

  Every day I felt the bond between us growing even stronger.

  The nights, however, were still a battle for me, and that was starting to affect my days. As time progressed, my insomnia, which, I’d learned from reading, was a common side effect of brain injuries, grew more erratic. In the first few months after my accident, I’d consistently been getting no more than three hours of sleep—an hour or two after I went to bed around 11:00 and the rest in five- to twenty-minute catnaps during the day.

  A few weeks after Joan went to work, I was miraculously able to lie down one night and sleep for eight hours straight. But the excitement diminished a couple of days later when my previous insomnia returned. Although it varied, it was typically three to seven nights before I could knock down eight hours again. There was no cause or pattern that I could discern to this new sleep syndrome, and it became a vicious cycle.

  Oddly enough, I found it easier on my body and mind when the insomnia was consistent than when I
had to adjust to these extreme variations. I became increasingly fatigued, and my body ached all the time. My primary care doctor, Teresa Lanier, told me this could either be a side effect of the pain medication or simply a result of my brain injury, but she cautioned me not to nap during the day because I’d never kick the insomnia that way.

  But as hard as I tried to heed her advice, some days I just couldn’t make it through the day without a thirty-minute nap. Dr. Lanier prescribed the sleep aid trazodone, but it made me groggy in the morning. Next I tried Flexeril, a muscle relaxant, which Joan told me I used to take for backaches and always made me feel sleepy. Although this medication made me feel more rested, it didn’t work either. Even after taking two or three of the little yellow pills, I was still wide awake, leaving me tired and lethargic, which was no improvement over just plain tired.

  When I used to run the jet charter business, Joan said, I often got calls in the middle of the night from brokers or organ transplant teams that needed to fly doctors across the country. When this happened, I’d just start my workday because I couldn’t get back to sleep, taking advantage of the quiet time at the office. But now that I didn’t have a job to go to, I was left with nothing but my own ruminations over whether my memory would return or my insomnia would ever resolve.

  Although I found it easier to deal with the headaches than this ridiculous sleep schedule, the pain had not let up either, and the two were interrelated. These days I usually had only a four-hour window when I was pain free, and the nearly constant pain was easier to handle in the evenings and on weekends, when I had my family to distract me. We’d go watch Taylor cheer at high school football and basketball games, and we’d visit her at Nando’s restaurant, where I made her bring me special items such as chips with barbecue sauce. But when the pain woke me up—and kept me up—in the middle of the night, I felt miserable and alone.

  During those long wee hours of the morning, I got sucked back down into the vortex of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty, which was even deeper now that the window had long passed for when the doctors predicted I would return to normal. I longed to sleep and for the pain to stop, wondering if this torture was going to last forever. Still haunted by the black hole where my knowledge used to be and the nagging lack of a diagnosis, I felt lost. I still didn’t know what my values were or what I stood for; my sense of identity felt very soft, like a baby’s skull, and my self-confidence was next to nil. When my anxiety led to panic, I climbed back into bed after Joan left for work, where I hid and cried for hours, feeling like a wounded bear.

  Dr. Lanier finally prescribed the antidepressant Cymbalta for me, which helped to ease the panic and depression, but I still had those days where I couldn’t drag myself out from under the covers even to watch television. It was difficult to find anything positive in my life, and sometimes reality was simply too much to face.

  Chapter 15

  GRANT HAD BEEN DOING BETTER for the past few weeks since he got out of detox, or so he’d been telling us, although he still called with money-related and other life crises. Meanwhile, I’d been watching a lot more of Intervention and Celebrity Rehab.

  But it turned out that Grant had been lying to us again. He called us in mid-March with the news that he’d been continuing to use since his last bout in detox and wanted to go back to rehab.

  “I need help,” he said.

  Joan had been calling around, looking for a decent free or affordable rehab facility for Grant, but we couldn’t find one nearby without a weeks-long waiting list. We were, however, able to get him into Ocean Hills Recovery, a ninety-day residential program a former counselor had recommended, which we hoped would give him a better shot at stability. The only thing was that it was in Dana Point, California, about thirty minutes north of Oceanside.

  Putting some distance between Grant and his dealer and drug-using buddies in Arizona was Grant’s choice, but to me it sounded like he wanted to run from his problems and avoid dealing with the reasons he took the wrong path in the first place. Either way, Joan and I were tired of all the hassles and hoped that after he finished treatment he’d find a job and an apartment there with his new, sober friends.

  This would be his third stint in rehab, and his habit was getting pretty expensive. He’d spent a couple weeks in a failed outpatient program for cocaine addiction in October 2007, then two weeks later he did a six-week stint in a residential program. Every time he relapsed, it angered me even more that he’d let us down—again.

  I can’t understand why he can’t stop the lying and doing drugs. Can’t he see how it’s hurting his family?

  But if I was tired of his lies after just a few months, I could only imagine how Joan felt after dealing with them for nearly two years. For me, the hardest and most confusing part of this was my inability to counter my anger toward him and my self-doubt about my parenting skills with memories of the good times Joan said that he and I had shared while he was growing up. All I had to go on was the irritation of the moment.

  Grant stayed the night at our house under close watch before he and I headed to California at 6:00 A.M. on March 18, as Joan was leaving for work.

  “You have to get better,” Joan told him tearfully. “This is yet another opportunity. We’re spending a lot of money on this. You have to give it your all. You can’t live like this—you will die.”

  As we headed toward Interstate 8, the freeway that led us into southern California, Grant fell asleep. This was okay with me because I didn’t have anything more to say to him. At least by taking him to rehab, I could know that he was safe and getting better, giving Joan and me a much-needed respite from worrying whether he was getting high, getting hurt, or, even worse, hurting someone else.

  Grant slept for most of the trip, waking up at the halfway point in Yuma for a bathroom break and a drink.

  “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?” I asked, hoping to avoid any more nasty surprises.

  “No, no,” Grant insisted. “Nothing.”

  Once we arrived at the Oceanside harbor, I put him to work washing down the boat while I worked on the interior, monitoring him carefully to ensure that he didn’t take any shortcuts. Joan and I had decided that I would keep Grant on the boat with me one night then take him to rehab early the next morning.

  We went to a Mexican restaurant to grab some tacos and burritos, where Grant told me about all the times we’d come out to California as a family before my accident, traveling to many motocross events even before we’d bought the Meridian.

  “We had so much fun with the Jet Skis and just hanging out on the boat,” he said, describing the leisurely excursions to Catalina Island and Huntington Beach on the Fourth of July and my birthday.

  Then he grew somber, saying he was scared about the months and years ahead. He seemed like a different kid, acknowledging that his days of participating in family vacations would be over for quite some time. It saddened me that he saw his future in such a bleak light.

  I tried telling him that his life wasn’t finished, it was just beginning, and that he needed to start a new life without drugs. I wanted so much to hold and console him, but I had learned from my TV education on addiction that because nothing else we’d tried had worked, what he needed most from us now was tough love. If Joan couldn’t give it to him because her emotional attachment was too strong, then I was going to do it on my own. I was the logical choice, and even though I didn’t really know how, I certainly would give it my best.

  “Your days of fun are over for now,” I said. “You need to straighten out your life before you can think of having fun because fun is what got you into this mess to begin with.”

  We spent the rest of the night watching hockey on television. After being out in the sun all day, we were both worn out, so around 11:00 I told him to go to bed. My plan was to leave for breakfast at 7:00 in the morning.

  In the meantime, however, I was worried that he might try to sneak off in the night to get high. “If I hear you moving around, I’ll
break your f---ing legs,” I said.

  Thankfully, he was still there the next morning. We gathered up his belongings, making sure he didn’t forget anything, had a quick bite, then headed north on Interstate 5.

  The Ocean Hills treatment facility was a two-story blue and tan house in a middle-class neighborhood a few blocks east of the highway. The place seemed a little weathered, with a yellowing lawn, but it matched the rest of the neighborhood. The owner, Shaggy, a man in his midforties with bleached brown hair that hung just past his shoulders, looked like a beach bum. He and Thurman, the intake counselor, greeted us when we arrived for our 8:30 appointment.

  Thurman was a muscular, hard-nosed guy with a shaved head who reminded me of a marine. He gave us a quick tour of the place, which had room for twelve residents, ages eighteen to twenty-five. Including Grant, it housed ten, four of whom were women, which, as you might imagine, could make for some obvious challenges. But it wasn’t so bad—the back wooden deck had an ocean view.

  The office was in the garage, where the door was always open. The residents often smoked in the driveway and on the back patio. We sat out there, filling out the necessary paperwork, while the counselor asked Grant some questions.

  “When was the last time you used drugs?” he asked.

  “Five days ago,” Grant said.

  I noticed that Grant’s speech was slow and lethargic, and so was his thinking; he was struggling with questions that even I could answer.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” I asked him.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “I didn’t sleep well.”

  “I don’t care if you’re tired. Pay attention and talk right.”

  I was determined to be hard-nosed with him, giving him my best tough-love act. After I’d put the $7,500 for the first month on my credit card, Thurman asked if I wanted to stick around while my son got settled in. But feeling a jumble of emotions, I felt the urge to get out of there as soon as possible.