The groups were very general. We all had different problems. Most of the people in rehab had a dual diagnosis—some sort of anxiety or depression that had developed into alcoholism or drug addiction as a way to cope. But I convinced myself that the other inmates had nothing in common with me. Like the big gal who wouldn’t stop eating; or the woman in her eighties who shopped so much her own goddamn kids put her away; or the heroin addict from L.A.; or the geriatric millionaire with a booze problem. What the hell am I doing here with this cast of weirdo screw-ups and addicts?
We’d gather morning, afternoon and night in various rooms that seemed pretty much exactly the same—the assembly room, the common room, the meeting area, etc. Always a circle of chairs and hour after hour of emotional show and tell.
The counsellors gave us assignments to complete during our free time. It was always weird shit. One counsellor wanted me to write a letter about why I love myself. Another wanted me to write a letter saying sorry to myself. I thought it was stupid and refused to do it at first. I’m not going to write some corny letter to myself. I knew where it was going and I wasn’t going to fall for it.
The whole time, I kept a journal in a blue notebook. I’d asked Joanie to buy it for me while I was lying in that hospital bed in the ICU back in Reno. There was something about writing that I enjoyed. Getting it all out on paper was cathartic. But who wants to share that with a group of crazy strangers? What’s the point? I wondered. Are we all going to hug it out after?
Eventually, though, I gave in and wrote a letter to myself. It was still corny—but okay, fine, it felt kind of good. After the exercise, we went around the room complimenting each other. Also corny. But again, it felt pretty damn good. I went back to my room and wrote down everything they had said about me in the blue notebook. They told me my “heart could heal the planet” and that I was “hilarious and a leader and a great speaker,” and someone said that she saw “nothing but strength in me in every way.” Another person complimented the beard I was growing, and one woman noted that I looked like the actor Hugh Jackman, while another said she liked my eyes and wished I wasn’t married. I scribbled those things down, too.
“You make me feel safe,” one person said.
“You’re a warrior,” said another.
I wrote it all down, because putting it on paper made it all seem real. I felt good about myself for the first time in a while, and even if that was something small, it was still something.
Sometimes, we had art class. My reaction: Can it get any more like elementary school than this? The counsellor would give us some theme to draw. It’d usually be some meaningful bullshit. And we’d always play these stupid games—trying to solve puzzles and problems—in our groups. Okay, that stuff was actually all right. I’ve always enjoyed trust falls. And some of the other team-building exercises were fun. But still, here we were, a bunch of grown-ass adults with grown-ass problems playing games like a bunch of teen counsellors from Camp Caribou! We even did a goddamn sweat lodge.
The kooks got on my nerves. I don’t want to say that an eighty-something-year-old shopaholic doesn’t have a legitimate problem, but how the hell am I supposed to relate to that? Her husband died and she just started shopping, buying up all these books and shit online. Her kids put her in rehab to make her stop. I guess I could appreciate the obsession that this old lady was dealing with. But at the time, I thought it was just crazy. At the other end of the spectrum, several patients suffered from addiction to hard drugs. A lot were hooked on heroin. I was surprised to find out how many. Oxycontin was another common addiction. I’d never touched an illicit drug in my life. Sure, I’d been down the dependence road before, but I really didn’t think I was a true alcoholic. I drank too much, yes. But I managed to kick booze for eight years before. Well, okay … yeah, I developed a drinking problem … but it was strictly related to my OCD and depression … I mean, come on, I wasn’t an alcoholic alcoholic—right? Just in case, my schedule included an AA meeting every night.
One of the guys who came through rehab was an Irish white supremacist. He had all these racist tattoos—swastikas, the iron cross, all that shit. He was big, too—probably six foot two or three—and thick. He had a marine haircut. It made him look intimidating. I felt his anger when I talked to him. When he got stressed, you just knew it was boiling over inside him. He was an alcoholic and would use the booze to channel his anger.
Worldviews aside, I related to this guy. He’d start out as this happy, funny, outgoing kind of guy and then snap into an angry beast. We were both pretty normal drinkers who would go out and have fun. But when the anger boiled out of him, he’d get really mean and resentful. In our AA meetings, he always talked about resentment. One day, our AA counsellor asked us what the number one cause of a relapse is. I looked at the Irish white supremacist and boom, it came to me. I put my hand up. “Resentment,” I said. I was right. I’m not Doctor-fucking-Phil here, but let’s just call it an educated guess. I’d carried a lot of anger and resentment through life. It didn’t matter that I’d been a pro hockey player. I could have been working my way up in business, in a factory or on the ice. Resentment exists in all those places.
I harboured a lot of resentment towards the people I cared about—particularly women. Women that I married and didn’t know how to love. It was always a problem for me. Growing up, dating wasn’t really a thing I did. Remember, I had one girlfriend before I started playing pro hockey. When I was young, my dad told me to stay away from women because they’d just screw me up. When I became a junior and pro prospect, people always told me women were only after one thing. When I did date, I figured they only liked me because I was a hockey player. It became a self-worth thing. She doesn’t like me; she likes what I do. I assumed she was after what I might become and the financial benefits I might receive. Then, when I was in my first real adult relationship and thinking about breaking it off, she told me she was pregnant. I couldn’t dismiss the thought that she’d gotten pregnant on purpose. Every relationship I have had was doomed by my unfair, preconceived ideas about women.
When I really tried to get to the root of my drinking problem, it always came back to this irrational resentment towards women. Not just the good-old-boy partying; I mean excessive self-medicating with alcohol to get rid of the pain. I was trying to protect myself, but all along I was sabotaging my ability to have a healthy relationship. I took it to an obsessive level.
31
Family Day
THE FIRST WEEK IN DECEMBER, WE HAD A SPECIAL WEEKEND FOR the families of the patients. Everyone had people come in to take part in addiction workshops and be part of all the constructive exercises and bullshit like that.
The events went on all day. In the first session, we had a big group meeting, and then we split off into smaller discussion groups. During the first meeting, I was laughing the whole time, making jokes. I felt my anxiety rising just having Joanie there beside me. I could see where this was heading: it was going to be her versus me again. I had learned a long time ago to use humour to ease tension and distract people from seeing the truth. Take up all the time with jokes, and they won’t have time to ask you something serious. Walking to the next session, I prodded Joanie. “Everyone thinks I’m funny but you. Everyone likes me except you.” She knew my behaviour, though—the jokes were a sign that I was getting anxious and nervous, and that I was trying to mask it.
When we got to the next session, there were about five patients grouped together with family members. We all sat in a big circle. There were about twenty people there. A guy from the Betty Ford Center, who was running the session, asked all the guests to share specific traits about their loved ones that they found particularly hard to deal with. Then the patient had a chance to respond and talk about all the things that frustrated them. It was kind of like: When you do _______, I feel like _______.
I knew right away this was going to piss me off. Everyone started spilling their guts, crying and hugging. When it was our turn, Joanie we
nt first.
“When you blame me, it makes me—”
She didn’t get to finish before I jumped out of my chair. “This is bullshit!” I shouted. “Do you see what I have to deal with?”
“Clint!” Tina yelled. “Clint! Sit down.”
“Screw you,” I said. “You let her talk, now let me talk.”
It didn’t matter what Joanie said. I had so much anger; I was just waiting to explode.
“Clint!” Tina said again.
I got up and tossed my chair against the wall. “You goddamn bunch of donkeys!” I shouted. “Why don’t you all just go to hell? You too, Joanie.”
She was crying now.
The doctor from the Betty Ford Center didn’t know what to say. He just stared at me.
“Screw you and screw Betty Ford,” I said. “You don’t know shit.”
And everyone just stared at me, frozen in fear, like I was an uncaged tiger at the zoo.
“Bunch of goddamn losers. What the hell are you looking at?”
“Get out,” Tina said.
I went out to the lobby and paced back and forth, like I was holed up in a prison cell again. Goddamn bitch. This is what she does—makes it my fault. Fuck her. To hell with this. I sat down and tried to breathe. The monster was out of me. I needed to pull him back. This was the watch-what-you-fucking-say-because-I’ll-rip-off-your-head-and-shit-down-your-neck version of me. In all the outbursts I’d had in rehab, they’d never experienced this from me, though they must have known it was inevitable. I mean, come on, I put a bullet in my own head. I had tried so hard to control the story, but here I was exposed again, bleeding out in front of everyone as they gasped at the horror.
Joanie was still inside the room, crying. I didn’t give a shit about what anyone else in there was thinking. Tina came out into the lobby.
“You can’t come back in, Clint,” she said. “You’re done for the day.”
They let Joanie stay in the group, and she did. I just sat in the lobby all morning until I returned from Pluto.
The staff told Joanie she didn’t have to talk to me, but she came and sat with me at lunch. She and Tina had spoken about my outburst. Tina told her not to take it personally—she hadn’t done anything wrong—and that it was perfectly understandable if she just wanted to leave.
“Don’t worry about Clint,” Tina said. “He’s an adult. He can handle his feelings. He’ll be fine. Don’t worry about offending him.”
Joanie said she could take care of me. She was calm when she sat down.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just get so mad at you sometimes.”
“I’m really sorry you feel that way,” she said, “but I’ll see you next weekend.”
“Are you sure you’re coming back?” I said. “Goddamn it, I’m sorry. I just hate you sometimes. Please come back.”
Joanie went out into the parking lot and started to drive away. I ran after her.
“Are you coming back? Will you come back?” I was panicking. I couldn’t lose her and I thought she’d be gone forever.
“Yes,” Joanie said again. “I’ll be back again next weekend. Clint—I love you.” And she left.
When I went into my session with Tina on Monday, she ripped me a new asshole. She went on for half an hour about all the things I needed to deal with. I told her I thought she had let me down. I’m sure she realized I wasn’t ready to be in a setting like that with Joanie, but she had rushed me because of this stupid goddamn family weekend. I was convinced she had done it because the NHLPA wanted to know she was getting results.
“I trusted you, Tina,” I said, “and now I think we have a problem.”
We didn’t speak for a few days after that, but then we started working together again because I knew she was the only person in that place who could really help me.
Two weeks later, Joanie went to the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs to take part in a special program for families of people suffering from addiction. When the counsellors at the rehab centre recommended the clinic to her, Joanie was upset. She thought I’d convinced everyone that this was all her fault. Her parents urged her to go—she had nothing to lose, they said, and she could use the time away. It turned out to be the most important thing Joanie did through this whole painful ordeal. Whatever she learned there really helped. When she came back, things started to change. She was angry before—and I couldn’t blame her. At the time, I was also filled with rage. But my anger was about me; I didn’t stop to think about what I had done to her. When I saw her after that Betty Ford trip, she just seemed softer. More patient, more understanding—like everything didn’t have to be a fight. She had learned a lot about mental illness and addiction, and how to deal with people who suffer from both. She learned not to take things personally. After a while, people in her position start to really believe that it’s their fault—I am doing this to him. I’m ruining his life. I’m making him miserable. And the counterbalance to that is instinctively to respond with anger and hurt, so she’d lash out at me.
There were about thirty-odd people with loved ones suffering from addiction or some kind of mental illness at the Betty Ford course. Joanie listened to them all share the hurtful things that their loved ones had said. It was identical to what I had been saying. She realized that my circumstances weren’t so special—I was acting like so many other people do. They explained that it was like a kid who isn’t allowed to go out because he hasn’t cleaned his room. There’s a lack of understanding and perspective.
They taught her that, by taking me on in our battles, she was actually enabling my behaviour. As bad as she felt, they told her to let it go; it wasn’t her fault. And so she stopped taking things personally. “I have nothing to do with this,” she finally told herself. “I’m fine.”
The few friends that I made in rehab through those first couple of months had pretty much the same attitude as me. You know, misery loves company. We sat around and complained together. We’d bitch about the shitty rules and swap our woe-is-me tales of life on the outside. Everyone had their own version of the victim story. I mostly complained about Joanie. I let everyone know that she was the real reason I was stuck there. She was the one who messed with my mind so much that I tried to put a bullet through it.
I got along well with a couple of young guys from Philadelphia who were both, I’d guess, in their mid-twenties. They had gone to high school together but hadn’t seen each other since then. Rehab was their reunion. Both were big hockey fans, so we had that in common. The Flyers had been my favourite team growing up, and I had also played in the NHL. They were pretty impressed with that. They knew all about my injury—they remembered seeing it on TV and on the Internet.
One of the other guys there was a mixed martial arts fighter. He said he was actually part of the UFC and was on his way up the chain. His whole body was covered in tattoos, and he was jacked. Another rehab centre had sent him to this facility because he kept getting in fights there. If a patient got violent with another patient, they always got sent away.
We tried to get the MMA guy to fight with the juice monkey who had screwed up my gym scam. The fighter was so insecure. I kept telling him, “Man, that guy is way bigger than you. He could probably kick your ass.” And the MMA guy would get all upset. At first, I thought he was joking. He was huge—there was no way our little comments should have bothered him. “You’re a little pussy compared to that guy,” I’d say, and he’d just start going crazy. “Fuck you!” he’d yell. “I’ll whip his ass!” Steroids. I’m telling you—never do them.
Some really messed-up stuff went on in that place. It kept me entertained, at least. Like the meeting where two female patients got into a huge fistfight. And then there was the guy who must have had a sex addiction or something, because he and another patient were sleeping together—which was strictly against the rules, of course. And then he banged one of the housekeepers who came regularly to clean the place.
One of the other patients was there for eating too muc
h. She was a big girl. We got along well and became close friends. You could tell she was a genuine person, honest and kind. She used to have an important office job, but she wasn’t able to control her eating and it became a serious problem. Everything fell apart for her, and she ended up sitting next to me in rehab. This one time, she got extremely mad at me. There was this old, wrinkly guy who always walked around in loose shorts. He’d fall asleep during meetings and never wore underwear. In a meeting, we were going around the room, talking about whatever feelings we were dealing with that day, and this old guy’s nuts were hanging out while he snoozed away. It was so disgusting and yet so hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing. My friend thought that was so mean and was furious with me after that. She didn’t talk to me for a week. Otherwise, though, we got along well. A lot of the patients would come and go, so we never really got a chance to connect. But she became like family on the inside. It was a Shawshank Redemption kind of scenario.
After she got out, we kept in touch for a while. I was still doing my time—had been for a couple months and would be there for a while longer. It was encouraging to hear about her new life out there in the real world. Ever since she was young, she had always dreamed of being some sort of actress. She had a perfect voice for radio or TV—I always told her that. A while after she left, I got an email from her about the commercial she’d landed as a voice actress. She thanked me for encouraging her. She wasn’t young, but she finally got a chance to follow her dream.
Many of the stories from rehab, though, don’t have happy endings. The success rate for full recovery if you stuck with the program was something like 4 per cent, we were told. That’s a grim reality.
One guy came in for a single afternoon before he was shipped out to hospital because his liver was messed up from too much cocaine over too many years. They did a standard blood test when he arrived and realized he probably shouldn’t even have been alive at that point.
Boozing was probably the most common addiction at the clinic. Some of the people who suffered from alcoholism really shocked me. One of my roommates was a rich old guy with grey hair who was there for a month. He owned an oil company—I mean, this guy was an incredibly successful alcoholic. I liked him a lot and I admired that he was able to check himself into rehab when he knew he needed it, when he felt himself slipping even if he hadn’t had a drink. That took a lot of strength and wisdom.
The Crazy Game Page 22