by David Carr
There is no more grateful recovering person than someone who has come off years of cocaine abuse. The financial and emotional burden of maintaining the addiction is so corrosive that it is initially just a pleasure not to have to fight to live. Recovering cocaine addicts experience a particularly powerful treatment high, a sense of well-being, and a wish to share it with everyone. Unfortunately for the user and society as a whole, this state of bliss and this commitment to wellness evaporates when the user is exposed to cocaine.
Truthfully, I was less grateful than terrified by my last bounce along the bottom, just trying to stop the hemorrhage that was pumping the life out of me. Conventional wisdom suggests that recovery begins with submitting to a higher power. I have always had trouble getting the hang of that—less about a spiritual deficit than a tendency to overintellectualize things—but I found a pretty handy substitute in Marion.
Marion was not a girl. Marion was/is a man, a man of fearsome goodness. I hated his guts the moment I met him, he of the constant sunglasses, the Cheshire-Cat smile without a trace of friendliness, a person with a taste for whimsy who treated his clients as toys. A black man with the forearms of Hercules and the tactical aggression of Machiavelli, he cultivated mystery in a way that I found preposterous. He would say nothing for long stretches during group sessions, and I would step in and provide brilliant, synthetic analysis of what was being said. He would smile and say, “Whenever you get done bebomping your gee-whompers, you might want to take a look at your own shit.”
Well, there’s always that. Because he was as inscrutable as Buddha and a lot less talkative, clients began to assign superpowers to him, aided in no small part by the constant mirrored sunglasses. He may have been sitting in group thinking about things like whether he should barbecue chicken or hamburgers that night, but behind the mirrors, it all seemed very deep and portentous. And the rumors about the murky past helped. He killed a client. No, he almost killed him. No, he threatened to kill a client, and the client killed himself. I decided that it was all bullshit, just a matter of trade dress and a cultivated image. Except that he did seem to have mystical powers when it came to me.
A big part of the routine at Eden House involved the domestic arts. Our beds had to be made army style and our rooms kept spotless. Marion was the counselor in charge one weekend, doing inspections, and he took an interest in the stack of reading I had on my headboard. With a kind of delicacy I can still recall, he went three-quarters of the way down the stack and teased out two pages from a girlie magazine that I had ripped out and stashed deep inside a book. Another time, there was a public event in the basement with speakers and graduating residents. One of the women in attendance was pretty and very turned out. I stole glances when I could. The next day, Marion had me in for a one-on-one, never a happy circumstance. He got right to the point.
“My wife said that you took quite a bit of interest in her at yesterday’s event.”
Gee.
But Marion landed with the most weight the weekend my sister Lisa was going to be married. It was about three months in, and I had been out on passes before and made it back safely. I had all approvals in order, and my family was planning on coming to get me on Saturday morning. It would be the first family wedding I would ever attend sober. On the Friday morning before I was to leave, Marion had me paged down to his office.
“You’re not going to your sister’s wedding,” he said plainly.
I went ballistic, whining that everything was good to go, that I had the pass coming, that my family was expecting me, that I was taking my twins, that it was all set. “Blah, blah, blah,” Marion said, as he often did. “I am telling you no. You can go, but don’t think you are coming back here. You leave, you leave.”
Why?
“Because you need to hear that word: no. Call it a therapeutic no.”
I phoned my family, and they agreed that I should leave the place; that it was a totally unfair and inappropriate decision. Even some of the counselors agreed that the decision seemed hasty and whimsical. I remember I went at the end of the day to tell Marion that I was leaving and to let him know what a pompous fucking asshole he was. And I planned on adding how I didn’t buy into any of his silent Buddha jujitsu bullshit.
Marion pulled up on a motorcycle outside a coffee shop in South Minneapolis in July of 2006, still looking pretty damn scary after all these years. The mirrored shades were there, and he was still in shape. He seemed glad to see me. I had done some reading before I saw him, including a story I did about him after I sobered up. “I work to help people make a conscious decision and then begin to believe in that decision,” he was quoted in the story, characteristically concise.
We’d had enough conversations in the intervening years for some of the mystique to drop away—it was a little easier when he was not the Lord God of my waking life. I asked him about the persona he brought to work every day.
“It was not your ‘routine’ delivery as far as treatment goes, but it seemed to work a lot better than taking the time to sit down and say, ‘Happy day, good feeling,’ and so on and so forth.”
So part of it was tactical? Taking a sip of his coffee, he said it was a matter of tailoring the approach to the audience. I thought of a picture I had of our so-called primary group. That is me just off Marion’s shoulder.
“There was rugged clients,” he said. “They came from all over the streets, the penitentiaries, psychiatric wards. And they were set in their ways. And especially with me, I had this thing, ‘Don’t let them see me sweat and don’t back down.’ And I didn’t try to present myself as a badass, but I was just, well, do whatever you’re going to do, but I’m not gonna go and let up on this. And a lot of times, you know, I was walking around there for a while maintaining a particular aura that was free floating because there were some bad actors that came through there consistently.”
Hearing Marion, who actually was a badass, admit that the place seemed rugged to his eye made me feel better. I had thought with some shame about how much Eden House, and some of the clients, freaked me out. The street vibe of the place made me feel like the white boy from the suburbs I actually was.
Sitting there many years later, he told me plain and simple that the reason he did not let me go was that weddings were slippery places; that in his clinical analysis, I wasn’t ready, and he decided to just say no and see what I would do. It was far from a whimsical decision, but it was a patently unfair one. Then again, there was a sign in the main room of Eden House that promulgated three truths: “Nothing’s Fair, Nothing’s Fair, Nothing’s Fair.”
As I sat there at the coffee shop next to a rolling video camera, I told Marion that I remembered going down to his office to shove that therapeutic no up his ass. But I had left his office, stayed in the program, and had not gone to the wedding. What had he said? He remembered what I did not.
“You were on the verge, and I told you, ‘Well, why don’t you just get those two girls high too?’ And you kind of flipped out, because those girls were the loves of your life, and just the thought scared you.”
32
BOY ISLAND
On this evening the chief forces of the island were disposed as follows. The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the redskins. They were going round and round the island, but they did not meet because all were going at the same rate.
—J. M. BARRIE, PETER PAN
Supply is the only issue of moment to an addict. Running low, riding high, all things in reach of an addict are subject to entropy—money, honor, the milk of human kindness—but the inventory of mood-altering chemicals serves as the maypole of every waking day.
It’s helpful to think of junkies as like minds with a common interest, like folks who knit or clog dance. The activity is just part of it; there’s also the endless rumination about every corner of the obsession. Even at Eden House, where many of us
had been off the street for months, we loved our war stories. And they were usually stories of untold abundance. The night you got locked in the fully stocked bar, the weekend when the coke was measured by the fistful, that magical stretch when one was not too many and a thousand seemed like a very plausible number. Too much of a bad thing is always a good thing when you are a pharmaceutical autodidact.
The interest in what is on hand is writ even larger when the piles get smaller. Addicts often cluster, if for no other reason than to meet the humiliation of it all with numbers. And the dynamic of the group will help individuals elide over dry spells. It is a sort of numerical certainty that someone in the broader organism will be flush at one time or another, and if he is a good group member, he will share. Until the supply runs short. Then the little circle of sharing breaks down, and everybody starts leaning in over the now suddenly diminutive pile. Scientists could have saved time figuring out how to split an atom if they had convened a bunch of junkies. When things get short, a junkie’s interest will not only dance on the head of a pin, it will tell you which half of the head of the pin looks bigger.
If you were going to come up with a hypothetical hell on earth for an addict, you might conjure an island, populate it with junkies, and then secrete some, but not enough, of a few treasured substances in their midst.
Fowl Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is actually a lot easier to access if you arrive from the Canadian side, but the annual fishing trip at Eden House consisted of far too many felons to mess with the border crossing. Once we got there, there would be a commute involving three lakes and two rivers so we could come in from the Minnesota side.
The twenty-three clients who got to go—I was in that lucky number—included two murderers, a rapist, a handful of strong-armed robbers and some run-of-the-mill losers like me. Dave, my buddy, was now chief elder. Most of us had not been off asphalt for years, and for some it was a first time in the woods. A very rough, remarkably urban crowd was loaded into vans for the long trip from Minneapolis, along with axes, filet knives, and handsaws. “What could go wrong?” said Tak, one of the clients who organized the trip, as he surveyed all the lethal hardware. People whose skills began and ended with three-card monte and selling carved cubes of Ivory soap as crack suddenly found themselves with a canoe paddle in their hands.
It was late May of 1989, and I was nearing the end of my tenure at Eden House. Apart from being so obese that I threatened to swamp a canoe merely by stepping into it, I had achieved a kind of stasis, a détente with the real world which suggested that I might not have to spend the rest of my waking hours making sure that I had enough drugs and alcohol to meet the day. My kids had prospered in foster care and were returned to Anna, who had successfully completed an inpatient treatment program. Hope floats, sometimes in a canoe.
I’ve never been all that handy in the woods, but after months of being trapped in the hermetic, noisy confines of Eden House, a sky full of stars and a horizon framed by lakes sounded glorious. But some of the guys on the trip were not people I would have chosen to split a six-pack with on the outside, let alone share space with on an island full of sharp utensils for more than a week. Scott was a whiner with a bad criminal history around women, Brett was a kid whose tenuous grasp on reality did not seem to need much of an assist from recreational drugs, and Vinny, God bless him, was a full-on nut ball who wore his devil-man beard with a great deal of pride. I was on antidepressants for the first time in my life, but many of the guys who came—there were two women on the trip—ate antipsychotics like they were Lucky Charms. Whatever it took, fine by me.
The counselors who ran the show—Jerry and Marion—were used to getting all the frogs in the wheelbarrow and headed in the same direction, and so what seemed like a script for a B horror movie actually had a kind of organized air. David and Tak worked hard as the clients “on top” of the trip to make sure that we had enough of everything to get by, even if we didn’t catch fish. There was plenty of coffee, oodles of ciggies, and the counselors had everybody’s meds apportioned into daily doses. We were good to go.
And then came the last river on the way in. It had been a very rainy spring, and the stream raced around its bends and through small drops. Right away, it was total mayhem, with at least four of a dozen canoes tipping and hapless nonswimming street bums floating everywhere. Nobody died, so we had a good laugh about it—until we realized that much of our preciously hoarded cargo had bit it along with the canoes. The cigarette supply was suddenly iffy, and the meds, well, some of the residents would be even more clean and sober than usual.
By the time we pitched camp, we were a bedraggled lot. When someone mentioned that we all needed a cup of coffee, we discovered that the big thirty-cup camp coffee pot had not made the trip. We had a teeny one tucked away that made a few cups at a time. “We have forty pounds of fucking powdered milk, but no way to make coffee?!” someone asked. There were feckless attempts to dry out the cigarettes and some misguided efforts at making cowboy coffee, but we knew that, basically, we were screwed.
Vinny, without his antipsychotics, took to making moonlight patrols, muttering as he thrashed around in the swampy parts of the island. He’d walk back into the light of the fire at night with his eyes ablaze. One night his grin was particularly epic, and someone asked him if the cat had swallowed his tongue. He opened his mouth very ceremonially to reveal a little painted turtle. It patched out on his tongue, trying to get away.
He had some trouble mastering the fishing, but at midweek he caught a big northern pike and began walking it around the campsite, introducing it as an old friend. If this were an episode of Lost, he would have been one of the “Others.” “God answered my prayers on the spot; I cast out onto the water and said, ‘Lord, gimme a northern,’ and my pole started bending.”
Much of the detail of the trip is easy to access because in order to keep some money coming in while I spent time at Eden House, I had pitched the story to the Pioneer Press. There was a fair amount of discussion by the leaders at Eden House about whether my notebook would put me at a remove from the therapeutic community, but in the end, they decided that I would need to graduate from the institution with some degree of professional momentum.
Reporting or not, I was completely seduced. For many of us, the idea that you could get into a canoe without beer and actually spend time catching fish was an epiphany that rivaled Archimedes’s jolt in estimating the mass of objects. Jerry, one of the counselors, built a sweat lodge down by the lake out of a plastic tarp and some pine boughs. Apart from opening our pores and letting some of the grime out when we jumped into the cold water, it gave some of our time there a ceremonial air. Not to go all Robert Bly on the whole thing, but we did man stuff, no whiskey or narcotics involved.
Still, as the candle burned down on remaining cigs, and the coffee continued to arrive only in small dribbles, people began to get twitchy, especially the guys who were short on their meds. The Pioneer Press assigned a photographer to take pictures to go with the story, and when I paddled out to the Canadian side to get him, I asked three questions:
“Do you have a coffee pot?” (“No, I was pretty sure you guys would have one.”)
“How are you fixed for cigarettes?” (“I don’t smoke.”)
“And I suppose a little Thorazine is out of the question?” (Long, quizzical stare.)
I explained that the island was a bit restless, more Lord of the Flies than therapeutic community, but Chris the photographer explained that he had worked in a number of war zones and that it would be no biggie. But he left a day early. His pictures were spectacular.
As was part of the plan, something about being out in the woods annealed some of the street right off us. The hardened dope fiends became guys who were suddenly afraid of the dark, the kind of deep-woods murk most had never seen in their lives.
In the context of the crew I was running with, I seemed like a direct descendant of Daniel Boone, more handy and adept than I realized. Now goin
g on five months sober, I began to see that the hopelessness that had been draped over my every hour as an addict had been supplanted by a far more normalized reflex of finding fun wherever it showed up. Others were not so lucky. Brett tried to smoke his lithium on the trip back, not a pro move regardless of who was keeping the score. Scott freaked over some misdemeanor baloney and got kicked out. Vinny, well, he was a lost soul who was not destined to rest. Some of the guys from that trip, even the ones who had fun, went back out into the Life and did not make it back.
Midway into our trip, there was fearful talk of some guys on the lake with outboards and twelve-packs of Bud; drunken motorboaters from Canada. Someone said that they had yelled something untoward at the women in our group. It fell to Marion to recontextualize the situation:
“There are twenty-three of us. We are people who have been cut up, shot, beat with chains. Some of us shot dope into our eyeballs because that’s where the best veins were. Nobody in their right mind is going to mess with us.”
Tak was one of the client organizers on the trip. These many years later, I called him at Eden House, where he had become a counselor. I could hear the obnoxious pager in the background. It all came back to me, how we all came in and were dubbed Seekers, our names announced over the speaker for this and that. “David C. to the nurse’s office.” After serving as Seekers, we were brought up through a series of levels with privileges attached, all of us part of what was then called the “primary family.” Really gooney stuff, but it worked for some, including me.
When Tak came in, on Valentine’s Day in 1989, the house had been “on ban,” or lockdown, for weeks. That meant no television, no radios, no board games, no passes, no nothing. He had a population sheet from the days when we were there. There were fifty-four men and eleven women. We quickly went through the names. Dead, in jail, back on the streets, nuthouse, and so on. About a dozen of us made it. After years of watching people come through and go back out, he had noticed some things.