by David Poses
In the terminal, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Heard It Through the Grapevine” crackles out of an overhead speaker. I flip through my CD case—eighteen discs from a collection of three thousand. Did I bring the right music to get through the next month?
Mom didn’t say where someone from Hazelden would meet me, only that someone would. Headphones on, I follow signs to baggage claim, listening to Neil Young. Live Rust. On the escalator, I stay to the right as harried travelers scamper by. A woman with a giant purse crashes into me and apologizes. I feel proud, smiling and waving like no big deal. Then I feel stupid.
At the carousel, an older man holds a sign with my name on it. His swollen nose teems with dark veins. I wait for “I Am a Child” to end and then I approach.
“I’m David.”
“Hey, Dave. I’m Pete.”
I hate being called Dave.
My yellow duffel is the first thing out of the chute. I nab it and follow Pete on a twenty-minute trek to a blue van at the farthest reaches of the cold parking lot. He drives painfully slowly, his plump tongue poking through thin, cracked lips unless he’s reading street signs aloud.
The radio is off. I’m riding shotgun. My eyes are heavy, but they refuse to close. I never went to sleep on heroin—I passed out. It’s been almost a week since my last hit. My mind is racing, but I can’t complete a thought, and my body still feels like it’s being pulled apart by horses.
“Burger King. Dillard’s. Blockbuster Video. Ramada Hotel.”
On a wide strip-mall-lined boulevard, Pete hits the windshield with minty green washer fluid and fashions his hand into a visor as the wiper blades battle a splotch of bird shit.
“Better ’n sunglasses,” he says. “’Cause your hand ain’t getting lost or stoled.”
I force a chuckle. Pete grins.
At the next intersection, he leans toward me and says, “Just so you know, I got the disease too.”
What the fuck is he talking about?
“Yes siree Boberooney. My head came awful close to the blades a time or two.”
Though I assume he’s speaking metaphorically, I picture Pete’s short gray hair in dangerously close proximity to whirring helicopter blades and an industrial fan.
“Looking for answers at the bottom of a bottle—till God took me in his arms.”
Got it. He calls addiction a disease—which makes no sense.
We turn onto a narrow, windy road of split-levels and short driveways with minivans. Two lefts later, we approach a dozen absurdly tall speed bumps and an open gate next to a shed. Pete rolls down the window and nods to two security guards, who raise sandwiches wrapped in tin foil to toast our arrival.
A massive, modern pastel yellow structure appears. Wide columns support an overhang at the front entrance. I remember fifth grade and Mr. Tacelly’s lesson on the three types of classic Greek columns: Doric, Ionic, and the other one. What is it?
Nancy, the director of counseling, greets me with a bear hug in the reception area. She’s short and overweight with red spiky hair. In a thick Midwestern accent, she says, “Thank God you’re here.”
I resist the temptation to say, “Praise the Lord.”
Nancy says my counselor, Ron, will be “out in a jiffy.”
Approximately two jiffies later, a guy in a dark suit appears. “Nancy,” he says, “can I borrow you?”
“Okay, Lester . . . but only if you give me back.”
Lester and Nancy laugh their way to an office. I drop down on a flowered love seat and prop my feet on a coffee table between stacks of Hazelden’s magazine, Together.
A mini fridge buzzes. What’s the third type of Greek column?
A set of double doors open, and a girl with rectangular glasses and purple streaks in her long brown hair saunters in. After a quick nod in my direction, she dive bombs the love seat across from me, straightens her plaid Catholic-school skirt, and grabs an issue of Together.
“They should call it This Is My Sucky, Fucking, Fucked-Up Life Now,” she says, flipping through the pages. “What the hell? Someone already did the crossword puzzle—in pen. Duh, dumbass. A five-letter game that starts with ‘O’ isn’t ‘Oprah.’”
“‘Ouija.’”
“Damn, new guy. You’re good.”
The receptionist snaps, “Victoria.”
“Big Brother doesn’t like outgoings talking to incomings,” Victoria whispers. “What’re you in for?” she asks.
“Heroin.”
“Well, well, well. Heroin. Very chic. How long were you on it?”
“About three years. What were you in for?”
“Weed, booze, coke, meth. You name it. Shrooms. Acid. You trip out?”
“I got scared away from hallucinogens in fifth grade.”
“You dropped acid in fifth grade?”
“A cop came to my school for a drug prevention assembly. He said a kid from our high school took acid, thought he was an orange, and peeled off his skin.”
“I’m sorry, but that is complete BS. Acid’s the bomb. Of all the things I’m gonna miss, acid’s right up there with coke, shrooms, weed—you smoke cheeba?”
“A few times.”
“Drinking?”
“I got drunk once. I hate being intoxicated.”
“You hate—dude, heroin’s the most hard-core drug there is.”
“It has a bad rap. Alcohol and pot fuck you up way more.”
“Well, I never tried it. Nobody did heroin where I grew up. Where you from?”
“New York.”
“City?”
“Just outside. Westchester County. Rye.”
“No way! I’m from Greenwich.”
The receptionist says “Victoria” again and shoots a stink eye while poking a straw into a can of Diet Dr. Pepper.
Victoria scurries around a half wall covered with framed awards and commendations for Hazelden’s work on addiction recovery and flops onto an overstuffed upholstered chair with a lilac batik pattern. She crosses and uncrosses her legs a few times, then scribbles on a magazine page and tears it out and balls it up.
“Incoming!” she shouts, hurling the note into a nearby fichus plant. I retrieve and unravel it—her name and phone number.
“All right, Victoria,” the receptionist says, “Pete’s here.”
On her way out, Victoria says, “Give me a call when you get home. We’ll go to an AA meeting. Or something.”
I sit back and imagine myself a month from now, driving around Greenwich’s backcountry with her. Then it hits me. Corinthian.
four
Ron’s gold track pants make a swishing sound as he walks toward me, his right hand outstretched. Tall and skinny with the impeccable posture my mother would love, he’s probably in his late twenties. He yawns and apologizes for yawning while leading me through a maze of hallways to a small room with a twin bed, a chair with initials carved into the seat, a tall dresser—and no door.
“Call it a way station,” he says, gesturing from the threshold like he’s revealing a prize on a game show. “As long as there’s no contraband in your bag and no red flags go up in your intake evaluation, you’ll be in general population tomorrow morning.” He follows me into the room and stands at the foot of the bed with his arms folded. I hug my bag and stare at the shiplap wall.
“Okay, so here’s the deal,” he says. “Every morning we’re up at six, except Sundays when you can sleep in. That means seven. Group therapy every day, and AA and NA meetings. Physical fitness, meditation, recreation, lectures on sober living—the whole nine. Unless you have a doctor’s note, everything’s mandatory, so don’t think about trying to ditch. Capisce?”
Does he want me to say “Sir, yes, sir”? I nod and drop my bag on the bed, trying not to laugh at his dorky impression of a drill sergeant.
“This will be your life for the next twenty-eight days. Once you’ve been here a week, you get phone privileges. Forty-five minutes a day. Abuse those privileges and sayonara the phone.”
/> “I promised my mom I’d call when I—”
“Holy smokes, Dave. Has it been a week already? I could have sworn you just got here.” He grins. “No, all kidding aside. Mom knows you’re here. I just talked to her. Part of my daily routine is a check in with your folks.”
“My parents are divorced.”
“Yep.”
“Will you talk to both of them every day?”
“Mom and Dad have as much to learn about recovery as you do. And fortunately for you and them, Hazelden does a terrific job of educating parents about enabling and tough love, everything they need to know to help you avoid old patterns when you’re back home in six months or—”
“Six months?” He can’t be serious. But it doesn’t matter. Mom won’t make me stay. She’s never forced me to do anything. Seven days until phone privileges. Home in eight, max. This place is for serious drug addicts and hardened criminals.
“Dave. Coming here for a month is a great start, but that’s all it is. A start. Recovery’s a lifelong process. You’ll want to go to aftercare when you leave here—a halfway house—we’ve got options all over the country. Some folks don’t go home for eighteen months. Some never do. All depends on how bad your disease is. Questions?”
“Why do you call addiction a disease?”
Ron narrows his eyes. “You being facetious?”
“No.”
“We call addiction a disease, Dave, because that’s what it is.”
“Er, when I think of disease, I think of cancer. My mom didn’t choose to have it. It could’ve killed her.”
“Bingo. We’re saying the same thing, yeah?”
I smile. “I love the idea of you telling my parents that a disease made me stick needles in my arms, but they know it’s my fault.”
“Sorry, Dave, but that’s baloney. Buh-loney. You have a disease. First step in AA is admitting we’re powerless over the disease.”
“But if I decided to start and I decided to stop—”
Ron winces and exhales hard. “Dave. You might have decided you wanted to stop, but you’re here because your higher power saw you at rock bottom and said, ‘Hey, look. There’s Dave down there. Let me see if I can’t give him a hand.’”
A security guard appears in the doorway, a tall, heavy-breathing dude with a greasy blond mullet. “Keith,” he says, giving me a curt nod. He blows into a surgical glove and stuffs his sausage fingers inside, then opens the zipper on my bag.
While Keith commences the perfunctory “welcome to rehab” inspection, Ron picks up a big blue hardcover from the dresser and opens to “The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.” He reads aloud and follows the words with his finger.
“Number one: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. Number two: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Number three: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him . . .”
Ron drones on about making a moral inventory, admitting our wrongs, asking God to remove our character defects, and making amends to everyone we’ve harmed.
He finally reaches number twelve. “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” He snaps the book shut with one hand and gives it to me. “What do you think?”
“Seems awfully religious.” When I talk to Mom, I won’t need to make anything up. After a couple of conversations with Ron, she’ll know this place is completely fucking bonkers.
“Not religious, Dave. Universal. The only way to keep this disease from being terminal is to put your life and will in God’s hands and you work the steps.”
“So, if God is keeping me clean, is it his fault if I relapse?”
Ron stands there, gaping at me in teapot stance, the back of his hands on his hips.
“Aha,” Keith cries. “Contraband.” He removes a can of Right Guard deodorant spray and gives it to Ron.
They probably assume it’s one of those decoy cans my nana hides jewelry in, or maybe Hazelden has an environmental policy prohibiting aerosol deodorant?
Ron shakes the can in my face. “Should I get your folks on the horn? Have them book you on the next flight home?”
“Why?”
“Let me guess. It never occurred to you to monkey with the nozzle and get high off the fumes?”
“What?”
We lock eyes for a beat. He’s not running me out of here—I’ll leave on my own terms.
“All right, Dave. You get the benefit of the doubt, but give me one more reason and so help me God . . .”
Keith resumes the search and rattles off other banned household items: whipped cream, certain kinds of air conditioner cartridges, Purell. “Hand sanitizer’s the most popular alcoholic beverage in the US prison system,” he says.
“Hmm,” I say. “I remember something in the news a while back about a politician’s wife drinking nail polish remover. Kitty Dukakis?”
“Whoa, Nelly!” Keith says, elbow-deep in my bag. He slowly tweezes my Discman and CD case out with his fingers.
Ron snickers. “Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave. If I call your folks, what’re the chances they say you knew we don’t allow music to be brought in?”
“We can’t have music?”
“That’s not what I said. Clock radios are allowed, but you wouldn’t know that because, obviously, you didn’t bother reading the list.”
“List?”
“Golly, Dave. Most folks bring clock radios because most folks read the list, which clearly states that you can listen to any station you can tune on the dial, but you cannot—I repeat—cannot bring Walkmans, Discmans, record players, LPs, CDs, tapes.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a trigger, Dave. Music is a trigger.”
“It’ll be easier to live without dope than without music.”
“Sorry. Them’s the rules.”
five
The window is narrow and rectangular, the kind you crank open, except the crank is gone. Ice on the screen partially obscures the view of a snow-covered field with random footprints and a wall of pine trees. I exhale onto the glass, draw a smiley face in the condensation, and watch it evaporate.
“Knock, knock,” Pete says, rapping where the door should be. He slides a brown plastic cafeteria tray onto the dresser and leaves without another word. Three slimy slices of turkey, with some sort of gelatinous goo on the ends, on white bread, a small packet of mustard, and two slightly larger packets of ketchup. No sides. I don’t eat anything.
As the sun sets, I lie down on the small bed. Headlights sweep across the ceiling and remind me of the nights when my father tucked me in at my mom’s house. After he left my room, I’d stare at the ceiling until his headlights appeared. Then I’d run to the window and watch him do “tricks”—his term for veering off our long driveway onto the lawn and peeling doughnuts and figure eights. I’d brag about the show to my friends. “This is why it’s great to have divorced parents!” Two years ago, when Mom sold the house, there were still patches of lawn where grass didn’t grow.
No one I know has been to rehab. Is it all prayer and religious mumbo jumbo? Maybe some of it. The therapy is probably more like the weekly sessions Mom started taking me to when I was five. After the divorce. Fuck. What if she makes me stay here after all?
I overheard her tell one of my psychiatrists that I was “devoid of feelings.” She was wrong. I felt everything. She used to ask—constantly—“Why are you so sad?” or “Don’t you want to be happy?”
I didn’t want to be sad, but I didn’t know why I was sad or how not to be sad or how to talk about it. I was broken. I felt broken. My body ached. My stomach hurt. I couldn’t sleep. Nothing was pleasurable. Every morning, I woke up knowing I’d failed before my feet hit the floor. At night, I’d lie in bed and wish for a terminal disease.
Mom would pull my shoulders back and
say, “Body language speaks volumes about how you feel about yourself.” And she’d say something similar when I failed to make eye contact during a conversation or didn’t ooze with confidence.
“Someday, David, I hope it’ll be important enough for you to decide to be happy.”
Though I kept my shittiest feelings inside—even in therapy—three different shrinks diagnosed me with clinical depression by the age of sixteen. Their scientific explanations called for chemical solutions. But Prozac made me more depressed. Zoloft made it impossible for me to sleep (not terrible) or get an erection (not acceptable). Paxil made me sweaty and confused.
I knew what I needed. I’d known since the drug prevention assembly in fifth grade. The cop said cocaine made you angry, pot made you stupid, and if you drank alcohol, you weren’t allowed to drive.
“Heroin is the worst drug,” he said, and then lowered his voice to an ominous whisper. “It’s a painkiller so powerful, it makes you not feel anything.”
That sounded perfect to me. The last thing I needed was anger or an impediment to fulfilling my lifelong dream of driving into a tree at top speed. The idea of heroin gave me hope.
From the beginning of high school, all other substances were readily available and liberally consumed by my friends, who used weed and booze like an essential garnish for activities. Peer pressure was rampant with hallucinogens and cocaine. I experimented and hated the effects. Reality wasn’t the problem. I was.
But I had no access to heroin. It might as well have been plutonium in my slice of suburbia.
The bright hall light shines into my dark room, and a peculiar wet dog and corn chip smell fills the air. It’s eerily quiet and I’m restless. I get up and pace the small room.
Rob doesn’t know where I am. I couldn’t call him or go by the apartment before I left. Will I ever see him again? Probably not.
When we first met during the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, Rob looked nothing like the junkie stereotype in his pleated khakis and polo shirt, his short hair neatly combed and parted to the side. He was seven years older than me, close with my friend Andrew’s older brother and supposedly with Michael Alig, leader of the Club Kids. I’d seen them on talk shows. The self-proclaimed freaks and outcasts struck a chord.