How to Grow an Addict

by J. A. Wright

  I didn’t do anything my group therapist recommended for the next few days. Instead I read Flowers in the Attic, a book I found in the bottom drawer of the little dresser in my room. I felt just like those kids. Locked up and realizing that there was no one out there who would rescue them. The story made me miss my mom and hate my dad even more. After I finished the book I cried myself to sleep, which was weird because up until then I’d hardly slept a wink.

  Falling asleep had been a problem since I was a little kid. I slept fine at Uncle Hank’s and Aunt Flo’s, but not at home. I was anxious at bedtime, scared that my dad might barge into my room and yell at me about something, which he often did. I once put my dresser up against my door, but Dad just pushed it over and came in anyway. “If I wanted you to be able to lock this fucking door, I would’ve put a lock on it!” he yelled before he threw my shoes at me. The ones I’d left under the kitchen table earlier.

  It was around that time I started helping myself to Mom’s blue pills, and the more I did it the more I needed them. I was probably twelve when I discovered I couldn’t get to sleep on my own.

  A few nights after I started sleeping at the Facility, I awoke to a pounding noise coming from the room next to mine. It was almost 2 a.m., and I couldn’t decide if I should let myself fall back to sleep or get up to investigate, because the woman in that room was kind of crazy and I was afraid of her. She’d only been at the Facility for five days and was in one of the other therapy groups, but everyone knew her business because she never stopped talking. I overheard two women from her group talking about her one day at lunch. One of them said she was a stripper and in the Facility for leaving her kids locked in a car for a weekend. The other one said she’d flashed her tits in group the day she arrived and almost got kicked out.

  As far as I could tell she didn’t need to flash her tits, because they were visible all the time. She wore only white tank tops and never a bra, probably because she couldn’t get a bra to fit with the big gold rings she had hanging from her nipples.

  On her first morning there, Charlie told her to put on a bra or wear a darker shirt when he saw her at breakfast wearing the smallest tank top I’d ever seen.

  “It’s just a little ol’ wife beater,” she said, laughing.

  “I don’t care what they call it. I call it inappropriate,” he replied.

  “Well, don’t look at it then. Take a look at my ass instead.” Then she stood up, turned her butt to face him, and jiggled it.

  It was gross. Charlie marched over to her table and motioned for her to sit down. I left the dining hall with a few others after he pulled out the chair next to her, sat down, and said, “Oh my, trouble has surely arrived today.”

  After that, I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up and hear her and some guy going at it in the room next to me, but I was because the Facility felt like a place where people shouldn’t misbehave, like church. I lay still for a few minutes, hoping they’d stop, but they just got louder and louder, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. I got out of bed determined to go knock on her door, but the moment I opened my door I could smell the dope, so I headed down to the lounge to tell the night manager—I didn’t want anyone to think I was smoking weed in my room. They busted her for using drugs, and for fucking a new guy in her room, and kicked them both out. Boy, was she pissed off.

  “You’re no better than me!” she seethed at me as they escorted her down the hall. “You’ll be stripping for a drink soon, you fat bitch. You’re the worst kind there is—a fucking snitch. Show your face around my club and I’ll kill ya!” she screamed.

  It was after 3 a.m. when I got back into my bed, and I couldn’t fall asleep for the life of me. It scared me to think I’d ever end up like her. I didn’t want to. I wanted a nice life and a husband like Uncle Hank. After thinking about it for a few hours I decided I’d take Mike’s advice and try to figure out what my three worst things were.

  I found the pad of paper and pen the therapist had passed out when I first arrived. I put the date at the top of the first page (October 5, 1998) and thought about what I was going to do next. A few moments later the title “Three Things by Randall Grange” appeared on the page and I began to write about me, my life, the people in it, stuff that happened, stuff that didn’t happen, and a whole bunch of things I never should’ve said or done. I wrote for so long I was shocked when it was time to go to breakfast and I was still writing.

  Later that morning, in group, I told everyone about how I hadn’t slept without pills or booze for years. One of the guys said he had the same problem and figured he couldn’t sleep because he felt guilty about all the shit he’d done. That made perfect sense to me. Thinking about my family, and especially about how Uncle Hank died, could keep me awake all night, sometimes even after I’d taken a pill or two.

  Uncle Hank’s accident had been 100 percent my fault and I knew it. Actually, I figured I’d killed two people by the time I was sixteen, but I’d never really felt bad about Dad dying. Probably because Dad hadn’t seemed to care about me. I’d wanted him to, prayed he would, but he just hadn’t liked me very much.

  But Uncle Hank was a different story. He’d cared about me a lot. He was the best person I’d ever known, and I felt responsible for his accident every day. I’d replayed the scene a millions times in my head, but the ending was never any different. He was dead no matter how I sliced it, and Aunt Flo was always lying on top of his body and the ambulance people were always pulling her off and saying, “It’s time to let him go. Please let him go.”

  Sometimes when it got so bad that I thought I couldn’t stay alive for one more second I’d hear Uncle Hank’s voice saying, “Be brave, or pretend to be brave—either one will do.”

  CHAPTER 21

  By the time my eighteenth day at the Facility rolled around I’d written fifteen pages about the things I’d done and things that had happened to me, and I still hadn’t figured out what my three worst were. Nor had I fully recovered from my injuries. The bruise that covered my right thigh was still purple, the stitches over my eyebrow hadn’t completely dissolved, and the yellowish-green bruise around my eyes hadn’t disappeared, either.

  I’d gotten tired of asking the nurse if I could have something for the pain, because every time I did she’d say, “Oh no, ya know, some people will take any type of pill just to be taking something. They get relief from the process of popping something in their mouth. So let’s not help that part of you, okay?”

  Instead she’d offer me wheat bags or hot towels with lavender oil on them. “You’re gonna feel better just as soon as it stops hurting,” she said one day, a half smile, half smirk on her face.

  She made me feel like I was a five-year-old with a pretend stubbed toe asking for morphine. I hated her. But I needed something to make me feel better and the hot towels did help, so I kept going to her office and I kept listening to her talk about living one day at a time and staying away from the first drink, “Or in your case, the first pill.”

  They didn’t talk too much about pills in the Facility, but they did talk a lot about alcohol. Unlike most of the others at the Facility, I didn’t get smashed every time I drank. And I told everyone who’d listen that I liked pills more than I liked booze, but no one seemed to care, and the staff continued to refer to me as an alcoholic, which continued to piss me off.

  The few times things got out of hand with me and booze was only because I’d lost count of how many drinks I’d had, or because I’d forgotten to eat. The really crazy episodes I’d experienced had all happened because I’d mixed booze with pills. It was the combination that wiped me out, and I had spent years trying to figure out how much I could drink with tranquilizers or painkillers and still stay standing. Sometimes it only took one or two beers to tip me over, and other times I could drink eight beers and still be the best driver in town. And there were many times when I could have gotten legless on free booze from the Hangout but I didn’t because I wasn’t interested or because
I had a good high going on from something else. It seemed to me that a real alcoholic wouldn’t turn down a drink for any reason.

  The more I listened to the other clients at the Facility, the more I was convinced I wasn’t like them and shouldn’t be there. They all had DUIs, and some of them had been in jail more than three times. On day nineteen, I decided I was going to tell my therapist that I was leaving. I was planning to tell her at the beginning of the Monday morning group session, before she had a chance to start asking her usual questions: “Do you feel like using today? Have you thought about what’s right today instead of what’s wrong?”

  My plans went sideways when she walked into group and didn’t ask any questions; instead, she just started talking. “Untreated addiction of any type gets worse, never better . . . ever, ever, ever!” she said. “And that’s true whether you’re currently using or not. If you don’t get honest about your relationship with drugs and alcohol, you’ll likely die from this disease, or from an accident brought about by using or pursuing. In fact, statistics say that of the eight of you in this room today, only two of you will get and stay sober and clean. The rest of you will leave here, decide you know what’s best, and use again. But for the two of you who’ve had enough of being sick and tired, I’m here to help you. So, who are you?”

  No one said a thing or moved a muscle. The silence became painful, so I put my hand up. “I don’t think I’m an alcoholic and I don’t buy the story of it being a disease,” I said as quickly as I could, then wiped the sweat from my top lip.

  She smiled, lips spread tight, not showing any teeth. “Alcoholism doesn’t care what you believe. It doesn’t care if you’re convinced you’ve got it or not. It doesn’t care where you come from, who you are, what you look like, or what you own. It only cares about being fed. And if you continue to drink, it’ll continue to whip you around and drag you down, and that will happen regardless of what you believe about it. I promise.”

  After that speech, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about wanting to leave. She kept talking, too, telling us how hard it is for alcoholics to have quality relationships, of any type. I think she scared everyone in the group that day, because none of us spoke for the longest time. I understood what she’d said, though, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Her talk made me think about my childhood best friend, Katie, and writing about her in my new journal made me sad. I cried myself to sleep that night thinking about the time in high school when I watched her walking down the street crying so hard I could see her body shaking from across the road, all because I thought it was a good idea to fuck her boyfriend.

  When it was my turn in group the next day to read through the list of friends I used to have, and the reasons they weren’t my friends any longer, everyone, including my therapist, thought it was a pretty long list for someone so young.

  It made me cry, and I wasn’t used to crying in front of people. It also got me thinking about other people I’d lied to, stolen from, and caused trouble for. I didn’t want to be that person anymore, so I decided to pay more attention to what my therapist said from then on, especially about fixing broken relationships and not beating myself up for every mistake I’d ever made.

  By day twenty-one I could feel that something inside of me was changing, though I couldn’t explain what, exactly. It felt like I had a word on the tip of my tongue but couldn’t say it. Even though my lockdown was over I decided not to call Nick again and to give up my plans to leave the Facility until I’d figured out what was happening to me. When I walked out of group that day, the therapist said, “It takes an awful lot of shame and despair to grow an addiction like yours. Personally, I think you’ve got what it takes to recover, and I’m really glad you’re here.”

  “Really? You really think I can change?” I asked.

  “You’ve probably got a better chance than the others in your group,” she said as she smiled and waved me out of the room.

  From then on I felt better, lighter, and I even went to see her later that day to tell her about the guy raping me in the car because I was worried I might have gotten some disease from him—or worse, that I might be pregnant.

  She made an appointment for me and drove me to a women’s clinic that same afternoon. She waited in the car for me like I’d asked.

  After I filled in a bunch of paperwork I was taken to an exam room and asked to strip from the waist down. I lay on the exam table with a little paper sheet over me, praying to something that I wasn’t pregnant. When the nurse came in I told her I’d been dating a guy for a few weeks who didn’t use condoms and I was worried I might be pregnant or something. “Does that something have anything to do with that new scar above your eye?” she asked.

  “Oh no. I got that playing softball,” I lied.

  I don’t know if she believed me or not but she was really nice to me as she examined me and then took several vials of blood from my arm and then gave me a plastic cup to pee in.

  When I got back into the car to go back to the Facility I was so happy about not being pregnant I yelled way too loud, “I’m not knocked up!”

  My therapist smiled.

  “ And I didn’t tell them I’d been raped, okay?” I said.

  “It’s okay with me,” she replied as she started the car.

  I felt safe around her now, not scared like I had for the first couple of weeks. She was a lot older than my mom, probably more like Aunt Flo’s age, and she wasn’t very pretty, and she didn’t giggle when she spoke like most of the women in my family did. She had a steady, calm way of speaking that made everything she said sound important. Actually, she seemed more like a man than a woman to me, but much nicer and smarter. She reminded me of Barbara Walters.

  After our visit to the women’s clinic, she began to pay attention to me like never before. She talked to me about my mother and brother and how I might be able to make things right with them. And she even wrote me a vitamin plan to give to the Facility’s nutritionist and a note for the doctor to check my thyroid and iron levels.

  Twenty-two days into my stay at the Facility, and things were going pretty well—until Josh snuck out and lay down on a railroad track about a mile away. We were all upset the next day, and no one knew what to say or do. That day the therapist took her usual seat, blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and said, “I’m really sorry about Josh. Sorry I didn’t see it coming, and sorry for his family. I sometimes wish I had an easier job, because you guys are heartbreakers.”

  “I saw it coming,” said Sam, the guy who’d arrived at the Facility three days after me. “Josh’s wife wouldn’t bring his kids to visit and she wouldn’t answer his phone calls. I think he tried to call her fifty times yesterday,” he said.

  “Be snitches, you guys. It doesn’t count in here. Tell me if you’re worried about someone. I’m here to help, ya know. If you want to get well, I’ll do anything I can to help you, but be warned, it’s probably going to get harder before it gets easier, and there’s no way to go over it, under it, or around it. You have to go through it.”

  I looked around the room. Everyone was crying.

  “It’s just another day in the world of bad news,” Sam said, sighing.

  The therapist passed me the box of tissues and, in a softer voice, said to us, “I wish it was the bad news, but it’s just a small piece. The really bad news is that you guys have no experience dealing with problems without booze and drugs. Unless you get some new skills, you’re vulnerable and likely to use again. Everything we try to teach you here is designed to help you retrain your brain, create a new internal voice. One that doesn’t insist that you get shitfaced before going to a family dinner or drunk because you’re paralyzed over the fact that you’ve gained a few pounds or lost your favorite lighter. Wouldn’t it be nice to live with a head that wants you to be happy instead of miserable?”

  I heard myself say “yes,” and I must have said it pretty loud because everyone looked right at me.

  CHAPTER 22<
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  Twenty-four days at the Facility and I’d been to ten AA meetings and written twenty pages of stuff. I was feeling better, and everyone said I was looking better, too.

  The Facility nutritionist said I’d gotten off pretty easy for someone who’d been living on a diet of downers for so long. “I’m surprised you weren’t sicker coming off all that shit,” she said.

  “I’m surprised I was sick at all,” I replied. I never thought the pills I took were dangerous or addictive, like the drugs those TV commercials warned us about. I thought drugs meant heroin, methamphetamines, and cocaine, not pills you could get from a doctor.

  I also heard from the resident manager that Nick had phoned the Facility looking for me. Charlie walked right up to me as I was getting in line for lunch and said, “A guy named Nick called the office a couple of weeks ago looking for you. You know, the day I let you use the phone to call your Mom on her birthday.”

  Charlie’s tone was mean, and he emphasized “birthday” like he knew I’d lied. It was clear to me, and likely everyone in the dining hall, that he was mad.

  “Sorry, Charlie, but I wanted to go home and I thought Nick would come and get me,” I replied.

  “Well, I just got my ass chewed out for breaking the rules. I need this job. And just so you know, you’re no prisoner here. You can walk out anytime and no one will say a thing.”

  “I’m sorry I lied to you,” I replied.

  “You’ve used up all your lies. No more,” he grumbled as he walked out of the dining room.

  Mike joined me at my lunch table and told me not to be too upset. “Charlie’s been working here for ten years. They’re not gonna fire him,” he assured me.

  The news that Nick had called looking for me made me happy and kind of anxious. I bummed a cigarette from Mike and skipped the afternoon meditation class because I knew I wouldn’t be able to sit still and pay attention to my breathing. I hardly slept that night, too busy wondering what I should do about Nick.