by Joey Bush
“Yeah, thanks for pushing us.”
“You’re a leader to these patients, Cassidy. Always remember that your actions can guide others.”
Wow, Melanie was profound in her words. I hadn’t known her all that much since she had started working at Paradise Peak, but she knew about my past. We had talked on a couple of occasions and I remembered thinking she could never really understand addicts, since she hadn’t been one herself. But as we stood there, looking out over the city of Aspen and relishing our accomplishment, I realized she probably had a much better understanding than even I had.
I didn’t feel like a leader, though. I could barely maintain my own sobriety, so feeling responsible for helping others get sober seemed a tad bit overwhelming for me. But I would deal with it. I would deal with anything I had to in order to keep my life moving forward and on a good path.
Two years before, I could have easily killed myself with all the stupid life decisions I was making. It felt good to be finally making some decisions that were better for me. I even considered going on another damn hike with Melanie some time – but perhaps when the snow had melted and the weather was better.
Our bodies were sweating from the amount of work we were doing, but the sweat was making us cold because of the weather. It was certainly time to get back down to the treatment facility, and maybe even have some hot chocolate.
“Now can we go back down? My balls are falling off,” Brad said through his shivering teeth.
We all laughed and together started our trek back to the facility. It was much easier to get back down than it had been to get up there and I enjoyed that part of the trip the best. I could hike down mountains all day long, I thought to myself.
BILLIONAIRE IN REHAB PART II
Chapter 6
Erik
“I’m not bringing your breakfast in there, so if you want to eat, you’re going to have to crawl out here,” Cassidy said from the doorway.
“Come here.”
“No, you’re probably naked or something. I’ll be out here. If you want to talk to me, you’ll need to come out here.”
“Ugh, you’re killing me.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the drugs leaving your system. Don’t blame that on me,” she replied as she got farther and farther away from my room.
It was the truth, though. I had thought the withdrawals from my first few days were the worst, but add in dehydration and cramping, and I was absolutely miserable. I could hardly manage to move my muscles and when I did, I pretty much moaned in pain. Our little walk had been enlightening and fun, but it left my body totally destroyed.
I really wasn’t trying to trick her into coming into my room, but I could see how she might have thought I was. My stomach hurt, my head hurt, even the muscles in my legs hurt and because I was in treatment, they couldn’t give me anything stronger than a Tylenol without taking me to the doctor. There was no way I was going to get poked and prodded by some random doctor, so I just suffered through it.
As much as I wanted to see Cassidy and talk to her, I couldn’t bear to get up out of bed and instead drifted back to sleep. While sleeping, I had the joy of reliving the last few months before I had arrived at the treatment center. My dreams were often filled with random women, drugs, and parties. I couldn’t even keep them all straight and the reality and dream life of my past seemed to mix together. It was a lonely life I had lived, even I had to admit that.
With friends and acquaintances filling my home for party after party, none of them cared about me. They came for the free booze and parties. They came so they could say they knew someone rich. I was an idol to them, but not because I had invented a technologically savvy way to buy tickets online; I was an idol purely because I had money.
I was wrapped up in it and couldn’t see it at all during that time of my life. When I would revisit those moments in my dreams, it always felt like I was on the outside looking in and watching my own self destruction. There had only been one person in my life that reached out for me and tried to hold onto me and prevent me from slipping off the cliff.
Spencer had reached out over and over; and I had kicked him off the damn cliff. He shouldn’t have stuck with me. There was nothing about the way I had been behaving that would have endeared me to him, yet my friend continued to be there for me. I had treated him horribly.
My dreams were vivid and often, but I always woke up feeling like I was drowning and couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t remembered falling into that pool in a drunken stupor, but I did remember waking up with a tube down my throat and my friend sitting next to me.
I imagined while I was drunk and in the pool, I had probably fought to breathe, but my drunkenness had prevented my efforts. Even though I didn’t have a conscious memory of those moments, my body still had them.
Water gave me anxiety, which sucked because I loved to swim. I really did want to get in the pool here. But I hadn’t worked myself up to that yet. Nightmares and fears were still too powerful for me.
When I was in the hospital, my father and brother had been called, but didn’t bother to show up for me. Not even when they knew I had almost died. No one else came. If it hadn’t been for Spencer, I would have surely died that night, yet my own family wouldn’t be bothered enough to come sit with me. It left a hole in my gut that was hard to fill.
We hadn’t been close and I understood that, but if either of them had almost died, I certainly would have been there for them. That’s what families did. Even if you were angry with each other, you still showed up when it mattered.
Well, at least that was what I thought families should do. Apparently that wasn’t the case in my family.
My mother would have been there. If my mother hadn’t died, she would have been there the second she had found out. But then again, if my mother had been alive, I probably wouldn’t have been so desperately holding on to reality. A boy needed his mother. Especially me; I needed her.
Laura Levy had been one of the strongest women I knew. When she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, it was like a wicked joke that I thought couldn’t possibly be true. Despite losing her hair and going through treatments for months, I never actually thought I would lose her. I knew she was going to beat it. Every fiber of my being knew she was going to be all right. That made the day she died one of the most shocking in my entire life.
I could still remember my father’s screams as he woke up to her lifeless body next to him one morning. He cried out with such pain that I thought he had been hurt at first. Heath and I were only teenagers when we stood in the doorway to our parents’ room and saw our father holding our stiff mother in his arms and wailing with tears. There was nothing that could be done. It was clear she had been dead for hours.
The shock of the moment prevented me from crying. Instead, I took charge. I called 911 to have the police come to the house even though I clearly saw that she was dead.
It wasn’t until the day of her funeral that I finally cried. When I saw my sweet mother lying in the casket and unable to hug me any longer. Unable to offer me advice about girls, or tease me about my grades. It wasn’t until that moment that the loneliness set in.
I didn’t intend to alienate my father or brother. I truly loved them. But as I managed to graduate from school, all I could think about was getting as far away from our East Coast home. I applied to every college on the West Coast and managed to land a few interviews. Cal Poly drew my attention very quickly, though, and I accepted entrance there without talking it over with my family at all.
My father had assumed I would work with him; his anger toward me when I told him about college, had probably been fear of being left alone. I was leaving him. I wasn’t going to be there to run things after he got old. Everything he had worked so hard to build was going to go to waste because I was leaving and Heath had long said he wanted to be a lawyer.
It baffled me why my father hadn’t been angry at Heath for not wanting to be in the family business, yet had been irate wh
en I “went behind his back” and enrolled in college.
If I had been a better man, I wouldn’t have taken his words to heart. I would have known he was just a broken-hearted man who was losing someone close to him. But I hadn’t been a good man at all. I said things I would long regret. I said things that drove a wedge between us and prevented me from reaching out to him and him from reaching out to me.
Before coming to the treatment facility, I did call Heath, just to let him know where I was. I wasn’t looking for his sympathy, I was just relaying information.
“I’m heading to rehab,” I said in our phone call.
“Okay.”
“I’ll be away for a few months at Paradise Peak in Aspen.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” my brother had said.
“Nothing. I was just letting you know.”
“Fine. Enjoy your cushy resort. I’ll just stay here taking care of everything while you fuck up your entire life.”
He was angry. Heath had been angry with me since I left for college. Because I had left, he gave up his dream of being a lawyer to stay home and work in the mortuary business with our father. He had felt obligated not to leave Dad alone. Every chance he got, Heath tried to make me feel guilty for my decision.
But Heath could have gone to college, too. He could have followed his own dreams and I hadn’t forced him to stay home. Although I didn’t blame Heath for being angry, either; it was a messed up situation and none of us seemed to get the happily ever after that we had been searching for.
When I dreamed, the past was so clear, but then I’d start to wake up and start gasping for breath and feel like I wasn’t able to breathe. It was like my body could still remember what it had been like to be underwater and almost drown.
“No!” I screamed as I woke up sweating and holding my chest.
I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t been breathing. As I woke up, my breath was labored and I felt dizzy from the lack of oxygen. My dream had been so real that I had actually been holding my breath. It had been happening frequently to me since I didn’t have drugs or alcohol to knock me out for sleeping.
My body was in a fight, and I felt like I was losing. My hands clenched my chest as I desperately tried to breathe but never felt like I was able to get much more than a tiny breath in. It was like torture. I was going to die, I just knew it, and no one would be there for me. I bet even if I actually died, my own father and brother wouldn’t bother to show up.
Before I knew it, my therapist, Jarrod, was sitting at the end of my bed trying to comfort me. I knew I was actually breathing and my breaths were labored, but I still felt the overwhelming feeling of not being able to breathe. The room was spinning. My hands shook. And Jarrod, with his calming voice, was all I had to focus on.
Therapists had never seemed that useful to me in my life. Even in the few days that I had been at the facility, I wasn’t all that sure I needed one. It seemed like they basically made me do all the work, but I had to pay them for it. But in that moment, as panic rushed through my body, I was happy Jarrod was there with me.
“You’re having a panic attack, Erik. Try to take a few deep breaths. Look at me,” his deep voice said.
“I…I…can’t breathe,” I managed to say.
“You can breathe, Erik. Look at me, take in a deep breath like I am,” Jarrod said as he inflated his lungs and looked me in the eyes. “Slowly, let your lungs fill up. Don’t worry about anything, don’t think about anything. Just follow me.”
His calming voice had so much faith in my ability to breathe that I even believed it. Soon I found myself pulling in a deep breath and letting it out again. We continued to sit there on my bed just breathing. Jarrod kept me focused as I took in breath after breath and let it out again. I felt my heartrate slow, my sweating stopped, and the shaking in my hands let up.
“Thanks,” I managed to say as I felt my body coming back to me.
“Have you had panic attacks before?”
“Not like that. I really felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was in a dream and then before I knew what was going on, I woke up and felt like someone was choking me.”
“Your body is going through a lot right now, Erik. You’ve got to listen to it. Have you had breakfast yet?”
“No. I was too sore. I decided to sleep instead.”
Just then Cassidy came into the room with a breakfast tray. She set it down next to me and looked on with pity in her eyes. I didn’t want her to feel pity for me. I didn’t want to look weak to her or anyone else, but in that moment, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I was weak and there was no denying it.
It was funny to me that I was so afraid of looking weak to people, yet for months I had been getting so drunk that my friends had literally carried me up the stairs to my room. One night, a girl had been waiting in my room fully naked and I couldn’t even remember if I managed to get myself together enough to screw her. She had disappeared by morning, and it wasn’t like I knew her name, so that was a mystery I would likely never know the answer to.
“Go ahead and rest up today, then tomorrow, I want to see you out more. Deal?” Jarrod asked. “And you have to eat something and drink some Gatorade.”
“Yeah, I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all any of us can do.”
Jarrod left and Cassidy followed him. I liked her, but as time went by, I started to like her for real reasons, not just because she drove my body crazy. She was obviously a bit of a misfit, with her bright red hair and tongue piercing, yet she seemed to fit in with everyone. That ability made me jealous. I was a regular guy with brown hair and brown eyes – nothing about my physical appearance stood out, yet I always felt like an outcast.
Never had I been in a room of people and felt like I truly belonged; well, not since my mother had died. She was the last person that I had truly felt like myself with. With her death had come the death of my own personality and happiness.
It didn’t happen because I wanted to be misunderstood, like many other teenagers did. I actually wanted friends; I wanted people to care about me. I searched out that feeling of love by giving people things. I threw parties so people would surround me with their version of caring, yet none of it ever filled me up.
As I lay in bed, still drenched in sweat, I hated the person I had become and the emptiness that filled me up. None of these people could understand what it was like to be happy on the outside and devastatingly lonely on the inside. The other people at Paradise Peak were rich and had people in their lives. They knew more about love than I could even imagine, and I didn’t want to let them see how uneducated I was on the topic.
I closed my eyes again, but not to sleep. I just wanted to lay there and take in the calmness of the moment. For months, even years, I had been constantly running around trying to prove I was worth being loved. It had been exhausting and look where it had landed me.
I didn’t know the answer to get out of my own despair, but for the first time in a very long time, I was all right with not knowing. Whether Jarrod knew what a good therapist he was or not, I wasn’t sure, but I appreciated his focus on me in those moments. I had felt worthy of it, and appreciated it.
“Do you want my pancakes?” Brad said as he carried a stack of hot pancakes in his hands toward me.
“Um, I have some, but thanks,” I said as I sat up and pointed to the tray Cassidy had brought into my room.
“You’re not supposed to eat in your room.”
“I know. I think it’s all right this time, though.”
“What’s your name? I’m sorry, I forgot. I forget things a lot nowadays.”
“I’m Erik. You’re Brad, right?”
“Yeah.”
“How long you been here?” I asked him as I tried to be a little social with the guy.
“I can’t remember.”
I laughed at first because I thought he was joking. How could someone be in a treatment facility and not remember how long they had been there. But as
I looked at the serious expression on his face, I realized he was telling the truth.
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right. I fried my brain over the years. It’s my addiction. I can’t stop,” he said nonchalantly.
“Well, you’re here, right? You’re trying to stop. You look like you’re doing better than me, if that helps at all.”
“Yeah, a little,” he said as he cracked a smile.
Brad and I continued talking for a little while. He certainly had lost a few brain cells over the years, but he was a down to earth guy. It was funny to me how normal he seemed while talking to me. I had heard him throw a fit about almost every single meal he had been fed since I had been there, yet while sitting with me he seemed like a meek and mild mannered guy.
“Brad, it’s time for group,” Cassidy said as she stood in the doorway. “Erik, you should give it a try today. I hear Melanie is going to talk about our hike yesterday.”
“How many groups do we have around here?” I grumbled as I climbed out of bed.
“A lot,” Brad answered while he walked out of the room.
“Hey, now. What else are you guys going to do with your days? Sit around and have a pity party?”
“Thanks for the breakfast. I’m sorry I didn’t feel like eating much.”
“You scared the shit out of me, you know. I couldn’t wake you up. I had to get Jarrod,” she said as her eyes watched me walk toward her.
The realization that Cassidy had seen me so vulnerable didn’t make me feel great at all. I was eroding away my cool exterior faster and faster. She wasn’t going to fall for a guy like me. She had probably been hit on by dozens of guys like me over the years. I felt a little foolish for the way I had behaved when I first arrived. Of course, I wasn’t about to apologize, but I did feel bad about it.
“You saw all that?” I asked.
“I’m just glad you’re all right.”
“Thanks, doll,” I said and strolled past her.
Thanks, doll?! Oh my God, what had I just said? Cassidy was being genuinely nice and instead of just being normal, I turned into some sort of seventies player. Close, personal interactions certainly weren’t my thing.
