by David Poses
The night Rob took me to Michael’s Disco 2000 party at Limelight, we skipped to the front of a line that stretched down the block and around the corner and got in without having to pay or show ID. Rob introduced me to Michael, and I started hanging out with both of them and going to the clubs at least once a week. It was easy to lose myself in the dark rooms and loud techno music.
Soon after I told Michael I could attract rich, thirsty suburban kids to Limelight, USA, and Tunnel, he hired me as a promoter. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t old enough to enter a nightclub.
The Club Kids drank and used cocaine, ecstasy, and Special K, but they shunned heroin. When I found out Rob used heroin and asked for a hit, he said, “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.” He resisted for months, but I persisted.
He finally caved at the end of an all-nighter at Save the Robot, an after-hours club. I was sixteen, in the passenger seat of his grandmother’s Chevy Celebrity, choking back tears as I told him about my struggle with depression.
“Please,” I said. “This has been going on since I was a kid, but lately, I think about suicide all the time.”
My heart raced as Rob shook an infinitesimal amount of rough beige powder onto the back of a magazine. I snorted it with a rolled-up five-dollar bill. As the bitter mix of heroin and coagulated snot dripped down the back of my throat, my body started to relax, and years of bottled-up shame, sadness, anger, and fear melted into warmth and safety. I wasn’t high—I was even. I could breathe—for the first time.
The next morning, all I could think about was getting more.
I’m still pacing when Dr. Burton comes in and turns on the overhead light. He could pass for an English professor at a small liberal arts college: longish, unkempt gray hair, blue shirt buttoned to the top, collar buttons undone, one side jutting up. I sit on the edge of the bed, and he eases into the chair next to me and moans about his back.
“Sciatica. Not fun.” He licks the tip of his index finger and flips to a blank page in a legal pad. “Do you prefer Dave or David?”
“David. Thanks for ask—”
“All right, Da-vid. Anyone in your family with a history of addiction?”
“My aunt Jo was a heroin addict in the ’70s. Other than her, no one.”
We breeze through my limited experience with pot and alcohol and my lack of experience with hallucinogens.
“Cocaine?”
“I snorted it a few times—smoked it more. Crack counts as coke, right?”
“How do you figure?”
“On a molecular level, powder is the hydrochloride salt form of coke, and crack has the added base that lets you smoke it, but it’s just baking soda.”
“How often did you smoke crack?”
“Thursday mornings, mostly. I had a job as a nightclub promoter. Wednesday’s at Limelight ended at dawn on Thursday. I didn’t want to fall asleep driving to school.”
Dr. Burton nods and jots something down. He must know I don’t belong here, right? Pen poised over the page, he asks about heroin.
“I started at sixteen, after every antidepressant known to man failed.”
“We call that self-medicating.”
“Exactly. Depression is pain. Heroin is a painkiller.”
“How much did you use?”
“Two bags a day. Maybe three or four. Five.”
“Shoot? Snort? Smoke?”
“I snorted at first and started shooting after a year or so.”
“One day you said, ‘Here’s an idea’?”
“I was the kid who hated going to the doctor because of the finger prick.”
“And yet . . .”
“I was in withdrawal. My nose was too stuffy and runny to snort. My friend Rob put the needle in. I had to close my eyes.”
“So you got over your fear of needles?”
“Rob told me to make a fist and count backward from ten. By nine, I knew I’d never snort again.”
“Ever share a needle?”
“No.”
“Not even with Rob?”
“Never. We were militant about hygiene, and clean needles weren’t a problem. There were plenty around. My brother had a prescription for—”
“Ah, you stole needles from your brother. Ever been arrested?”
“Never.”
“Five bags a day isn’t cheap. How’d you pay for it?”
“My job at the clubs.”
“Isn’t that something—a teenage nightclub mogul-entrepreneur, non-degenerate addict who had everything under control.”
“I did.”
“So why are you here?”
“I guess I got sick of being a junkie.”
“You just said enough and quit?”
“I’d been thinking about it for a while. Then Rob and I were coming home from the Bronx in the middle of the night and a kid threw a brick at my car as we drove under a bridge. We pulled over. The kid was on the bridge laughing, and the top of the driver’s side door frame was bent like an elbow. It could have easily gone through the windshield, and we would’ve died.”
“In recovery, that’s known as an epiphany, a sign from God. That how it felt?”
“I’ve always thought of God as Santa Claus for grown-ups.”
“Uh-huh. And did you stop after the accident?”
I shake my head.
“You couldn’t.”
“I needed a plan. A few months after the accident—last week—when my mom went to Florida, I gave Rob all my money and my car so I’d have no way out, and . . .”
“Withdrawing from heroin is a serious medical condition.”
“I’d kicked before. Rob said it’d be much worse this time—he tried to convince me to get on methadone or do a slow taper.”
“Why not take his advice? There are safer, less excruciating ways to withdraw.”
I choke up a little and stare at the wall. Finally I say, “I thought I deserved to suffer.”
six
“Seven o’clock, Dave. You’re late for a powwow with Nancy.”
I sit up and rub my eyes, nowhere near well rested after yet another night of being jolted out of nightmares I can’t remember but can tell are brutal.
Ron claps his hands. “C’mon. Shake your tail feathers.”
I slide out of bed fully clothed and reach for my sneakers. He bounds into the hall and I follow, holding my toothbrush between my teeth and hopping on my right foot so I can wedge the back of my left sneaker over my ankle. We zig and zag down a series of brightly lit narrow corridors papered in an ugly floral pattern.
“What’s the powwow about?” I mumble through the toothbrush.
“Intake eval. Dr. Burton’s diagnosis.”
When we arrive at Nancy’s office, the door is open and she’s at her desk, talking on the phone.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
“You’ll brush your teeth later.”
“I have to pee too.”
“This’ll only be a few minutes.”
Nancy hangs up and waves us in. Ron perches on the edge of the desk and futzes with a Green Bay Packer’s mug. I drop my toothbrush into my shirt pocket and crumble into a chair.
Opening a folder, Nancy says, “Let’s get down to brass tacks.” She glances at a short, typed paragraph. “Cross-addicted. Textbook.”
“That means you’re not loyal to a drug,” Ron adds. “You’ll do anything to get high.”
My mouth is dry and tastes like an ashtray, and my bladder is about to explode. I plant my hands on my thighs and push—hard, burning, sweaty palm-on-denim friction. “No! I’ve never taken a hallucinogen. I got drunk once. I hate alcohol.”
Nancy and Ron exchange a look, two guards reacting to a prisoner proclaiming his innocence. “Now, Dave,” she says. “You might hate alcohol now, but with this disease, you don’t get to decide not to become an alcoholic. You’re powerless.”
“There wasn’t a gun to my head. I made a conscious choice to—”
“The disease chooses,�
� Nancy says. “The disease is the gun.”
Sunlight hits the gems in her crucifix necklace, spraying a kaleidoscope of color on the wall. Diamonds or zirconia? Did she buy it for herself? She’s not wearing a wedding ring. Do drug counselors make decent money? What kind of training do you need? I’d be a good counselor. I should start a rehab that doesn’t march you up twelve steps and force God down your throat.
Ron hops off the desk and snaps his fingers in my face. “Earth to Dave. Do you copy? What. Religion. Were. You. Raised?”
“Jewish.”
“So Hebrew school? Bar mitzvah? Whole nine?”
“Yeah, but where I grew up, Judaism was more of a cultural thing. Less synagogue, more country club.”
“You told Dr. Burton you don’t believe in God. That true?”
“Between the robes and beards and followers and trying to curry favor through good behavior—no, I don’t believe in God.”
“Dave.”
“Maybe I’m biased. God didn’t do anything to help my mom when she had cancer, but he helps junkies, drunks, and crackheads?”
“Dave, for this to work, you need to start by admitting you’re powerless. Put your life and will in God’s hands and you’ll see.”
“But if I’m powerless, how can I put my life and will in anyone’s hands?”
“Dave.”
“Okay, so there’s a loophole. Somehow, I manage to put my life and will in God’s hands. Aren’t I still powerless?”
“Dave.”
“What if God is a morning person, with bad taste in music and a yen for backgammon? What if he calls me Dave?”
Nancy chuffs air and runs a hand through her hair.
I cross my legs. Maybe that’ll stop me from pissing myself. “There’s no question I was addicted to heroin but—”
“Are addicted,” Nancy says. “Once an addict, always an addict—even if you’re not actively using.”
“Heroin isn’t the problem.”
“Exactly,” Ron says. “Just like Purell isn’t the problem for the guys knocking it back in jail. When you’re an addict and you’re desperate enough for a high, you’ll abuse anything that can be abused.”
“Do you get what he’s saying?” Nancy tilts her head.
“I get why drinking soap is abuse, but heroin is a painkiller. I ran out all the time. If I never even thought to drink a beer, why would I start chugging Purell?”
“Denial,” Ron says. “It’s not just a river in Egypt.”
Nancy looks at Ron. “I think he knows the truth and he’s scared. He’s been squirming and wriggling since you two got here.”
“I’m trying not to pee all over your chair.”
Nancy rises to her feet and inhales deeply through her nose and lets it out slowly. “Why don’t we let you get settled and we’ll pick it up later. Sound good?”
Ron takes me through general population, and my stomach twists into knots as my world is compressed into an eternity on two and a half floors. We pass the kitchen, dining hall, and gymnasium and enter the small library, which has no shortage of Bible bibles and bibles for Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
In a hall of offices and classrooms, some of the doors have placards next to them with names and titles etched in white on phony wood. On one, the letters are unevenly spaced in “therapist.” It looks like “the rapist.”
The bedrooms are downstairs, off long corridors with dark brown carpet that reaches halfway up the walls, below sconces with low-wattage light bulbs. All the rooms have doors.
Mine is a perfect square. Hunter green walls. A white popcorn stucco ceiling. Cheap plaid flannel curtains. Four twin beds made with military corners and covered with navy blue blankets, the hard kind of wool you don’t want near your body. Adjacent to every bed is a short, wide dresser with three drawers and a clock radio on all but mine.
“Obviously, your roomies read the list,” Ron says.
A framed print from an Audubon book hangs on a wall. On another, a faded, sad-looking still-life watercolor of a fruit bowl.
The bathroom has a toilet, sink, and shower. No tub. The blurry vanity mirror appears to be unbreakable, depriving you of the option of shattering it and slitting your wrists.
“All righty then. Get yourself situated and I’ll see you in group in a bit.”
After Ron leaves, I count to twenty, grab my jacket, and take off for the smoking area.
A frozen drizzle falls on half a dozen diseased young adults in the small outdoor space, walled-in with wooden slats you can’t see over. On a bench, a white kid with dreadlocks and bad acne draws disproportionately large penises on pictures of men in a Dillard’s catalog. Two girls huddle and suck down Marlboro Lights.
The tall one says, “I told her—I was all, ‘Rachel, if you’re gonna live in denial, then move back in with your frickin’ ex-frickin’ boyfriend and go back to using.’”
A pale, skinny guy wearing a Chicago Blackhawks hat pulled low chuckles in the corner.
The tall girl says, “I’m sorry, Steve, but Rachel’s a fucking cunt.” She coughs up a wad of greenish-yellowish phlegm and spits it on the ground. “You think I’m wrong?”
“I’d agree,” Steve says, “except Rachel lacks the warmth and depth of a vagina.”
“Yeah, well, that cunt’s made no frickin’ progress. Especially with the fourth step.”
The short girl turns to me. “That’s when you’re supposed to do a fearless moral inventory of yourself.”
The tall girl goes inside. The short girl follows. Pausing at the door, she says, “Sorry to disappoint you, new guy, if you were expecting a parade when you got here.”
seven
In one of the classrooms, eight of us, including Ron and both Rachel bashers, sit on folding metal chairs in a circle. Overhead, a couple of the fluorescent lights flicker on and off. We begin by reciting the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Ron tells me that when the group welcomes a new member, everyone tells their story. Alex goes first. Identifying as “addict, alcoholic, eight days sober,” he brags about getting high on angel dust and blowing up gas stations and claims to hold the record for highest blood alcohol content in Breathalyzer tests in seven Wisconsin towns. He beams with pride.
“I started getting fucked up at eleven,” he says. “Drinking, smoking weed, huffing glue and gas, whatever I could get my hands on to escape the hell of my homelife.”
I can’t relate to this guy. As he tells how his father broke his wrist with a baseball bat, I remember fighting with Daniel over baseball cards and our father throwing them at a wall, dinging the corners of several Mark McGwire rookies.
Then there’s Vanessa, the tall, phlegm-spitting Rachel basher, who says she’s an addict and alcoholic, twenty days sober. She covers her face with her hands and recalls an uncle who physically abused her. Voice breaking, she says, “My parents threw me out when I told them. They were all, ‘You’re destroying the family.’” She started smoking meth and sold her body to pay for it.
She talks about a warehouse roof where she used to have sex for meth money. I can’t relate. All I can think of is when I was nine, I went over to a friend’s house and climbed on his roof. His mom told my mom, who, for some reason, told my father, who took away my TV privileges. After he tucked me in and left, Mom invited me to watch TV in her master suite—an enormous bedroom with a bathroom, dressing room with mirrored walls and four walk-in closets and a step-up study bigger than most of my friends’ bedrooms.
Venessa says, “The worst hour of my life was on that roof. Four guys in a row. One pulled my hair so hard, I thought my scalp was coming off. When it was over, the last guy went ‘You’re a fucking whore. I hate you’ and spat in my face.”
While Mom and I watched Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd tackle a mystery and exchange c
lever witticisms on Moonlighting, I sat in her lap, breathing her perfume as she stroked my hair. When the show was over, I fake yawned, stumbled to my room, and slid under the covers. Seconds later, Mom came in, and I pretended to be asleep. She knelt beside me, kissed my forehead, and said “I love you.” I made a slight snoring sound. Mom said, “One of these days, I hope you’ll say ‘I love you’ to me.”
Claire, the shorter Rachel basher, is an addict and alcoholic, twenty-two days sober. Talking with her hands, she says “the disease” made her steal to pay for the hundred grand worth of meth she banged into her jugular. “I woke up in an emergency room to a bunch of doctors going, ‘Um, hon, you had enough meth in your system to kill a freakin’ rhino.’ I thought that was cool.”
Until she hit rock bottom. She closes her eyes, and when they open, she whispers about a massive overdose in the parking lot of an outpatient rehab. “That’s when you know you’re powerless—when you’re getting high in rehab.”
No story is complete without at least one trip to the nebulous, figurative place known as “rock bottom,” where God rescues addicts. For Jared, fourteen days sober, it was the back of a police car, following an arrest for possession with intent to sell a large volume of liquid LSD. For Phil, five days sober, it was a bakery—he drove drunk through the front window on a Sunday morning. Pulling strands of wool from his mukluks, he thanks God for the intervention specialist his parents hired. “I didn’t know I was out of control until then.”
“You’re up, Dave,” Ron says. Before I say a word, he says, “Dave’s struggling with our belief that addiction is a disease and only God has the power to restore us to our sanity.” He asks me if I’m a lost cause or willing to be open-minded.
“I’m open,” I lie.
“Well, good,” he says. “Who accepts the challenge?”
Everyone raises a hand.
At dinner, I sit by myself at a round table with ten chairs and poke at a pile of overcooked spaghetti and bland meatballs. Steve joins me. A twenty-one-year-old from some Chicago suburb, he’s another stereotype-defying heroin addict—in blucher shoes with knotted lace ends and a white Oxford under a Northwestern sweatshirt. This is his second stint at Hazelden in as many years.
