Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  Meth gives you all of this, plus paranoia, irritability, anxiety, aggression, and often violence, not to mention all the lying, cheating, and stealing you’re doing in order to get your next fix. Most disturbingly, studies have shown that using meth over a long period actually changes how the brain works. Meth users have difficulty learning and recalling information for years after they’ve quit. This may explain why people addicted to this drug develop such serious emotional and intellectual problems, many of which persist long after the person has stopped using—which is tremendously difficult to do, by the way.

  Not a pretty picture, right? But even if I’d understood what was in store, it wouldn’t have stopped me. You know the tremendous relief you feel when you finally twist the knob on the stereo after your music has been on too loud for too long? How the whole world suddenly feels calmer and more manageable? That was how doing meth made me feel, like I could finally claim a moment’s peace and quiet by turning the volume down on all the sick, sad, frightening feelings that would otherwise plague me every waking moment of every single day.

  I’d been asking Him for answers, but after I found meth, I gave up talking to God. I wrote my brother a letter, telling him I understood why he was an atheist. In my journal I wrote, “It’s pretty harsh, but at this time in my life, this is how I’m feeling. I do not believe in God. It’s hard for me to say that, but as of right now, I have given up.”

  I can’t tell you how much I hate seeing those words in my own handwriting, or how much I hate to own up to them here. I hadn’t had a very deep relationship with God or a very complete understanding of how He was working in my life. All I knew was that, despite my prayers, He hadn’t made me feel better or delivered me to oblivion.

  Meth, on the other hand, never failed me. After about six months, I had stopped snorting the drug and started freebasing, which is when you smoke the drug off a piece of aluminum foil. When you smoke meth, you get higher a lot faster than after snorting it. As soon as the smoke hits your lungs, you start feeling it, and that was what I wanted: to feel it right away.

  Freebasing hurts. The chemicals in the foil cause painful blisters on your tongue and on the back of your throat. I converted a marijuana bong so that I could smoke meth out of it, and carried it everywhere with me. I named my bong, as if it were my pet. That’s how into it I was.

  I could function on meth and still not feel anything. I barely remember my junior year at all. I was constantly drunk or high. I look at pictures from that time, and they might as well be photographs of a stranger. I don’t remember most of my friends’ names, or a single family dinner my mom made, or anything I learned at school. I certainly wasn’t doing the important work that might have helped me down the road, like processing the violation of the trauma I’d endured or girding myself to testify.

  Looking back on it, I can remember how terribly lonely I felt. It’s ironic, because loneliness was one of the feelings I was so desperate to avoid. It’s almost a physical memory, like pain. You know when you’re watching a horror movie, and you almost can’t stop yourself from screaming at the screen: “No! Don’t go in there!” That’s how I feel when I remember that time. The choices I made then meant that I lost a big chunk of my life. I know why I did it, of course. But I wish I’d known what I know now, which is that I did not have to walk through the valley of the shadow of darkness by myself. There was someone right there with me, the whole time. All I had to do in order to feel His love was open myself up to the realization that I wasn’t alone.

  But I didn’t know. I had found the oblivion I’d been searching for, and I couldn’t see anything else.

  Chapter Five

  Hung Out to Dry

  For most high school students, senior year means applying to colleges and going to prom. I spent my senior year in rehab, before testifying at my own rape trial.

  We had expected that Seth’s dad would hire the best and the most expensive lawyer for the guys. But nobody was expecting an eleven-person defense team.

  One of the lawyers they hired was a former state Supreme Court justice. Another was infamous for his ability to get jurors to ignore video evidence. He’d done it for the cop who’d been filmed beating Rodney King and for another police officer who’d been accused of excessive force with video evidence. He’d developed an almost magical reputation: How could you sit there and watch an unarmed man being brutally beaten, long past the point of submission, and then vote not to convict the men who’d beaten him? It felt almost supernatural, as if he could get jurors to disbelieve their own eyes.

  The lawyers were only the beginning. The private investigators, we discovered, were part of a larger team, headed by a retired FBI agent. The defense hired a consultant from the O.J. Simpson trial to help them select the jurors they believed would be most sympathetic. They hired an audio­visual expert, who was charged with coming up with different, multicolored ways to present evidence to the jury, as well as a publicist.

  These were very big guns. When my parents saw the resources that the defense was throwing at the case, they began to feel deeply alarmed.

  And yet, as everyone kept reminding us, we had the videotape. I hadn’t seen it, of course, and neither had my parents. But we could tell it was bad. A thirty-year veteran of the police force choked up when he was talking about it with my dad. Everyone who had seen the video always said the same thing, in the same horrified tone of voice: that the DA could probably just play it for the jury and go home. Even then, I was more cynical. If only it were that easy, I thought.

  Nobody was consulting me on anything. I went to the appointments my parents made with the lawyers, but only because I had to be there. Nobody spoke to me or asked my opinion; most of the time, I sat in the corner and played solitaire on my phone while the grown-ups talked over my head. A couple of times, they even sent me and my mom to do some shopping at the mall.

  My age had a lot to do with it; as a minor, my parents had to speak for me. But there was another dynamic at work, too. My dad felt a tremendous amount of guilt and shame because he had not been able to protect me, and he responded to those feelings in the aftermath of the rape by becoming overly protective. If he had anything to do with it, nobody would ever hurt me again. So he did everything he could to shield me from further unpleasantness—which often meant speaking for me and intimidating our own lawyers so they wouldn’t ask me questions that would make me uncomfortable.

  Everything I knew about the case, I knew from eavesdropping at those meetings, piecing together the bits and pieces of information I could gather. That feeling of powerlessness threatened to overwhelm me, the feeling that I had unwittingly set into motion a cascade of dominoes that were set to topple everyone’s life. All I had to do was look around me to see the damage I’d caused. What kind of a person would do something like this to her friends? No wonder I had no one left. I had brought this upon myself, I felt, and all I could do was stand there, watching in horror as the effects rippled out to hurt everyone else in my life.

  Serious trial preparation began, and I watched my parents aging right in front of my eyes. The lines on my dad’s face seemed so deep they might as well have been etched in stone. More disturbingly, my mom started experiencing numbness in her face and tongue, making it extremely difficult for her to speak and eat. Her doctors said it was a reaction to the overwhelming stress. One day that summer, I realized with a start that I could see her scalp shining through in spots, where hanks of her beautiful golden-blond hair had fallen out—another stress reaction, and more evidence of what I’d done to their lives.

  My parents never stopped loving and supporting me, but I wasn’t a fool: I could see the tremendous strain they were under, and I knew I was to blame. For a while, their marriage was even in jeopardy. Their twenty-eight-year rock-solid relationship was on the rocks, and it was all because of me.

  On top of the emotional and financial burden, participating in the trial required a seemingly endless amount of time and work. My parents
often stayed up late into the night dealing with the case. We were drowning in paperwork, and it often seemed as if my mom did nothing but drive me to and from therapy and appointments with the lawyers. As the pressure increased, my parents fought more and more, and my brother withdrew. He didn’t blame me for the rape, but it was hard for him not to resent me for the turmoil and the chaos in our household when I was at the center of it.

  To me, the message was clear: I wasn’t just worthless, but actively destructive.

  The preparation for the trial terrified me. Of course I knew that my history would come to light. My party girl phase had been a very short, stupid period, but I’d managed to cram a lot of pretty big mistakes into those six months. Preparing for the trial, I came to understand that every single one of them was going to be trotted out for the jury. Now, the law is clear: Rape is a crime, no matter what someone’s behavior has been in the past. But that’s not how it works in the real world, and it soon became clear that the defense would move heaven and earth so that everyone would learn what a slutty liar I had been.

  Meth was my only escape from the swirl of feelings that threatened to overwhelm me, and I clung to it like it was a life preserver. But in September 2003, the first week of my senior year, my parents discovered what I was up to.

  They’d had their suspicions that partying was going on, of course, but they thought I was drinking—maybe smoking pot. This was shocking enough for them, because I’d always been such a good girl. So they’d responded the only way they knew how, by locking me in. I’d always had their trust before, because I’d earned it. Now I had none. My parents drove me to school and they picked me up. I wasn’t allowed out on the weekends, and I wasn’t allowed to be home alone. Where once they’d been trying to protect me from the guys lurking outside, now they were trying to protect me from myself.

  But you can’t outwit a drug addict. If getting high was my job, then I was Employee of the Month. Locking me in didn’t work. I developed ever more elaborate schemes for sneaking out of the house after they were in bed. For instance, I’d leave my pajamas outside on the porch, so that I could change back into them before heading back into my room. If my parents caught me, I could pretend I’d gotten up to get a drink of water.

  One night, my parents busted me, drunk. My mom had woken up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and checked the house alarm. Of course, it was off because I’d turned it off in order to sneak out, but my mom thought she’d forgotten to set it, and turned it back on.

  So I rolled back into the house at about five a.m., so drunk that I couldn’t stand on my own two feet; I had to crawl on all fours to get up the driveway. The alarm went off, scaring everybody half to death, myself included. My dad charged down the hallway, gun drawn, alarms going off all around us. He found me drunk out of my skull, trying to change back into PJs as fast as I could. Unfortunately, I was so wasted that I’d ended up with both feet stuck through one leg of my pajama bottoms.

  My parents didn’t see the humor in the situation. Instantly, they put me into an outpatient program for teenagers with substance abuse problems.

  I didn’t even break stride. I was Employee of the Month, remember? It was the easiest thing in the world for me to cheat the program.

  My parents are into vintage cars. It’s their main hobby. They buy them inexpensively, fix them up, show them off, and then sell them. They spend a lot of time at car shows; in fact, their whole social circle and most of the charity work that they do revolves around their cars. One night, my brother told them he had plans and wouldn’t be home to keep an eye on me. My mom had finally gotten her dream car, a cobalt-blue and white 1955 Chevy Bel Air, and she was taking it out to a car show—which meant that I was going with them.

  Of course, I wasn’t going anywhere without getting high first. So I locked the bathroom door, did a line, unlocked and opened the bathroom door, and turned—a bag of meth in the other hand—to wipe down the countertop. That was when my mom walked by.

  She couldn’t see what was in my hand, but she knew it wasn’t right. She followed me into my room. I was trying to be super-slick, so I pretended to be straightening my bed covers while I was actually sliding the bag of meth under the pillow on my bed. I thought I’d gotten away with it for a second—but then my mom sent me to the car so she could be alone in my room, and I knew I hadn’t. But then she came out and got into the car and didn’t say anything.

  I will never forget that drive. I was sitting in the backseat of the Bel Air, sweating bullets. I was pretty sure that my mom had found the drugs. But if she had, why wasn’t she saying anything to my dad?

  After a virtual lifetime’s worth of stony silence, we got to our first stop: my dad’s automobile repair shop. My mom and dad went inside. And when my father came out of there, shaking the baggie of meth, he was as angry as I had ever seen him in my entire life. He looked to be on the verge of a heart attack. By then, I was too high to care. With every word out of his mouth and shake of his finger, I rolled my eyes, a big smirk on my face.

  Truth was, my dad had no idea what was in the bag. When he had been a cop, crack was the big drug. Meth was more marginal, a hard drug that crazy bikers did, and it was usually blue.

  My mom started crying: “Tell us what it is.” I finally admitted that it was meth, but I told them it was only my third or fourth time doing it, instead of the truth, which was that I’d been using heavily for more than half the year.

  When they heard it was meth, my parents instantly became terrified that I was overdosing right in front of them. We got back into the car so they could rush me straight to the emergency room.

  At the ER, I fought like a cat, spitting and hissing and shouting every curse word I could think of. My parents were wide-eyed with disbelief and horror: Who was this lunatic? I had transformed into someone they’d never seen before, someone they didn’t know.

  Four of them had to hold me down, but the nurses finally got some blood. When the doctor came back with the results from my blood test, he looked deeply alarmed. He asked me how long I’d been using. I repeated the same lie I’d told my parents: Just a couple of weeks, I swear.

  The doctor looked at me hard, and then he asked me again—more clearly, as if I didn’t speak English, or hadn’t heard him correctly the first time around.

  At that point, I knew I was busted. And for a moment, I didn’t care. I almost wanted my parents to find out. If they knew I was addicted to meth, maybe they’d understand how much pain I was in. In that moment, I really wanted them to know.

  I looked at the doctor. “Seven months.”

  I could hear my mom break into sobs behind me. Shock radiated off my dad.

  The doctor looked down again at my chart and nodded. “That sounds about right. You using every day?”

  I said, “Yes. Usually at least twice.”

  That’s how my parents found out that I was addicted to methamphetamine. They knew I’d been drinking heavily, and they probably suspected that I’d used other drugs as well. But they’d never suspected anything so serious. I had been addicted to methamphetamine for seven months, and they’d had no idea.

  The next day, they sent me to an inpatient rehab, and I got clean. The withdrawal was the worst pain I’d ever been in. I thought I’d go crazy. I was so lethargic and depressed that simply brushing my teeth would wear me out. And of course, as soon as the drug was out of my bloodstream, I found myself face-to-face with everything I’d spent the last year and a half trying to block out of my mind. The shame and humiliation and powerlessness and pain rushed back in to fill the space where the meth had been.

  I hated my parents with a rage that blinded me to everything else, and I wouldn’t let them come visit me in rehab. As far as I was concerned, I’d had one crutch that had actually worked—meth—and they’d knocked it out from underneath me, leaving me with nothing at all to lean on.

  They never abandoned me, though. Here’s part of a letter my dad sent me when I was there:

/>   When the going gets tough, your friends get going—in different directions, that is. But your family comes running to your side, with love and support. So lean on us, let us be your pillar. We will hold you up and support you until you can build enough faith in yourself to support yourself. The dictionary describes faith as “A confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person.” You must also have faith in us, your parents. Faith in knowing we can, will, and want to help you put your life back together again. Please put faith in our many years of experience and knowledge. Put faith in our love for you. And if you should fall back again, have faith in knowing we will be there to pick you up, brush you off, and start again, as we have done many times in your life.

  SO YOU HAVE FAITH, ALISA!! Faith in your parents, for together we can fight this thing with lots of work, love, and support.

  My mom was completely amazing after I was discharged. She was so proud of me, and made it clear that she’d do anything she could to help me stay clean. For instance, one day she went to Michaels and bought every single craft item she could think of to keep my hands busy. That fall, I made tons of jewelry for gifts and lots of little pieces of decorative stained glass. I found that I could get absorbed in making a tiny beautiful thing, and I enjoyed it.

  Ultimately, though, the pressure was too much. I hadn’t done the work I would need to do for rehab to work; I didn’t have anything real or substantial to fill the hole I’d tried to cram full of drugs. So when I went to a Christmas party, December 2003, not quite four months after my release, I hooked up again with someone I used to use with. Within a week, I was using heavily again.