Acrobaddict (28 page)

In the calm of the night, Nick and I reached through the bars and grabbed each other’s hands—beautiful lovers, clasping hands through the iron bars, our hearts kept apart by the guard outside. We savored our dream of a nightmare. Addiction is the only jail cell where the key is on the inside, impossible to find in the darkness. In my oblivion, I sobbed, knowing the world still did not approve of us and that we were the last two people on earth harboring a dream.

In the morning Nick had vanished. I didn’t know why I was in my underwear or where I was, except that I could tell I was in jail. It was cold and my head hurt. I called for help, and it hurt to breathe; it felt like my ribs were broken. I had dried blood and dirt caked around my lips and fingers.

A cop came in and said, “Oh, loudmouth, you’re awake! Seems like you’ve sobered up.”

They threw me my clothes; I got dressed and was released. I had to promise to return the next day for a court hearing. As I walked out the precinct door, I realized that I was badly injured and knew
those cops were responsible. I spotted a pay phone near the door and called 911, not realizing that the call was actually being directed to the very building I was standing in. I told the operator I wanted to press charges against the cops who beat me up, and when they saw I was making the call from the pay phone in their station, two cops rushed over, grabbed my arms, opened the door, and catapulted me out. It felt like I was back on TV, lying facedown on the pavement with the warm sun hitting my back. I saw a hospital across the street and walked into the emergency room.

After I waited for hours to be seen, the doctor said I was too intoxicated to be given pain medication. But when she left the room I stole vials of injectable lidocaine, which had no euphoric side effects, but just taking anything relieved my anger. I was exhausted and pissed at Nick because I didn’t know where he’d gone.

Somehow I found Angela’s apartment and crawled up to the attic and onto our dirty mattress, curling up next to Nick. He had been asleep, but rolled over to ask me where I’d been, which started a fight. I screamed at him, wanting to know why he abandoned me by not waiting for me at the jail, and I told him I never wanted to see him again.

I closed my eyes and drifted off to safety until horrible shrieks woke me up. Paramedics huddled over me, shaking me, yelling, “Wake up! Joe! Wake up!” Katherine stood next to Angela, holding an empty prescription bottle I’d filled a few days before.

The paramedics asked if I’d taken all the pills at once. “Yeah, but I always take that many. I’m fine. I’m not overdosing. I just want to sleep,” I told them.

I looked over at Katherine. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Did you call them?” Scared I was going to overdose, she’d called the paramedics, but I’d finished those pills twenty-four hours before, so if I had taken a lethal dose, I’d have been dead. They knew I was right, but said I had to go to the ER. Using my TV medical education, I told the paramedics that I was invoking my right to refuse medical attention, but they disagreed and took me back to the same hospital I had just left hours earlier. I was placed under strict observation. The
nurse treated me like I was a serial killer, and made it her life’s work to make me feel like shit about myself.

A few hours later I walked back to Angela’s apartment. All I wanted to do was sleep. When I arrived, Angela’s brother and his crew of dangerous elves were sitting there, waiting for me. Their energy was in protection mode, and it felt like I was walking into a lion’s den. I went up to the attic to lie down, but everything was gone except my teddy bear, Oatmeal. He was the only one left that had not abandoned me. We’d begun to resemble each other—generally filthy, with torn noses and matted hair. A few pieces of my clothing were thrown around the attic, but when I went to pick them up I found huge tears across them, slashes from top to bottom. Someone had had playtime with box cutters at my expense.

Angela’s brother came up to the attic with his mob and told me I had to leave. I said, “Not without my journal. Where is it?” He found it and handed it over. There I was, with everything I owned: Oatmeal, my journal, and the clothes on my back. The rest of my things were gone and it was clear I wasn’t getting them back. I was bone-sober at that point, with nothing to protect me from the pain.

I heard rain strike the attic’s roof and realized if I didn’t leave immediately I’d be drenched. I asked Angela where Nick had gone. In her nastiest voice, primed from years in the sex trade, she responded, “You don’t remember, you crackhead? You broke up with him. He called his uncle to come pick him up.”

All I remembered was a fight, not a breakup; I loved him. I left before my conversation with Angela and her brother and the elves could escalate to a fistfight, and walked out to the streets, back to my now “usual” hospital to ask my favorite nurse if there was a shelter in the neighborhood. She wrote the directions on the napkin that had been underneath her Styrofoam coffee cup. I wasn’t even worth wasting a piece of paper on.

Exhausted and broken, I went to the shelter and got a bed in a huge room full of other homeless men. Two large fans were on full blast at the end of the room; it was the most soothing sound I’d heard in
a long time. It reminded me of my father when he lived with us; he couldn’t sleep without the soft sound of a fan. He was there with me, the white noise cradling his broken child. What was he doing right now? I wanted to see him. I couldn’t believe I was in another homeless shelter, alone, scared, gripping every ounce of teddy-bear life out of Oatmeal. Listening to the hum of the fans, I fell into one of the darkest sleeps I had ever known. I hit a new bottom that would be my watermark in the well of my life. I felt I could only go up.

I awoke and faced the sunshine in perfect fear. The other men were kind to me; everyone had a version of being broken by the system, drugs, families, and life. There were twelve-step meetings, and I went to one; on Sundays we had to attend church, where a crazy guy tried to baptize me and force me to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. I wouldn’t do either of those things, and it pissed him off, but he said God still loved me. I was thankful to hear somebody still loved me.

I had nobody left to call. Feeling completely alone, I remembered talking to Darren a few weeks ago during one of my meltdowns. We had moved far away from each other, and neither wanted to see the other again, but I called him and begged him to pick me up. After I cried and pleaded, he finally agreed and said he would come in a few days.

I was so happy to see Darren, but he was shocked at the sight of me. He knew I was in trouble. He convinced his mother to let me move in with him. I was terrified of using again. I would do everything possible to get into recovery and change my life. I was a desperate, dying boy, and though I wanted to cry, I didn’t. I climbed into the backseat of Darren’s new car and fell asleep as he drove home to Virginia.

26

CEREBRUM

T
HE CEREBRUM
(L
ATIN FOR “BRAIN”
)
IS THE LARGEST AND MOST HIGHLY DEVELOPED PART OF THE HUMAN BRAIN, WHILE ALSO BEING THE MOST RECENT IN EVOLUTIONARY TERMS
. I
T IS ASSOCIATED WITH ALL THE HIGHER COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS, INCLUDING THOUGHT, MEMORY, IMAGINATION, PERCEPTION, INTELLIGENCE, LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION, AND PERSONALITY
. T
HE BRAIN TAKES THE LONGEST OF ANY ORGAN TO DEVELOP AND UNDERGOES THE MOST CHANGES
. O
N AVERAGE, IT LOSES FROM 5 TO 10 PERCENT OF ITS WEIGHT BETWEEN THE AGES OF TWENTY AND NINETY
.

Sitting in the backseat of Darren’s car, I was surrounded by my truth. I was beaten up, and had crashed and burned into bits of debris and despair. In the past, I would have pulled myself together to mentally and physically connect with Darren, but at that point in my life all human interactions had been reduced to an animal level. After all those years I had bought into and cultivated a dangerous look, investing in body piercing, clothes, and tattoos to speak for me, I now saw my darkness reflected in the fear in Darren’s eyes. I no longer needed to hammer into people’s hearts, “Fear me.” I had become fear.

Darren lived with his mom, and I would be allowed to stay in their basement. It took a few weeks to get back to a state of mind where I could think normally. Even simple thoughts were difficult to articulate.

I called Nick to make amends, begged for his forgiveness, and asked him to believe in me and believe that I was finished with using drugs. He was skeptical, but I was determined to prove that I could leave my former life of destruction. We made a loose plan that if I stayed in recovery, worked hard, and saved money, we would find an apartment together. I even contacted another college that had expressed interest in my gymnastics before Staunton, but got no reply.

Darren still partied, but kept it under control. While I was reemerging as a functioning human being, I wanted no more drugs in my life. I found a counselor who guided me in writing letters of amends to my family, begging for their understanding and acceptance of my apologies. I didn’t dare call them because I knew they were through with me. I would only be able to repair the damage by showing them—over time—that I had changed.

I was looking for a job when my brain started clearing up, and I found one as a waiter at a sports bar. Never a morning person, I started my first shift at 7:00 a.m., pouring coffee for a group that rented a function room every weekend. I couldn’t imagine what kind of people would regularly meet so early and have coffee in a crappy room, but I needed every cent and my manager said they all tipped a dollar.

That first weekend shift was an absolute shock. Late to arrive and get the coffee brewing, I rushed into the room and heard someone speaking. Trying not to interrupt them, I looked over and saw some books on a table. I had seen that book before, but couldn’t remember the context. I knew the setting too, but paused in confusion in an effort to jog my brain for memories. It was a twelve-step meeting, a meeting for the disease people believed I had. I poured the coffee and stood outside the room, listening to their stories through the closed doors, desperate for help, too terrified to talk. Could I tell them I might have a problem? Would they tell my boss? I was grateful to be entrusted with the job and couldn’t afford to lose it.

I was in the room cleaning up cups when the chairperson asked, “Is there anybody new here who would like to introduce themselves?” I wanted to speak, to scream, for all the flesh to melt off my bones,
exposing myself to them, but I didn’t. I just stood there in silence—the silence that kills a person, the silence only the destroyed and damned understand. My body heaved in defeat as I filled a woman’s mug. I wondered what it would have felt like, divulging my truth to those strangers. I left the room and pressed my ear against the door, eavesdropping for hope.

Then a woman spoke. When she came to the meeting, she said she thought the doors of heaven were opening, but realized it was just the Gates of Hell closing behind her. She had left the underworld and was ready to live a life of honesty and recovery. Tears streamed down my face as I clung to the door separating me from them, my Gates of Hell—which side was I on?

Instead of embracing the help of those recovering addicts, I opted to switch shifts with another waiter. I could no longer hear their truths on one side of the door and live my lies on the other side. Hearing the honest emotions spoken at the meeting was too painful, and I didn’t see success for me in their program. I felt my disease was unique.
My
addiction was more malicious than theirs. I knew if they heard how truly evil I was, they would never let me stay in the group. I still wanted recovery, but it felt like a theoretical heaven, a place people talk about but never reach.

I did the same thing every day of every week—work, come home, and put my money under my pillow. The more time I spent drug-free, the more I wrote, mostly poetry, endlessly scribbling words in my journal about Nick and the pains of separated love. Nick had peered too closely through the keyhole of my soul. My bender frightened him and illuminated my potential danger to us both. He never thought I would succeed and see our plan through to the end, but I vowed to prove him wrong. We would live together, in secret from his friends and family; I would reside as the phantom ghost, the invisible love of his life. Forever.

The Virginia summer slowly passed, and I began to feel my welcome at Darren’s waning, though his mother tolerated me sulking around her home. As I put some time together in recovery, I forgot how bad I was, especially my last horrible fiasco, and slowly started partying
again. I placed strict guidelines on my using: no pills from a pharmacy, but illegally obtained substances were fine.