Recovery (part two)
The day I returned home from the Atlanta coke bender I landed in inpatient treatment. At that point I was pretty crazy. Part of me wanted to “do right”. At least as big a part wanted no part of “recovery”. At that point I was sure the cure was worse than the problem. Still, I submitted, probably because I had developed strong feelings for one of the church girls.
The medical social worker, I’ll call her Becky, and I had spent quite a lot of time together over the several weeks of my failed outpatient treatment. We took long walks and talked about “my issues”. It didn’t take long for nature to take it’s course and for me to fall in love with her. I had zero experience dealing with women in an unimpaired state, however, and considering how screwed up I was, I couldn’t believe that she was feeling it to. Nevertheless, I wanted to be close to her, and that wouldn’t be possible unless I was more or less “acting right”.
Inpatient was torture. It’s difficult to describe what a motley cast of characters were there. This was the late 80s and the crack epidemic was in full bloom. While I’d tried crack once at that point, somehow it didn’t get a hold on me. I’m not sure I thought I was better than my crack head piers, but I was pretty sure I was different. Crack just ravages people. You would think my exposure to this fact would have prevented me from going down that very bad road later. Unfortunately you’d be wrong.
Anyway, I hated treatment, and wouldn’t cooperate to the degree the staff wanted me to, and eventually, after the center had milked my insurance for every penny it was worth, they kicked me out. The people who’d been relatively supportive of my efforts “to reform” weren’t pleased with my flunking out of rehab. They all cut me off. Having nowhere else to go, I went to Rudy’s. Needless to say I was drunk before the sun went down on my first day of freedom.
But I missed Becky. Finally, in a half-drunken state, I confessed my love to her. To my delight, she admitted she felt the same way. We were both scared by my glaring alcohol and drug problem. Although we never articulated it, however, we were also both sure that Becky would cure me. It didn’t work out like that, but we gave it a helluva shot. Becky was pretty and sweet. We had things in common like a love for music and movies. Maybe best of all, Becky was as horny as I was. She was bad to blather about Jesus, but frequent sex overcomes a multitude of sins.
At this time I was 26. I’d never been in love before, and I liked it. It was powerful, in it’s own way maybe as powerful as alcohol and drugs. This was one of the two happiest periods of my life, and Becky figured prominently in both. She really was a wonderful woman. For the next year and a half, I managed to stay unimpaired most of the time. If I could be with Becky, I could stay clean. Unfortunately I wasn’t with her all the time and went on several binges of varying severity over the course of that year and a half. This scared Becky to death. She started having stomach problems from all the stress. Eventually she decided that to save herself from me, she had to move away.
I was devastated. She had been the glue that more or less held me together. With her departure eminent, I slipped into full-blown and active addiction. That was one of the lowest points of my life and could very easily have killed me. I had a wreck one night and Rudy’s and my head both busted my windshield. It didn’t seem to hurt us, but neither one of us really needed another blow to the head. Additionally I made a half-hearted suicide attempt. My plan was to cut my wrist and hopefully be rescued. Somehow I thought doing so would force Becky not to leave town. At any rate, the wrist slicing proved too painful, even under the influence of god knows what all, and I was left with little more than a scratch. I was pathetic.
