Tits on a nun

She tapped the mouse, and we jumped 15 feet down the street. A few seconds later, the fog of pixels cleared to reveal... what we were just looking at, only fifteen feet closer.

Tap. Jump. Tap. Jump.

Things went this way for awhile. Several times we thought we may have found what we were looking for, only to tap/jump ourselves closer and each time, it was just another strip club. With what limited information we had, we were trying to find the rehab facility I would be moving into the next day using Google Street View. Frankly, I was getting a little tired of the sleuthing, but A was on a roll. A is the kind of person who will buy an appliance and read the manual, just in case the information comes in handy some day. I am the kind of person who buys an entertainment center from Ikea and puts it together based on the picture on the manual's cover, which usually means that I not only have spare parts when I am done, but have to run to Home Depot to buy new parts to finish it my way. I've gone through a lot of entertainment centers this way, and this inability to defer (or even work very hard for) gratification is something I need to correct, but fast. More on that later.

After several minutes, I said, "I don't think we're going to find it"
A said, "Dude, I think maybe your new neighborhood is kinda sketch".
"This can't be the neighborhood."
"I hope not. But at least, if it is, you'll be close to Mister Peeps." Tap. Jump. "And OH MY GOD! FABRIC DEPOT! We are SO going to Fabric Depot when I come to visit!!!"

She was already forming an agenda for her first visit, and I could see the bullet points popping up in a thought bubble above her head. Already we had dissected the facility's client handbook, and encountered some enigmatic formatting. Such as:

• Phase 1 clients must be escorted by a phase 2 or higher to all activities outside the house.
  
• Phone calls are to be limited to 15 minutes unless express permission has been granted by the House Manager.
  
• DO NOT FLUSH ANYTHING BUT TOILET PAPER DOWN THE TOILET!!!
• Internet access is only available for personal use after 7:00 PM on weekdays...

Obviously, someone flushed something fucked up down the toilet once, and we spent a good chunk of my last day of freedom wondering what it could have been. Nobody would tell me what the address was until I was actually collected the next day by my "mentor" to be taken to the house. So I had two questions for my mentor: 1) What is the address so that all my friends can look it up on Street View, and 2) What got flushed down the toilet?

• NO VISITORS ALLOWED WITH CLIENT IN BEDROOMS!!!

That one kind of spoke for itself. It is a house full of ten guys for 3-6 months, after all.

*******************

C is my mentor. Upon assignment to the program, I was given his number and told to call him to make arrangements. Our conversation went like this:

Me: "Hi, I'm looking f-"
C: Is this B? Hold on a second.
Fumbling noises, freeway din. Then, after a long pause,
C: Fuck it. They can just give me a goddamn ticket if they see me using my phone, I don't give a shit. This goddamn hands free get-up is about as useful as tits on a nun. Is this B? Yeah sorry about that, this is C. I'm glad you called."

I hadn't gotten that far yet and could have been his daughter's soccer coach for all he knew, but something tells me he wouldn't have cared much.

C gave me some of his background. He's spent a total of 15 years in prison and has "tried everything, you name it, I done tried it at least a dozen times". His drug of choice is meth. He's been clean for 7 years.

C: "I know this program in and out, up and down. My job is to get you prepared to tackle recovery and tackle the twelve steps. I'ma gonna give you time with each step, you know, to really get the most out of it, but if I think you're slackin' or not pullin' your weight around the house, BLAM, I'll be a drill sergeant on your ass, in a heartbeat, you bet".

I do not want C to be a drill sergeant on my ass, so, mental note: "Follow the rules".

Before November, I didn't even know how unemployment really worked. Before my date with C, I definitely didn't know how to get things for free from the government. I'm no libertarian or anything, but I feel weird taking things for free. But since a good portion of C's job is seeing to it that I get a bunch of gratis necessities, I had food stamps, a bus pass, personal products, and a gym membership within three hours.

A and I were on the right track when we were Street Viewing Mister Peeps and Fabric Depot. These are some of the places I can get to from where I am. I was more surprised, though, to see where I actually am, on a quiet residential street of 1950s single family homes. The place looks like any other house from the outside. Not until one enters do you notice the walls covered with informational brochures, a dry erase board with numbers indicating who has to take a piss test today, institutional furniture, and a kitchen with four mismatched refrigerators.

I was led to a bed, one of four, in the basement den that had been converted into a sort of bedroom. C took a bite of his fried cherry pie and said "Welcome home!". He departed up the stairs shortly thereafter, smacking his lips the whole way. I made my bed, sat on it for awhile. Then, when I was sure he was gone, I went into the bathroom and carefully flushed the toilet.

Is that a pound of halite in your pocket, or are you just happy to watch me starve to death*?

"I have put graham crackers and peanut butter into the cafeteria!" said V, who I think had come to find me watching The Shawshank Redemption alone in the movie room specifically because I'd made a big stink out of not getting any the last time. Bless her Russian immigrant heart. It's that kind of thoughtfulness that almost made you forgive her deliberate pairing of silver patent leather tennis shoes with purple stirrup pants. (Two days in a row).

Here's the thing about the graham crackers: what the fuck? Because I've never seen adults behave this way about a snack in my life, or at least not since the first regional Krispy Kreme opened near my work in 2003. What's worse, in the end, I was starting to behave exactly the same way.

Here's how it went down - Once every two days or so at an unpredictable time, a tub of graham cracker packets would appear in the cafeteria next to a tub of single-serving peanut butter packets. A symphony of excited whispers would soon erupt in the dormitory. Minutes later, the unmistakable din of crackling, crushing graham crackers would fill the room as men aged 21-65 would emerge, pockets bulging in odd angular ways, from the cafeteria. Each man was holding a single packet of crackers and a single container of peanut butter as if to suggest, "Who, me? I'm not the one hoarding the graham crackers. I just have this one packet and two pockets full of, like, Legos." Eight minutes- that's the longest I ever saw those tubs retain their product.

I didn't even realize I cared about crackers until I couldn't get any, and I suspect the same could be said for most of my roomies. They assumed the role of currency in this place, the way cigarettes do in prison movies. The worst offender was a very hot, felonious smack addict named S. Owing to his towering height, his giant meatball hands, and his adorably oafish demeanor (and also his willingness to share with a select few, me included), S was forgiven.

I'm not sure how I got on his good side, as we couldn't have had less in common. We were addicted to different things, we came from different backgrounds, and there was a 12 year age gap. Still though, we ended up hanging out a lot and discussing strategies for snagging hoardable grahams.

He got word that he was entering an inpatient facility; he'd waited long after he was "medically stable" for the opportunity. It wasn't until he told me this that I'd learned he'd been homeless for years. He was extremely excited. "They help you get your license back, they help you find a place to live, everything! It's not just drug treatment, they actually help get you back into the real world!".

The day he left, I took a nap. When I woke up his bed was made, and he was gone. I didn't get to say goodbye. When I rolled back over the other way, though, an avalanche of graham crackers and peanut butter containers fell all around me. It was the most touching cracker-related experience I'd ever had.

Many days later, I learned that the program I was being shipped off to was the same one that S had gone to. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to say thanks to the hot, huggable smack junkie. When I first spoke to my program mentor, C, I said "Hey! I understand that this is the same program S went to a couple of weeks ago. How is he?"

"Let's just say S is no longer a part of this program".

Turns out, shortly after arriving, S had learned that there was a warrant for his arrest. Rather than have the program members hold his hand through the legal process, he snuck out of the house before anyone could stop him.

*you couldn't actually starve to death in this place if you tried. I gained 1.013 pounds for each day I was there.

Stay Classy

At four in the morning, J and I found ourselves alone in the dimly lit cafeteria. One couldn't say that the state we were in was "awake", exactly, but we were present enough to acknowledge that we were homosexuals, and attendantly we were both really concerned about the color scheme.

"I find that the crayons aren't always the color you think they are, especially when you're dealing with the generic ones", he said, spitting out the word "generic" the way my Southern Baptist kin do when using the word "Catholic". "That's why I like to create a color story before I begin a new project." He gestured towards an unmolested page from a coloring book featuring a pair of joyful stegosauri that we'd selected as tonight's enterprise. "Do you see how razzmatazz looks mauve by just eyeing it? Check this out".

He rubbed the crayon onto a piece of scratch paper.

"Ooooh, right", I cooed. "It's like, more purple"

After a battery of testing, we decided on complimentary shades of brown and copper, bright splashes of cerulean, and that we would definitely be in touch with each other after all this business was said and done because we were both awesome.

I'd met J in the cafeteria a few days earlier, randomly sitting across from him during one of our tray meals. I'd seen him in the last few days, I thought, but in my benzo -fog I wasn't sure where, or why I sensed that I had been there a little longer than him.

We started talking and he made an offhand comment about an ex boyfriend and the band Built to Spill. We were fast friends. It was his second time in this facility in a month. "And the first time I was here I spotted absolutely no 'mos at all, which, come ON!".

At five in the morning, we'd made considerable progress. While discussing how to alternate the placement of Alloy Orange Metallic and Chestnut on our second palm tree trunk, my counselor arrived for her day at work. She seemed surprised by what she interrupted.

"I guess you really do get here at the crack of dawn!", I said, because she'd said that.

"Yes,.........", she said, before quickly disappearing into her office.

J and I were pals for days, sitting together during acupuncture hour, watching the Shawshank Redemption again, and again, and again, eating our thousandth garden-salad-with-ranch. A few days before I left, though, J got good news. He was being released from the facility and would be entering an inpatient rehabilitation facility shortly. It was bittersweet, like it must be when your prison bro gets paroled and leaves you in the clink with words of encouragement and nobody to color dinosaurs with at four in the morning. "I'll text you with my info when I get home", he said before he left. I was discharged several days later and made a beeline for my phone. I was delighted to find that J had texted me. I got in touch with him and we made plans to attend an AA meeting the following evening.

I was with my friend A the next day when Josh called to confirm our plans. When I got off the phone, I said to A, "I really wish you could come with us to the meeting tonight. You would SO love J. For example, he has a tramp stamp that says 'Stay Classy' and-"

A interrupted, "Oh MY GOD. YOUR friend J is my friend J!!!". It was true. They'd known each other for years. It was only one of a mystical series of coincidences that have occurred lately.

Before our meeting that night, I gave him the finished dinosaur project. I'd deviated from his color story somewhat, and it was clear the project had gone downhill after his resignation as Project Manager. He didn't mention it, though, which was uncommonly kind.

J's time since leaving detox has been a little rocky, and he ditched the city to stay with his sister in a more rural area until he gets placed into an inpatient facility. He was a priceless resource when I needed someone who knew the score to speak with during my brief period of freedom between facilities. I got a really encouraging email from him regarding his circumstances today.

Before leaving the detox facility I had a conversation with my counselor about my post-detox plans. I said "You remember that guy I was coloring with the other morning? We have a lot in common and he has some experience with meetings in my neighborhood, so he was able to recommend a few for me".

"Uh huh", she said, eyeing me seriously over the top of her Tina Fey glasses. "Just be careful you're going to these meetings to recover, not because they're some sort of meat market". Noted.

First gaseous days

The detox portion of my recovery tour had been billed by my interventioneers as "5-7 days". It ended up being closer to two weeks.

I don't recall ever seeing the inside of the facility for the first time. What I remember is this: a sassy black nurse overseeing my admission, taking my vitals and "Oooh Lawd!"-ing all over the place. She handed me a dixie cupful of pills, and the next thing I knew I was being jarred awake from the bed I had been sleeping in. I didn't know if it was day or night. "Don't get up", another nurse said. "I just need to take your blood pressure and give you..." she confirmed something on a clipboard and satisfied, handed me another dixie cupful of pills, "...this". I took them, noticed I was wearing bright orange hospital scrubs, and went back to sleep.

The first two and a half days were like this, apparently as much for me as for anybody. I woke up at one point during these two days and the guy next to me, looking terrified, asked me "is it 2:00 PM or 2:00 AM?". "I really have no idea", I'd said, before noticing that the plastic, e-z wash sandals I'd been issued were the exact same ones I'd been issued when I went to jail that one time. Something about the fact that the manufacturers tossed a clumsy bone to aesthetics, in the form of a monochromatic faux wicker pattern covering the foot's instep, struck me as a little generous, but mostly funny. Like if we really put on our thinking caps, we could mentally transport ourselves from a farty, clinical detox facility to brunch with Blanche on the Golden Girls' Sunshine State lanai. Annnnd... back to sleep.

When I finally started getting up to get up, instead of just getting up to get my pills every two hours, I began to notice that the facility wasn't so bad. Smelly, yes, and marked sonically by the moans, groans, and wet farts of my 40+ roommates in the throes of acute withdrawal. But, you know, it was painted a nice sage green. The food was okay. The people serving it were not surly. My survey showed that my temporary home consisted of three rooms: the farty dormitory room, the small cafeteria (less farty), and a tiny movie room (least farty of all).

We were not permitted outside, so these three rooms were our everything. There was a floor to ceiling bank of windows about 12 feet wide in the dormitory, but it was covered with a white coating so that nobody could see in or out. Though we could watch the movies provided by the facility, there was no TV, no radio, no newspapers, positively no internet, and extremely limited telephone communication via a wall mounted pay phone in the cafeteria. If this sounds about as disorienting as being captive on a far-flung, low-fi spacecraft that may not have the juice to make it safely back to its landing strip somewhere in rural, late 80s USSR, then we might share a hive mind because I was TOTALLY THINKING THE SAME THING.

Late one night something happened with the heating ducts and the fire alarm went off. We were all herded out into a back parking lot as the nighttime floor manager, I'm sure in total compliance with his state-mandated safety training, screamed behind us in a narrow hallway "RUN!!!!!!!!! GO GO GO GO GO!!!!!". The *right* way to do things must have held over from frequent grade school fire drills, or maybe it's because we were still all pretty high on our meds, because we all just kind of calmly lumbered outside.

But outside we were, in our threadbare scrubs on a 31 degree February evening. With chattering teeth and blueifying complexions, we noted every sensation to one another as though it were an uncommon revelation:

"It fuh-fuh-feels like it's going to s-s-s-snow-wuh"
"th th the air smell-smell-smells so c-c-c-clean"
"I d-d-didn't realize you could suh-suh-suh-see the conv-v-v-vention center from here"

It was marvelous, and really a bummer when we were called back inside.

This is not to say that the isolation was wholly unpleasant. On the contrary, it was a pleasure to take a break from everything. No emails to respond to, no calls to return, no bills to pay. There were no personal problems. I've never taken a vacation like this before. Even during an actual, recreational vacation, you've still got your cell phone. In New Orleans you're looking for the complimentary executive lounge in your hotel because someone just texted you about a hilarious youtube video, or you make sure your room in Vegas will have free wifi before booking the ticket in case someone tags you to an unflattering facebook photo. Rich people pay for this, to be away away. Though the personal care products were not, the isolation was nice for a change.

Sorry for not responding to your very awesome email

Bored: 22 days

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has received a great, lengthy email from a friend. It's such a good email that you re-read it three times when you could have been composing a reply, but you realize you only have 15 minutes or something and you feel like it deserves a really great, lengthy response (an aside: I am currently reading "A Confederacy of Dunces" for the first time and am now wondering if, instead, friends dread my lengthy responses. You'd tell me if I had spinach in my teeth or if I was starting to act like Ignatius J Reilly, right?).

Later, during the time in which you have still failed to respond, something significant happens in your life and you want to tell your friend, but you haven't responded to their great email yet. Somehow you feel the expiration date on that email has passed, but then you feel weird telling them your dog just barked "I love you" or whatever when you haven't responded to them yet. The result is that the person who most deserved to hear from you, your great email friend, is cheated out of both a reply to their email, and the fascinating news that you have had a stroke and now believe that your dog is communicating with you like a human. Maybe they could have sent for help before you lost the hearing in your right ear. Now your nickname is "Def-Jam" and you have only yourself to blame.

So much has happened in the last 21 days, and more keeps happening, and I keep waiting for the right time to sit down and get it all out there (the counselor says journaling is critical). But I'm feeling the same stresses associated with the email situation illustrated above and so I'm just going to take a chronological word dump and sort things out later. Here goes. Ahem.

On the morning of January 29th D, who had a massive hand in organizing the intervention, explained to my friends the following: "I know this sounds fucked up, but what we have to do is bring B in shitfaced drunk, so that they take him more seriously". That's what I heard he said, anyway. I wasn't there. I didn't know that my friends were meeting for clandestine coffee without me, or that my friend A, with whom I am currently living, had sneaked out of the house while I was in the shower. "Where art thou?", I texted, when I didn't see her in her bedroom. Figuring she must be in the basement without her phone, I cracked and slammed a PBR tallboy in preparation for my friends arriving. I'd been out drinking heavily with an old friend the night before and was starting to get extremely anxious and shaky now that I'd been out of bed for a few minutes, a common enough occurrence over the last two years or so. I followed that up with another when I failed to hear from her minutes later.

Then IT happened, and I've already gone on about that (below).

That night, after a very weird day, it was time to have the most uncomfortable drinks in the world. Except we didn't get to the liquor store in time, so E and B kindly procured 24 cans of Budweiser for me.

I said something like, "Well? Let's get this party started, I suppose", and cracked the first beer.

Nobody else was imbibing and everybody just looked at me, sad. Cheers!

B said, after I'd cracked my fourth or fifth, "You don't HAVE to drink ALL of those". I didn't want to tell them that there was no way I could get shitfaced off of 24 cans of beer, that it could not get me drunk in the time it takes for me to drink it. For me, beer works as a supplement to booze, if you want to continue drinking after the bars have closed. It also works to calm the shakes and anxiety that accompany the very first withdrawal symptoms the next morning. But when they came in the early hours Sunday, around six, five or six hours after they'd left me with my sea of brew, I was still irritatingly coherent after having stayed up the whole night chugging each of them down. Amanda revealed a secret cabinet of high-end liquor that she'd been hiding from me after I'd apologized for not being "drunker". A few shots of fancy tequila and... there we go. Mission accomplished.

What I wanted to have was a screen shot of the paperwork I filled out when I arrived at the detox center to post here. I didn't see or remember it until days later, when it fell out of my file as a nurse was reviewing it in front of me. In the approximate location of the field "ADDRESS: _______", I'd written A's address in magnificent, childlike block letters, about one inch in height, the house number beginning in the upper left quadrant of the page and terminating with "AVE" somewhere in the lower right hand quadrant.

I don't remember much from the following few days except being shaken awake to get a tray of food from the cafeteria or being shaken awake to take my next dose of Librium, which I consumed liberally for the next several days every two hours.

(Spoiler alert!), even though I am typing this at 3:30 in the morning (disruptions in sleep patterns are to be expected, they say!), I'm doing better than I have in a long, long time. The weeks in detox, my foray into freedom, and my first week settling into the new place are all all things I'll be posting about here shortly. In the meantime, though, I'm going to try and get some rest. Night!

Hey you guys! Outpatient rehab totally worked!

For one year. Er, almost one year. Outpatient rehab totally worked for about ten months, followed by two months of "normal" drinking, followed by this message that I sent to friends on the night of January 30, 2011:

Interventioned!

On the phone with my mom at midnight (she's a night-owl), I told her how much I didn't want to make the call, and how I had thought all day of ways to avoid it, or lies I could tell to explain it. But she always sees through everything, anyway, so I knew it would be useless to try to explain a mysterious and sudden three-month trip to, like, who doesn't have cell towers these days? Somalia?

I said to her "What I am about to tell you is incredibly difficult, and it's hard for me to form the words. But, have you noticed I've been drinking more lately?". I was humiliated to learn that she ABSOLUTELY had (but in a weird way, also kind of relieved). "Well, E and B were supposed to come to Portland today to have breakfast with me, but instead it was all of my best friends in two cars who came to have a chat with me about their concerns about my drinking, and..."

"AN INTERVENTION?!?!?!"

"Exactly an intervention."

She cried tears of joy, the first time I've heard my mom cry (unless from laughter) since her mom died twenty years ago. Reared in Appalachia with twelve siblings in a three-room shack in the middle of the coalfields, at 5'1'' she has an admirable sense of style and a full on NO BULLSHIT attitude about everything.

So that happened today. I saw everybody arrive and asked, "Uh, is this like an intervention?". A, my oldest friend who allowed me to move into her lovely home in my new city a month ago (fun fact: she used her Wheel of Fortune winnings as a down-payment) while I looked for work and relocated from my old city, confirmed that it was.

Having gone through outpatient rehabilitation in the past, we were able to skip the grit. Yes, I know I have a problem, blah blah. No storming out of the room and having a "chaser" come talk me back in.

I think I tend to associate with hyper-organized people who Get Shit Done because I am the opposite. There was the bulleted list of "focus items" (If he says no, focus hard on #3, if he says yes, skip to #5). There was a seating chart (disregarded). And the whole thing was so well put together. There were many, many tears from my friends who I fucked over, but we were able to joke in no time, as always.

I am terrified. I can't believe I let this happen to me. But I am so grateful to have the best friends in the world and I've been aware of my problems for a long time. Looks like no chillaxy outpatient, "I'll just come in after work" therapy for me (which, by the way, works for LOTS of people, it worked for me for the year I attended and the reason it didn't stick is because I wasn't even a little diligent about using their recommendations afterward). What's been proposed is three months in-patient rehab. It's probably the best option. But it's such a huge new commitment. I'm confused. We'll see.