CHAPTER ELEVEN
So, I packed my things that day and moved out of the house before dad returned from wherever he was. I know I would have killed him if I saw him.
That day, my life took a turn; I started to drink heavily. I was angry at God and angry at the world. I made a vow to do damage to both. Of course, I couldn’t harm God, but I could harm others and myself.
The first step I took after leaving the house was to go buy a small parcel of land with a used trailer on it. I paid around eight thousand for it.
The next thing I did was buy a fake I.D. so that I could get into bars. Every night after I got that, I made it a point to get completely trashed so that it would slow my reflexes and disrupt my balance.
You see, I was leveling the playing field.
When I was drunk enough, I’d go find the biggest guy in the bar and start a fight with him. Sometimes I’d win, sometimes I’d get beat. I didn’t really care if I lost. I just enjoyed the pain; inflicting it and actually feeling it.
Somehow, I thought that giving or receiving pain might actually bring me back to life, maybe grow me a heart and start caring again. I laugh now and think how ridiculous that sounds, but it somehow made sense at the time.
So, for the next three years, I partied hard. I got involved with drugs, and it wasn’t long before I ran out of money, and when the money ran out, I figured that it was time to go back to work.
Those days were really dark, just a blur of images, flashes of stuff I really don’t want to remember. I still drank heavily, but I slowed down a lot on the coke and completely stopped all the pills. On the practical side, I wasn’t making enough money to do all of them.
Around that time, I was messing around with a woman named Heather. She would use her body to make some money, then, go buy us cocaine. I would also break into change machines at laundry mats and car washes to supply us with the money for liquor. Needless to say, the relationship was pretty messed up. If we weren’t high or scoring cash, we were fighting. We were strung out most of the time, paranoid and looking for our next fix.
From there, it wasn’t long before things went from bad to worse, and then from worse to really screwed up.
I lost everything. I was disgusted with my life and everything else in the world. I lived in an abandoned building, with only a few pairs of clothes. Heather and I slept on an old mattress I stole from a camping store one day. I was so high, I don’t even remember how I stole it and got out of the store.
Anyway, I woke up one morning and I was cold. I moved around a little, trying to get closer to Heather to share our body heat, but it didn’t work. Then I smelled something strange. I sat and looked around as the haze of drug and alcohol induced slumber started to lift from my brain. I struggled to focus my eyes, then, reach out to Heather.
Her body is ice cold; she was dead.
Let me tell you, in the state I was in, I didn’t have any sympathy for her at all; about her family or any friends who may have missed her.
No, my first thought were that the dirty whore had scored enough coke to O.D., and that she had held out on me. We had been together for about a year and that’s all I thought of her.
I took everything out of the room we’d been living in, making sure to erase any and all signs that I’d even been there. The only thing I left was her body.
As I left, I looked back at her, lying there in her own waste, I felt nothing but disdain and contempt for her.
I also felt rage—I hated her. When I had time to wonder, I asked myself why I hated Heather so much. The answer came to me fairly easily.…it was because she was a mirror; a reminder of who I had become. Looking back, I wish I had called someone, anyone, and told them where to find her. She was once someone’s baby girl. Someone had loved her.
But I didn’t. I just left her there, like an old piece of furniture.
What had I become? I was so ashamed. God, you should have killed me then, but you didn’t. You had mercy on me.
I realized I needed help. My thoughts were muddled and my muscular physique had deteriorated until I was nothing but skin and bones. I was sick most of the time and I found myself wishing for the days prior to mom’s death. The days when I was doing well and was sober.
Not knowing what to do, I made my way to the local ‘Bargain-Save’ store. I was sick and hurting and I needed something. I didn’t want any coke, and as long as I wasn’t drinking I was ok.
I walked into the store and the clerks looked at me like I was glowing or something. I’m sure I looked a mess, but I didn’t care.
I made a beeline for the medicine aisle, where I grabbed four boxes of Bromo-Seltzer, stuffed them under my shirt, then, walked quickly to the restrooms at the back of the store.
When I got into the men’s room, I went to a stall, sat down on a toilet and tried to tear open a box. My hands were so sweaty and shaky, it took me about a few minutes to get it opened.
I finally got the packs out of the boxes and stuffed everything into my pants except two packs. I grabbed an empty plastic soda bottle from the trash can and poured the powder into the bottle and added water. I shook it up, then drank it and immediately puked it all back up, luckily into the toilet.
I did this two more times before I was able to keep anything down. Not much, but some.
I tore up the Bromo-Seltzer boxes and flushed them, then headed out. Luckily, no one stopped me.
From the store, I headed to a homeless shelter in town. It was in an old church that had seen better days. The stone walls were slowly crumbling and were dirty from decades of pollution coating them.
I walked inside the building and asked someone, an old woman, where I could find some clothes. She pointed down the hallway. I walked that way until I found an entry way with one of those half-doors; the kind with a shelf on it. A young guy was sitting behind the door, hands on the shelf, reading a book. I glanced at the title. Farenhite 451 by Kurt Vonnegut. Hmm, a very good book. A classic. I had read it for my Senior English class. Did a ten-page essay on it. That started to bring back memories of Joy Purdy but I shut them down with a shake of my head.
I knocked on the counter to get the guy’s attention. He looked up and smiled warmly at me, then asked how he could help me. I asked him if he could give me four or five changes of clothes, and a jacket. It was going to be getting pretty cold outside and I wanted to be prepared.
When the guy got the clothes, he brought me a thick mesh laundry bag and a plastic garbage bag without my even having to ask. Apparently, he was used to dealing with people who lived on the streets.
I went to the back of the building and someone else showed me where I could change. They also offered me a hot shower and a hot meal. I gratefully accepted both of them.
Unfortunately, my stomach rejected the meal, even though it was just a bowl of chicken soup. As soon as I got it, I drank it out of the bowl and promptly vomited it up, right there in the middle of the dining hall, while everyone was still eating.
As the upchucked soup dripped from my beard to the table, I looked around me at society’s destitute. They all had expressions of repulsion on their faces.
I wanted to care, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t concentrate. I was just trying to make it from one moment to the next.
A volunteer came over and cleaned up my mess from the table and floor. It didn’t really smell like vomit does, but I’m sure it still made it difficult for those who were eating to keep their food down.
The volunteer’s name was Albert. When he was through cleaning up my mess, he helped me to the bathroom where I washed my face and shaved. I changed my clothes again, then, came out of the bathroom, feeling a little bit better.
As I exited the bathroom, Albert was standing there waiting for me. He asked me if I liked sports drinks and peanut butter crackers. I said sure, hoping that if I tried some, I’d keep it down.
He told me to take a seat a seat then he left for about twenty minutes. When he came back, he had a large sack full of beverages and snacks. He then sat down and talked to me. He didn’t say much, just small talk. He was on his second marriage, with two grown kids. He worked in a factory, on the night shift. He volunteered at the shelter three days a week.
I just sat there, listening and sipping the lemon-lime drink; I wasn’t ready to try a cracker yet.
He didn’t talk very long. After a few minutes, he was done and he just sat there gazing down at the floor. Not waiting for me to respond, but far away, deep in thought.
He seemed too nice; too friendly, too eager to help. I figured he probably liked helping out at the shelter so that he would look good to his family and friends. Maybe trying to make himself feel good by helping those ‘less fortunate’ than himself and his crowd. Whatever the reasons were, I wasn’t going to feed into them and stroke his ego.
Finally, after a long period of silence, I angrily told him that I couldn’t pay him back for any of the stuff he’d given me. He told me he didn’t want anything in return, that, he was glad to help. I then said something smug-like I was sure the church would reimburse him. He gave me a friendly smile and said that he would be repaid sometime. I didn’t understand the full meaning of what he’d said at that time.
It had already been hours since I had thrown up in the dining room and I was ready for Albert to go away and leave me alone, so I asked him what he wanted from me. He looked at me with an expression of surprise and said he didn’t want anything.
Then, in a real serious and genuine tone, he asked me if there was anything he could do to help me.
I looked at him a moment. He looked sincere. I was a little bit shocked. I wanted to tell him to look at me and what did he think? Before I could formulate an answer for him, he said he could tell that I was in bad shape; strung out. Then he asked me where I was with all of it, if I was in need of a fix, or if I was willing to try giving it up.
I hung my head and told him that I was tired of my life and that I was ready for it to change or ready for it to end. I told him a little bit about my life, how hard it had been since losing mom, and how the drugs and alcohol made everything feel more distant, far away. I didn’t tell him anything about Heather. I don’t think that would have ended up well at all.
After I was through with my story, Albert said he understood. He told me that he had been where I was. That he had lost his third child to leukemia, and how that had devastated him. He told me how it had taken him several years to accept that his child was gone and to how he had learned to trust God, and not just with his own life, but with the lives of his family too.
I asked him how he came to that conclusion, how he could trust someone he couldn’t see, or hear, or anything.
He then told me about how, after his child’s death, he had turned to drugs and how one night, he’d been so high that he let someone shoot him up with heroine.
It turned out that the heroine, combined with the other drugs in his system, had caused him to overdose and end up in the emergency room at the hospital. When he had woken up and regained his senses, he lay there, in the thin hospital bed with the thin foam mattress and thin sheets, surrounded by monitors and the smell of death and disinfectant clogging his nostrils, he finally realized that something had to change. His first wife and his two kids had left, and he’d lost his home, his job, his car; even his friends had given up on him. He had absolutely nothing.
That’s when he cried out to God and asked Him for help. And then Albert said that God answered him! That He told him that everything would be alright.
A week later, Albert left the hospital. He had refused any treatments for drug withdrawal, instead going ‘cold-turkey’ and depending totally on God.
He didn’t have a single withdrawal symptom, and didn’t experience any kind of cravings whatsoever.
When he left the hospital, he walked three miles to the homeless shelter, the same shelter I was sitting in, and started to rebuild his life.
But there was a problem.
When he got to the shelter, he got some food, some clothes, a place to sleep, but there was no one there to talk to about his experience, his next step. The putting back together of his life and his walk with God.
That day, when he realized that there was still something missing, he made a promise to God, a promise that if God helped him, one day he would help others who were trying to find their way also.
One of those others turned out to be me.