Diary of a Druggie

September 11, 2010

It’s 11:00 PM. I struggled to catch a wink; the bed felt like sleeping on bricks and nails. I shouldn’t be in this hellhole. I should be checking the locks and kissing the top of Clara’s head. Instead, I’m sitting on a mattress that smells like industrial lemon cleaner, thirty minutes and a world away from the life I spent ten years dismantling.

The silence in the car this morning was loud enough to break glass. My wife – Beckie Washburn-Miller – kept both hands on the wheel at ten and two, her knuckles white as bone. I kept looking at her profile—the way her jaw was set, that hard line I’ve put there through a thousand broken promises.

Every time we hit a pothole on 26th Street, I wanted to tell her to turn around. I wanted to tell her I’d drive to Dr. Schacter’s office down the street and apologize for the number of times I’ve feigned pain to drain myself into an early grave.

But we’ve played that record until the grooves are worn flat.

When we pulled up to Miracles for Chicagoans, she didn't even turn off the engine. She just looked at the dashboard and said, "Marco, if you walk out those doors before they clear you, don't bother coming back to 49th Court. I’ll have the locks changed before you hit the city limits."

She didn't cry. That’s the part that scares me. When she was crying, she still had hope. Now, she just has a schedule and five kids who need a father, not a manipulative ghost who refused to bear the weight of five.

I keep a crumpled Polaroid of the kids tucked into the back of this diary. I took it on Easter of 1999, and staring at it reminded me of the times when I was mildly addicted, and I didn’t try to hurt them for imperfections.

The TV in the common room was on all day. Nine years since the towers went down. Everyone is talking about "Never Forget." It’s a strange day to start this. The world is mourning a tragedy that happened in an instant, while I’m mourning a life that collapsed in slow motion over a decade. Actually, a person here for alcohol addiction was a 9/11 survivor. During our first group therapy, he shared that the only reason he survived was that he was on the 25th floor. He also mentioned that he was a former cross-country runner in high school and was very active before abusing alcohol.

They call this place Miracles for Chicagoans (I instantly got an impression that this building was probably a sh*thouse based on the given name). Right now, it feels more like a prison. My skin feels like it’s being crawled on by a thousand ants. My head throbs in time with that damn lightbulb. They say the first seventy-two hours are the "Valley of the Shadow," and I believe them.

Every cell in my body is screaming for a pill. Just one. Just enough to level the floor and stop the room from tilting. But then I think of Beckie’s white knuckles on the steering wheel. I think of Maya’s pity.

I’m a man from Cicero with a house, a wife, and five beautiful reasons to live, yet I’ve spent years trying to disappear. I’m tired of disappearing. If this is where I have to be to find Marco again—the Marco who used to laugh, the Marco who could hold a job at the plant without missing Mondays, the Marco that Beckie tried to support—then I’ll stay.

Even if the silence is deafening. Even if the humming light never stops.

September 12, 2010

Today I didn’t feel like getting up. I wanted my damn pills, but the doctors took them away from me, and some random metrosexual opened my bottle of prescription strong opioids and dumped them in the trash in front of me! I tried to leap over it, but several other nurses on duty ended up restraining me and locking me inside my cell until I “learned to control my urges.”

After spending two hours in a terrifying quietness that felt foreign, I met with my psychiatrist, Dr. Ashkar. I didn’t want to talk, never wanted to, but Dr. Ashkar told me that she would talk to me about her rough past if I spoke. I reluctantly agreed and talked about my rough childhood.

I told her about my childhood like I was dumping a box out on the floor: getting bullied for being the weak link, running with gangs in Cicero and selling what I shouldn’t, becoming a father at eighteen and having nightly panic attacks that I’d turn into my old man, watching my father blow his head off in front of me, and losing Cornelia in a nightclub bathroom when she bled out after giving birth.

Cornelia was my anchor after Mom was sent to an asylum. She could’ve run off and lived like a normal teen, but instead she took care of us—until her stupid boyfriend showed up and ruined the only steady world I had.

She kept her promise and told me about her own past—growing up in Hyderabad, India, surviving Shaken Baby Syndrome as a one-month-old, and living with epilepsy and partial blindness ever since. That’s why she said she does this work: because she shouldn’t be alive, and she wants to make that mean something.

The woman next to me, Leigh, let out a primal sound, old and raw as the earth itself. It was so loud that nearby joggers and onlookers thought something inhuman was happening in the building, and an outpatient from down the block came in to ask if everything was okay.

And they also announced that tomorrow was going to be our first inspection, so if we had any illegal drugs or attempted to illegally make any, then we would be in solitary confinement for seventy-two hours with zero visits or contact with the outside world.

Nothing else happened for the rest of the day, but other than that, it was a normal, but slightly chaotic day.

(P.S. Jo Laurie was just caught trying to make homemade booze. I was hearing pleas and cries all day long, talking about her baby and that she can’t afford this.

September 13, 2010

I made it three days without opioids, the worst three days of my life—headaches, vomiting, dizziness, snapping at everyone. This morning, the fog finally lifted. I felt so light I yelled, “YEEHAW, BABY!” and woke up half the ward, but nobody complained. They knew what I’d been through.

In Dr. Ashkar’s office, she asked if my kids loved me. I said, “Of course, they love me,” but she just looked at me. I started to argue, then heard how stupid I sounded and admitted, “Okay, maybe they’re mostly afraid of me, but sometimes we do really connect.” I’m not sure she believed me.

And during lunch, Leigh was melting grape Jolly Ranchers in a styrofoam cup and pretending it was her beloved codeine, and nobody bothered to intervene! I mean, like, come on, like I don’t see anyone else recreating drugs or wine in here, so how come she can do this? I asked, and apparently it passes for “safe coping.”

Group therapy started today—six chairs in a circle and a psychologist named Diane who looked more like she belonged in boot camp. One by one, people began to share why they were here.

Nevada talked about abusing fentanyl patches for a desmoid tumor on her neck. By the time an MRI showed the tumor was gone, the addiction had taken its place.

Jackson grew up watching his father use crystal meth and followed him into it as a teen. He cleaned up long enough to get married and have a baby, but his wife left when their child was six months old. That’s when he came here, trying to hold on to the last people who hadn’t given up on him.

A man who called himself “No Biggie” said he grew up homeless, selling any drugs he could just to eat. Eventually, he got hooked on ecstasy. When the police finally caught him, the judge gave him a choice: rehab or jail. He chose here.

Then it was my turn.

I started with Cicero.

Cracked houses. Peeling paint. Doors that never shut. Streets that smelled like heat, piss, and rage.

My father's brain was like broken glass. All sharp edges. Fists and slurs, nothing in between. A man wired for explosion.

My mother—gone before I was old enough to remember her face. Just a blank spot where a story should be. A hole at the table.

Cornelia tried to plug it. Burned fingers, tired eyes, shoulders too small for the load. Signing school papers, making dinner out of nothing, keeping us from tearing each other apart. Tape over a bullet wound.

Then the nightclub bathroom.

Blood on tile. Blood on her legs. Baby on the floor. Cornelia, on her back under a buzzing light, bleeding out between a toilet and a trash can.

My anchor, ripped loose.

Then Darius.

Seventeen. Crackhead grin. Bones, smoke, and trouble.

He stopped buying food. He started buying Coke.

We stopped eating. We started watching him.

Baggies under bridges. Strangers in our living room. Glass pipes clinking like evil little bells. If we asked about Mom, he hit us. If we didn’t ask, he hit us anyway.

He knocked up some girl and vanished. No goodbye. No baby. Just gone.

My voice was getting faster. I could hear it–words tripping over each other, like they were trying to escape my mouth.

“I remember the gun,” I said.

Everything else fell away.

Just the gun.

Cold. Heavy. Too heavy. Perfect fit.

My hand. His hand. I don’t know anymore.

I remember the weight. The aim. The thought: If I do this, it stops. All of it may stop.

The shot.

Not a sound. A crack in the world. Ears screaming. Walls pulsing. Then—nothing.

Darius down. Or standing. Or both.

Then hands. So many hands.

Badges. Clipboards. Arms reaching past me, peeling my siblings off my shirt, my skin, my hair. Little fingers clawing, little voices shrieking my name like I was a hero and not a bomb.

I told them I’d find them. I didn’t.

I did what I knew.

I got a girl pregnant. And I ran. Just like Darius. Just like my old man. Same infection. New host.

By then, I sounded like I was having a stroke.

The circle blurred. Chairs leaned in. Faces smeared together. My heart slammed the inside of my ribs like it wanted out.

“I can’t—” I choked. My jaw shook. My tongue felt like metal.

F*CK.

I COULDN’T FINISH.

September 14, 2010

Everyone saw me fall apart in that group therapy session, and I actually had a lot of people come by my room to check on me that day.

Leigh brought me her homemade “codeine” and asked if I wanted company. The stuff tasted like bad medicine, but sitting there talking with her hurt a little less than being alone.

She started talking about her kids like she was picking at a scab she couldn’t stop touching.

Lizzy came first—the one CPS took. Then the three still with their dad, names spilling out in a rush: Jeramiah, Jebediah, Addie. She said she heard them at night when the lights went out, little voices asking when she’d come home and if she’d still smell like “Mama’s purple juice.”

Then she moved on to her grandmother. Houston summers. Box fans in the window. Fried chicken and lectures about boys who weren’t worth the trouble. Her grandma was the one who fed her when her parents forgot, who told her she wasn’t a mistake.

Now that same woman is in hospice—shrinking under a white sheet, lungs rattling while nurses use soft words like “comfortable” and “transitioning.” All Leigh hears is “dying without you here.”

Her voice shakes, but she doesn’t cry. I recognize that stubborn grip on your own pain.

Somewhere in the middle of her story, I realize I’m not thinking about pills. I’m just sitting on this lousy bed, listening to another broken parent list all the people she’s still losing.

She finally asks, “You got kids?” and I almost lie.

Instead, I give her the whole ugly roll call.

The first one—the son I bailed on when I was eighteen and terrified. A kid who grew up with my blood and none of my presence.

Then the four at home with Beckie: Maya, fifteen; Lauriene, twelve; Sydney and Whitney, nine; and Clara, four. I say their names out loud, one by one, and it feels like reading a list of people I’ve damaged in different ways.

“I keep saying I’d die for them,” I tell her, “but most days I just disappear from them instead.”

Leigh doesn’t try to fix it. She sits there, letting me hear how bad it sounds.

There’s a knock on the doorframe, then this lazy voice: “Group therapy, huh? Y’all havin’ the Sad Olympics in here without me?”

It’s No Biggie, leaning against the wall as he lives there, hands in his pockets, eyes doing that half-amused, half-tired scan of the room.

Leigh rolls her eyes but doesn’t leave. I don’t either.

He looks at me. “Five kids and a wife still waitin’ on you?” he says. “Man, you’re rich. You don’t even know it.”

I almost laugh in his face. Rich. Right.

He shrugs, like he heard me think it. “You got people who still got your name in their mouth. Still mad at you. Still hopin’ you come home different. That’s fortune, Cicero. That’s more than some of us ever had.”

Leigh stares at the floor. I stare at the ceiling. None of us says anything for a while.

Eventually, they head back to the common room, and I’m alone again with the hum of the light and the sour taste of fake codeine on my tongue.

I lie back on the brick mattress and try to picture all five of my kids’ faces at once. I can’t. They keep slipping, overlapping, blurring at the edges.

Still, for the first time since I got here, the idea that I might be “fortunate” doesn’t feel like a joke. It feels like a debt.

I turn off the light and let the darkness buzz in my ears, and somewhere between Leigh’s kids, my kids, and No Biggie’s voice calling me rich, I finally drift off.

September 15, 2010

I woke up today and didn’t feel like myself. I felt a decrease in cravings (not by much), and I wasn’t irritable or grumpy all the time. I felt…

New

Alive

Reincarnated

Fresh

I went down to the breakfast hall, and I didn’t throw up. I also managed to make new friends today, with a fisherman addicted to tobacco and a farmer addicted to marijuana. Their names were coincidentally Ralph. Fisherman Ralph grew up in Kankakee, Illinois, and loved fishing so much that it was a natural high for him. Farmer Ralph lived in rural Kansas doing farmwork until he became addicted to marijuana and needed rehab, so his doctor referred him to this center since he had family here, and he absolutely resented them.

I asked him why, and he said that they waited till he was an embarrassment, and then his daughter, albeit reluctantly, let him in and was convinced he was the oldest person in rehab.

Leigh tried to reassure him that there had been older people, but Farmer Ralph was convinced that he was the oldest.

Today was our second group therapy session.

Diane sits in the middle this time and speaks, “Talk about the first time realizing that you used hurt on someone you love.”

Leigh started first. She started calmly, trying to talk calmly about the day CPS took Lizzy, and then the dam broke. She talked about missing her other four and seeing her grandma lucid for the last time.

I couldn’t take it anymore and gave her a tight hug; she didn’t try to refuse and hugged me tighter.

Diane would thank me at the end of group therapy and encouraged me to open my heart to more people.

But during lunch, I felt an overwhelming guilt wash over me, and we saw that an unfamiliar patient came back after relapsing in 24 hours, so I quietly excused myself and sobbed in my room.

Lord, why did I do this?

Why did my sister have to die?

Why didn’t I stay with my grandma?

Why are my children scared of me?

Why did I have to wreck such a good marriage?

Should I just end it, and my life will be yours, God?

…

I guess being fresh does come with a cost.

September 16, 2010

Dr. Ashkar and Diane sat me down to break the news to me.

“You’re officially an outpatient, Marco.” Dr. Ashkar said, “You get to go home.”

My expression instantly lit up with joy, and I shook both their hands before walking out and seeing everyone from their rooms saluting me as I walked to my room and fro.

And as I walked out and everyone saluted me on my way out, I began to cry, and I waved at everyone and said, “Take good care of yourselves in this facility, and Leigh,” She looks up at me, “I hope you see your granny and your kids.” and left.

As I waited outside with everything, I called up my pal Lenny.

“Hey, Marc, ready to stay at my place?”

“Yeah, but before going to your place, can I visit Cornelia’s grave?”

The line became silent for thirty seconds before…

“Of course, man, rest in peace, by the way.”