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Off to the Races

Mike Brennan

    The tremors had increased to a dangerous degree. It had never been this horrifying. Even a triple dose of Xanax couldn’t take away the shakes and the insufferably internal sense of impending doom away. I packed a suitcase, while my muscles twitched through the process, counting out at least a week’s worth of clothing, all the while somehow knowing that I’d forget something. My stomach somersaulted for the second time this morning. I couldn’t reach the toilet but made it to the sink. Yellow bile and a symphony of dry heaves poured out of me into the cracked porcelain, as I washed it all down, pushing the larger chunks through the drain with my nicotine stained fingers.
    I caught myself in the mirror. My skin was ravaged and scratched. I brushed my teeth and surveyed the damaged two-bedroom apartment. Empty bottles and cans, stolen and borrowed books, random and loose papers, full and empty prescription bottles, and dead bugs and cigarette butts littered both the linoleum and the thrift store carpeting. My bed, sofa, and skin were all a graffiti collage of uninspired Jackson Pollock styled scars and burns.
    Three days before, I had officially received my MFA from the University of Upper Michigan and turned in the final grades for the Freshman College Composition class I had been teaching this past semester. I was now kicked out of academia on my ass, unemployed and on the verge of a complete mental and physical breakdown. I gave in and began the steps to check myself into the Veteran’s rehabilitation center in Milwaukee, but first I had to detox in Stony Ridge, Michigan without dying in the process.
    I downed my last remaining shots of bottom shelf gin seconds before the Disabled American Veteran’s(DAV) van arrived to whisk me away to the hospital. It was the same two hour ride I had taken before but this time I had to vomit a couple times by the side of the road although nothing came out except noxious gusts of air.
    Once I arrived I was immediately taken to the ER. IV’s were attached, blood was drawn, and when I was finally semi-hydrated. I was shot up with some Ativan, which did help some, but the staff obviously underestimated my tolerance following my several years long crash course of benzodiazepines chewed up and washed down with copious quantities of booze. My hands still shook but not nearly as violently. An hour later I was given two Librium and a large multi-vitamin, before my gurney was pushed into an elevator to take me up to the Detox Wing.
    Veterans from over sixty years worth of American conflicts surrounded me in varying states of disarray, all with purple hearts and with decorations of scars and small units of wheelchair bound and armless amputees caught in this trap between life and death. Ball caps bearing the slogans World War II, Korea, and Vietnam Veteran, the titles of various Naval vessels, and Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom told the true story cut out of most high school history books. I just had a large gash on my forehead from when I blacked out and fell face-first into my bookshelf after my last day of class.
    When the Librium began to finally smooth out my shakes, I suddenly realized that it was both a Friday and two days before my 30^th birthday. Fuck it, I thought, I really won’t die before I’m 30. A lot of people surely had bet I would.
    My mind kept wrapping itself around concepts such as cirrhosis, jaundice, alcoholic hepatitis, and internal bleeding. My stomach and liver definitely no longer wanted to be friends with me. Even my brain had begun to seem as if it had contracted an untreatable disease. I had heard the term Wet Brain before, and mine seemed like it was soaking in formaldehyde, and possibly about to be displayed in some carnival exhibit; I assumed right next to the Siamese baby fetuses in crudely aged mason jars.
    A crew-cut male nurse wheeled me into my room of recovery and hooked me up to more machines. He asked me what was wrong in so many words.
    I laughed a little and replied, “I’m totally burnt out from overwork and have been boozing way too much for too long.”
    “Well Will, You are in good hands. My names James, and if you need anything just push the assistance button and I’ll take care of it. What is your pain level right now between 1 and 10?”
    “8”
    “I’ll be back in a few minutes with some Ativan and Hydrocodone? I’ll also get some gauze and antibiotic gel for that head wound of yours. First let me take your vitals.”
    He placed a clamp on my finger, ran a device across my forehead that took my temperature, and allowed the standard sleeve to squeeze the pulse out of my right arm.
    “All right, I’ll be back in a flash.”
    I laid back and gave in to the shakes that rolled from my toes to forehead like miniature seismic waves. I closed my eyes and thought of everywhere I could be but here. When he returned with the medication cart, he scanned my wrist band, punched in some numbers, and handed me a cup of water with my Ativan and Vicodin tablets.
    I chewed the pills up in a sly manner that wouldn’t attract his attention, and swallowed the goo down greedily with a quick gulp of water followed by some room-temperature coffee to get rid of the aftertaste.
    “Would you like some ice cream, since it is pretty obvious you haven’t been eating anything”
    “Sure, vanilla, I guess I might be able to hold that down.”
    “You bet,” he said, while I started to feel the meds take effect, “I’ll be right back.”
    Was this the bottom that so many alcoholics often spoke of? I felt I had hit it so many times already but for whatever unknown reason, I just had to keep digging further down.
    James gave me an institutional grade cup of vanilla ice cream and by the time I had it down into my raw tender stomach, the meds sent me into a sleep completely void of dreams.
    When I awoke, I was still slightly buzzed from the meds and desperately needed a cigarette. I pressed the buzzer for James’ assistance, and a minute later he pulled open the curtain concealing my bed.
    “You think you could wheel me out for a cigarette man,” I asked him, figuring he wouldn’t mind since he was also a Veteran.
    “I can’t Will, but I can give you a nicotine patch and gum.”
    “I guess that will have to do,” I frowned, twiddling my thumbs anxiously. He soon slapped on the patch, I popped in some Nicorette gum, and turned on the TV. I gradually passed out again, watching a 9/11 conspiracy program on the History Channel. My last conscious thought was that I couldn’t believe it had already been over ten years since September 11^th and three years since I had been medically discharged out of the Navy during my second enlistment. A lot had changed. It seemed that now I had to as well.
    Two days later, I was provided a doggy bag full of prescription drugs and driven to Milwaukee. Once in the van, I opened the bag of medication, fished out the bottle of 85 Ativan tablets I was given, shook out a small handful, and chewed them up like breath mints. I figured that it would be better for both myself and the staff dealing with me that I go in with a bit of a buzz on rather than completely sick and panic stricken.
    By the time I entered the building, I was feeling a bit better than bad, and walked into what was called the Domiciliary 123. There were a few Vets around my age but the average seemed to be in the late fifties/early sixties. Judging from the caps, t-shirts, and ID card holders wrapped around their necks, most of the patients had been in the Army, followed by a not very close second place of Marines, more than a handful of Sailors, and maybe one or two former Air Force personnel. Military ranks I am sure were of all levels but the vast majority seemed to have been enlisted. I guessed officers didn’t do enough dirt to develop mental illness and substance abuse problems.
    A kindly female doctor, who I had talked to on the phone a few times to make reservations for my bed, led me into her office. I was fairly drunk every time I had talked to her, but I never thought she would be this cute and intellectual looking. I answered all her standard questions coherently, tried not to sound too sarcastic, and when she asked me about my academic background, she smiled and said, “Oh I think you are going to be trouble around here.” I just replied with a dumbfounded grin, as she shook her head of shoulder length brown hair. I took in all of her figure and would later call her Nurse Lavender, due to her love of aromatherapy.
    She asked me about my medications I brought with me and I made a mental debate about whether I should tell her about the bottle of Ativan in my pocket, or attempt to smuggle them in. I quickly caved in, not wanting any trouble and hoping that honesty was truly one of the first steps towards recovery and admitted to having them and taking a few more than recommended on the ride over to avoid a possible seizure or anxiety attack.
    “Well you’re not checked in yet so that’s not an issue and we will keep you on the same medication until you are evaluated by a psychiatrist and have a full physical done by a doctor.”
    This information immediately made me more at ease with the whole terrifying and ultimately humiliating situation. I had never been totally sober asides from a few spurts here and there, and of course while on deployments. Ever since I was 13, drugs and especially alcohol had always been my pretty consistent companions throughout the years. Now it felt as if my spouse of sixteen years had died in a horrific head-on collision. I could only watch on in horror as she bled out through her neck. I now belonged to the custody of the VA, but I had to do this if I was to live.
    I was led to my room by an orderly, where I would be spending the next 90 days. My bedding was already made and my roommate was lying in his right next to mine and reading a Narcotics Anonymous text, which I recalled rolling joints and doing lines of coke on the cover of when I was a teenager.
    “I’m Will,” I told him, while starting to unpack my suitcase and place items in the storage locker across from my bed. I couldn’t believe the similarities between this room and so many of the barracks rooms I had stayed in while in the service.
    “I’m Harry,” the skinny black man with crooked crocodile teeth and gray hair told me. He kind of looked like Morgan Freeman if he was a dope fiend and had lived on the street for a few decades.
    “Good to meet you Harry, what are you in for?”
    “Crack, I’ve been smoking the shit since 1985.”
    Damn, I thought, I was only two years old when he started smoking rock.
    “I’m here for booze bro. The bottle finally broke me down. What service were you in?”
    “The Navy. You?”
    “Same man. What was your rate?”
    “I was a cook. That was pretty much all they let niggas do back then,” Harry replied with a toothy chuckle uniquely his grizzled own.
    “Yeah I know man, there was a race riot on my boat in 72’. The USS Nixon.”
    “Oh yeah man, I knew about that shit. I got out in 74’.”
    “Damn you’re a Nam Vet huh?”
    “Yes sir,” he chuckled. “First time I tried drugs and haven’t stopped much since. I’ve been in and out of jail and rehabs so much I can’t even count, but I know this time the Lord be looking out for me. I be 60 next week son and can’t be doing this shit no more. How old are you brotha?”
    “30 today,” I mumbled, glumly thinking where I would be at sixty, or where else I could be today.
    “Another Gemini huh, right on. You know we’re all fucked up, good and evil twins, your either one or the other any given day you dig?”
    I nodded in agreement, and thought it actually made quite a bit of sense.
    “It’s all good though, you see here Will, all you need is faith in God and a good piece of pussy here and there and you’ll be all right.”
    I figured out that he was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic with three primary obsessions: recovery through devout Christianity, the link he perceived between crack cocaine and Satan, and a hunger for women that often crossed the fine line between a voracious sexual appetite and full blown nymphomania. He was a pervert to a T. I’d soon witness him hit on damn near every female that crossed his path, and while I usually found his antics hilarious, it often pissed off other patients of both genders and especially the staff. He often randomly sang old R&B and Gospel songs at top volume, and had some very animated mood swings on an almost hourly basis. Several patients would look at me in wide-eyed sympathy and say, “Damn that’s your roommate. That motherfucker would drive me crazy.” I would just shrug and laugh, since I thought the old man was hysterical; although the various sedatives I was taking four times a day probably would have made Hannibal Lector amusing to pal around with in this place.
    After I unpacked, I headed out to smoke and quickly found myself lost in the large brown rectangle of a building, every side looking the same, and with the only knowledge being that the smoke shack and zone was outside the cafeteria. Feeling like a lobotomized zombie, I eventually found the exit doors and had to sign a sheet with the time next to my room number to go outside and was told how I had to be back in before 11, even though the protocol was that I was restricted to the hospital grounds for the first two weeks of my stay. There wasn’t anywhere I wanted to go anyway.
     I was struck by the surreal scene outside. I seemed to have found myself in a strange mishmash of a drug rehab, mental ward, minimum security prison, homeless shelter, and makeshift military base. There were three different treatment programs: PTSD, General Mental Health, and SAR or Substance Abuse Rehabilitation, which was the largest population, and the wing we lived on was D, or a as I informed a letter communally designating us as drunks and druggies.
    Two men in wheelchairs kept fighting with each other, while the refrain of “Anyone got a Newport?” bellowing around them.
    “Sorry man, I only got Camels.”
    “Beggars can’t be choosers. You mind.”
    I offered up my crumpled cigarette pack.
    “Thanks brotha,” the old man said, while removing one with trembling hands.
    I encountered what was going to be the major topic of conversation out in the smoke shack, which was VA Disability Claims and how to increase your rating to get a higher monthly check. It was obvious some people desperately needed it but some of the Vets were just trying to scam the system to support their drug habits. I also was secondarily informed that when the checks came in a large percentage of patients would vanish since the VA guaranteed three square meals a day and a plastic mattress until they got paid. It was the third of the month so a few random names and the stories of their disappearances were passed around like the cigarettes they were smoking.
    There were all kinds of characters mulling around, some talking to themselves, others nodding out into medicated oblivion. I began chatting with a couple of Vets that seemed to be around my age.
    “Hey what’s up man, I am Will O’Bannon,” I introduced myself.
    “I’m Jack and this is Mike.” They both seemed rather fit and mentally together, so I figured they probably were ex-combat Marines or soldiers from Iraqi Freedom or Enduring Freedom.
    “What are you guys in for?”
    “Heroin and PTSD. How about you?”
    “Booze, though it seems like they just want to keep feeding me pills like peanuts instead.”
    “You know it. They got us on Methadone and just try to keep upping the dose so we don’t go out and use. Of course, I tell them no but the clinic makes a shit-ton of money from the VA,” Mike, the taller one of the duo told me. “It’s worse than H and the last thing I want to do is get totally strung out on that shit. As long as I’m not going through withdrawal, I’m cool. But I know one motherfucker named Jorge who is on 340 milligrams a day. The whole thing is about money. It’s like a legal dope game.”
    “Damn, I’ve got a tolerance for drugs but that shit would kill me.”
    “It’s actually pretty good here if you truly work the program. I mean, if you honestly want to get clean this is the best place to start, but there are a lot of really fucked up people here, and some of them are just here to get off the streets. There are a ton of whacked out bums, schizos, and brain dead crack heads straight out of the pen.”
     “Yeah,” I replied. “That’s pretty obvious. So what is there to do around here?”
    “It’s the weekend so you’re not going to have to do anything until Monday. Who’s you case manager?”
    “I’m pretty sure it’s some guy named Noah.”
    “That’s cool. He’s ours too and he’s pretty good but really out there man. I mean he is one strange dude. On Monday, you will start doing group therapy with us and Noah, go to coping skills and anger management classes, have occupational therapy which is pretty much arts and crafts hour, and then go to an AA or NA meeting at night. They do keep you busy around here and then you will have homework on top of it all.”
    “Great. I just graduated from school, I’m not really in the whole homework mindset,” I laughed while puffing on my Camel.
    “You just graduated?”
    “Yeah, I just got an MFA.”
    “No shit. You just got a Master’s degree? What, on the GI Bill?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Damn, you must be a genius,” Mike laughed, “Were you an officer?”
    “Nah. Just an E-4. ”
    “What service were you in?”
    “The Navy.”
    “For real? A fucking squid. So you never saw real combat or shit.”
    “Nah, but I am considered an Operation Iraqi Freedom Vet and worked on the Flight Deck of an aircraft carrier, which got pretty hairy at times but it definitely wasn’t combat but is considered the second most dangerous job in the world, and for whatever reason I’m still considered a combat Vet on paper, but fuck it, it doesn’t matter to me.”
    “Sure man. I hear you. You want to go get in line to eat?” Jack asked, putting out his smoke in a coffee can, “It’s about lunch time.”
    We entered the cafeteria, and stood in the short line that was rapidly forming full of more men in t-shirts and ball caps displaying the usual names of armed forces and conflicts. I was quickly becoming accustomed to the sight of amputees and other guys confined to wheelchairs, and quickly learned how to interact with them without seeming patronizingly sympathetic. I was starting to feel somewhat normal, if not slightly intoxicated, by my medications and definitely still a bit out of place since, while I did serve for two stints in a time of war; I mainly drank and fucked foreign whores when I wasn’t on duty which led to my medical discharge after a pretty heavy alcoholic incident in Guam, although I still retained full benefits even though that incident also happened to accidently collide with an F18 Hornet the following morning.
    My experiences paled in comparison to spending long months shooting Hajjis and dodging IEDs in the desert. Planes were much more my style than guns anyway. That’s why I joined the Navy, along with the GI Bill and all the promised travel opportunities I took full advantage of. There was also an obvious tension between Vietnam Vets and Post 9/11 Vets considering the reception we received and the lack of respect they got from their ever so liberated hippie peers.
    As I waited in line with Jack and Mike, I was soon accosted by a tall orderly, who asked “Where’s your badge?”
    “What badge?” I asked, before noticing that Mike and Jack wore ID cards around their necks.
    “He just got here today,” Mike told, “He’ll get his on Monday.”
    The man left and Mike explained, “See this is your Veteran ID badge, and on the back is a list of the foods you can’t or won’t eat that you’ll go over with the dietician. Try to put down anything that you can think of because they will make you eat whatever shit their serving.”
    Jack laughed, “I just made my own in the computer lab.”
    We entered the kitchen, where they were serving meat loaf which was fine by me. The staff was led by a large black woman with a goatee that she must have been aware of but did nothing about. One of her underlings plopped the helping onto my plate followed by a side of fried potatoes, and we each filled up cups of coffee and sat down at a table to eat.
     I had just finished my meal in the hurried guarded manner that only the military or a prison sentence can instill in a person, when a commotion occurred across the cafeteria, which must have seated around 200 people. A man on crutches but with both legs intact suddenly swiped off his tray from the table spilling food all over the floor and started screaming unintelligibly, as two orderlies including the one who chose to confront me ran over to him. His back was turned to me as they led him away, and I watched the emblematic back of his U.S Marine Corps leather jacket disappear around the corner while two white coats held firmly onto both of his arms at the elbows as he screeched off.
    “Fuck,” was all I could say, as Jack mindless slopped a dinner roll in some gravy.
    “It happens all the time here, Man. Are you ready to go take your afternoon meds?”
    “Yeah,” I told him, as we dumped the refuse off our trays into two large barrels, placed our trays into a winding washing machine, and headed over to the nurse’s station where I appreciatively popped my pills, while they swallowed down their methadone and took some other pills and went out to chain-smoke and observe my new surroundings more attentively for a few more hours until dinner was served.
    Most patients were silent and others discussed what meds they were on. A few looked like they were lost in a pharmaceutical oblivion they would never find their way out of. I was sure that if I was a Tunnel Rat in Nam, I would need to be sedated for the rest of my life, and it should be America’s duty to do the deed. Once the meds took hold, all the war stories began. How you could buy beer in the Philippines with severed Vietcong ears, what wounds everyone had, and the details of various firefights that collided into one surreal nightmare of several oral narratives. The after effects of Agent Orange were apparent and discussed everywhere both inside and out of the building. There were at least two Nam Vets who must have been accidently napalmed, which I deduced by their extensive skin grafts over their severe burn scars. There were also bunch of guys in their mid twenties, obviously younger than me, who returned from Afghanistan and now had to kick their burgeoning heroin habits; some by choice others by familial force. My alcoholism seemed like nothing compared to all these obviously broken purple hearts.
    I was easily institutionalized. I’d long known that about myself. The military, the university, the hospital, the bottle, the girlfriends; I always fell into routines with little effort. It was the fear of not having a routine that really relentlessly gnawed at me. I went to groups and classes geared at a 5^th grade educational level, popped my pills, and began working on a ceramic ashtray in our vocational skills class, which was really arts and crafts, that I figured I would give my loving chain-smoking Grandma. The sedatives made my hands so calm that I could paint the tiny thin lines of the ashtray that had eluded all my canvases for longer than I could remember.
    Besides Jack and Mike, my group included two other Wills, who both happened to be middle aged black dudes. They would stand beside me on each side and be like “Check out how us Wills is an Oreo.” Neither of them were combat Vets but both were chronic alcoholics, and had each been through the system, even this exact program, a couple times prior. They had nowhere to go and were just rolling through all this again, much like I was, and hoping the best would come out of their live’s SNAFUs. I instinctively knew all this wouldn’t get me sober. I enjoyed now being relatively clear headed and not vomiting up my pancreas in the morning, but I still felt entitled to beer, which I swore to myself was all I would ever drink again, but I had to avoid the harder shit being handed around the hospital; namely heroin.
    It soon became fairly obvious that Mike wasn’t as dedicated to kicking his habit as he let on when I first met him. He flunked one of our random piss quizzes for opiates and cocaine, a speedball he shot up in the hospital parking lot with one of his dealers, and developed a routine of disappearing several times a day. Staff would be unable to find him for hours, and he still wasn’t kicked out. He also went to the Brewers Stadium for drinks at night, since we weren’t breathalyzed, but would come back obviously buzzed on their ballpark vendor’s beer. Somehow he just kept getting away with doing as he pleased. One day we were standing alone in the corner in the main yard, and he pulled a packet out of his pocket.
    “Want some of this man?” he asked, showing me the small cellophane wrapped ball of brown powder.
    “Nah man. Shit we are in rehab.” I was tempted though. It would feel great to just get loaded out of my mind.
    “Come on, fuck it, it’s a nice day, let’s go get high?”
    “No bro. I’ll catch you later.”
    That night, Mike and Jack were shooting up in their room since it was Jack’s last day and he didn’t have to worry about a piss test. Jack OD’d and Mike brought him back around with a can of NARCAN that he bought at the methadone clinic the day before. Jack bounced out as early as possible the next morning, since he was on the drug testing list, and Mike told me what happened in confidence immediately after. I knew I was by hospital rules supposed to say something to the staff, but I ignored it. I figured the truth would come out soon enough anyways and it did. I still don’t know if the staff knew all I knew about what was going on behind their locked doors.
    Two hours later, Mike was tossing his stuff around his room and screaming at the orderlies about how he actually saved Jack’s life, before storming out with two garbage bags of clothing. He had nowhere to go. His parents had kicked him out, he had no money, and I soon learned he was crashing in the hospital’s large park at night, while hustling for his habit on the streets of Milwaukee during the day. I saw him a few times, but knew enough to stay away, although part of me wanted to score some dope for when I was released, but there were room searches and I wasn’t about to risk anything. I also thought it was wrong to bring all that shit in here, when so many people were sick and trying to kick, and Mike was undoubtedly hurting hard inside, but was obviously still too in love with his habit to stop for any apparent reason.
    Mike was just the closest buddy to me, but patients were relapsing on a constant basis and forced to admit it in front of all us peers. They didn’t kick you out immediately for using or drinking, so several people still did, if they didn’t just take off come payday. Most people were serious about getting well. I straddled the fence and figured I would be drinking again despite any miraculous treatment. I just didn’t want to die doing it, and because I was at least determined to give this my best shot, I started hanging out with the older Vets who were serious about why they were in here. Soon there were a few of us who always wound up eating and smoking together in between our days full of classes, or the therapy sessions where I focused on if I was a walking horror show for women, and trying to determine what exactly had happened to my life through the haze of the past year.
     There was Scott, who was an Army Vet in his mid-forties who was another of the rare strictly boozers. He had been on a self-destructive epic bender like mine, where he had to drink to survive and avoid seizures, and detoxed five times before finally being admitted to the Dom. He fell from middle-class wealth to homelessness as the bottles piled up over a period of only a few months as he drank and watched movies in a permanent haze.
     It was his second stay here though, and he had in fact been a patient in the Domiciliary ten years before for a freebase coke habit, and met his ex-wife here who was an RN at the time, and left against doctor’s advice, got married, and was sober for several years before he started his liter of vodka a day downward spiral. He was now trying to get into one of the programs where he worked on the VA grounds while he lived here indefinitely, but had to complete the rehab section first and stay sober for at least three months. Almost all the patients had been here at least once before.
    One of the Vietnam Vets I came quite close to, although he was not being treated for substance abuse, was Dr. Bob, the most educated patient besides myself, who was a psych professor at Marquette University, and had placed himself in here under the General Health section because his wife of twenty something years died on my birthday, and he needed some rest and to also deal with some traumatic issues related to his time in Nam. I never asked him about it, but knew his PTSD was horrific and very longstanding. We generally bonded, because we both were educators, and he always called me “professor,” and I called him “doc,” and laughed a bit that we were more educated than the majority of the staff but were on the wrong side of the treatment plan. I knew he would be all right, he really just needed an escape from life for awhile and was not in any kind of danger to himself or others, like many of the other patients were. He also always went out of his way to help everyone, especially the younger combat Vets who looked up to him as a mentor. I did as well, as he plotted my academic future for me, which I really hoped it was possible for me now to get back to.
    Another pal was a lighter skinned black dude named Dominick from Chicago, who was an ex-Marine in his early fifties who served in Okinawa in the 80’s, had done a couple stretches in prison for various non-violent crimes, and was here to kick a strong but strictly nasal heroin habit. I also gave him a tremendous amount of respect considering he was also trying to quit smoking cigarettes at the same time. I found it unimaginably sadistic to quit both substances simultaneously, and he struggled tremendously with his withdrawal symptoms from both. I just really dug his form of religion which denies that you speak of God, a major staple of meetings, which he undoubtedly learned in prison. He always walked out during the prayers which I admired.
    These guys, along with the two other Wills, formed our therapy group, which with the exception of Dr. Bob all had to go to the same classes and AA meetings together. As I admitted my powerlessness over alcohol, and painted my therapeutic ashtray for an hour a day right as my afternoon Klonopin and Ativan tablets really started to kick in; new guys admitted themselves in droves. The almost unbearable humidity of the summer heat waves, now starting to sizzle up the Midwest, may have had something to do with the hordes of reinforcements replacing all the troops that had fled as my time there wound down like an antique clock.
    Soon I was technically 30 days sober, then 45, and was heading towards 60 and I really didn’t feel cured of anything but slightly fitter, happier and more comfortable rather than a nervous twitching mess. Most of the self-help slogans said in all my groups I’d heard before, or knew plenty about, and although I got along with almost all of the patients very well, I knew I would soon find myself with a beer in my hand again despite any inner will or higher power. I figured it would happen almost sub-consciously, but because I was feeling better and more physically and mentally together, I tried to put relapse plots out of my mind, which was an almost impossibility with my anxiety issues.
    I also couldn’t find my higher power, spoken of so often in AA meetings, no matter how hard I looked under my mattress or in my metal closet locker drawers. My smart ass response was that it must be my shoes, because they were the only things I knew for sure had a soul. Asides from my sarcasm, I did put effort into everything else I had to undergo and revealed my feelings, wrote out my thoughts, and did try to picture a sober existence, but it always seemed like a grim apparition I wished for but was sure I couldn’t wholeheartedly grasp.
    I applied online from the hospital computer lab for a teaching position at a small community college in Stony Ridge near the Michigan VA I had just detoxed in. It was a major step down from UMU, but other than this small application towards my future I really couldn’t think of anything else to do with or change in my life, but was starting to really itch to get back to my own apartment. No one had any advice with what to do with my life other than to stay sober and I was tired of that obvious answer. My anxiety over my post-college purgatory was going to kill me quicker than the alcohol I kept thinking and fretting about. My biggest problem now was what to do next with my miserably lost life of such potential I was told enough I had but just couldn’t believe.
    I still had some money in the bank, and I could always file for unemployment, so I asked our chief counselor Noah if I could go home earlier than my allotted 90 days. The strange and mostly useless counselor who looked and talked like Doc Brown from Back to the Future agreed and my release date was set. I figured someone else would need my bed much more desperately and that this was a selfless act on my part since the Vet to replace me was likely homeless and broke, so I started counting down the days until my discharge, while keeping my head down and sticking to the program.
    Dominick had a car so we started checking out some local AA and NA meetings, which were nicknamed “gunslinger” meetings because of their disordered noisy zealousness. I was always the only white guy, and would pick up on the inquisitive looks with just a little nervousness, as the brothers and sisters shouted out about struggling to stay off crack, their higher powers interventions, and not finding or hating or being thankful for their jobs. It was like an outlandish thunderous church gone crazy. The meetings were held in clubhouses that had No Weapons signs on all the doors. I felt like Eminem in 8 Mile, surprised at the similarities between Milwaukee and Detroit, as the addicts shouted out of turn, praised and tore into each other; and I just immensely enjoyed these so much more than the primarily Caucasian run book club/prayer circles that were all of the other ones I’d attended so far.
    Two days before I was going to hop on the bus back to Michigan, we had another heroin OD in the Domiciliary, but this time it was a fatal fix. I didn’t know Jorge well, but I had talked to him a few times out in the smoking shack, and he seemed nice enough if not terminally fucked up by all the methadone he was taking in continuously increased doses. He was a long-term resident, and an Iraq War Army Vet, and had been living here for over a year. This night he shot some dope on top of all his methadone and the staff found him the wrong shade of blue in his room. He was living straight down the hall from me, and I looked on as the paramedics tried to revive him before taking him out of the building on a stretcher with the cloth of death covering his face.
    It was shocking, and further fueled my focus on leaving. People dying and nearly dying around me from overdoses only added as a major incentive to get out of this hospital immediately. I was definitely an alcoholic but the issues I encountered were new to me. I wasn’t up for the transition from recent Masters Degree recipient, college educator and struggling artist to being surrounded by crack, smack, vivid nightmare flashbacks, and the scariest side-effects of manic depression and schizophrenia.
    The next day I talked a fellow patient out of slashing his wrists with a razor blade in front of his counselors. Tom was definitely the kind of man that belonged here, but was also a kind of gentle giant. He was black as hell, about 6'5 and 250 and always dressed in tattered rags that really showed he just came off the streets which he always topped with a battered and filthy U.S. Navy ball-cap. Tom was one of the worst of the many schizophrenics, much more so than my schizo crack-head roommate Harry, and at one point had attacked his own mother with a samurai sword in Puerto Rico, and had also drunk bleach in a botched suicide attempt.
    Tom was probably on more medications than anyone else there; I had seen a print out of his med list and it was several pages long, and one morning he was accused of not being in his room during bed checks, and was up for a disciplinary review board. I knew for a fact he had gone inside and to his room that night because I was with him, and a couple of us signed a makeshift petition saying he was innocent, and if he did wander off somewhere it was because he was so pilled out every evening.
    Tom showed me the razor blade he had hidden under his tongue, and slyly told me, “If they try to kick me out of here or do anything crazy, I’m pulling this fucker out and slashing every vein in my arms and wiping all the blood on my counselor’s faces before I tear open my motherfucking jugular.”
    “It’s not worth it man,” I told him, trying to be as calm as the greatest mental illness suicide prevention counselor, but completely desperate to talk him down. “They are definitely not going to kick you out with nowhere to go. They won’t do anything but talk to you. Give me the blade Tom. I’ll talk to them myself if something goes wrong. You have my word brother.”
    This seemed to work and we both relaxed. He gave me the blade, which I pocketed, and then I noticed his eyes growing misty.
    “Thanks Will. I appreciate it. I won’t do nothing stupid.”
    I sighed with relief, and later flushed the blade down the toilet in my room. Despite Tom’s obvious madness, I really liked and cared about him and he cried a few emotional tears when I hugged him goodbye when I was heading home. I truly hoped he would have all the treatment he needed and it would be extensive. Psych wards, VA hospitals, prisons or perpetual homelessness were basically all that would ever await the man in America, whose mental pains were more extreme than almost anyone I had ever known; although the residual horrors of Vietnam were also always around us, and watching guys having sudden, violent flashbacks from a war fought thirty years ago on an almost daily basis was equally unnerving.
    I had to leave. In many ways I was feeling my treatment was just making me worse by expanding my fragile receptivity. I had sunk so low emotionally, and so unbelievably fast, I would do anything to go back six months ago. It was this event that seemed to send everything in my world down to the dirt. I just desperately hoped I had enough strength to climb up to somewhere resembling where I’d once been. I was lost without a map and only a broken inner compass and hoped every waking moment I would make something of myself in this world somehow and someway, because just like after I left the Navy and retired my status as a sailor, I was now a man with no identity. I was one of the many hollow men cored straight through by this mad new millennium.
    I left Wisconsin with the diagnoses of a bi-polar recovering alcoholic with severe general anxiety disorder tagged on my back, and said goodbye to everyone, somewhat unsure that I was really ready to go home and confront myself and the wretched past. I was wished good luck and told to stay in touch several times, unpacked and cleaned up my room, checked out with everyone I needed to, grabbed my stuff including my many medications and the finished therapeutic ashtray secured in a small box packed with newspaper, and finally caught my bus back to Michigan.
    There were about twenty men on the bus and I was the youngest by at least twenty years. These Vets had come to Wisconsin from Michigan for short stays for various medical reasons Stony Ridge wasn’t equipped to handle, and it was obvious to them why I was here. They could tell I had come from the nutty druggy drunkard ward. I popped an excessive amount of my sedatives and slept for the six hour drive back to Stony Ridge, where I would have to spend the night at a motel before being taken back to Middleton and my old apartment in the morning. This was a terrifying but my only and totally free prospect.
    The motel was the kind that I had gotten drunk in thousands of times, and as I sat there on the bed and turned on the basic cable TV, I kept thinking about how much I wanted to get loaded tonight but also how badly I didn’t. My mother and grandmother had paid someone to clean out my apartment so I could start anew, and all I wanted was to get back to my own hole in the wall. Or maybe just to smash right through it.
    You’re supposed to go to an AA meeting as soon as you step out of rehab but I wouldn’t. I really didn’t like them or feel like that ritualistic bonding of defected human beings helped me in any way shape or form like it did for so many others. I just sat there by myself and moped for several moments. There was a grocery store across the street where I could buy any bottle and there were a couple bars in walking distance. My inner-self was completely torn in half; the exquisite corpse syndrome again. You’re also supposed to call someone when you were contemplating blowing you sobriety like I was. I had the numbers of all the guys I befriended in Milwaukee but wanted to put most of them and the traumas of that whole experience and those poor guys behind me, and decided to update my family on my location and to say hello and I’m fine, but knew I was still was royally screwed and quickly caved into the temptations of my favorite vice.
    I wasn’t going to go back to view my past sober. I was too weak and couldn’t or wouldn’t. I walked to the store almost as if I was sleepwalking to go find my crutches that happened to be stored across the street. Nothing felt like it was of my own choice. I was just a bad actor starring in a terrible play. So I played along. I took the dreaded walk that I somewhat knew I would the whole time I was in treatment, which was now totally wasted just like I was going to be in a few minutes and bought a case of Coors and a pint of gin.
    I opened the debauching and devilish genie’s gin bottle and knew the vicious cycle was about to begin anew, but I knew it wouldn’t in full force. Unlike the alcoholics I’d heard in meetings, I knew it would take some time and not instantaneously for the real hell of alcoholism to engulf me, but the disease was definitely still in the parking lot of my subconscious mind doing push-ups and watching old Mike fix smack in his dealer’s car the whole time I pledged my desire to never drink or use again. I justified my actions by saying to myself I was celebrating completing my treatment, with cheap gin washed down with Coors, and I was going home to what I guessed I considered as much of one as I’d ever had of my own; a haunted hovel just like the boats full of ghosts I had also once found myself living on. It was now off to the races from here.

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