ONE SHOE AND A FEW BRAIN CELLS AWAY FROM MADNESS
Sometimes when I’m warning adolescents struggling with drug problems about the dangers that lie ahead if they continue to use, I feel as if I’m alone in a deep cavern listening only to the echo of my own voice.
I’m not saying it’s hopeless. Like so many others—educators, recovery coaches, probation officers, counselors, treatment providers—I throw out the seeds of factual information and real-life experience.
Then we wait, not always patiently for the seeds to geminate and grow. We know it’s a process. We know it takes time.
But we know, too, that life follows a zig-zag pathway and some kids will get hurt before they get better. Some kids will die. And those facts make us edgy and maybe even a little bit crazy.
Because these kids are not other people’s children. They are our children, our friends’ and neighbors’ children. They are our future.
Joining our voices together helps, so in this column, I’m turning the podium over to my friend Jeff Jay, whose real-life story illustrates how fast drug addiction takes hold and where it can end up.
His story shows us how even lost souls can be found, giving us all reason for hope.
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I remember stumbling down Mission Boulevard in San Francisco on a cold, rainy day in 1981 without a nickel in my pocket. I was 26 years old.
I’d spent my last 75 cents on a half-pint of port wine two hours earlier. Now it was 9 a.m., and I was hungry and tired, not to mention a little wobbly. I looked wistfully into the window of a corner grocery, wishing I had enough money for a little bread and cheese. The port was burning my ulcer, and I did not want to start vomiting blood in broad daylight.
I had become my own nightmare. A few years earlier, I’d seen a pathetic young man on this very street. Underneath his torn and filthy clothes, he looked like he belonged in college. He had only one shoe on, and he was walking half on the curb and half in the street, delirious and lost in the city. Seeing this madness, I vowed that I would never allow myself to sink into that condition. But now, just a few years later, I was only one shoe and a few brain cells away from that same fate.
As I walked down the street, I caught sight of myself in the reflection of a large storefront window. I couldn't bear to study the lost soul who looked back at me. In my addiction, I had become a face without a name, unknown to anyone in this city. Turning away, my mind flashed back to my childhood and the good life I’d left behind.
I had it made when I was growing up in Michigan. The oldest of five children, I lived in an affluent neighborhood in a loving household. At 18, I was a national merit scholar, president of my student association, and the recipient of dozens of scholarship offers from colleges and universities throughout the country. No one could tell that I was already a budding alcoholic.
My first serious drinking experience was a textbook example of alcoholic predisposition. I was 13. After school, my friends and I snuck down to a secret place by the lake with three bottles of wine.
I got the cork out of the first bottle and drank deeply of the warm, bad-tasting wine. It burned as it went down, but it instantly gave me a wonderful feeling. I refused to share the bottle. I drank more and more, even though I hated the taste. The wine immediately became the love of my life, and like all young lovers, I only wanted more.
Within half an hour, I was hugging the trees in ecstasy and loudly proclaiming the goodness of all things. I was in a rapture, with a full bottle of wine in my empty stomach. My friends could hardly hold me back as I headed back to civilization, ready to evangelize the fruit of the vine.
A normal teen would have been unable to drink a whole bottle of wine in 20 minutes on an empty stomach. My reaction to the drug alcohol was atypical, much more like that of a seasoned alcoholic than an inquisitive kid. Some people wonder when they cross the line into alcoholism from social drinking. I crossed the line immediately.
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By the end of my first year in college, I was drinking and drugging on a daily basis, and almost unable to function. For a while, I continued to pretend that I was a serious student, but soon college became nothing more than a place to party. I managed to stay in school for almost four years but finally dropped out without earning a degree.
I began hitchhiking around the country, renouncing home and family. To this day, I’m not exactly sure where I was from 1976 to 1981. I crashed cars, stole money from friends, sold all my possessions, and lived like a dog. I had nothing to show for myself but a perpetual hangover, but I steadfastly refused to acknowledge that I had a problem.
My addiction dragged me down to the point that I was sleeping under bushes in city parks. Suffering from a bleeding ulcer and a bleeding colon, I was unable to work and barely able to walk because of nerve damage in my legs.
Stumbling along for more than a block was out of the question, as my legs would freeze up in pain. I tried to quit drinking for a day, but the sickness and hallucinations were too much for me to endure.
One morning in October 1981, I was startled into consciousness by a loud knock at the door of my tiny room in a San Francisco flophouse. Another lost soul was pounding on my door, shouting that I had a phone call.
I walked slowly down the stairs, picked up the pay phone, and said hello through the fog of my hangover. I was startled to hear my father’s voice.
“I can’t talk to you right now,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”
I hung up and slowly made my way to a liquor store where I bought a bottle of cheap wine. I sat down in a park and started drinking.
As I clutched the brown paper bag, I realized that the bottle was my only world, and booze was pulling me down into its black hole. I was cut off from everything around me, and the only sensible thing to do was end it all.
I looked down into the neck of the bottle, into the black hole that had become my life, and I did something that I hadn’t done since I was a child. I cried like a baby.
I stopped that as quickly as I started and polished off the bottle of wine. I resolved to kill myself that day but, as a point of honor, I would return the phone call to my parents as I had promised.
When the call went through, I immediately noticed something different in the tone of my parents’ voices. There was no anger or recrimination, no blame or scolding. They were both very calm.
My mother said she loved me and then put my father on the line. He asked me a simple question.
“Jeff,” he said, “how are you doing?”
Then I said the single most intelligent thing I have said in all my life. “I think I need to go to a hospital.”
The next morning, with my parents’ help, I was admitted to a detoxification unit. Ten days later, I was transferred to a 28-day inpatient treatment center.
I will never forget the words I heard on my third day.
I was sitting on the edge of my bed, sweating and shaking. Dr. William Keaton, the physician in charge of the treatment ward, pulled up a chair, sat down, and called out to me as though I were deaf. A large, powerfully built man with a deep, booming voice, Dr. Keaton had the demeanor of God Almighty.
“Boy!”
I nearly jumped off the bed.
“Boy, you’ve got a disease. You’re not responsible for what you’ve done.”
Great! I thought with genuine relief.
“But you’re responsible for what you do now.”
Damn! I thought.
“Your disease is incurable,” he continued. “We’re going to give you a program to follow, the Twelve Steps. You follow that program, and the disease will stay in remission. You stop following that program, and the disease is going to kick you in the butt again.”
He looked at me hard, stood up, and walked out.
By the grace of God and the help of many people, I got a chance at life again. And one day at a time, I haven’t had a drink since October 4, 1981.
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