- Drugs
- Faith
- Friends & Family
Submitted by: Susanne Johnson
I was nine years old when I got drunk for the first time. I lived on the island of Jamaica, where my father owned a hotel. I was born there, grew up there, and both my parents were alcoholics. My mom and dad thought it was cute to see me drink four beers when I was nine years old; I got totally toasted.
By the time I was ten years old, I was a spoiled brat and out of control. My parents sent me to an English boarding school. Can you imagine? A spoiled Jamaican boy and all of a sudden they threw me in a cold country in a military-style boarding school– it was traumatic. I learned to adapt and survive in my new environment. I was never a good student, since I didn’t have a good start.
I was always behind and started to gravitate toward the rebels, listen to rock ‘n roll, drink cider, and get in trouble.
I continued smoking lots of cigarettes, smoked hash, sniffed glue, drank, and just did what the bad boys do.
At age 17, I left the English boarding school and went to Bermuda to hotel school. It was going to be either Lausanne, Switzerland, or Bermuda, but since I didn’t speak either French or German well enough. I ended up in Bermuda. Bermuda has one of the highest alcohol consumption per capita in the world, so I fit right in. It is one of those places in the world where you can drink, throw up, pass out and get away with it in public because everybody else does it.
My alcoholism progressed to keep up with the guys; we drank heavily and all the time. I had many, many motorcycle accidents during this time from driving totally drunk, which I feel today. None of those were bad enough to land me in the hospital, but I still had bad injuries. During that time, I also engaged in my first experiments with cocaine and real free base, but this was really expensive there. (If you pay about five dollars in the USA for crack, it is about $50 in Bermuda, so if you go on a crack run, you are pretty broke.)
After my father passed away, I moved to my mom to Miami. I was 27 years old. The hotel in Jamaica was sold a while before that. So a drunk mom and addict son lived and partied co-dependently in Florida together. I was a high-end bartender at that time, working in top class bars and making a lot of money. I had a lot of drugs, happy that they were so much cheaper than in the islands.
One day, when I was sober, an old rock song about using with a needle came on. All my entire youth I was always very curious about this song, about this topic, about using a needle to get high. I was about 13 when I heard it first. When I was doing art in high school, I won an art award for a creation of a needle with a bubble, and a rock band in the middle of the bubble. I never had done heroin, but I was very curious and attracted to it.
I came to a point where I didn’t like the crack high anymore. I was tired and didn’t want to be awake three days in a row anymore and simply had enough of that way of feeling and living. It often made me paranoid– it was a crazy drug. I started to look out for heroin and it got me. I started eventually using a needle, just as in my early childhood fantasies.
A random pull-over lead to my first arrest. Cops found drugs in my car, possessed my car, threw me in jail and I lost my job. This was my first consequence. As we all know, it gets progressively worse and I had more arrests to follow soon thereafter. My lights were turned out, I pawned everything I owned. Mom was helping me with some bills and I was stealing from her to get more drugs. I had four overdoses, where I almost died and then I was in a coma for a month. I got out of the coma and got high again– it wasn’t enough yet. Very soon after that, I was in a high-speed chase with the police after getting in a fight with a lieutenant because he was trying to take my drugs. I did a year in jail for that.
After I got out of jail, I got six months of court ordered rehab, but after that was over I went back to bartending and started using heavily again. Soon after that my mom died and I got hold of her bank account. I always thought that it would be the solution, that if I only had enough money to finance my habits, I would not get in trouble anymore. But this brought me to my knees. So looking at it now, this was money well spent.
My former drug running partner found a number and called it for a joke one day. It was a detox center and he was joking with me about taking me there. His joke soon became my own wish. I went there, at age 35, and checked into this detox facility on my own. When the day came that I was discharged they told me, “You are discharged, you can go home.” and I answered, “I can’t go home, I will get high.” I stayed a little longer and fell asleep on purpose on their couch. I was so grateful the next day that when I was out I bought hamburgers for all of the people working there and brought them over. They all had their own experience, and they understood my desperation and my fear. Through the kindness of their hearts, they let me stay again. I ended up sweeping the floors, making cigarette runs, and so on. They told me, that if I wanted to stay there, I needed to go to meetings. I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to have a sponsor or work the steps, but I did it all, and eventually it became the place where I wanted to be.
I was really good at being a drug addict in my life, but that was all I knew. I was not good at anything else. If I tried to communicate with a normal person, I had nothing to talk about. In the meantime, I got a little career at the detox facility. I didn’t know what else to do or where to go, since bartending was not an option anymore. Once I got clean, I was totally insane, I was depressed, couldn’t get out of bed for days at time. I was the Prozac poster child, and suffered from total anger. I kept working the program and the steps, and finally my life started to get better and better, little by little. After about a year I started to level off a little bit. It took about two years before I experienced total peace and happiness with a lot of hope.
I went to Germany to break up with my long distance relationship with a woman. I met her after my jail time after staying in my mother’s condo in Miami and saw this pretty blonde walking by on vacation. She was with me for three years during my struggles, then I disappeared and as I got clean we got together again. I learned by now to be honest and I couldn’t do the long distance relationship anymore; I grew into a different person, and needed to get it to an end. She was a sweet girl, always there for me during my tough times and in my struggles during recovery. It was very, very difficult to be honest with her, I felt obligated and grateful, but the chemistry was gone and my life had to go on. The beautiful part of the story is that we are still very good friends today.
My current wife was my shampoo girl at my hairdresser; a beautiful and sweet Latin girl. She is a “normi” and she had a couple margaritas during our first date and as she loosened up, she told me that she had five children. I almost ran out the door. But then my recovery kicked in and I asked myself how I could I judge this beautiful woman just on the fact that she has five kids. Then I came to realize that she is a single woman, raising five kids on a salary of a shampoo girl… what a powerful woman! I was very fortunate to meet her. Nine months later we got married. Today I have four grandbabies, my middle daughter works for me in my company and I’m a happy family father.
I became the marketing director of the same detox that I refused to leave. I got hired by a big rehab, and later by a national rehab. I had a secure job, a good income and nice benefits. One day I met the father of my daughter’s boyfriend as he asked me to meet with him. First I thought, “Oh my God, is she pregnant or what?,” but the father heard what I was doing for a living and he wanted to open a treatment facility and asked me if I would be his partner.
I gave up my secure job, borrowed money, and invested into the facility, that started with just 15 beds. We worked day and night, were always ethical, and it was a scary start, but it got slowly better and we soon opened a second facility. My partner had the business mind, I had the ethical mind, we both shared the same heart. As I got clean, I was in a comfortable place where people were extremely nice to me, and this is what we wanted for our facility. Today I sometimes still run into people that I picked up at the airport on the way to treatment and they still remember the talk we had on the way. We need to give hope and care for those who are so hurt.
The committee is always chatting, but I keep it at bay. We all picked up a white key tag. You may see me today as a successful man driving a nice car, but I picked up the same white key tag. I was right where you are. If you do this thing, one day at a time, it does get better and better.