- Drugs
It would either kill me or change my life forever.
I mistakenly believed I had a choice. Until this moment, I have spoken to no one of the two weeks of my life that eclipse all others in importance .
My first glimpse of any hope or lucidity came on Sunday, September 11, 2011. Bedridden, unshowered, unshaven and in a week’s worth of pooled sweat, I awoke from week-long storm of hallucinations. I had no idea if it was day or night, but it didn’t matter anymore. Blinds and drapes had long since been drawn in preparation. Mine was once the busiest front door in town, but it had remained unopened for a week. Voice and text messages were gathered in numbers on my dead phone, but I didn’t bother to plug it in again.
I was awake, and it wasn’t the kind of awake I’d been accustomed to for so many years. I was awake, and I could feel. I knew I could feel because I had just turned on the television to catch up on what had transpired during the past week. I had been alone without a single visitor. The world’s end easily could have escaped my notice, and, fortunately for me, in a very tangible sense, it had.
The TV images were predictable. The tenth anniversary of the terrorist bombings in New York and other points was marked by services, memorials and reflections of survivors. It wasn’t exactly the kind of programming to watch after a week of crystal methamphetamine withdrawal. I had not cried during the prior week, but I could see I was entering that next phase, and the TV news that morning was the divine catalyst.
Calling myself lucid at that point would be an overstatement, but something had changed. The fevered stupor of my addiction was breaking, and I could actually reason and move from one thought to the next. Despite this glimpse of hope, the worst was yet to come.
Two weeks prior I had been wearing an orange jumpsuit and was confined to a hard metal cot in a large room with hundreds of very creepy men. I had little hope that my environment would change any time soon. A week before that, my arrest led to the discovery of my habit by my family and friends. Detectives and a SWAT team raided my hotel room, home and car after months of surveillance. The confiscation of thousands in cash and even more thousands’ worth of drugs of all kinds was their biggest bust of the week according to the detective who had first cuffed me.
I had saved around $23,000 cash in total. This was the remaining profit of what had been a highly lucrative illicit drug sales business over the past few years. After the denied theft of my cash on hand by the arresting detective team and the documented $5,100 cash taken from my home during the raid by the SWAT team, I had about $15,000 in cash in other hiding places. Remembering this was the first hopeful though I mustered as I watched the footage of the 9/11 memorial events on the television. Reality had begun to hit me.
The money situation had taken over my selfish mind, but as I watched the tragic recollections of events, I was overcome by a more important reality. As I watched, I was overcome with feelings of loss and grief I had never before experienced. I no longer cared about the money. I didn’t even care about the future. The present was irrelevant. I had become fixated on the past.
The program host was doing a segment on children orphaned on 9/11. Their fathers and mothers had lost their lives in acts of heroism and compassion on that day. The children, now a decade older, were recalling their parents with pride and fondness. It was at that moment the tears came. I wish I could say they were for those children on the screen in front of me, but they were for my own children.
I would have rather rewound the week and returned to that earlier sweaty, hallucinatory state than to have faced what I knew was the most profound loss in my life of addiction. The stories of those fathers and mothers who were noble, selfless, compassionate, bold and courageous were as far from my own story as the east is from the west. The stark contrast between who they were and who I was sickened me. The hardest thing I had to face wasn’t the possible 25-year prison sentence. It wasn’t choosing an attorney or the thousands I’d have to pay him or her. It was my three children.
I vividly recall the moment the undercover officer called my name, grabbed my right arm and cuffed me at the elevator entrance. My second thought was of my youngest and only son. He is now a vibrant, genius-level student in his first year of college. He and I had remained close during my addiction. My two oldest were already on their own. They are smart, perceptive women who might have caught on quickly to the secret I was hiding if they had been at home. I kept them and my extended family members at a distance, but my son was a minor and custody arrangements with my ex gave me a couple days a week with him. I could have had more if I wanted, but I rarely exercised that privilege.
Every father has a paternal instinct to be with, care for, protect and support his children. I never lost that instinct, but I subdued it daily and pushed it down so I could continue to use drugs. I rationalized my behaviors and believed I was managing my dual lives quite well without raising curiosity from my family. I thought my son was the easiest to deceive. I went to Boy Scouts with him on Monday evenings and was often high, but he never seemed to know. I picked him up from school, shared a meal, a drive, a movie or some other activity before returning him to his mother and racing off to make my next drug deal or host a drug party that would likely last for the next few days. More than once I suddenly remembered my commitment to him, raced to shower and dress and shooed my guests out the door so that I could meet him in time to have a nice, unsuspecting, quality encounter with him.
Memories of my deceptions came in waves, and the steady progression of shame I felt through my tears was punctuated by an occasional glance at the TV to hear yet another story of a proud son’s words ten years after his father’s heroic death.
I had been no hero.
I believe it is a paternal instinct for a father to want his children to think of him as a hero, but I was not only a non-hero, I had become the enemy. I cried alone for hours or maybe days. I awoke crying. I cried on the toilet. I cried in the much-needed shower I finally got myself to take. I am crying even now as I recall this.
It would either kill me, or change my life forever.
An addict must experience both. The want to let drugs and alcohol kill your “self” and the want to have a changed life are inseparable desires for an addict. Now, clean, sober and two years later, much healing has taken place between myself and my children and family. Much is still left to accomplish. I’ve learned how to be a father once again, but, unfortunately for me and my children, we missed and cannot ever recover years. Many important events happened during my addiction, and when they come up in conversation, I am embarrassed to have no recollection of them. I simply wasn’t there, and even if I had been, I still was not.
Without a lifetime to build up resistance, mistrust, walls and resentments, children can be quite forgiving. Mine have been when they didn’t have to be. The knowledge of the walls I created that I still work to tear down make the tumbling and crashing of the twin towers on September 11th vivid, visual reminders. This day will always make me contrite, somber and thankful.
Today is September 12, 2013, and I am very glad it is.
I am proud to be the father of three incredible heroes.