White Out (30 page)

“Well,” Al said, “they are sure going to tell you that.”

I got a cup of coffee. It was lukewarm. I think boiling water was prohibited. Then a cute little guy in jeans ran up and told us to be ready for group in five minutes. Al told me he was a rising rodeo star addicted to ketamine. My confidence in the treatment center sank. I had taken ketamine by accident once. I was sure no one could be addicted to ketamine. It was like going into a hospital for brain surgery and learning that they also treated people for demonic possession.

“Group in the lounge! Group! Group in the lounge!”

The twenty of us assembled on the long couches. I felt uncomfortably sober. All these new people. I hadn’t done the face-to-face thing raw in nine or ten years. I tried to look cool. How did you do that, anyway? I couldn’t decide on the correct expression. Smile? (“Look at that happy-face motherfucker.”) Frown? (“Somebody steal your teddy bear, faggot?”) Look people in the eyes? (“What the fuck are you looking at?”) Stare at the ground? (“Look at me when I’m talking to you, bitch!”)

I decided my best bet was to look stoned. I let my mouth hang open and my eyes unfocus.

“You feeling all right, Mike?” Marty said, worried. He turned to whisper loudly to the fat man sitting next to him. I picked up a few words. “New guy…big problem…high…smuggle it in their assholes…look at him.”

Marty’s whispering was cut short when a sly-eyed man with a gray ponytail bounced in and stood in the center of the room.

“I’m Kirk, and I’m the head counselor on this unit, and I’m an addict.”

“Hi, Kirk,” everyone said.

“I’d like to ask those of you who are new to the unit to tell us who you are.” Everyone looked at me.

“I’m Mike,” I said. There was a long pause. Al nudged me and whispered, “Say you’re an addict.”

“I’m an addict!” I said.

“Hi, Mike,” everyone said.

“Now,” said Kirk, “I know a number of you are pretty new, so to get to know each other better I’m going to go around and ask each of you to tell us a little bit about what brought you here. You first, Mike.”

“I’m Mike, and I’m an addict,” said the other Mike. He was a bright, confident-looking man in his late thirties.

“What brought me here,” he said, “was 9/11.”

There were sighs and groans around the room. Marty had a look of anguish.

“Yeah, it hit me pretty hard.” People were nodding and sighing. One thin pale inmate had his lips pressed tight together and his nails dug hard into his palms. Al looked like he was praying.

“I work in the financial district. I drove in late that morning. I was in the Holland Tunnel when it happened. I lost friends that morning. I had friends who worked in those towers. Fuck.” His face twisted up. Someone gave him a Styrofoam cup of water. There was no glass on the unit. Broken glass cuts and kills. Mike continued.

“So I started to drink pretty heavy after that. One day, a week before Christmas, I came home and my wife and my family and six of my closest friends were waiting for me. My new secretary even. I’ve got two. An intervention.” He sighed deeply. “So now I’m here. I’ve had a tough time. I feel like I’m at about 80 percent right now.” He looked around the room. “I’m at 80 percent and I’m trying to get back up to 110 percent!” He slapped high-five with the guy sitting next to him and everyone clapped.

“OK,” Kirk said. “How about you, Marty?”

“Well,” said Marty, “9/11 hit me pretty hard too. I don’t live in New York, but I identify. In some ways my problem is that I identify too strongly. I was the first one up on the unit that morning. I was at a treatment center on the West Coast. They let people sleep in until nine there. It was shameful. High relapse rate. I saw the planes hit live on CNN. It was awful. I said the Third Step prayer, but inside it didn’t feel right. It’s like my connection to my Higher Power just died. When I got out, it took just five days before I relapsed. That’s the fastest ever.”

“My name is Tony and I’m an addict,” said the next guy, “I don’t work in New York either but it’s like after 9/11 I just wasn’t the same person. Inside, I mean.”

“I’m Al and I’m an addict. I’m here just simply ’cause I messed up and started smoking that damn ‘caine but I want to say to Mike on 9/11: I feel you, bro.”

“My name is Peter.”

“Hi Peter.”

“I think September 11 was an absolutely terrible thing,” Peter said. “I’m not American; I’m British. I want you to know I sympathize. I was out of the country at the time. I’m a chef and I wish I had never heard that you could smoke cocaine. I didn’t have any problem with snorting it.” He shook his head sadly. “I was on a private yacht when it happened, cooking for my employer and his guests. I can tell you that Mick Jagger was among the guests. I can tell you that everyone felt absolutely terrible about September 11. It affected us all. I don’t remember much about October.”

While Peter was speaking, I wondered, for the first time, how 9/11 had affected me. It was such a huge event. Everyone agreed on that. How could it not have had an impact on me? I was just as much a part of the world as anyone else, even if I felt pretty aloof sometimes. I breathed the same air as everyone else. Was I in denial about 9/11? I cast my mind back to that day four months earlier. Cat had woken me up. She’d been all excited.

“Something has finally happened!” she said. I dragged myself out of bed and over to the TV. As I watched the replay of the second plane hitting the tower my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it.

“Finally,” I said. “Finally something big has finally happened.”

“They say more planes are coming,” Cat told me. “They say Baltimore could be a target. Ohmigod look!” We stared fascinated at the TV. She turned the volume way up.

“And then,” I told the group. “Then I realized that this was a special day. I’d been planning to quit dope that day. I’d even written myself a note. But when 9/11 happened I thought, ‘Nothing matters now, the economy is probably fucked, no one will have to go to work again. I can get high today for sure.’ And I did, and a few months later I got arrested, and now I’m here.”

The guys around me sighed and nodded. It felt good to be in a place where people understood. I remembered telling Cash about how I felt that day and Cash saying he was going to call the FBI tip line and tell them I had expressed joy at 9/11. With friends like that…

“OK,” said Kirk when the last of us had spoken, “9/11 was tough for many of us. Especially those who lost loved ones. No one wants to minimize that. But, as tough as it was, we are here in 2002 now, and whatever got you started using, or made you use more, the simple fact is that now you can’t stop. You wouldn’t be here if you could.”

After group a number of us stood out in the cold smoking, gathered around the other Mike. He had emerged as a natural leader. I felt kind of good that we had the same name.

“I agree with everything Kirk said,” Mike was saying, “I mean…”

“Yeah.”

“Right on, Mike.” We felt an unfocused positivity. I found myself smiling. Looking back it’s hard for me to disentangle my feelings from the others’. Everyone was talking at once.

“Man, motherfuck dope.”

“Never again!”

“I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.”

“I do, and it was stupid.”

“One day at a time.”

“Everything’s gonna be fine.”

“The First Step, man, the First Step.”

“You use, you lose.”

“A day without a buzz…”

“Is like a day that never wuzz.”

“That ain’t right, man!”

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

“Just keep your eyes on the First Step.”

“And your hands.”

“And your mouth.”

Addicts have thin boundaries. Or maybe we have elastic I’s. Huddled together in the cold smoking, I caught some of Marty’s feelings, and the other Mike caught some of mine. We were all mixed up together. It was kind of fun. I’d always secretly wanted to join the Army. Comrades, brothers. That night we all wobbled together on the rehab center patio, a single happy animal, starving hungry, horny, dying, smiling.

Togetherness therapy. For the next three weeks I went to group therapy sessions and smoked and ate four meals a day. We were all in it together. Together. With no drugs, the addicts huddled together and lost themselves in the crazy group animal. It cavorted around the lounge and the smoking patio and ate the hours until eventually we’d have to go to bed. Separately. I’d find myself lying in bed alone, zipped up in the tight envelope of my skin, and God only knows what I felt. Two weeks without drugs? Three? Some people never slept. Sneaked out at 2:00 a.m. to the lounge to talk to someone, anyone, everyone. You want to talk about food? Cars? Music? God? The talk went from your mouth into his ear out his mouth into your ear out your mouth into his ear—the talk went faster—you started remembering what his wife looks like and your loneliness woke up inside him and didn’t know where it was and wandered around and got happy. Talk faster. Faster.

It went too fast. The counselors looked worried. Tensions began to infect our group therapy sessions. People started burning out. The rodeo boy announced that he wasn’t an addict. “I never really liked ketamine.” He felt he was being held at the facility against his will. This was bad for morale. We lost two patients who left when they realized no one was going to stop them. Rodeo boy stayed. Al asked him bluntly why he didn’t just get the hell out if he wanted to so bad. Rodeo boy replied that he wanted to, but he just
felt
he couldn’t leave. He blamed other people for that feeling. I also had some feelings I knew weren’t mine. I nodded.

Over the course of several sessions, it slowly came out that Tony believed that he had killed someone and buried the body on a construction site in Indiana. Mike called Tony a show-off, and Tony responded by suggesting that the only friends of Mike’s who had perished in 9/11 were imaginary friends, and Karl had to cut group short. That upset Marty.

Every couple days, a senior patient would “graduate” and we’d have a little ceremony beating tom-toms and yelling and giving emotional speeches about the senior’s triumph. Mike was particularly good at the speeches.

“You will definitely make it,” he’d say, looking straight into the senior’s eyes. “You will definitely make it out there.”

A guy named Tom graduated at the beginning of my first week on the unit and was back at the end of my third week. He said his mistake was answering the phone without checking caller ID. A few senior patients didn’t graduate at all. Mike said that the staff had identified some patients as benefitting from a more intensive and extensive treatment regime. Mike was not one of them. He was at 95 percent.

By now Marty was telling everyone that the treatment center was one of the two worst he had ever attended. You weren’t supposed to use the Internet, but one of the patients somehow gained access to the counselors’ computer and downloaded and printed and passed around an article from a website saying that treatment centers were completely ineffective and that every single addict sent there relapsed except the ones who suffered only from “addiction hypochondria.” The counselors, all of whom were alumni of the center, presented themselves as evidence refuting these lies. Marty unexpectedly emerged as one of the article’s chief opponents.

“That’s crazy,” he scoffed. “Of course treatment works.”

There were two huge windows in the treatment center lounge. I stared out. A high, thin winter cloud was coming apart. Ten seconds. Twenty.

“Oh!”

“Freaking out a little, Mike?” Al sauntered in chuckling.

“No, uh, I was just zoning out a little…and…kind of surprised myself,” I said, getting up and pacing around. I felt frightened and embarrassed.

Because staring at the sky my eyes had started to get dry. Then they dried completely out like bones. Like dice. And the looking that was in them wasn’t mine and wasn’t of the world and was some kind of bad luck. I’d blinked and freaked. Made a loud sound. There was a sharp taste of metal in my mouth.

Even the weather seemed to be coming apart. After I’d been at the center for about three weeks, there was a sudden thaw. The temperature, which had held steady in the twenties, rose suddenly through the thirties and forties. It stayed in the high forties for two days. Clear skies. The light looked more yellow than white. More butter than bone.