“All we really do is lie to ourselves… and everyone else. Lies. It’s all lies.”
I glanced over at him from the corner of my eyes while I drove, but he was staring forward through the windshield like he was hypnotized. I could feel his angst as if it were dark cold waves brushing up against my skin, trapped inside my car, wanting to escape and flood the world with what it was like to keep such a red and wild rage bottled up inside.
He was struggling.
He was slipping.
I had just picked him up from his sober living house and we were headed to a CA meeting.
He was just a kid, Samuel, 20, not even old enough to buy a fucking drink at a bar.
But the stakes we were playing with weren’t any child’s game. It was almost unfair being faced with such challenges so young. Yet it had been the same for me when I was even younger. This was the real world, with real consequences. Get a game over in this life and you’d be traveling with a one-way ticket to the great beyond.
But we were pals.
And we liked to switch it up for our nightly meetings. AA can feel too much like church at times, and then NA will get on a tangent if you haven’t done hard time, but CA usually kept it pretty light and fun. Cokeheads always knew how to have a good time… they still knew how to fucking party even without busting lines – take enough sugar and caffeine and the sky’s the limit.
Hahaha.
Although, HA was Samuel’s favorite. But he went alone to that one. He was the treasurer now, moving up in the world. Baby steps my friends, baby steps. And he was with his peeps… his generation.
But it just wasn’t my crew. I’d been a few times, but that was as much as I could take. It was all kids hanging out and talking about how popular Herion had become – high schoolers and community college stragglers.
That was a hard one for me.
Because the world had changed, and not I with it.
Back in my day dope was still taboo. You never told anyone if you scored. You had to be very careful who you kept in the know. Back in my day it was anything but cool, it was a black mark that you never wanted to be branded with.
Samuel couldn’t drive. He didn’t have a license or a car. But his sober living house was right up the street from me, and I had no job, so I went to a lot of meetings. I always gave him a text if he wanted to join, and almost always he would.
Gotta find some way to pass the time while the jumper cables haven’t sparked your life back to a respectable level. Plus, it always looked good if you were getting your card signed. When you’re still in the outpatient part of your program you have to show proof you’re doing the work.
The funny thing was, I was popular in rehab, because I had a car… and a valid driver’s license for that matter. You don’t realize how lucky you are just to be able to have your own transportation, when you see everyone else is facing time and had their car impounded or license suspended a long while ago.
Shit, if you have a license in rehab, you might as well be a king on a throne. They practically worship you.
“So that’s what you think?”
I asked it in a way that I knew he’d have to respond – manipulative and sly like flipping on a switch, when I wanted to.
“Yeah.” Was all he muttered at first, agitated. Then he spit out the words like venom, “I’d never tell someone if I picked up again.”
“Huh… Why’s that?”
I tried to spin it like I was only half interested, as if when he traveled down these dark and treacherous roads of thought, twisting and turning like a roller coaster from hell throughout the deep and hidden labyrinthine slums of the mind, I was only taking him half seriously.
“You know how it is Q. When it really matters the most… that’s when we feel the most alone. That’s when we retreat inside. And by that time, it’s already too late.”
I shrugged my shoulders nonchalantly. “Maybe… maybe not.”
He looked at me, and his smile was back. It was a winning smile, and I was glad to see it. “You know we can always hide it until it is too late. Once an addict, always an addict.”
I glanced over my shoulder and changed lanes before answering.
“So, you think asking for help isn’t inside of us. We’re fighters. It’s just the way we are. Reaching out is quitting in a way, surrendering. And addicts don’t know how to do that? We’ll battle until the end… unto death do us part?”
His smile only widened, “Don’t you think you just answered your own question?”
I remember the first time I met Samuel in group. I was the new guy walking in while he had already been there a whole week. He was sitting in the corner and leaning back with his chair balancing on only two legs tilted all the way up against the wall. A mop of brown hair was tussled over his brow and our eyes locked as I stepped through the doorway, holding his stare for a fleeting moment.
Probing. Exploring.
He had a confident gleam behind those welcoming eyes and a disarming swagger. I could feel his gaze assessing me, and I recognized that gift. It took one to know one.
He could see into people.
I had liked him right from the start. He reminded me of someone – he reminded me of myself when I was his age. Why is it that we tend to favor those who connect us back to our younger selves?
Samuel usually had no money, and his dad would send him some rent down from Bakersfield once a month to pay for sharing a room in a local sober living joint. Everything else, I’d normally pay for –lunch, smokes, whatever he needed. He kept it to a minimum, because he still had some pride. But I didn’t mind. I was out of a job, but I had means. That’s why I was a saver. Particularly for moments like this, when the sky caves in, and you find yourself on the downside of up.
I don’t think he was used to people performing acts of kindness for him. But I liked him, I liked him a lot. And we had a bond, because we were the only two left from our original group of sixteen in rehab. We were the only survivors – him a 20-year-old kid, and me a 34-year-old dude trying to patch up his midlife crisis.
It can get scary when all the others start to fall away, folding one at a time like dominoes in a row, or sometimes in groups (misery loves company). But the result was always the same. Eventually you found yourself alone.
That’s when shit gets real. That’s when the fear grabs hold of you like a stranger in the night and you begin to doubt yourself. You begin to question whether you can actually make it on your own or if you’ve only been lying to yourself from the start. All that sparkly bullshit you feed each other during groups, within the safety of that circle of chairs gets put to the test once you walk out the door.
The real world doesn’t hand out training wheels.
But I don’t fault the fallen. The world is a web of stories. And we each choose which tale we’ll tell.
Yet it can be ironic the moments life throws in your way sometimes.
Samuel and I were as odd a pairing as you could get with our paths heading in opposite directions. His life was just beginning. There was a whole world unfolding out there at his fingertips. My path was more concrete. It was to repair my marriage, build trust with my family, and lift myself back up in the corporate ranks.
But most importantly, forgive me.
I was still relatively young myself – mid thirties, had ambition and drive if I could only stop self-sabotaging and get out of my own way. There was so much I could do if I wanted to take the risks. But it sure didn’t feel that way. It felt more like I’d already lived a few lives and was clinging to borrowed time.
This was my last chance. My final cast of the dice.
Fuck this up and my next beginning would be passing through that long and lonesome night to the other side.
Not yet though, not yet.
Samuel had been real fucking lucky in how he lost his license. He had been driving his car through an upscale neighborhood when he had a seizure behind the wheel from mixing benzos, alcohol and a whole other slew of substances. After losing control his foot hit the gas and his car jumped the curb and smashed through the front wall of someone’s house all the way into the living room.
No one was injured except him. If he had killed someone, there’d be no hope. He’d be a product of the system. He’d be a lifer.
But the wheels of fate were spinning differently for him that night.
Still watching the highway, I thought I’d throw out one more lifeline, just to see if he’d bite – toss another life preserver out into a black and hopeless sea. I kept my eyes on the road while I asked quietly, “so if you ever picked up again, you’d never tell anyone… not even me?”
Asking him this was different. I had changed the game. I wasn’t being vague anymore. I was narrowing this down to our specific relationship. I was testing him directly. How much did he trust me?
It was something I rarely did, and he knew that.
We were too much alike in some ways.
But he didn’t take any time to respond – it was as if he knew the question was coming and greeted my refrain with a flat and certain, “no.”
And then came the kicker. He threw it right back in my face.
“And what about you Q? Would you do the same for me?”
I turned to him and stared, hoping he could see in my eyes the deep sadness I felt lodged in my chest. It was that crushing sadness of forever knowing some things would never change. People would be who they were regardless of the destruction it would cause. It didn’t matter how much we wanted to do the right thing; the truth would always remain – we had never learned how to ask for help.
He was more than a 20-year-old kid in that moment. He had become something different. Timeless. That age-old struggle of man’s search for meaning, and when we came up short, it always ended the same, settling for the illusion in the bottom of a bottle or a spike in the arm.
But I didn’t say a single word in response. I let the tread of the tires on the road do my talking.
Because we both already knew, exactly what my answer would be.
-Q-FI
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Part II to follow…
