Volume 4, Issue 49 It’s been a few years now—seven, to be exact—but I still have dreams about rehab, or more specifically, the vans that would drive us around. They would seat ten, sometimes 12 people, and it would either have the raucous energy of a party bus headed to a wedding or be silent and nervous like we were driving through a dense fog. Our vans took us to group therapy sessions in the morning and AA meetings at night. Sometimes on weekends—if we were good—we went to the beach. One time we went bowling, and I felt like I was transported back to a 5th-grade birthday party. One very early Sunday morning, the van took two fresh-faced heroin kids and me to church. I wasn’t even converting or searching; I wanted to pretend I was participating in a normal Sunday ritual anyplace else on earth with other normal Sunday people. One time we were allowed to get supervised haircuts or pedicures. The pedicure option was primarily for this kid named Joe, whose toenails were so black with grime it looked as if his feet had been trampled by a stampede of cattle. He would always wear flip-flops, too. Nobody ever sat next to him in the van. In the fourth season of the show “Maron” there’s an episode called “Field Trip,” when he’s in rehab. There’s this great scene with grumpy 52-year-old Marc, being forlorn and annoyed to be in a van full of 20-something junkies, staring out the window as they drive through the Highland Park neighborhood he used to live near. “Oh look, there goes my old life,” he says. I had one of these moments when we drove through the shopping center to get the pedicures. Not because that ugly shopping center of Florida was ever part of my old life, but the idea that the 45-minute excursion was the highlight of my Saturday—and felt like a true luxury—was a reminder that I was nowhere. I wondered why I didn’t run away? We weren’t shackled. The technicians were not armed with batons or tasers. But if I did run, where would I go? We weren’t allowed to carry wallets or phones. I would be running away for another mile, probably to a Publix parking lot or another shopping center that would look exactly like the one I’d run from, just to return to the treatment center without anything to show for it. Here was my old life and new life, separated by the windows of this van, like the plexiglass between a prisoner and a tired family member wondering when they’ll come home. ***** The vans drove us to an AA clubhouse in West Palm Beach on Thanksgiving for a big family-style dinner and a 90-minute meeting. The food spread at the club was fantastic—and you could smoke cigarettes everywhere inside the place. I spent 15 minutes shuffling through a maze of folding tables as hairnetted Friends of the Program performed their Thanksgiving service commitments, splatting paper plates with heavy spoonfuls of stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and burnt biscuits and greasy turkey legs and strange casseroles. While we ate, there was a meeting with several speakers. The room was so crowded they had to pack people up on the second-floor loft space, giving it a rabid Thunderdome vibe. There was easily more than 100 people there, many from other recovery houses who arrived in their own sad vans. But the rest were locals—real-deal, cherry-nosed Florida alcoholics with oxygen tanks and prosthetic limbs. I took my heavy plate and sat on a folding chair in the hallway outside the main dining area because there were no more tables left. I thought I’d feel nostalgic for the cozy Thanksgivings of previous decades: Shooting pool in my parents’ basement. Triscuits and square orange cheese. Helping my father put on the dining room table extension. Sambuca. Smoking on the driveway after dinner, even if it was raining. The first leftover turkey (dark meat) and mayo sandwich before bed. The noisy love of aunts and uncles and cousins and friends. But mostly, I thought about the Thanksgiving the year before I went to rehab. I was renting an ugly one-bedroom apartment in Los Feliz as part of a two-month “work trip.” I was so hungover on Thanksgiving that I couldn’t eat anything, but I knew I needed to, so I walked over to Ralph’s grocery store in the early-late afternoon. I hoped they’d have some sort of Thanksgiving pre-made plates available, something I could heat up in the microwave, but no dice. Instead, I opted for a gift basket wrapped in cellophane with a few packs of gross creamy cheeses, strange nuts, and summer sausage. Another reason I’d lost my appetite was that I was taking a lot of Fen-Phen on that trip. A friend back in Brooklyn stopped using it after the recall, but she gave it to me as a going-away present before I left for the west coast. “Since you like pills and coke, I think you’ll like it,”she said. I loved it, so I barely ate. I wasn’t trying to lose weight, but two weeks in, I could see lots of ribs. Eventually, I had to buy a new belt because my jeans began to sag. On Thanksgiving night, I drank whiskey from a large, slender glass—growing up, my mother used to call them “iced tea” glasses—because it was one of the only clean ones left. I ripped open the giant cheese basket and got to work. I eventually passed out on the couch, watching the last football game of the day. I woke up to a coffee table full of smushed-up Fen-Phen, a tube of half-eaten summer sausage, and crumpled cellophane full of loose nuts. “Thanksgiving is finally over,” I thought. But it wasn’t. It was only 3 a.m. My head was pounding, and I walked outside to smoke in the street. Someone had hung Christmas lights on the front porch next door while I was asleep. Back in the AA clubhouse, the secretary turned the meeting over to the chip person. Since it was mostly newcomers, everyone just gave a big round of applause for the most important people in the room as they came up one by one, many of them crying. I wondered if they were crying because they were spending Thanksgiving banished from their families. Or maybe they were crying because no matter how shitty and lost they felt, there was still a roomful of strangers ready to clap for them. I inhaled so much turkey, mashed potatoes, pie, and cigarettes. As I was smoking, listening to all the applause, I realized it was one of my best Thanksgivings.
***** Two years later, my sister was spending her first Thanksgiving alone, on-ramping to divorce after a long, suffocating marriage. She called me crying on the day after. It was the first one without her children, who were all grownups, but they had chosen to spend it with their dad. She was talking to me, but it sounded like screaming—the kind of sound that shoots out of a person who feels broken and betrayed. I don’t know why I was able to calm her down, but I did. I am usually not great in those situations—I panic or clam up—but I was dug in that night. “This is just turbulence!” I said. “Your plane is not crashing. This is just turbulence!” The volume in her voice decreased. She was crying more quietly. “I promise you next year’s Thanksgiving will be different. You will feel different. It won’t be like this,” I said. I believed every word of it because I’d sat in those vans going nowhere, but they dropped me right here, right where I needed to be. I could tell she believed me, too. And next year, it was different for her. She was finally happy.
So I wonder where you are—are you stuck in the cold corners of your past? Or maybe you’re someplace else, more alive in the future, but here for whatever madness shows up today. Wherever you are, I’m sure you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
On Thanksgiving, we’ll have two Zoom meetings. Come on in if you need some people to talk to or just to blink at you. All the information is below. — AJD |
