I. Hate. Rehabs.
Standing at the intake counter of this ridiculous rehab in the middle of the foothills of Southern Missouri, amongst the hillbillies who probably have car parts in their front yard and white trash girls who are honestly sexy as hell but will probably be pregnant three times before they’re even old enough to drink, I realize I didn’t think this through. I hate addicts, I hate recovery, I hate groups, I hate clichés. I hate being in the same room as people who want to open up, who think their shit is so interesting, who feel strongly that they have to compete on whose life has been the most f&#%ed up.
Hi my name’s Bill, and I’m an addict. My life’s events are worse than any of ya’ll’s so I’m going to talk longer than I should and probably cry like a snivelling bitch in front of every stranger in here. I hate them all. Every f&#%ing one of these unoriginal bastards. I hate the way they look at me, I hate the way they fake it to make it with contrived, bullshit smiles and this make-believe ideal universe where we are all in this together. And I know what I’m talking about because Mom and Dad put me in one back when I was sixteen, because I drank beer and smoked pot too much, right alongside the kids who were shooting heroine and the cheerleaders who were blowing their dealers for cocaine. Clearly, I didn’t belong then and I don’t belong now. Still, if I’m being honest, I hope someone can help. Because something inside me wants to be different. I think.
I take a Marlboro from the fresh pack that Mom bought me, a pack that signified new beginnings or an olive branch or common ground, it wasn’t clear, and as I light the cigarette I notice the overweight man standing in front of me in line is pale and sweating, nervous. Unlike others who are engaging with people around them, he has this look like he is being chased. Like there are demons that only he can see and they are clearly closing in.
Then a second later he’s on the floor, sweating, convulsing, with spit boiling up from his lips, I see that his demons have caught him. I want to do something, I want to help, I want to be involved. Maybe it’s because that’s the way I am or maybe it’s because I would want him to do something for me if the shoe was on the other foot. Or maybe I am already beginning to realize the strength of powerlessness, although I don’t want to admit it, and I see myself in his passing life and I need him to show me survival is possible.
The counselors rush the mob from behind the counter and push us back. They move efficiently and quickly, repeating codes into walkie-talkies, louder each time—this is obviously a scenario they are prepared for.
And seeing this man’s reaction makes me realize how incredibly
deep the addiction of alcohol might be. I try to wrap my mind around
how much you have to drink to be physically addicted, but my experience is lacking. He’s not the first man I’ve seen with the purple blood vessels showing on his cheeks, on the tip of his nose. Or his bloodshot eyes that earlier seemed so apologetic and unable to make contact with anyone else’s, as if shame had taken on a human form. This quiet man, who looked all alone and frightened when he was standing in front of me, is by no means the first late-stage alcoholic I’ve seen in the throes of alcoholism—hell, I was raised by a man who had his fair share of clear alcohol, the kind with the least amount of odor, the kind you could hide from your wife by drinking it out in the workshop—but this might be the first one I’ve seen brave enough to try to quit. My hat goes off to this poor, lost soul dying in front of me. And as the paramedics arrive and do what they do when faced with someone who might be dying, I feel sadder and more empathetic and humbled and reaffirm that this place isn’t for me because I’m sure I’ll never be as bad off as that poor bastard.
It has been at least three weeks since the fire, three weeks of sleeping at my mom and dad’s house before I checked in here, eating normal food and living with this ache. At times, my body has the urge to move, to exert energy with muscles and fuel and strength. I want to kick things hard and swing punches late at night when I watch TV. When I’m lying on the couch, I feel pent-up electricity kicking inside me to just move but I don’t. My teeth itch in ways I can’t describe. Like they are too close together and the gums feel like the hard plastic of a mouthguard and I brush them to no avail.
Mom and Dad didn’t talk much about it, didn’t try to figure out what was going on with me while I was there. But they didn’t lay on a guilt trip either. To get a call from some strange woman, telling her where I was and that I was physically hurt from a fire must’ve been the answer to her prayers to show her where her baby boy is. Like God’s end of the bargain, I guess.
God just let me know, dead or alive, just let me know.
The alcoholic man is gone now. Whisked away on a stretcher to hopefully live and heal and find the will to carry on in spite of his broken spirit. And I am here being processed into a place that is just a series of boxes to check.
And ten minutes into this place and the only box I want to check as quickly as possible is ‘Relapse’. Something we all can agree on.
“Making amends is really all I want to do,” Cam tells the group. He’s doing that thing where he plagiarizes the soundbites of speakers before him and says the words that help his case file. He is clearly a ward of the state or here on some court-ordered avoid-jail Monopoly card.
“That’s great, Cam. How do you plan to do it?” Sandy, the counselor, asks as we sit in a circle facing one another. Her posture is perfect; a stack of folders balanced on her lap and knockoff Gucci glasses on the bridge of her turned-up nose. I hate the counselors with their ridiculous phrases and their condescending ways of looking down on me. As if they have a better story. As if they know so much better than me. I don’t trust any of them to guide me towards self-realization because I’m smarter, I’m sure of that, and my situation is different than what they typically see. F&#% ‘em all. These counselors have issues or why would they be here working the program? They aren’t as fancy as they think. Listening to the counselors’ false, contrived compassion is like fingernails down a chalkboard to me. And I just want to hear one goddamn original thing come out of anyone’s mouth in this stupid hillbilly rehab. “I don’t even care about jail,” Cam continues. “Like, I’m really sorry man. You know what I’m saying?”

“You don’t care about jail?” A man named Spider snorts. “Man, everyone cares about jail.”. And Cam shakes his head, sticking to his guns, but I can tell he realizes maybe he’s laying it on too thick. Even Sandy looks at him suspect. It’s day three and I hate my life. My daydreams are incessant and out of control like the ADD of a three-day binge. I sit here in these meetings yearning to be different, wishing to never hurt anyone again, but knowing there’s going to be more. The replay in my mind comes up constantly with all the ways to cook better, safer, yielding more. But I realize I’m also a little crazy. A few weeks without the drug is not enough detox to find yourself underneath the rubble.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Cam says to Spider. “I don’t want to go to jail. I’m just saying making amends is important.” This Cam kid is a joker. Pretty adept at lying. He’s even good at lying to himself, but aren’t we all? He has long hair and seems to be my age, mid twenties, and we both know we haven’t seen our last bump.
Spider takes a sip from his coffee, swallows hard and mutters, “Uh-huh.” Who am I kidding? This shit isn’t going to work for me. This is the program for the ‘others’. I see the depth of my creator and my challenge, my cross to bear, is more existential than anyone who sniffs glue or uses needles or drinks alcohol in a way I never have. I am happy that somewhere in the Twelve Steps these people find breadcrumbs to their better lives but it’s not going to help me. I just really like meth. I admire the commitment of some of the people in here—the older people who cling to their Styrofoam cups and watch the clock, biting their nails waiting for the next cigarette break. They are who this is for. They seem committed. But not the court-ordered patients, the ones checking the box to appease some judge somewhere who has a little faith that some of this works. And certainly not for me.
But don’t get me wrong. I mean, I’m all in, I swear to God. Well, I think I am. As long as it’s easy. I’m committed to never feeling the shame or the unrelenting pain of hurting another soul that cares for me as long as that commitment doesn’t take work and pain and crying about all the loss. Or facing what I have left in my wake—like my child. I mean, come on, there’s way too much of that. To be honest, I’m good at seeing my addiction patterns; I’m good at feeling powerless and even good at admitting it. But sobriety is new, as individual as the path to salvation, and a part of me wants to be changed or woke or whatever it’s called. So, I hope it all goes well. But something inside me knows that sobriety is but a philosophical concept. But relapse, now, that’s something I can wrap my mind around.
Sandy scribbles in a folder. “What about you Kyle?” she asks without looking up.
“What about me?” I answer.
Her eyes drift up from her folder and land on me. “What’s important to you?”
I think about the alcoholic man. Although I’m still not sure if I was a witness to the passing of a man’s life, I’m 100% sure I witnessed his rock bottom. And I hope he gets his second chance because I haven’t seen him again. I haven’t heard if he lived or died. He’s not sitting in this circle and his life hasn’t been talked about. I will never know if he gets sober or if he will fall in love or if he will ever save another tormented soul, someone like him, because he cleaned up and he knew better and his convictions changed lives. Never. I will only be left to imagine the pain and torment of his existence and how he fell so far down or how his mother must’ve cried herself to sleep at night wondering how her baby ended up with such an unforgiving curse. Now that’s authentic to me. That’s original and personal yet universal to me. And I hope God forgives him because the man was lost and broken and deserved a f&#%ing break from that love-shaped vacuum in the center of his being. Yeah, but don’t we all. And I wonder if everyone here is just checking boxes. The addicts, the counselors, hell, maybe even God. Maybe God is like me, telling himself that all of this getting sober business is a hopeful and precious concept but not real. God knows better than any of us how impossible it is to put down your vices by visiting this place and having faith in anything other than “you’ll get there when He decides.” When sobriety becomes the final box on his clipboard left unchecked, just below the f&#%ed-up shit like rock-bottom and humility and complete and utter loneliness. And we all know I’m not going to get to that point. Don’t we?
I’ve only been at this for less than a year. The addiction part anyway. But at least until any of us get there, we will always have the sanctuary of our substances. Unfortunately, the most original thought I have is the undeniable fact that with me, clarity is going to be directly proportional to how cynical my outlook becomes. And who the f&#% needs that? “Kyle?” Sandy’s voice is a nudge.
What do I want? I shrug. “I guess more than anything, I wish I could find the desire to even want to quit.” The room seems to gasp. Oopsie. I don’t think Sandy has a box to check for that.
She shuffles through the stack of folders, opens my file, and thumbs through the papers. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said.”
“Do you hear yourself when you say that, Kyle?”
Yeah, I hear myself, Sandy. I’m not fake like these other fuckers. I want to tell her and her condescending tone that a week into my detox at Mom’s, I had a tiny square baggie fall out of one of my shirt pockets and that sent me down a path I’d never experienced before. I mean, five seconds before that happened, I was committed. The loving, nurturing moment with Mom was still fresh. The tiptoeing around my feelings with my father was very new and real but when I saw the pink tinted miniature Ziploc with a fat half gram of pure, white oblivion my blood changed direction in my body. My heart pumped thicker, my lungs moved faster, heavier, and my palms started sweating even before I picked up the bag, pinched securely between my thumb and index finger.
At first, I thought, “No way.” I’ve never lost track of my stash; therefore, this must be a gift from the universe. God knew about the itch and the commitment I had made and knew I couldn’t just go cold turkey. Nobody does that. You need to know when your last hit is being taken. It’s part of the process, the ritual, right? And as I quickly hid the bag before Tom noticed I was salivating over some dope, I knew this internal dialogue was probably horseshit, but I still couldn’t get over how perfect the timing was.
And in the end, I let myself believe the lie. That it was a gift from heaven and who am I to question God’s plan? Make no mistake about it, the more you try to quit, the worse you find your addiction. And whaddaya know, I was high for four days. Much respect, God. “Do you think you probably misspoke?” Sandy slowly nods her head in a yes motion like I’m a child.

My blood starts to rise. I feel the room staring at me and consider retracting, suppressing the anger, but remind myself that this is real. That I’m the only person here who cares about being honest and authentic. And my anger is a pure expression of telling the truth in this moment, in this room full of bullshit users going through the motions to find leniency for their crimes. In this moment, true or not, it feels like I’m defending the weak, I’m defending everyone too impotent to speak, everyone who has ever cowed to these bullying bastards with their listless looks and superiority complexes and textbook terms to deflect real meaningful dialogue. In this moment, I guess I am still a little scared and uneasy about the frothing alcoholic that nobody seems to talk about.
“Do I think I misspoke?” I repeat the question. “Let me ask you, do you think your approach works?” Because in the dorms we talk about cooking meth and how I can use the phosphorus from the striker on the matches to make the chemical reactions—all theories I read in books that infected my mind with the chemistry, as well as the history, of this insidious drug. Both pieces of information that an addict doesn’t need to know or talk about when he’s in a rehab full of condescending counselors that he can’t stand. If anyone here is truly getting clean, I’m not seeing it. Sandy looks over the frames of her glasses and pauses for what feels like five minutes. “I follow the procedure of this institution.”
“Is it procedure to try and intimidate people?”
“You might want to be careful, young man.”
“What do you mean? I’m just trying to be honest.” It comes out sarcastic, but I am sincere. This anger building in me is causing something to crack. Like molten rock below the Earth’s crust, the boiling current has found a hotspot—a place where this pressure can be released. In the center of this f&#%ing ridiculous circle. Sandy makes a sour face. “We can talk about this in private.”
“No. I want to talk about it now. While I feeeeel it.” I stand up from my chair. “Isn’t that what would make sense?” I feel the other twenty people on the edge of their seats. They probably want to cheer for the guy who’s disrupting the whole inane process.
“I see that you are passionate, Mr. Houston.” Sandy closes my file and moves the stack of folders from her lap onto the table next to her. “But there are more appropriate ways to deal—”

“Like what? Sit around in a fucking circle and listen to more
bullshit?”
That sour face reappears. “Watch your mouth in the circle, please.”
“Why?” The tension in the room is almost as intense as it is within me. Something needs to break, something’s gotta break, but I’m not sure what.
Then I realize it’s me, and how I can’t hold back and my voice is high and my mouth is shouting. “I want to quit this shit! I don’t care any more, don’t you see? I don’t care about your files or your checked boxes or saying what you want me to say. I just want to stop hurting people and feeling like shit. Doesn’t that mean something?”
Sandy is pissed. “It might, if you weren’t screaming.”
“F&#% you,” I can feel the tears welling up, the lump in my throat, “I’m here for help. Just like the guy you hauled out on a stretcher the other day.” What about that poor bastard? Can’t anyone see that it matters, god damn it?
“That’s quite enough, Kyle.” Sandy stands and turns to leave, her stack of files now tucked neatly underneath her arm.
“I’ll tell you when it’s enough, Sandy. And we ain’t even close.”
“Calm down.”
“You’re supposed to help!”
“I do.” Her face is calm, and I wonder if maybe she does have some answers I need.
“Then help me,” I scream. “I want my f&#%ing life back!” I have flashbacks of my mother rocking me to sleep as a child, my father teaching me to play baseball, and I want to hug them both and tell them it’s not too late, that I found the will to change because love is stronger than addiction right now. I want to fix it all because it feels like there is time, still so much time to become the man they knew I could be. I’m ready to get clean, to quit.
Without turning around, Sandy says, “I’ll give my recommendations
to the staff and we’ll figure out what to do with you.” “Good! Maybe we can talk about it in the f&#%ing circle next time.” But I know I’m f&#%ed. These counselors don’t get talked to this way, from the heart, from the pain. I’m sure they have some bullshit box they check for assholes like me but what do I do? With everyone telling me my life matters, maybe I need someone to prove it. Just a little. Because I don’t feel it and I don’t believe it. And as Sandy walks out, I want to kick something, I want to scream at her and tell her that she would act exactly like me, if she had this itch, this confusion, and most of all, this guilt that grows louder each day I am without my drug.
But in this circle, I’m on my own. “I tried everything I could, “Darius tells me. “Sandy is adamant that you were violent.” It’s just after lunch and Darius, the African American counselor who up until this moment was the only person I believed had a backbone, stands at the doorway to my room, shifting from one foot to the other.
I shove my stuff into my bag. “Did you tell them I had a…” I catch myself because it sounds so clinical in my head.
“What?”
“A breakthrough.” There, I said it. What’s it matter now?
“Look, Kyle, I don’t like this decision. Between you and me, I think it’s wrong.”
“So don’t do it.” I want him to make it better because I’m in this precarious place and we both know if they kick me out, I’m going right back to those little baggies.
“It’s out of my hands.” I believe him. Darius is a genuine guy. Although we weren’t allowed to discuss his past, I can tell he has some scars. He’s one of the good guys, a true convert who understands the consequences of turning me away. He’s compassionate and tough and someone I could have admired if our paths would’ve crossed at a different time. “I’m sorry,” he tells me.
“I know.”
“This can be a powerful moment in your life, Kyle. You get to
decide how this plays out.”
“I know.”
“You can turn it around, find a good chapter, live a happy life.”
“I know.”
“Or you can continue down the path you were on and end up
in a morgue.” I say nothing. And I wonder if Darius is supposed to give me a rah-rah speech before he shows me the door. Did the alcoholic guy get the same speech in his past? Did he believe it? Did he do a damned thing that brought him closer to that happy life? I just wonder where that poor son of a bitch is right now.
Darius and I shake hands and I know this will be the last time I ever see this man. I think to myself that maybe I failed here. Maybe I owed more effort to my mother, I don’t know. All I can tell you with complete certainty is not much has changed. I still hate addicts, still hate recovery, still hate groups, still hate clichés. I still hate these counselors, with their ridiculous phrases and their condescending ways. I hate them all. Every fucking one of these unoriginal bastards. But the only thing that seems to matter, as I continue shoving clothes inside my bag, is the uneasy fact that this will be the last time I ever see this man again. Later in the day, as I drive through the winding landscape of the southern Missouri foothills with my mother, I think about the events of the last three days. I think of the words of Darius and my whatever you call it — breakthrough, I guess. And what thirty days would have been like with those people, what I would have been like on the other side and I consider feeling remorse for how I acted. But I’m mad at those sons of bitches, shocked by the lack of compassion from kindred spirits who have actually walked a mile in my shoes. They know what happens with lost souls if you send them away. And now I’m what—discarded by the very people who are obligated to give a shit? Congrats Sandy, I’m triggered. Back to this familiar sadness that reminds me how we got here in the first place. Lucky for me, I don’t care, not really. A weaker person might feel rejected or unimportant or not worth the time but not me. Because I am reminded of how unnecessary feelings really are when you can manufacture methamphetamine. And suddenly and without warning, it’s all better. I’m excited and trying to look contrite for my mother, but inside, I’m anxious and ready. I’m on my way back to a world that will help me find my last burn, my last hit, my last three-day binge. Because it will be different this time, under control, willful after all. Just a few more hours and the answers will be circulating back through my bloodstream.

But as we meander down the road, trying to sing the songs that are on the radio, looking at how green everything is around us, how impossibly green it is in springtime, I know there’s a good chance that I’m going to understand that alcoholic and his fate better than I ever wanted to. I look over at her, and wish I could just say what I’m thinking. I’m so sorry, Mom. It would have been so much easier if you could have just given up on me.