GREER: a guy goes to detox to detox
In Cottage B I met a baker’s dozen of characters, and by that I mean that there was more than a dozen—although truth be told if it was a true “baker’s” version as before stated I cannot say, so, as they say, “bear with me.” They were not only like characters in a story—as in, this one—but also in the colloquial sense. In other words, lord the bakers they were—junkies and drunks and Adderall and speed addicts, the concoction of which was a vast airy bread of confusion—they brought with them their baggage, and the orderlies kept most of that baggage locked in lockers to which we only had access when we asked for it, and only then upon that orderly’s good humor. It was in short, a deranged arrangement of circumstances with deranged occupants under insane rules, said rules meant for us who may have been and/or still are and always were insane.
It goes without saying that I’m saying all this with a literal grain of salt, plucked off the bib of my T-shirt, a leftover of a burrito lunch, indulged post-detox by any number of years. Of all those standouts I will acquaint you with a boy—for a boy he was—I’ll call him Slater, for he reminded me of that character (here we go again) from a seminal 1990s film about stoners, and thus it is fitting, for Slater, with his long hair and easy ways, was in detox for heroin. He was the first to say something to the effect of “What’s up dude? You need a smoke?” about ten minutes after I’d been admitted to the cottage. To say I would call this a welcome would be disingenuous, for I believe I was still a little drunk, and as such a smoke sounded like about exactly what I needed.
Greer, was a kind of sage, or the detox chieftain. You could tell this because he was taller than anyone else, including Johnny the orderly, about whom it was said he’d once played NBA basketball, though I had my doubts. Johnny never liked to move much from behind the front counter, though he was tall and lanky and bald like a basketball player ought to be. Whenever I’d pester him for my Diet Pepsis he’d look at me with the kind of disappointment a mother knows to show. He was the physical embodiment of a customer service representative’s voice. Instead of working somewhere where he belonged—think CVS, think Dollar General—he’d ended up at the detox. But enough about Johnny the orderly. Greer seemed taller even than detox itself, and seemed to take the fact of his being there at all like a religious calling. He wore the scars of his penitence on his knuckles, and at first I thought it was because he’d fallen and busted his ass, or that some poor yuck’s face matched those knuckles.
But I’d soon find out that these scabs were the effect of the eczema that plagued him, the way all spiritual leaders are plagued by maladies, whether they have them themselves, or can heal them. It was Greer in fact who ended up bumming me that first smoke, though Slater had offered it. This was typical of detox. Someone might offer you anything, but never provide it, and now I know that that’s just breathing. And it was Greer in fact who later remarked that I was still drunk right after admittance, though the truth of this is impossible to say. I remember all of that first night. After reflecting on this I think that perhaps everyone was correct, and probably none more so than Johnny the orderly, who maintained his post behind the counter through it all until, forced to retrieve us from outside on our smoke break. He languished at the door, as if half out of breath, or of beers haha—as if he had any—half bored like a bar bouncer, and he said, “all y’all inside now, fun’s over.”
On visiting day, what do I say about Greer’s little pregnant wife, done up all pretty and beaming and him standing there just inside the glass doors of Cottage B to greet her, and her looking happy—yes genuinely happy—to see him? I thought of the poor creature growing inside that woman, and what all that child might have to endure. I gave no thought to my own little creatures and what all they would live through and I won’t divulge that to you now, for if I did there’d be little point of writing this.
I talked with Sarah and explained to her what things were like in the cottage, and while Greer talked with his smiling pretty pregnant wife, and while Slater—even Slater—talked to this older couple whom I assumed to be his parents, but come to think of it they must have been grandparents or something like that.
After a while, after all our visitors had come and gone, we wandered around, and we went out to smoke, and we told ourselves we were getting better. And we continued to believe that lie.
***
One day after detox and while I was in PHP, after the day was done and I’d returned home, or to the neighborhood, that is, I stopped by the local grocery store, because I use the pharmacy there and I had some refills, etcetera. It was going to take a half an hour, of course. These universal laws cannot ever be broken, lord only knows. What else could the little labcoated pharmacists inside their windowed cell be doing as they jogged hither and yon and jostled about one another and took calls and gazed into computer screens and talked to the interminable customers and the interminable computer screens, all of whom never knew that their prescriptions could cost anything in the first place let alone that much? How could they (and here I’m referring to these same labcoated people) ever count out the thirty or so of my weekly antidepressants? Nevertheless, in the old days what I’d have done was I’d go to the bar on the street level—a floor above this basement—and had myself a beer and a shot and generally enjoyed the wait for the Rx. And so, on this day, to the bar I went. But I hadn’t any intention of drinking. I figured, it’s a pleasant enough place to wait. And there I did indeed wait, hovering above my Diet Coke.
I told all this to an addiction group meeting the following day at PHP, beaming in my triumph, for I’d indeed ordered that Diet Coke, which I’d nursed and I quietly paid for that and returned to the pharmacy and I went on my merry and sober way, much pleased—if you cannot already tell—with my restraint.
It was Greer of all people in that circle of addicts who spoke first. We’d gathered in the same space where we convened for the morning meditation, though now there were only eight of us give or take, and the counselor guiding us through the meeting, which ran exactly as an NA or AA meeting might run. There were endless rows of empty chairs and with the high vaulted ceiling you could hear your lies ringing out to god. Except today I wasn’t lying. Greer leaned forward towards me, his forearms on his knees, his eczema scabbed knuckles on a nice mend—now a few days after detox—and he said, “I’d get another pharmacy if I were you.”
This sentiment rang round our circle of chairs and of assholes sitting upon them, and in them for that matter. It would only be years later, while still in “recovery,” that I’d learn this brand of shame was part and parcel of the entire recovery philosophy. I’ll get into that in a minute, as they say down here down South. What’s important to note now was that, at that moment—a moment of exaltation—my cohorts brought me down a peg. Not so that I could join them. That wasn’t the goal. It was so that they could realize the nothing I was, and so that they could feast upon that, and so that I could feel every bite. Oh, the irony, of eating something that doesn’t exist! The very organic matter that comprised me was compromised. But this I refused to believe. And thank god. Think of the word “believe”: to “be live” oneself. How glorious. How catholic. How holy at odds with the philosophy of recovery.
***
This is the tragedy of Greer. He was, as I have already told, a kind of Buddha in Detox. Greer loomed over all others, tall as he was. And he effervesced a kind of wisdom that probably came as a result of his being a chef, which he was. Ah, the etymology of such a word. There are some who read “chief,” for what’s the difference? If only the ignorant knew of the perils that those people who work in the service industry confront, about which you have no knowledge and little concern. What would be the point in going into the mire that is the standard American treatment of our restaurant workers? If you ever want to know what happened to indentured servitude and slavery in North America, here are two answers: prison, and the service industry. And of course in a land that likes to pretend that work is blind to race it matters not at all that Greer was tall and white and male and straight. What does matter is that he was a drunk. But man, Greer could call down a horde of drunks and junkies and he’d bid them listen as he gobbled Texas Pete and grits. And yet he failed like we all do. Maybe you don’t know that yet, but you will.
I ran into Greer outside of PHP, in the pathway leading to the doubledoors, where patients often gathered to smoke their endless cigs. You might think there was some interminable furnace burning there for all the smoke, and you wouldn’t be wrong. It was the oven driving the combustion of all our selves, and recombining us into something we didn’t recognize, and would later have to learn to live with, that is if we accepted the new forms that recovery was supposed to mold us into. Greer was smoking, and he wore a shortsleeved plaid shirt, I remember that. And I remember the sad way that he looked at me when he told me he was getting kicked out. Kicked out? Yes, expelled from the Institute.
He had a face, how could I describe it? If you took an old and sad dog that you found on the side of a road and gave it Greer’s scruffy cheeks and hangdog bangs, then you’d have it, even if the description itself is a muddle of redundancy. This was the man who once told me to find another pharmacy because my pharmacy sat nearby a bar I frequented. But he was blunt when he told me that he had drunk, and that he had drunk no small amount. He was just exactly that vague. Sometimes I quail at the thought of what my cohorts might have done during those times, but if I’m going to be truthful, that is nothing. Greer said that he’d stopped by the liquor store and picked up a single shot—just one little shot of vodka. “It can’t do much,” he thought, so he told me. I remember that he flicked the ash of his cigarette at this retelling, as if he was flicking away that little plastic Smirnoff bottle so no one would find the evidence. Next to us the stupid trees were encroaching, and they were growing more sinister because it was March and they were blooming stupid and awful and waging their hateful campaign to keep us hemmed inside the Institute of our recovery.
“And then I went back for another single shot,” he told me. “And pretty soon I had a fifth. And now here I am.”
It’s in your pee, you see. What they do is they test for a metabolite of alcohol, and if you had something to drink within the last day or so, it’s going to pop up, and whenever something’s watching you (you could never say who that actual someone was, because whoever that person or people could possibly be you’d never know, not even when they cornered you and asked you into a meeting room and sat in front of you like a panel of judges which of course they were), as they always are at the Institute, then what happened to Greer’s gonna happen to you, like it almost did to me.
When I last saw him he was still outside with his phone to his ear, and he was lighting a fresh cigarette, and then he turned his mouth skyward to let go a puff, and then his chin dropped and the muscles of his jaw worked in that way when you can tell that a man is talking with his wife, and he’s trying so hard just to get her to let him back into the house: baby, please, baby, I know I fucked up bad this time, but please.
Some time later, years after PHP, I’d look back on it and think . . . What am I talking about? I don’t honestly look back on it at all. But what’s the purpose of all of this? To remember, indeed. What’s worth remembering? There were people there. They had hearts that had been broken. Their lives had been shattered blah blah blah. But most of this is true, though the jigsaw they’d made of their lives they were trying to piece back together. I’m aware of the irregularity of metaphor: the saw part, and not the puzzle part. But that’s no accident. Ask any one of us, and saw is what we’d done to our lives–the verb form of that word, that is. Have you ever tried to put something back together after it’s been sawed apart? That’s what we’re talking about here.
One day, about a year after detox and PHP, I received a text message from Greer, inviting me and presumably others, for there were numbers to which the message had also been sent, to a cookout at his house. “One condition,” the text read, “You have to be sober. If you are not currently sober, please do not attend.” What to say about how I felt at that moment? I was excited and sad. Greer was making it happen. He was championing his road. His cute little wife must have had the baby that was growing inside of her, and maybe Greer was working, and they were happy. And I was happy to hear this. I was happy too, for myself, where I was in life. But I couldn’t go to that barbecue. Was I to act like I didn’t drink?
***
Today I watched a man in line for tacos, and I watched as he nodded out, on his feet. There was something in watching and knowing. This was not unlike, at the same taco shop, when I met a drunk. But the drunk was maybe more sad. As I went to the beer coolers, a boy guarded the hall to the bathrooms, so as no one may find his drunk father. When he looked at me, the boy’s face like a lump of masa, his eyes big as tacos. But I wasn’t going to the bathroom, and when the father staggered out the boy vanished. There’s a phrase from a poem: the child, the father of the man, or some such. Here the father, piss darkening his jeans. It was summer, when no boy goes to school, but instead mows a lawn beside his father with the weedwhacker, and today daddy’s thirsty. The sad way the boy barred the bathroom, the father in the pisser sadly trying in vain to dry the wet piss on his junk. And then the sad spectacle at the counter. The son had wisely wilted into whatever, which was likely the truck that they’d trucked in on back out in the parking lot. I wore a suit—work, believe it or not—and the father had to know if I was a lawyer, likely on account he needed one. And the truth lay squat in the parking lot: the father had the boy driving for him. And that boy had to have been at most fourteen.
But to return to the man I started telling you about, the man who nodded out at the taco shop: I was pretty sure that only I saw he was a junkie, that he’d just shot up. He too had the garb of what crewed a job trimming limbs from growing things. And he had a clear track on his forearm, and I just hoped that of all things he wasn’t driving or operating anything heavy or that had a saw attached to it. It’d be one thing if all he did was seem to fall asleep on his feet, like a narcoleptic or something. But he had that itch too. I hate to say so, but I knew exactly what that guy was feeling. But then I watched him nod out as he ate, mid-conversation with his boss. And I wondered whether the boss knew what was what. And I wondered whether or not to say something. Let me tell you why:. if you’ve come this far you know I’d not say something. To say something means that that guy’s failed, is failing, and will continue to fail. It’s up to that guy to see—so I hope one day he can—that as he nods out while talking with his boss at a taco counter, that he has already failed himself. I know it’s a stretch to ask that the guy who’s high can see this, just as it’s impossible for the drunk father to stumble back out to the truck that he’s supposed to captain with his preteen son waiting in the driver’s seat, the boy too ashamed to be in public with his father. What am I gonna do for either man? I’m gonna make him want to get high or drunk by saying something, that’s what. And he’s already got plenty of reasons to do that. I thought of Greer telling me to get another pharmacy as I slipped the three twenty-five-ounce 411 beers into the sack with my taco, the cashier gloriously oblivious. Maybe—on some off chance, in some strange universe—I’ll come across this and recognize myself. The best I can hope is that all three of us—the drunk, the junkie, and me—might have a day, and on that someday we’ll see who we once used to be.
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