(I'm A) Rehab Star
by Kelly Dessaint
An excerpt from the novel A Masque of Infamy
From the moment I set foot in the Residential Treatment Ward of Hillcrest Hospital, I campaigned relentlessly that since I’d already made it to the second level on the adolescent ward, those privileges should be transferred to the new ward, and I should be exempt from certain restrictions. Like the No Smoking rule.
I pitched my case to Calvin because he was the most likely to bend the rules. It took some convincing, but he eventually let me sneak off the ward to smoke in the woods next to the building. He just looked the other way when I slipped out a side door.I kept my pack stashed in a log. It seemed like a safe enough place since I’d never seen anybody in those woods. Until the day I was heading down the path and a guy walked past me. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but when I reached into the log, my cigarettes were gone.
I panicked. It was my only pack and I didn’t have the money to buy another. Could that guy have taken them? I wondered. I didn’t know for sure, but I took off after him.
“Hey, dude!” I yelled, as I ran down the path.
When I caught up with him the guy looked terrified.
“Hey, man, did you come across a pack of smokes back there in the log?” I asked, out of breath.
“I uh…” The guy reached into his pocket and held out the pack. His hands were shaking. “I uhh… I found them.”
“Oh, man,” I said with a major sigh of relief. “That’s cool.” I offered him a cigarette but he shook his head. “You live around here?” I asked, to make small talk.
“Uh, I gotta go.” He ran away down the path.
It was only a matter of time before Julie found out that I was sneaking outside to smoke. Shortly after my run-in with the local kid, she posted a notice that stated all residents had to follow the same rules.
“No exceptions.” Calvin read the last part twice. “Any idea who she’s talking about there?”
I laughed it off, but I had to figure out a new tactic to maintain a steady intake of nicotine. Down the hallway from the RTW was the rehab ward. They had their own common room, a pool table, a bunch of couches, a television and even a piano. I was already sneaking in there occasionally to snag butts out of the ashtrays. Once they said I couldn’t go outside anymore, I began to spend more time with the rehabbers.
I hung around the pool table and kept my mouth shut, listening to them discuss how they ended up at Hillcrest. I was worried that I’d get thrown out for violating their sanctity, though nobody seemed to mind my presence. After a week of lurking in the corner, I got to talking with this guy Josh. He was only a few years older than me. Speed freak. He played guitar. But he was into lame stuff like ELO and the Eagles.
One day he asked me why he never saw me at meetings. I knew he was talking about AA.
“Oh, I’d like to go,” I said earnestly. “But I don’t think I’m allowed.”
“They can’t stop you from going to meetings. Meetings are open to anybody who wants to attend. It’s in the bylaws.”
I explained that I was in another ward, thinking I was about to get 86’d. But he said he’d look into it for me.
At first, I thought, Oh great. Now I’ve really stepped in it. Why would I want to attend a bunch of boring meetings and listen to these fucked up old people talk about how bad drugs are? Then it occurred to me that all the rehabbers did was talk. And while they were talking, they were also smoking. Talking and smoking, smoking and talking. It seemed to be part of their recovery or something. So if they were in these meetings all day long, doing all this talking, they must be doing just as much smoking.
All of a sudden, AA meetings seemed like the perfect place for me.
In order to attend meetings, I had to fill a form. On it, there was a space labeled, “Drug of choice.” I wasn’t sure what to write. I made an inventory of the drugs I’d come across back in Rosemead. Weed was everywhere, but it didn’t have the right panache. I needed something that would make an impression with the hardened drug users in rehab. Besides pot, I had smoked PCP twice and snorted cocaine several times. PCP seemed too extreme. So I split the difference and put down cocaine.
When Julie got the paperwork for my request, she called me into her office.
“It says here you have a narcotic dependency? I didn’t see that in your chart before.”
I told her that I did a lot of drugs back in LA and, since I was going home soon, I was worried that I might be tempted to take up old habits.
“Ah, a preemptive measure,” she said. “Very well then.”
A preemptive measure? I didn’t even know what that meant, but it worked. Like a charm. From that day on, the psych tech on duty had to walk me to my meetings and pick me up afterwards. Calvin almost flipped out when he got the memo. “What kind of scheme is this?” he demanded. But I insisted that it was a preemptive measure and I couldn’t miss a meeting. He just shook his head with bemused resignation.
I went to as many meetings as I could. There was a booklet that listed where and when the meetings were held. All I had to do was plot out my daily schedule of smoke breaks. Besides the AA meetings in the evenings, there were Cocaine Anonymous meetings on Friday and Saturday nights, Narcotics Anonymous every afternoon, and Al-Anon on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
I usually got to the room at least half an hour early so I could start smoking right away. Sometimes there were free donuts with the coffee.
Each meeting began with everybody in the room introducing themselves. Then people went around the circle telling their stories. It was just like group in the adolescent ward, except each story ended with, “And that’s when I hit bottom.” The stories were always tragic, but never boring.
When they got to me, I just said, “My name is Louis and I’m happy to be here.” Even though I didn’t claim to be an addict, it was a little nerve-wracking being a fraud and manipulating them over their misfortune. I knew I had no business pretending to be in their league. These people had real problems. Their lives were falling apart because of a disease. They knew suffering. And there I was, some pissant kid, running a scam so I could smoke. But, I was happy to be there. That was no lie.
Because I was the only kid in the rooms, when the meetings were over, people often came up to me and congratulated me. They’d say things like, “You’re so brave.” And, “You’re an inspiration.”
I had the perfect racket. Things were going great. As long as I kept my trap shut, I assumed I’d be able to maintain my subterfuge indefinitely. But a few weeks later, this guy named Phil called me out in the common room as I was smoking and watching the guys shoot pool. Phil was a one-man pity party. He’d lost it all. His wife, his kids, his high-paying job, his expensive car… everything. Even his self-respect. When he hit bottom he was living in a motel room on Lee Highway outside Sylacauga. He always had to be the star of the down and out. Any time somebody told a sob story, he’d try to one-up their tale of woe by saying, “You think that’s bad. Well, listen to this…” I’d heard the other rehabbers talking shit behind his back.
“What are you doing here anyway?” he asked me. “Shouldn’t you be at home with your parents?”
I didn’t know if he was joking or if I really did have to defend myself. I tried to shrug it off. International man of mystery. That was me.
But he wasn’t letting up. “What’d you do, stay out too late one night and get a whuppin’?”
There was a whole group of rehabbers looking at me. Should I admit that I was just hanging around to smoke? Even if they weren’t totally offended by my deplorable actions, they’d no doubt put the kibosh on my whole scheme. So I told them about what happened with my father and my little brother. Surprisingly, once I started talking, I couldn’t seem to stop. I told them about my brother at the Ranch and the pending court appearance.
“And now I hafta testify against my father…”
After I finished talking, they told me how sorry they were about my circumstances.
“Bless your heart,” Mama Teri told me. She was hooked on painkillers. Said she was thirty-nine, but she looked fifty-four. “Even if you’re not ready to talk, eventually you need to let it out.”
I was quick to brush off their concern. “It’s no big deal. I just prefer not to talk about it. Don’t wanna bum anybody out.”
“Part of working the steps is sharing your story,” Josh said.
“It’s really good that you’re trying to get your shit together so young,” said Gordon, the alcoholic toilet paper salesman. “I wish I had the smarts to do it when I was your age. I’d be a lot better off today.”
Even Phil came up and apologized. “If there’s anything I can ever do for you, just let me know.”
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