Okay, my friend. I rifled around the mess inside me and found what I needed to wish her happiness. Fly away and don’t fall back into the slime I’m trying to crawl out of here, and also drinking on the sly, calling it my life’s blood. Too scared to leave the last place where people looked at me and saw their son or blood brother or their shot at a winning season. I knew what she’d say about that. Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you’re on your own with your ghosts. You’re the ship, they’re the bottle.
I spent the night curled up on the sandy floor with my back pressed against cold rock, thirsty and hungry and in the end not sufficiently doped. Every cricket that inched along the cave face was a copperhead, every squirrel rustling dry leaves was a bear. If I lived till morning, I would walk down the mountain, find June, and tell her I was ready to fly.
61
A year was not a long enough time to stay away. Even three years might not be, I would find out. One of the many things June got right.
Is it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? No. Just the hardest one I had any choice about. Getting clean is like taking care of a sick person, versus being the sick person. They get all the points for bravery, but they’re locked in. You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?
Rehab is like being married to sickness in a lot of ways, really. Disgust comes into it. You try to deny that, swapping it out for a kindness you may not feel. You fake it till you make it. You watch other people being smug, because they made better matches than you did. You let them say all the stupid things, God never gives you more than you can handle, etc. You get comfortable with vomit.
So I had a head start, being well used to the no-toucher lifestyle before I started into the program. Dalit, is the word he was saying all that time. The untouchables of Mr. Golly’s childhood are for real. I’ve read all about them now. It’s amazing how much time you may find on your hands, once you’re freed up from tracking down your next fix, chasing the means for your next fix, bootlegging scrips, dipping out, ganking, pheeming, chewing chains, raving with Jesus, trying to find a new dope boy, and steering clear of the old ones that would eat your liver with gravy if they could be bothered. The perks of sobriety.
The Halley Library branch on the north end of Knoxville was the other half of my halfway life, after I graduated from detox-and-therapy boot camp, learned respect for properly dosed Suboxone under the tongue, and settled into my residency situation. Sober living home is the preferred term of professionals, hard-knocksville among the natives. My roommates came and went to some distressing degree. Triggers are seeded into the dirt of your every day: a song on the radio, a taste in the mouth, the cherry-soda smell of methadone that can be injected straight from the bottle. Drug tests are easier to fail at than any other subject. We weren’t even allowed to have mouthwash in that house. I thought a lot about my mom’s months-and years-sober chips I used to screw around with like play money instead of the damn gold doubloons they were. I thought of Maggot, how dutifully he would apply himself to fucking this up. June and Mrs. Peggot were right, getting him sober would take a higher power than Maggot had in his list of personal contacts. Would and did. Juvenile detention was his worst nightmare and best shot. After two years he was out, living with Mariah now in Bristol, Tennessee. Outcome to be determined.
The pillars of my sanity in hard-knocksville were three guys named Viking, Gizmo, and Chartrain. Gizmo and Viking were from two different Kentucky counties, Bell and Harlan, both closer to Lee County than the nearest outlet mall, similar broke-ass localities up to their ears in oxy fiends with no place to go. The Knoxville treatment enterprise draws from a wide watershed of humanity. These two were not much older than me, and an unmatched set. Viking being this big, blond specimen, foulmouthed as they come, and Gizmo a little guy with funny teeth and a mild stutter, polite as a live-in aunt. They both shared my life’s crushed ambition of never living in a city. Our house, as June predicted, was on the outskirts, in a neighborhood of folks that didn’t mind junkie has-beens in their midst. Not rich. Houses were small and close-set, fences were chain link, dogs had outside voices, and none of this was the problem. What set us on edge were all the human eyes that wouldn’t look at us, out on the city streets. The continual sirens, the pinkish light shellacking the windows all night long. We were wonderstruck at the idea of anyone at all, let alone ourselves, staying sober in such a place.