I’m at Promises Malibu. It’s a drug rehabilitation center in you guessed it, Malibu California. At least it’s not jail. After crashing my Ducati and damaging a police car in the process, I still don’t know how I got out of that, but I did. Call it a fuckin’ if you want because it is.
Rehab is awful, just as expected. And it’s not even the fact that I don’t have access to drugs or alcohol. I think I can do without the drugs for a long time. Maybe even forever.
But I’ll tell you what or who drives me insane. Grunner. Who cares what his last name is. He’s a seventy-five-year-old man who refuses to wear pants. I don’t know about that motherfucker. He’s nuttier than all hell, but he finds entertainment in making me miserable.
Like the night he decided to play “Home” by Michael Bublé for an hour.
First of all, I’ve never liked any of the whiny bastard’s music, let alone a song that reminds me of Amberly, because every love song does.
Finally, I had to stand up and say, theatrically I might add by waving my hand in his face, “I’m gonna shove that iPad up your ass if you push Play one more time.”
He growls. No, really, growled and bared his stained-yellow dentures at me. “I’d like to see you try, nut sac.”
I smile and sit back down thinking I might have made my first friend in here.
They have me on a schedule. One I have to follow. It starts with a daily reflection and what they say in the brochure is a deliciously chef-prepared meal to get you energized for the day of recovery. Bullshit.
After breakfast, one-on-one counseling with a therapist.
Also, bullshit.
Then we talk more, but this time in a group. It blows my fucking mind the shit people bitch about.
Then lunch, more individual counseling, because God forbid you have alone time, and then guess what happens? No, really, take a wild guess.
I’ll wait. You know I have plenty of time.
Group time. More time to share with others on addiction and trauma, and you know, life skills, because apparently, if you snort a grand a week in cocaine, you have no life skills. I’m not saying I snorted a grand a week, but I suppose there was a time when I did. Possibly. You do enough of that shit and you won’t remember how much you spent anyway.
The rest of the afternoon is more individual therapy, and I’m really fucking glad this is a thirty-day program because four weeks of this shit and I’ll never touch drugs again to stay out of this hellhole because this place blows.
Oh and after dinner, we get in a group and sing.
No, not really, but it sure fucking feels that way. They hold a group-dedicated meeting to help you master one step at a time in the 12 steps.
I still smoke. They don’t take that away from me, though part of me thinks they should.
With all this scheduled therapy, you’d think I wouldn’t have any time for myself. And you’d be right, but I hardly pay attention to everything they’re saying. Most of my time is spent inside my own head, obsessing over a girl I destroyed.
Scarlet comes to see me after I’m there two weeks. She brings Shade and then she hands me the book for Beauty and the Beast. “What’s this?” I look at Shade. He says nothing. Doesn’t look at me much. We’re outside on a wooden bench in front of the building.
“Thought it might help you,” she says, her wild blonde curls blowing in the warm fall air.
“With what?” I laugh, blowing out smoke into the air. I wish she’d take me home and she wants me to quit smoking. One step at a time, I tell her. But then I stare at the cover, instant hate in my blood. “Wanting a loaded gun?”
“Stop it.” She pushes my shoulder. “I know you care.”
I do. That’s my motherfucking problem. My mind’s okay with not caring, but my heart says I need to.
The change between not being in love, and falling, can be subtle. The change can happen so slowly you don’t know the difference, if you’re better off, or worse for doing so. Until it hits you and it blows you away and makes you someone else completely. The difference so strong it’s impossible to ignore.
I’d never seen Beauty and the Beast until River wanted to watch it that night. Her obsession with the beast made sense since she seemed to like me so damn much. But the part that got me was when she asked, “Why the beast give up? Him not fight.”
Ignore her use of monosyllabic details, I did, and focus on the question.
Why’d the beast give up?
My answer then was he was a pussy, but was he a pussy? He’d lost the girl. Why fight anymore?
Scarlet lays her head on my shoulder. “I miss you, ya crazy bastard. And I’m thankful you’re not dead. It’s not the same at the house without you.”
My throat tightens. I don’t say anything in return.
“Camden misses you.”
Tears sting my eyes. I won’t cry. Fuck that shit.
Scarlet’s hair gets in my mouth. I tell her to move. “He shouldn’t.”
Her eyes meet mine, tying her hair up and out of the way. “He does. Kids are resilient like that. He begged us to let him come with us.”
I didn’t want Camden to see me like this, but then again, he’s seen me at my worst, hasn’t he?
“Have you heard from—”
I cut Scarlet off. “No, and I won’t.”
“Are you doing okay in here?”
I stare at the grass, my hands, anything but her face. “I don’t know.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence.
Scarlet speaks again. “Do you feel okay?”
“I don’t know.”
She sighs. “What the fuck? Talk to me!”
I turn to her. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“You’ve got to get better,” she tells me, concern on her face. She cares. She shouldn’t.
“I don’t know if I can. I’m fucked up and I did fucked-up shit. I’ve got huge problems and they. . . even I don’t understand them. Just that they are there and deep. I don’t know if it’s fixable.”
“Everything’s fixable.”
I nod; it’s not going anywhere like this. My problems are inside me and it’s up to me to fix them. Not my family
“Have you seen River?” I don’t know why I ask. It just sort of comes out. Probably because I fucking care and want to know if she’s okay.
“No,” she admits, swallowing and fidgeting with her hands. “I talk to Amberly, check in. River’s turning four next month.”
Again, I nod, my heart pounding, my hands shaking. I didn’t want River. I never wanted to be a dad. Does that make me a bad person? To some, okay, maybe many, it does. But hear me out. I didn’t want her to know me. This guy. The one who destroys everything.
And then I realized, somewhere within the last few weeks here, she has nothing to do with that. She’s innocent. She’s been brought into this world without regard to what she wanted. When I looked at it that way, I can’t turn my back on her.
I look anywhere but at Scarlet. The ground, the trees, the blinding blue sky. I don’t want them coming here, but Scarlet keeps coming, every couple of days. As if she feels the need to remind me someone loved me.
They tell you to work on relationships in rehab. The ones you inadvertently destroyed, or in my case, purposely. I wanted isolation because the fewer people who cared, the better off they were when they realized what a piece of shit I really was.
But, as it turns out, they care enough to come see me.
“Rhya called me the night she killed herself,” I tell Shade, making eye contact with him.
He stares at me, blank-faced, his hidden behind shades. Though I know it bothers him, her death doesn’t affect him as much as it used to. “Why?”
“She asked me to look out for you. She knew you’d blame yourself.”
Shade shrugs. “You’re doing a pretty shitty job looking out for me.”
There’s truth to his words. I’m not surprised by them either.
They leave, and I’m left alone. In thought. Prisoner to my own mind.
In those group sessions, one word comes up more than the rest. Addict.
An addict doesn’t have to be addicted to drugs. It can be alcohol, adrenaline, crimes, sex, shopping, food, gambling, there’s so many different forms of it you can’t just assume being addicted only means you’re into drugs. The life of an addict is always the same though.
There’s no excitement. There’s no happiness or a future to escape to. It’s only obsession. It’s forever there, fully controlling. This completely overwhelming obsession. And until you learn to control it, to say to yourself, I don’t need that, it’s never going to change.
When I look at the book on my nightstand that night, I don’t have any desire for the addiction. What I want is a little girl with my eyes to see there’s more to me than being someone who’s completely overwhelmingly obsessed.
I have more than one bad habit and more paralyzing fears than most realize. There’s the glaringly obvious habit you notice when you look at me. They see that I’m suffering. They suspect addiction, but what they don’t see is what drives me to that high.
They don’t see the one who controls me far more than anything I use to numb the pain.
It’s in the early morning hours when I think of Amberly. I don’t even recognize the man in the mirror. Dark, tired eyes stare back at me. I’ve spent the entire night on the bathroom floor vomiting, shaking, and willing myself to sleep. I want a drink, or more.
I don’t sleep. I can’t. I stay up all night and stare at the wall in the bathroom. If I do sleep, the nightmares I have keep me awake the rest of the night. I don’t even know what they’re about, just that they’re so terrifying that my mind won’t stop. I wake up drenched in sweat and confused, afraid to open my eyes and see that those nightmares might be real.
It’s been three weeks since my last high.
Three weeks.
Though I’ve gone weeks before, even months, this time is different. It’s different because I went from using a gram a week to nothing. The crash is unbelievable.
I’ve tried to quit more times than I can count. Maybe every day. I once went three months.
Drawing in a deep breath, I’m not sure I can do this.
And if I think this is the worst of the withdrawals, I’m wrong. The times I’ve tried to quit, I know it’s weeks after you stop that’s the worst. That’s when most relapse. I’ve never admitted to anyone all the drugs I’ve done. Not even to myself. To think I put myself through this, a little bump for a thirty-minute high that leaves me feeling like shit.
Stumbling back to the bed, the Beauty and the Beast book is on my nightstand, and I think of her.
“What happened to you?” I ask myself.
Grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge, I stumble my way outside, and flop down into one of the wooden lounge chairs. Fires still rage nearby. The sky’s painted a smudgy black orange, the distant glow from the hills eerily close. It’s not easy to breathe out here, with dense thick smog that never seems to lift. Funny how that’s strangely similar to the crazy inside my head.
There’s a knot in my throat I can’t seem to swallow, but I keep trying. I’m sweating, perspiration forming at my temples, prickling and pulsing through me like a fever does, but I’m not sick. Maybe mentally.
I reach for the book Scarlet gave me. I flip it open, read it, then write a note in the inside.
I mail it to Amberly, for River.