A few words on the industry.

OK, it's been a few months. Health has been up and down. Money has been up and down.  Life. Life and the fullness thereof.

This long delayed post is not about adventuring down the highway with some puking, boasting, human shipwreck. It's a little note about the actual nature of my previous work, stripped of the human drama.

I pretty much came to the conclusion that the recovery industry is a fraud. Not to say that people don't recover, and yeah, some people are so fucked up they need close medical supervision to survive detoxing, but the idea that you can pay some guy some money and he'll fix your addiction is just bullshit.

That sounds kind of naive to me and it's coming from me. You can't really pay anybody to fix what's in your heart and there's nothing new about that. I've known that for a long time. Thing is that treatment centers are aimed at people who were cursed to find a magic bullet. They know for a fact that they can hand a man some money and he will fix them right up. They've had that experience. It changed their lives and gave them new hope and meaning. The promise of consumer society is realized in the addict. Most people wander around buying shit and hoping that it will contribute to their happiness. Some of us have bought something that instantly relieved us of a life time of pain.

Instantly.

So then it stops working. It's just one more problem. One more failed attempt at living. At this point, the industry steps in and promises a return to comfort. Just give them some money and they'll turn you into the happily productive sucker you always dreamed of being. You'll work more, make more money, lose weight and finally be happy and there's the holy trinity of consumer inner realization: Productivity, money and weight loss. What else could there be? I just read a book by some smug asshole, all about how he cured himself of alcoholism without having to question one single assumption about his pathetic life. He knew his plan worked because he was working harder, earning more and losing weight.

And that's what we all want. Isn't it?

Behind all of this is an empire built on bullshit. Insurance companies, healthcare bureaucrats, psychobabble scammers, and behind them the world empire of violence that we all call home. To make it all work a certain percentage of us are sacrificed. If we're lucky we're not worked to death in a mine in some impoverished backwater. If we're lucky we'll just have our spirits crushed and our minds shattered in some institution of civilization like the family or work. We will look for something to restore us to a sense of completeness and we will find we live in a world that offers only product. So we will eat ourselves to death. Or dose ourselves to death. Or struggle to control the universe by playing god until the universe finally breaks us.

Then we'll go looking for something else and in steps the industry because our failed society can't really sell you anything but more of the same.

I won't be coming to pick you up this time, but someone will.

I'm not done.

I'm far from done with this thing. I'm taking a break. My life got kind of complicated around the time I lost that job. Health troubles, money troubles, death in the family. All that followed by a reversal and some unforeseen luck. Go figure.

Anyhow. I have something I need to write about. It's bubbling in my brain. Right now I'm just tired. Give me a little while.

How did I get stuck with this?

When I was 19 years old I was living in a radical commune in Detroit. There were 14 of us living in this decaying mansion. Most of us worked in the car factories. Every week we put twenty dollars in a coffee can. That covered our rent and groceries for the week. Every once in a while it was your turn to make a grocery run. I was unemployed and in no great hurry to find work.

One day one of the women from the house walked in the kitchen and said, "Put on a clean shirt. We're going down to city hall. I'm going to apply for a job as a garbage man If they won't take my application I'll sue the city. You need to get off your ass and find a job".

A couple of month later I was 20 years old driving a city bus in Detroit.

I was a new hire so I worked the worst shifts. Midnights on the weekend, that sort of thing. My bosses were old school maniacs. They told us to take manly action when there was trouble on the bus. "Don't be afraid to use your fists".

I was a 20 year old white boy but I wasn't completely stupid. I've always been a worker and I guess it started back then. I tried to figure out what I'd have to do to keep the job. I couldn't fight everyone who got on the bus but I'd be fired if I didn't follow most of the rules.

One night a girl got on my bus. It was around 2AM and she was wearing a party dress and carrying a little purse. It was too cold out to be without a jacket and I dimly understood that she'd been on a date, fallen out with her date and been kicked out of his car.

She tried to give me an old transfer that she'd found on the ground. I told her it was no good. She looked around to see if any of the men on the bus would help her. There were quite a few of them and none of them stepped up. She turned around and walked off the bus.

A mile down the road, I realized, I'd been a COMPLETE SHIT. I'd left a young woman stranded on a dark cold street alone in the middle of the night. I was a fucking rat and it was too late to do anything about it.

I never wanted to do something like that again. I only worked for the Detroit DOT for a year but I kept driving off and on for the next 40 years. I taught myself how to pay attention to people's problems. I stopped worrying what my bosses would do to me. Fuck them. If they didn't want me out there making decisions they shouldn't have put me out there by myself.

I got to where I was really good at dealing with hopelessly fucked up people and putting babies to sleep and helping people figure out that I didn't give a shit about their money. It was fated that I end up getting rid of respectable commuters and honest workaday folks and devote myself to driving fucked up people full time. Who else could do it better than me?

I'd found an art form and a spiritual calling.

Well.... Shit

I just got fired. I'm not driving drunks and drug addicts around anymore.

The job was getting weird. The center is a for profit operation and it hasn't been making a profit lately. I don't really believe the owner is sober.  For many years he's had the good sense to hire smart people and stay the fuck out of the place. Lately he's been around checking out every time card and receipt. All I ever heard from my bosses was nickel and dime bullshit. They used to be generous and considerate and they encouraged me to do my thing. Now they're looking for "team players" which in my experience usually means people who are willing to sell their souls for a nickel or two.

I suck at team playing, which is why I drive for a living, or at least I used to.

On my end, I was getting really burnt out. I have money problems. I have tax problems. I have car problems. I just had heart surgery. My father just died. This all piled up in a few months. I'll admit that I'm not as cheerful and energetic with the clients as I used to be. I'm tired and somewhat depressed. I need to be taking care of myself. It takes a lot. I mean a huge amount of heart to keep coming back for drunks and drug addicts. If you're not able to take care of yourself you can't very well take care of them.

Here's the cynical part. They were taking in all sorts of last gaspers and creepy assholes, not because their prospects were good but because they had insurance or money to pay. They were taking people back for their fourth or fifth pass through. Most of them didn't give a shit about sobriety. They were grown men with moms who kept taking care of them long after they should have been in the street. Or they were old drunks who wanted to be relieved of the consequences of their drinking so they could continue to drink in peace.

There weren't that many of them but the trouble was they were the ones I noticed. It got to where the people who might want sobriety, always a minority, were invisible. I just went to work and drove creepy assholes around.

I suppose the last straw was a guy who was blacked out when I got him. He had spent the day drinking and I had already driven a good three hundred miles on other jobs when I got to his house. He'd already been in there once and now his wife wanted him to come back in. When I got there he refused to get off the couch. He was abusing his wife. Shouting at her in Punjabi. The house was a mess. Everyone in the family was obviously worn down to nothing by his alcoholism. It took something like 45 minutes to coax him out to the car.

Shortly after we left his house he started babbling in Punjabi. Then he started screaming. Then he said he needed a cigarette. He wanted to stop and rest. He wanted the radio shut off. He said I wasn't allowed to listen to music and he proceeded to scream so I would not be able to listen to music. Then he started grabbing at me and making demands. I told him repeatedly to be quiet and to keep his hands off of me.

I pulled off the road once and called my boss because I didn't know what to do with him. My boss got on the phone and yelled at him. He quieted down for a few minutes then he started jabbing me in the ribs with something. I looked and saw that he had been digging through my bag. He had pulled things out of my bag and thrown them around the back of the car.

I pulled off the freeway and called my boss again. He told me to turn around and take him home. I looked at the freeway. The freeway heading towards the center was moving. The freeway back to his house was stopped. I figured it would take me two hours to get to the center or four hours to take him home and get back to the center. By then I had been driving around eight solid hours. I was too fucking tired.

I got him out of the car and stood him up. I told him to stop what he was doing in, uh, clear terms. He started telling me how much he respected me and how he loved me. He started bowing to me. I told him to keep that shit to himself until he sobered up. We got back in the car and he pretty much continued to scream and grab at me and make demands and light cigarettes and scream some more for the next two hours. I stopped a couple of times. He did things like start screaming that he needed to piss while we were stuck in slowly moving traffic on a freeway section with no shoulder and the next exit five miles away.  I finally got off the freeway, pulled down a country road and stopped by some bushes on the edge of a field. He told me couldn't piss because he needed a proper bathroom. I told him to look around. There was nothing out there but fields and vineyards and trees. He screamed some more and I got him back in the car.

I finally got him in there, but that was the beginning of the end. I had already fallen on the wrong side in a couple of personality conflicts with a couple of other workers. I could handle their eccentricities. We're all ex drunks and drug addicts after all. They couldn't handle mine. They're the kind of people who make up little rules and expect everyone else to follow them. My boss started telling me I shouldn't talk to anyone else on the staff. His boss and the owner started questioning my time cards. I kept an electronic log, even though I'm not required to. I said I'd be happy to show it to them but they weren't interested. They both like to drive long distances on their vacations so they knew all they needed to know about my job.

Then I found myself scheduled to drive a fourteen hour day. That's fourteen hours of driving. Probably around 16 hours at work. I pointed out to my boss that that was way more driving in one day than we had agreed to. I pointed out that if I was driving a commercial vehicle I would be in violation of a whole bunch of laws that I actually know quite a bit about. I told him that I was perfectly willing to drive part of job the night before, spent a night in a motel and finish it up the next day, only having to drive for ten hours.

His first reaction was to blow up at me. He actually yelled, "Just do what I tell you to do". Then he actually threatened to fire me or have the other driver take my hours. I finally got him calmed down but I almost quit right there. I ended up driving four hours that evening and ten hours the next day. I picked up a kid who lived way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere. He looked like he was about nine years old but he was supposedly eighteen. He told me he took twelve Xanax when he saw me pull in the driveway. He was unconscious for the whole ten hour drive. I kept checking to see if he was breathing. Just before he passed out he told me he'd been using heroin since he was 12. He really did live in a little city over a mountain range and out on the edge of the desert. There's nothing there but that town and the biggest prison in the state. It's hundreds of miles from anything at all.

Two days later he called his dad and his family came and brought him home. He didn't like it there. They came and got him. He gave me the fucking creeps.

I'm supposed to be taking care of myself, following a strict diet and regular exercise program. I was struggling with it but then my father died. Our relationship was never good but that's a story for another time. He was still my father and I just plain needed to time to sort out the complicated feelings I was experiencing. I couldn't keep driving a thousand mies a week at a part time job. I told some staff people that I was getting burnt out but I wanted to hang on for another year. I've got a pension now. It's not much but in another year I can get social security and finally retire for real. I'm ready.

In the meantime I was blowing off exercise and craving comfort food. All I wanted to do was go to sleep. This was not going to work in the long run.

I took the drunk Punjabi home four days ago. He had successfully completed treatment and told me he was a new man. Two days later his family was begging us to come get him. He was drunk and behaving badly. Yesterday morning I left to take two people home and then go get the Punjabi. I was so nervous I was on the verge of a panic attack. His wife had assured the staff that he had errands to run and that he would be sober when I got there. I knew that was bullshit.

I got to his house early in the afternoon. He was a little drunk. His daughters were there. They clearly hated him. I told him no more bad behavior or I'd just dump him in a parking lot. He started apologizing way too much. I told him the more he apologized the less I believed him. He finally settled down. We stopped twice along the way. Once for him to piss. Once for me to piss. After each stop he was noticeably drunker, so I figured he'd hidden a bottle somewhere. By the time I got to the center he was passed out, which I appreciated. I woke him up when we arrived. He got out of the car and began dancing around and running back and forth. I was trying to get his luggage out of the car and the most anxious, hysterical staff person was alone in the office. She practically  shrieked but she got him rounded up. When I put his luggage away she told me to go talk to my boss.

At that point I kind of figured I was fired. My boss had stayed late, waiting for me. He never stays late. He told me I was unhappy and they were unhappy and I should just give him back the keys and leave. I kind of put a little fight but he's a good guy and I was burnt out and that's all there was to it. I'm gonna be hurting for money but it's going to be all right.

There are a lot of stories from that job that have gone unwritten. I'm not giving up on this blog just yet. In fact I'll probably write a bit more now that I have some slack. Eventually I'll run out of stories and shut this thing down.

I drove for a living for forty years, off and on. I'm tired of driving. I'm pretty fucking depressed today. I'd like it if I never drove again. That's how I feel now.

Tired

I am getting old I guess. I go drive 500 miles and I want to go to bed and sleep ten hours. Used to be, I would be excited and need to drink beer and smoke cigarettes and talk shit for hours.

What I'm getting is that life is kind of hard and aging is very hard and people die from grieving their youth.

I picked up this 52 year old woman from the hospital, far away. Her grown kids were there. Her daughter told me, "Watch her. She's really fuckin' sneaky".

The woman was in the hospital because she had been trying to drink without a stomach. She had an ulcer and it tore open and ripped her stomach in two. Blood was pouring out her ass and she was drinking vodka. She couldn't get drunk because the vodka was just pouring into her abdominal cavity but she was trying.

That's how her daughter found her. She went to the hospital and they sewed her back together and when she was well enough I got called to come bring her so we could fix her up. Yeah right.

I liked her. She was an old lesbian with lots of piercings and tattoos. She rode a big motorcycle. She must have been the terror of the town.

She complained for weeks because she didn't like the clothes her daughter packed for her. I asked her what her daughter did with her bed and her carpets, now that they were blood soaked bio hazards. She said her daughter got rid of them somehow. Then I told her she looked swell.

A year ago I drove in a drunk, retired business guy. He'd been a big shot. Hadn't had drink in 20 years   Then he retired and sat on the couch. After a while he figured the couch by itself wasn't much consolation. He started drinking for something to do.

He was a mess and I brought him in and they sobered him up and I drove him home and it was all smiles. A year later, there I was again. This time he smelled really bad and his wife had dropped the brave and dutiful face.

He was kind of incoherent and after a while I asked him when he'd last eaten something. He didn't remember. I stopped in a rest area and ran and got cookies and orange juice.  When I got back he was lying in the parking lot. I'm a big guy and he is 5 inches taller and 50 pounds heavier than me. I got him to his feet and carried him to the car. He drank the juice and ate some cookies. After a while he perked up a little so I didn't call an ambulance. He ended up leaning on two of us but we got him into the office.

A couple of days later he said he didn't feel good and he wanted to go home. They talked him out of that but it looks like he plans to die, alone and drunk. Sometime soon.

Speaking of dying. I drove up the coast to my favorite town. When I was 10 miles away, I stopped to get coffee. I called the client and said I'd be there soon. She said she had a quart of rum in front of her and she'd had a few beers. I told her to hold on and I'd be there in ten minutes.

Ten minutes later, I walked into her apartment. The bottle of rum was almost empty. She hadn't packed. At first she was walking and talking just fine. I tried to help her pack but pretty quickly she got to where she couldn't stand up. Then she couldn't sit up. Then she almost fell through a glass topped table so I let her stay on the floor and called an ambulance. When the ambulance arrived it turned out the cops and EMT's all knew her. One cop told me he'd had 4 or 5 calls on her in the past month. I found her keys, poured out all the liquor locked up her apartment and gave the keys to one of the EMT's.

I drove home alone. We never heard back from her. I kind of figure she's dead.

I picked up another returnee at a hospital way up in the mountains. I picked him up and took him home before. The hospital had him so tranked up he didn't recognize his own name. Later he told me that the last time I dropped him off he was drinking as I pulled out of his driveway. This time he told me it was going to be all different. Christ, I hope so.

There've been others. Lonely people in their 50's and 60's who just couldn't bring themselves to commit old fashioned suicide.

You know, I'm 60. I'm tired. Sitting alone on that couch seems like a good idea. I don't want to drink but sometimes it's hard, letting go of my youth. I spend a lot of time grieving my youth. I don't want it back but it's sad to see it go. The future used to go on forever and the possibilities were limitless.

I'm writing on a bad day. Tomorrow will probably be different. Sometimes this job is the best thing that's ever happened to me. Other days I wish I could quit. I figure I'll give it another year.