Hard to get around to writing.

I used to work a lot. That's why I wrote a lot. I was at work all the time. I kept my work face on and I was lonely. Writing was my only chance to be myself. I would come home and write, falling asleep with my fingers on the keyboard. After I got fired, I thought about it for a while and decided, fuck it. I'm not looking for another job. Now, I have to remember to take time off from not doing much and be sure to keep to myself and do nothing. It's hard. There's a lot to do and that can distract me from keeping to myself and refusing to do any goddam thing. I need that though. It really helps.

I ran into a guy I helped at my old job. He told me he felt safe talking to me. He asked me to help him with his drug problem. He's a meth addict. Last night he called me very late. He was in a motel room with his boyfriend. They'd been shooting meth for several days and they were starting to come down. He was frantic to be told he'd be all right. He wanted to tell me all of his problems. Some of his problems were hallucinations. He kind of knew that. He kept calling me. Finally, a little before sunrise he made it into the hospital. He begged for help and they took him in and called his mom.

I'm hoping he lives through this latest relapse. I told him I loved him. I told him he would be alright but it might take a while.

This weekend I went and saw the Flaming Groovies in their home town of San Francisco. I stayed in San Francisco. I had terrific visits with wonderful old friends. I came home and played music with my new friend. I've been traveling. I would travel more but I got fucked on taxes. Fucking taxes. Another new friend owns a good tattoo shop. I go in to say hello and walk out with a new tattoo. It's a painful and expensive way to go visiting but it's fun all the same. My music friend got tickets to see the Drive By Truckers this weekend. I've seen more good bands lately than I'd see in ten years working. I don't even like to see live music. Too many people. Too much noise. I have to stay home by myself for a couple days afterwards. It's still worth it, like the tattoos are worth it. I have a happy little swallow on the back of my left hand. I'm free as a fucking bird.

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.

More drama

I drove a long way to pick up this kid. He was a heroin addict. He was the worst heroin addict in the world His detox was going to be the worst and most protracted detox in the history of heroin. We were all going to be shocked by the extreme sickness he would experience during his detox. He didn't care. He could detox on his own. He probably didn't need detox meds because he was tough. He was a thief. He was a completely heartless thief. He stole ten thousand dollars from his grandma. He had millions in cash buried out in his yard. He was coming into treatment on his mom's grocery clerk benefits. He was the greatest mechanic I'd ever met. He'd built the most extreme off road vehicles with the most powerful engines ever built. He'd made more money flipping cars than he'd made stealing and selling drugs. He never paid full price for drugs. He knew the right people. When you know the right people you never have to pay the kind of money that suckers pay for drugs.

His extreme, shocking detox lasted two days. He was up walking around boasting to people by day two. They made him attend classes and group sessions. He didn't like that. He wasn't the center of attention in classes and sessions. Classes really pissed him off. He stood up in the back of the room and gave the finger to whoever was teaching through the whole class.

The staff had a talk with him about this shit. He called his mom. She came and got him on his third or fourth day.

Been a while.

Somehow, the job is becoming a job. I have a wealth of experience. It tells me that drunks and drug addicts are pretty damn dependable. We'll say and do almost anything to keep living in our heads.

The other day I spent five hours with a 23 year old kid. He was a tough guy, a bit of a redneck and a raging drama queen. He claimed to drink 3 fifths of hard liquor a day. Then again sometimes he'd bump the number up to three half gallons a day. He said that he'd had chest pains and sharp pains in his left arm. He'd been to jail a few times. He gets in fights a lot. Everybody attacks him and he has to defend himself. He's sent guys to prison testifying against them after they tried to kidnap him. His girlfriend gets in fights a lot too. They constantly have to defend themselves.

I told him, "All that drama, that's alcoholism. Alcoholics love drama". He didn't really go for that. He just wants to be like his girlfriend. She's from "Europe". In "Europe" they appreciate fine wine. He wants to spend more time enjoying fine wine with his girlfriend. He knows how to talk to rich people. He can operate at their level because he cleans a lot of rich people's swimming pools. He owns a piece of the pool service. I'll give him this much. He's a hard worker.

I'll tell you the truth. I didn't really like him much and he's decided he likes me. I try to take a few minutes and talk to him when I see him. I know he's trying.

Did I mention the guy I went to high school with? Not really. He graduated from my high school seven or eight years after me. He was the last thing I did on a fourteen hour day, most of it spent in barely moving traffic. I picked him up at a psych ward. He'd been forcibly hospitalized after they found him wandering, drunk on a busy train track one morning.

He had a terrible girlfriend. She emptied out all of his bank accounts after he went in the hospital. He didn't think his drinking had much effect on his life. He keeps bobbing up and down in life. Owning fancy houses and living in motels with money borrowed from relatives. He wants to find the right woman. She has to be a lot younger than him. She can't object to his drinking. He meets women. He gives them control of his bank accounts. He has a few drinks and they steal from him. He doesn't understand it. He left to go to a big casino, have a few drinks and see if he couldn't meet a nice woman.

Last week was an anniversary. I haven't had a drink in 21 years. I've been single and living in this damn trailer for ten years. All things considered, it's alright.

Drug seeking behavior.

I spent quite a few hours in a squalid Emergency Room waiting area. It wasn't dramatic or anything, just sick poor people with no place to go but the ER. Lots of babies, sick, poor babies.

Two of the clients got sick at the same time. Everyone thought they had food poisoning but it turns out one of them had appendicitis. He had the all new appendectomy procedure, three tiny incisions and twelve minutes total on the operating table. He admitted he was hoping to catch a buzz off the anesthesia but he went straight to sleep. I brought him back the next day and he was fine.

By the way, the other guy had an upset stomach.

There's another client. A girl, very young, 19. She's been using meth and heroin. She's very pretty in a terribly vulnerable big eyed sort of way. She attracted a suitor, which is not a good thing. He's an older fellow, a real gangster, albeit a small town gangster. He's started putting his arms around her when he thinks he can get away with it. She lets him do it, for all I know she encourages him. The trouble is that 19 year old pretty girls don't almost kill themselves with meth and heroin because they like to party. She's in some kind of psychic pain from God only knows where, although it isn't hard to guess.

She has a habit of punching things and breaking bones in her hand. She'd sprained her wrist once from punching a wall. She got to go to the ER but all they did was wrap it and tell her to keep it iced.

When the guy got back from the ER, she started complaining that her hand was hurting her terribly. It was somewhat swollen but not red or discolored. She kept wandering off and coming back with her hand more swollen. Late in the afternoon, I was coming back from some errand or other when her paramour opened the door to her room and said, "What's going on? It sounds like you're punching the wall".

The staff yelled at him for going into her room and she came out and said that the noise must be coming from some other room. By then her hand was really swelling up and she said she wanted to go to the ER.

On the drive there she was gasping with pain every time the car went over a bump. I pulled up to the ER door and she went in while I went to park. When I got back, I asked about her. The guy at the door asked me who I was and I explained that I was the driver from the treatment center. He said, "That's pretty interesting because she fainted in the waiting room and she just denied that she was in a treatment center. You better come talk to the triage nurse".

I was led to the triage room. The client was in a wheel chair and the nurse was asking questions while she took the client's vital signs. After I was introduced the nurse asked again, "Are you in treatment for drug or alcohol addiction?"

The client said, "Yes".

The nurse asked, "What drugs are you addicted to?"

The client looked a little frantic for a second. There was a long pause. Count the seconds... one... two... three... four.... "Meth".

She was wheeled back to the waiting room. We sat there for a while. She had me get her candy from the vending machine. She stood up and staggered a little. I don't know if she was putting on a show or not. I put her back in the chair.

Finally, they came and took her back into the ER. It was my day off and I was not supposed to be there at all. We made arrangements for a cab to take her back later and I left.

When I got back, I heard a staff person talking to the doctor, "So, it was just a bruise? She was not given any narcotics? Good. Could the injury have been self inflicted? I see."

I don't know if she really came back or not. I hope so. She seemed like she was doing OK till that guy fell in "love" with her. I think that scared her.

There's another client who is addicted to diazepam. She's detoxing and she can't sleep. She's having panic attacks. She hasn't slept in 72 hours. She wanted me to go pick up some medication that might help her sleep. It probably won't. I've had the stuff and it didn't make me drowsy. I didn't have time to get her medication before the pharmacy closed. She's really mad at me. She thinks I did it on purpose. Like I said, it was my day off, I was not supposed to be working. She wasn't supposed to get her prescription till tomorrow anyway. I had other things to do. She hung around the office and glared at me. She kept telling me her symptoms, insomnia, panic attacks, shaking. I said, "That's because you're detoxing from a dangerous drug. You feel like that when the drug goes away". When I finally left for the day, she glared at the car.

No shows

I'm really tired but I think I'll try and write this before bed.

Two days in a row I drove a long way to pick up people who panicked at the last minute. It could be discouraging. I think it's a miracle that anyone, anywhere ever gets clean and sober. I'm impressed that anyone would even try.

Of course I'm talking about alcoholics and addicts here. Lots of people use drugs and alcohol without a problem. I always have to clear that up because I don't want anybody to think I'm for any kind of prohibition. Around here we make wine and we grow weed and if you can't handle them, I come scrape you up and drag you into treatment.

Anyhow, yesterday, I drove into the big city to pick up a lady who claimed that she didn't have a drinking problem but she seemed to be drinking a lot since her divorce. I called her on the way to her house but she wasn't answering and her mailbox was not taking messages. That's a bad sign right there.

When I got to her house I drove past. The front door was standing open. There were Christmas decorations in the window. Another bad sign. Most people, even if they're drunk, manage to put away the ornaments by May.

I parked the car and walked up to her house. She stuck her head out the window, saw me and ran and slammed the front door shut. I tried her doorbell a few times then stood around on the sidewalk for a while. After a while, I called the center. They told me to come home.

So there went something like 5 hours of driving in heavy traffic for nothing. I was kind of annoyed.

First thing this morning I woke up early and drove 3 or 4 hours in heavy traffic to pick up a young amphetamine addict. He'd been cut off by his family. He was homeless and living in his car. I called him a few times but he wasn't answering. His voice mail message was him bellowing incoherently. Bad signs.

He sent me a text message asking me when I would be there. I gave him a time and asked him to call me. I didn't hear back from him. I was supposed to meet him at a gas station near the freeway. I got there about the time I told him I would. He wasn't answering his phone. He wasn't answering text messages.

I hung out at the gas station for a while. Then I went and got lunch. Then I hung out some more. I sent him text messages every once in a while. After two or three hours I sent him a message that I was leaving.

I drove about a hundred miles when he sent me a text message asking if I could come back and pick him up. I pulled off the freeway, explained that I was 2 hours from home and it was late. I asked him to call me. He never did. I waited around for 15 minutes or so and then sent him a message that I was going home.

He called me a couple of hours later but I never got the call. I was almost home by then and there was no way I was going back down there.

When I got back to the center there was a group of clients standing around smoking cigarettes. I rounded up all of my stuff. Threw away the trash in the car. Locked it up and walked over to them. I told them I was proud of them for even trying to get sober.

I know most of them want to clean up because they are in trouble at work or they're facing jail time or their wives are mad at them. Not many of them have really looked inside themselves and seen the abyss. Most of them are going to die fucked up. That's OK I guess. They took some time off and tried out the program at the center. Lots of people are so scared they can't even take a break for a few weeks. They will die fucked up. I hope they don't suffer too much.

I'm sure this is full of typos. I kept nodding off as I wrote. This is not a bad life.

Got to love 'em

There was a guy who was my teacher. He was a spiritual guy. He was a guy who did tons of service for suffering people. He was infinitely kind to me.

He used to send me letters. He always said the same thing. "You've got to love alcoholics. If you want to be happily sober, you've got to learn to love alcoholics".

I kind of thought he didn't know what he was talking about. He was a retired small business man who lived in his old hometown. He lived quietly with his wife of almost 50 years. I was a bus driver. I talked to alcoholics all the time. They were whiny. They wanted something for nothing. They thought they were better than everyone else. They would fly into a rage unless you gave them what they wanted. They'd abuse and insult you if you gave them what they wanted. My friend just didn't know what it was like.

It took me a long time to realize that the reason why he always had a good answer for me was because he had made every stupid mistake I was making. He wasn't super humanly wise and he wasn't isolated from the real world in some little bubble of serenity. In addition to doing wonderful things that lifted my heart he had done stupid, greedy, fearful things, just like everyone else.

So, he died about ten years ago. I stopped driving a bus about three years ago. I've never stopped thinking about the things he told me. I started to wonder what would happen if I tried loving alcoholics. I would be nice to drunk guys who came to meetings. It didn't seem to make much difference one way or another but it felt okay. I tried listening to people who mostly didn't make much sense. I would sit and listen to people who talked and talked about themselves. They always said the same thing. They would cry on cue about some hurt they had suffered twenty, thirty, forty years before. They cried every time they told the story, even though they'd told me the story before.

It was starting to work. I started to realize that these awful people were struggling with pain and fear. The more I looked, the more I saw that everybody was struggling with pain and fear. Yep, me too.

Look, I know there are assholes out there. I know that there are people whose needs and interests are not the same as mine. I can tolerate being in an adversarial relationship. Jesus didn't say, "Don't have enemies". He said, "Love your enemies". I don't tolerate bullies. I don't like being manipulated. The only difference is that I can see my enemies struggling and yearning and talking shit and trying to con me, all at the same time.

This change didn't happen in a monastery or anything. It happened while I was watching TV and hanging out with friends and taking little walks and wanting to get laid, or eat dinner, or take a nap. Just regular stuff.

So then I got this job. Driving drunks and drug addicts from one Starbucks to the next. I like Starbucks because they are everywhere and they have bathrooms. I like seeing that green sign and knowing that I can piss should the need arise.

I get to meet these people who are in some kind of crisis. Their lives are falling apart and they say the most wonderfully foolish things to me. Kids like to tell me that they are scary gangsters. Now, the people who come to the center are mostly people who work in grocery stores, or family members of grocery store workers. But they're scary gangster grocery store clerks when they talk. Or older folks like to try and tell me that their problems are far, far worse than mine. They drink because their children don't understand them or because they got sick or because their bosses are assholes.

There they are and I listen to them and I mumble something back at them and they seem satisfied but a couple of weeks later, they've started to get their brains back and so many of them want to know what I thought of them when they were so fucked up, when we first met.

I tell them I liked them. I tell them funny stories about the way they behaved. If they behaved very badly I tell them that I figured we were not meeting on their best day. I tell them how awful my life seemed and how it still seems to be too much sometimes but that we are God's hands now and we don't have to run the world any more.

Some of them get it. Most of them are going to die fucked up. It doesn't matter. I love all of them. If only a little bit.

Moscow

Either I have fans in Moscow or someone in Moscow is trying to hack my blog. I tend to believe the latter possibility. If I'm wrong, Hi Moscow.

What I do

I had something happen to me and I quit drinking. Not only that, I started trying to talk to other people who were having trouble quitting drinking. I don't care if someone is enjoying drinking. Most people who drink like to drink and don't have much trouble because of it. Some of us can't seem to control our drinking even when it causes us nothing but trouble.

Anyhow, something happened. I changed in a lot of ways that still surprise me. I try to talk about it sometimes. It's hard, because the only way to talk about is to use the language of religion. I'm quite certain that whatever people are talking about when they talk about God or Gods they are talking about whatever it was that happened to me. I only know about one religion. I don't think it's the right religion. I don't think anybody else's religion is the wrong religion. I mean, I disagree with a lot of religious people but I'm not in this thing to see who is right or wrong.

So, I'm trying to talk about what happened. I sound religious when I do it. I have mixed feelings about that. Sometimes I think I should try going to church more often, really acting like a religious guy, you know? The thing is that, most of the time church is kind of boring and I feel out of place.

At the same time, people are accusing me of being some kind of religious fanatic. I did, after all, use some of the same words that religious fanatics use so I must be in the same class of people as them.

Fuck.

Really, what I do is I drive people around and talk to them a bit and listen to them a bit. Mostly, I drive them around. In one form or another, I've been doing this for my entire adult life. I've tried other stuff, but I'm pretty good at this. I think, in some ways, that I got better at it after I sobered up. I got older. I have to worry about taking care of myself more but I pay more attention and listen better so I am pretty good at driving drunks and drug addicts around.

So really, what I think is, regarding the God thing, I should drive people around to the best of my ability.

Small victory.

I drove a long way to pick up a young tweaker. He lived in a little farm town, a little better than a lot of the farm towns down there, the good job in town was a military base instead of a prison. Other than that, you might find work in agriculture or maybe you could work in a grocery store.

The kid told me to meet him at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. I mean, in the middle of the fields. Last gas station before a federal wilderness area. Every once in a while,  a car full of campers stopped off for ice and beer.

He left me sitting at the gas station for almost three hours. Every once in a while he would call me to tell me he'd be there in 15 minutes. Finally he called and gave me directions to a trailer park. I went to the address and there was a bunch of small town tough guys with home made tattoos working on a junk car. Turns out that was the tweaker's car. He'd been living in it. He was driving around going through his possessions that he had stashed at houses of various friends and relations.

He started hauling out garbage bags full of clothes and piling them up in my car. He told me he couldn't figure out what to do with the stuff from his car, so he might as well bring it all with him. The last thing he set in the front seat was a package of art supplies, sketch pads, pens and pencils.

When we finally got going he opened up his sketch pad. He had drawn a bunch of predictable, kind of cheesie looking tattoo designs. Still, I was impressed that he valued his art and wanted to give it first priority. He hadn't gotten high that day and he fell asleep pretty quick. All that waiting around put us in line to catch rush hour in a whole bunch of towns and two big cities. It was a long, long ride back. I listened to music and he snored.

He had a court case pending. Two weeks later, I got to pick him up at four in the morning for a nine AM court appearance. I ended up doing almost three hundred twenty miles in a little more than four hours. We got breakfast, which put him in a good mood. I sat with him until his lawyer showed and then went to get an hour's uncomfortable sleep in the car.

The court appearance was a formality. It was over in a minute and he came back to the car. I had a plan for the ride home. I know a couple of people in the tiny arts community down there. These guys are not the fine art crowd. They're homeboys. My friend is an old hot rodder and juvenile delinquent from the 50's. I thought it might do the client some good to meet an OG who is a successful artist who had been clean and sober for a long time. We went to my friend's studio, in the back of a body shop. He had been a custom car builder and most notably, a painter of custom cars, for many years. He finally got to where he couldn't take the paint fumes anymore, so he started doing paintings and sculpture.

He was getting ready to take a bunch of art to a car show, so he had a lot of finished work in the studio. The kid was impressed. My friend is really something. Even university trained fine artists admire him. After an hour in the studio, we went downtown for lunch. My friend told us stories about the old days, running the streets, drunk and loaded in all kinds of crazy home made cars. The thing is that he is so quiet and humble about those stories that he even seems a little surprised by them.

Now,mind you, we were throwing in a bunch of before and after stuff. My friend and I knew we were on a mission from God to reach the kid. Neither of us ever turned our back on the old life. We just embraced the new life. I could tell the kid was having a good time but I was hoping his eyes were being opened too.

Last stop before the road home was my other friend's gallery. I don't know him very well, but he impressed the hell out of me. He's a young man who left farmville and got an education in the arts, but he came back and decided that he was going to open a gallery and round up the local artists. The first people he drew in were young hip hoppers. He's got them hanging out in the gallery. He lets them use his computers. He shows their art in the gallery and every once in while he sells a few pieces for them. He  managed to attract their older brothers and dads, who started showing up in low riders and hot rods and riding choppers. A lot of those guys are artists too. Plenty of them do cornball prison art with big eyed babes and muscular home boys, African warriors or Vato Locos or Vikings, whichever matched them. Some of them took their talents a little further. They had developed real skill working on their rides and designing. He encouraged them to experiment with stuff to show in the gallery.

That's where my friend the artist came in. He sells his stuff through the gallery and he's brought in some money and fame for them. We thought it would be great to introduce the kid to the gallery owner and hopefully get him hanging with the young artists down there. Unfortunately, the gallery was closed and we didn't get to go in.

Shortly after that, the kid got done with treatment. He didn't want to go back and he ended up in a sober living house up here. I though he made the right decision and I didn't hear about him until the other day. He had to go back home for another court appearance. After the court appearance he dropped into the gallery. He ended up hanging out there for a few hours. He told the owner his whole story. He told him he wanted out of the life and he wanted to develop his talents. He wants more from life than drugs, gangs and small town isolation. The gallery guy said he seemed excited about staying clean and trying something new. He said the kid might have a chance.

I told the people at work. It made them happy. It made me happy too. I swear, we're working for peanuts because we're so excited about sharing "Life, and the fullness thereof". It feels good when someone takes us up on the offer.

Right here is OK.

I did get to drop someone off in a parking lot somewhere. She was in her late 30's, a mother of two. She'd been running the streets, living in dope houses and smoking meth. Turns out she had smuggled meth into treatment. She kept acting crazier and crazier. They asked her what was going on and finally, after a few days, she admitted that she had been getting high. They asked her if she wanted to stop and she said she didn't think that was possible. She was in treatment because, like a lot of people, she had no place to go. The state had taken away her kids. Her husband didn't want to see her. Her mother refused to speak to her. She had been living with an aunt who wanted no part of her. They told me to take her downtown and leave her at the bus station but she said she wanted to be left off in a parking lot. I left her there, with her worldly possessions at her feet. You could tell she used to be an OK person but she was dangerously crazy. We both felt bad.

I took another kid to a coffee shop. He refused to cooperate with the program and was open about his intentions to keep using as soon as he got out. His mother said she'd come get him at the coffee shop. What is it with these guys and their moms? My mother wouldn't let me come home, just because I'd flunked out of college. I guess she did the right thing.

I took another kid to the bus station. He'd walked off down the road after announcing that the whole thing was bullshit and he wanted no part of it. He came back at 3:30 in the morning, really loaded,  and announced that he wanted back in. When he woke up he announced that he would be in charge of his own treatment and we would be following his orders. He was really dope sick and he wanted to be given his detox meds so that he could decide when he needed them. He threw a big fit when the staff refused. I was told to drop him downtown. Someone said they'd come for him in 4 hours. I pointed out to him that he would likely be arrested if he hung around downtown, dopesick and dingy looking. I dropped him some place where he wasn't likely to attract much attention while he waited. I wished him good luck.

Not much to write.

Not much to write because I'm not working that much. I'm on call and the phone hasn't been ringing very often. I'm a lot less high minded when the money starts to run out. I don't care whether or not we save them. I just want to get paid to drive them around. That's not entirely true but money does count. I sure wouldn't do this as a volunteer. I do other things on a voluntary basis but when I'm working for a for profit enterprise I want my cut. Drug and alcohol treatment is part of the whole, corrupt medical/insurance complex. It's a wonder anyone ever gets well. I think, insofar as we workers count for anything, people get well because we care more about them than we care about the insurance industry. I know this upsets the industry.

Home to die.

The guy who started bleeding internally never came back but he didn't die. He spent a few weeks in the hospital and then went into some kind of long term care facility.

Last week I got to drive some guy home to die. He came in too late. He was tall and movie star handsome. A charming fellow. He'd destroyed his guts, his liver and his heart. He came in and stayed for a couple of days but his vital signs got dangerous, so he was taken off to the hospital.

A week later, he came back with a manilla envelope of care instructions and a list of 10 or so medications he was supposed to take. We are not equipped to provide that level of care, so he was shipped back to his family. It was a four hour drive to a charming, isolated seaside town. He lived in a nice old house. His wife was beautiful. He just had enough strength to make it in the door on his own power. He's younger than me. That is, if he's still alive.

I was supposed to pick up this guy at a motel. His mom had put him up there on the condition that he went into treatment. He'd been living on the street. He didn't answer his phone. I went to the desk at the hotel. He didn't answer his room phone either. I went up to the room. He didn't answer when I knocked on the door.

We ended up calling his mom. She came down to the motel with a key to the room. She opened the door, but it was latched from the inside. She called her son's name but there was no response. Finally the motel manager cut the latch and let us in. Just before he came back, the mom looked at me and said, "I've been going to Alanon for three years now."

I told her, "You're going to need all of that today".

When we got into the room, there was a motionless body on the bed. The mom shook him and called his name. He sat up and began cursing her. "Bitch, let me fuckin' sleep. Why the fuck are you harassing me?", on and on. I opened the curtains and there were bits of burnt aluminum foil, beer cans pizza boxes and prescription bottles with someone else's name all over the room. The mom started cleaning the room while he son picked up the prescription bottles and stuffed them in his pocket. Then he pulled out a cigarette and walked out of the room.

The mom packed his stuff and said, "He's probably outside, smoking", because, see, he would be concerned about the no smoking rule in his room. Right?

We carried his stuff downstairs and discovered that he had left. He was nowhere to be seen. Then her phone rang. "Bring me my fuckin' shit at the Jack In The Box", was all he said.

Mom tried, she really did, "If you won't go into treatment I'm cutting you off. I won't give you any more money, or take calls from you or let you in the house anymore", but she agreed to take his stuff to the Jack In The Box.

She asked me to go with her. I told her I would follow her but only to remind her when it was time to leave. We got to the parking lot and she put his stuff on the ground and got back in her car. He blocked the car in and wouldn't let her leave. "How the fuck am I supposed to eat? You went through my shit and stole all my fuckin' money bitch." he yelled at her. She handed him fifteen dollars. I guess she couldn't help it. He told her he was going to kill her. She got in my car and asked me what she should do. I told her to call the cops. While she was on the phone to the cops he was kicking my car and promising to kill his mother. Then he walked over to my side and yelled, "You should be afraid, bitch. I'm gonna kill you too!". He was a big kid, but pale and sick. I did not look forward to having to defend myself but I figured he wouldn't last long.

Finally the cops came and the kid went and hid in the Jack In The Box. I left and drove home by myself. He ended up having his mom drive him in on Christmas eve. It was cold out and I guess he didn't like the idea of a cold Christmas on the street by himself.

Over the course of the next couple weeks he repeatedly demanded to leave. He backed off when he found out that he would only be getting a ride downtown to the bus station, 80 miles from home. He tried a little bit to get with the program. His mother came to visit often. She brought him extra food and cigarettes and left him with money every time. Finally he convinced someone to come pick him up and he left. I guess he figured living on the street, getting high and leaching off mom was a pretty good life.

Bad drugs

Just creepy yesterday. Exhausting too. I'll talk about it soon. All day today I've been telling people, "You're so very brave and I'm so very proud of you". Drugs and alcohol make shivering cowards of us. Weak, whiney, horrible little people. It really is a miracle when one of us takes a chance at recovery.

Discouraging

Sometimes you kind of want to tell them to go fuck themselves. The clients that is. Some kid smuggled in a cell phone. He called his dealer and met him out at the edge of the property. He came back with a syringe and some heroin. He started sharing it around with some other kids.

Of course, they got caught. The case managers said, "Tell us what happened. We'll call it a relapse and let you stay and finish the program".

The kids got all hard. There was this one kid that I kind of liked. He went into a big routine about how he "wasn't raised to be a snitch". I'll give him credit. He was practically born in jail. His whole family is some kind of dope dealers. Still, he was being an asshole. I tried telling him, "This isn't a fuckin' prison you know. It's a fuckin' hospital. When they ask you what happened they want to know what went wrong, not who to punish".

He didn't get it. He wanted to go home, see his daughter and hang out with a bunch of old punks. That's what he said. When I dropped him at his grandparent's house he ran in the door to talk to his cousin, who sells heroin.

There was another kid who picked a fight over something. I can't even remember what. He was all tatted up and had piercings all over. He came on like a hard gangster. He wasn't scared of prison. You pay a cost for this lifestyle and he didn't mind paying. I had to take him home. Home turned out to be in a gated community on a golf course. You could fit two of my house into the garage. Fuck the police. Yo.

There was a very angry and obviously crazy young man. I had just come from driving almost 400 miles and dropping off Mr. Gated Community Gangster. On the way back I witnessed a terrible accident. I was told that I'd have to drive the angry young man to the bank so he could get money to buy cigarettes. It turns out he didn't have a bank account and he didn't have any ID. Somehow he managed to cash a check from his grandma but no one would sell him cigarettes. He got mad at me because I didn't want to buy his cigarettes for him. One of the case managers tried to tell me it was my job to "serve the clients". Fuck that. When I got sober I was told my job was to serve other people. I will not coddle a belligerent addict. That's not service and it's not teaching them about service.

I went to pick up some guy in a lovely, wealthy old mining town in the mountains. He had a sweet little house and a beautiful wife. He was a mumbling grey blur on the couch. He was smoking medical marijuana in a vaporizer. He was drunk as hell. He kept insisting that he couldn't leave until he had some more "medicine".  All the way back in he kept telling me about his rights. He had a right to smoke marijuana in the center. He had a right to keep his cell phone so he could check in with his wife every ten minutes, which he did throughout the ride in. He had a bunch of other rights. When he got to the center they gave him valium to keep him from convulsing and dying while he was drying out. He slept for two days. On the third day he woke up and demanded his marijuana. He was told he couldn't have it. He called his wife and left.

I dropped a really sweet, likable guy off at home. He was excited about his new, sober life. Two weeks later he was drinking all day, every day. He wasn't eating either. He begged to be allow back in. I went back and got him. He was a little sheepish, pretty drunk and as sweet and likable as ever. Two days later he became incoherent and his already swollen stomach started swelling up alarmingly. He's in the hospital with all kinds of holes in his guts. He's probably going to die in the next day or two. What a fucking waste.

I could use a big success story. I know this is a J-O-B but I want to believe. Even though I know what the odds are, I want to see someone get what is being offered and go on to live. It happens from time to time. It doesn't seem to have happened lately.