Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (37 page)

I thought a lot about my Nazi days after I moved to Iowa. Part of it was being back in the Midwest. Part of it was my new twelve-step sponsor, though. Bob was not a Nazi, but he was a biker, the kind of biker Scooter and Peaches had been in my prison days. I have not one doubt Bob rode herd over all the other
bikers in every prison he was ever in. And he was in a lot of them; Bob spent most of his adult life behind bars. When he got out, he got clean, hardcore clean. And pushing 6’4” and 300-pounds, that ex-con was one badass recovery sponsor. If I’d had any sense, I would’ ve stayed clean to stay alive, because even if the drugs didn’t kill me, there was a damn good chance Bob would. Bob had a real low tolerance for relapses.

So I hid mine as best I could. At first they were rare, and by recovery standards, more “slips” than full blown relapses. I’d sneak off and smoke a joint, but that was it. Bob didn’t act like he was on to me. Valerie wasn’t on to me because she was working crazy hours at her new job. I got cocky, then stupid.

I took a job with a moving company to fill gaps between my speaking engagements. My new coworkers were big partiers. It was a bad mix. I tried crystal methamphetamine for the first time on that job. Except that it made an eight-hour shift of hauling furniture feel like it flew by in about four minutes, I hated meth. Meth was the anti-heroin: it speeded me up, made me hyper-aware, when all I wanted was to disappear. One day, I was trying to explain the pure joy that is heroin to my meth-head coworkers, when one of the guys asked me if I’d ever been on methadone.

“In rehab.”

“They say if you mix it with Colodopin, it’s as good as heroin.”

“Can you hook me up?”

He answered with a smile.

He brought my order to work with him the next day. Mid-morning, I washed four Coladopins down with a swig of methadone. A couple hours later, I was driving to a restaurant to pick up the crew’s lunch order when a cop pulled me over.

“Would you mind taking a breathalyzer?”

“Sure,” I said, like a smartass, knowing I’d pass. I hadn’t had a drink in years.

I went to step out of the car and fell flat on my face.

I don’t remember much after that. Here’s the story everybody else tells: The cop hauled me off to the drunk tank. While I
was in the holding cell, I passed out, then started puking. If I’d been anywhere else, I probably would’ ve died. But a guard saw me aspirating on my vomit and called for EMTs. I woke up three days later with tubes down my throat, IV s in my arms, and a monitor blipping to confirm I wasn’t actually dead. Valerie hovered next to my bed in the small bleach-white ICU room. She held my hand and cried while a doctor removed the breathing tube.

“What day is it?” I whispered, my throat too sore to actually speak.

“Sunday,” Valerie said.

“I’ve got hockey.” I’d joined a local men’s league. We played on Sunday nights. I tried to get up, but Valerie pushed me down.

“Frank, you’re not playing tonight.”

I didn’t understand. “Why?”

“You don’t even know what you did to yourself, do you?”

I had damn near killed myself. While I was enjoying a doctor-prescribed drug-induced coma, Valerie had been in agony, waiting first to see if I’d even survive and when it looked like I would, to learn if I’d suffered brain damage. The doctors warned her to prepare for the worst. She’d called my parents. I realized just how close a call I’d had when my dad walked into my Iowa hospital room. My dad isn’t an Iowa kind of guy. That he’d bought a plane ticket and flown halfway across the country told me I was lucky to be alive. Then he told me he loved me and nearly dying seemed worth it.

I was released from the hospital after about a week. Valerie wouldn’t let me come home, so I moved in with my sponsor. I wasn’t Bob’s only “guest.” Bob had had so many “guests” over the years, he’d come up with house rules we had to follow. The rules were designed to keep guys like me on the right path, one baby step at a time.

Bob’s house rules made the Marines look sloppy. He was convinced that the path to recovery begins with a well-made bed. Of course, there was no way in hell I was going to tell my 300-pound ex-con host what I thought of his theory. I just made my
bed, again and again, until it passed his inspection. Then I got a shower and shaved and brushed my teeth, until I passed his inspection. That was the first half-hour of every day. They were long fucking days. Looking back, I can see that he was trying to give me structure, something I’d rarely experienced. I was raised by alcoholic-addicts; I was an alcoholic-addict. About the only time I’d ever regularly eaten three meals a day was in prison. The only time in my life I’d been meticulous about grooming was when I was a Nazi suiting up for battle. Wardens and gang chiefs had parented me more than my parents had. At age twenty-seven I was a parent, but I still acted like a little kid. Like any addict, I lived only in the moment, impulse to impulse. Of course, my first impulse was to run screaming from Bob’s House of Hell. I bridled under his strict behavioral codes, but not too much, for fear of Bob twisting my leg off at the hip. After a while, I stopped fighting his system. A while after that, I actually took pride in how tight I could make a bed.

Valerie was proud of me, too. She could see I was changing in ways I’d never changed during my stays in rehab. With Bob’s guidance, I was actually acting responsible. I was making good decisions, little decisions, but still good decisions, like eating breakfast every morning, doing laundry before I ran out of clean clothes, or paying bills before they got sent to collection. Those are the kinds of decisions normal people make every day; they’re the kinds of decisions I’d never learned how to make.

Valerie didn’t invite me to come home; she asked me if I wanted to go house shopping with her. Her folks had decided to move to Arizona, and they’d offered to leave her with a down payment on a house. Her house. But she wanted to make it our home.

When I told Bob I was leaving, he said, “You’re not ready.”

“Valerie wants me back, man, that’s all I care about.”

“You haven’t learned a goddamn thing,” Bob said. “The only thing you can care about is staying clean. That is your whole life. Nothing else matters. You ain’t shit to her or anybody else
unless you’re sober. And you’re not going to stay sober if you leave now. You’re not ready; you’re still just play acting. You’re doing what I tell you because I tell you. You ain’t really doing the steps.”

Valerie and I had been in our little Craftsman fixer-upper less than two weeks when I relapsed. When Valerie left for work, I promised to paint the living room. That’s exactly what I was doing when one of my meth-head buddies stopped by. I hated being on meth, but I hated being me sober even more. I begged a rock off the guy. By the time Valerie got home that evening, I’d painted half the downstairs, ripped out all the carpets and pulled up a section of the kitchen floor. She eyed me suspiciously, but she didn’t ask me if I was using. She didn’t need to ask.

She would’ ve kicked me out for good if she hadn’t been pregnant.

We were so fucking close to living her dream, our dream. We had a little house. We were expecting a little baby. Riley and Matt were coming out for the summer. We were so close, if I could’ve stayed clean. I tried so goddamn hard. I made the bed every morning. I did the dishes every night. I went to meetings every day. But still I relapsed. Over and over again, I relapsed. I’d make it a week clean, then I’d fall. I’d make it a month, then I’d fall. But I never gave up on the dream, the dream of normal, the dream of sober.

I was clean on the December day in 2003 when our son, Little Nick, was born. I relapsed again the first week of January.

I was so fucking close to the dream, but I couldn’t wake up from the nightmare. No matter how many meetings I hit, I couldn’t stay clean. I couldn’t stand to be me, unfiltered, unprotected.

The twelve steps only work if you actually take them. I convinced myself I was taking them. I tried to convince Bob I was taking them, but he stared me down and said, “Bullshit.”

The twelve steps take you on a journey, first to surrender, then inside yourself, your real self. I couldn’t go there. No matter how many times I tried to turn my will and life over to the care of God as I understood him, I couldn’t let go. And no matter how
many times I raced toward the fourth step, I never had the guts to take a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself.

Where would I have fucking started? The day I left a kid half bleeding to death under a toilet at Pepper Middle School just to save my own ass? The night I helped Dan Bellen pull a fucking tack hammer out of a guy’s head? The night I threatened to shoot that Sharpie if he let his blood drip on my carpet? Where the fuck should I start?

And where in the hell would it end? Me snorting my kids’ support payments up my nose? Paying a homeless junkie to stick a needle in my arm? Lying to Valerie every goddamn day I ’d known her? Me sitting there, at that very moment, in a twelve-step meeting, pretending I gave a fuck about what all those recovering losers had to say when the truth was all I could think about was getting the hell out of there so I could get high?

IN SEPTEMBER, 2005, I FLEW BACK TO PHILLY FOR A speaking engagement. I set things up with Nina so I could surprise Matt. I would catch a train at the airport, meet Nina at the stop by Matt’s school, and then we’d wait for him to walk out the door. “Surprise! Daddy’s in town! Daddy’s here for you! Daddy loves you!”

But Daddy didn’t get off the train.

I kept riding, staring out the window at the city that made me, knowing where I was supposed to be, and knowing exactly where the fuck I was going. I kept riding until the train stop at Sommerset and Kensington. I descended the filthy blue metal stairs into North Philly’s open-air underworld. The Badlands had not changed since my last descent, and neither had I. Dealers were still selling the promise of heaven for ten dollars a bag, and addicts were still buying the lie. I spent twenty bucks.

Nina found me late that night, staggering down a sidewalk in West Philly. She double-parked her car, left it running, and ran toward me screaming, “Goddamn it, Frankie!”

I stared vacantly in her direction.

“What are you on?”

“Fuck you!” I lunged toward her car.

“No!” Nina threw herself in front of the backseat window. “Don’t, Frankie! Don’t do this to him!”

“Get the fuck out of my way!”

“He can’t see you this high.”

“I’m not fucking high!” I bellowed. “I came all this way just to see my baby, and I’m going to see him. He’s my fucking kid!”

“And you are your fucking father!” Nina said.

Not even heroin could’ve dulled the pain of that knife. I lost my balance.

Nina peeled away with little Matt still sleeping in the backseat.

About an hour later, I broke into my dad’s house. I searched every fucking room. I found booze. I found pot. I found cocaine. But I didn’t find one picture of me.

Nina’s words echoed through my mind: “You are your fucking father!”

I was.

But I wasn’t going to be anymore. I wasn’t going to let my babies live their whole lives wondering why daddy chose drugs over them.

I walked upstairs to my dad’s bedroom. I opened the top drawer of his nightstand and slipped his loaded .22 revolver out of its hiding place. It had been in the same drawer my whole life, at the ready, just in case.

Just in case what, Daddy? Just in case somebody turns me into a prisoner of war? A punching bag? A Nazi? A cocksucker? Or how about this, Daddy? Just in case I turn the fuck into you?

Nothing tastes quite like a gun. I savored that metallic reality as it slid past my tongue and dead-ended against the back of my throat. I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. I watched my finger tremble on the trigger. We stayed like that for quite a long time, that .22 and me, snuggled up on the faded blue loveseat, alone together in my father’s house.

“I’ve got a gun,” I confessed into the telephone to Nina, the mother of my son Matt, the namesake of my dear friend who’d shot himself while talking on the phone with his ex-girlfriend.

“Frank, do not move. Don’t do anything. I’ll be right there.”

“I can’t do this to Matt. All the kids. Valerie. You. Everybody. I can’t do this anymore.”

“You can. Put the gun down. Let me hear you put it down. I’ll come right over.”

“Promise?”

“I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Nina?”

“What, Frankie?”

“I think I’ve got a problem.”

I laid the gun on the table.

 

BY SEPTEMBER, 2005, I was thirty years old. I’d been drinking for twenty-one years; I’d been a full-blown alcoholic for sixteen. I’d been using drugs regularly for twelve years; I’d been an addict for ten. I’d been incarcerated twice, and I’d been committed twice. I’d done four stints in inpatient rehab, four courses of methadone, and I’d attended probably about a thousand twelve-step meetings. The longest I’d managed to stay clean was two months, nine if I didn’t count pot, none if I’m completely honest. I never made it past being what twelve-steppers call a “dry drunk.” I wouldn’t drink, but I still thought like an alcoholic. I wouldn’t use, but I still lived like an addict.

My sponsor, Bob, tried to break me out of that cycle, but I left too soon, convinced I could do it my way. But my way didn’t work. It never had worked. It can’t work. My way is the pat answer way, the Nancy Reagan “Just Say No To Drugs” way. Just don’t drink. Just don’t smoke. Just don’t sniff. Just don’t shoot. It’s a great plan unless you’re already an alcoholic-addict. It’s a fine plan so long as you don’t spend every fucking waking minute of every day thinking of excuses to say “yes,” just one more time, just once, because just once more won’t hurt, will it?

I am an alcoholic-addict. I am powerless over alcohol and drugs. I cannot stay clean and sober my way because my way
is
using and drinking. It is who I am.