Wasted: An Alcoholic Therapist's Fight for Recovery in a Tragically Flawed Treatment System (30 page)

Sweat beads on my brow.
I can’t tell if the courtroom is overheated or I am. I take a quick look over my left shoulder. Is everyone hearing this? Or are they all so fixated on their own fates, they’ve got no interest in mine. Please God, let that be the case.

The judge continues. “Mr. Pond, you have a very, very serious problem. I hope you maintain your sobriety. In any event, I am sentencing you to thirty days
in jail and a two-year suspension of your driver’s licence. I suspect that the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles will take it away even longer. That decision is out of my hands. Good luck, Mr. Pond.”

And that’s it. He turns his attention to the next of dozens of cases he’ll pass judgment on today.

My shoulders drop and my arms weigh heavy at my sides. A warm, tingling sensation
floods the back of my neck, and I notice my breath for the first time this morning. Shallow and rapid—I’m ready for flight. But I’ve got nowhere to go. I fight the urge to bolt out of the courtroom. With a jerk of her head, the sheriff standing adjacent to the prisoners’ docket beckons me over. Cool sweat spills over my tight shirt collar.

“Inmate for processing,” she barks by rote.

Dead man walking
is what I hear. My life collapses into itself.

As if in a trance, I proceed down a concrete staircase to a dimly lit, cavernous tunnel. I sense we’re underground. Covered security cameras stand like sentinels. I remember observing prisoners from the other end of those cameras when I worked for Federal Corrections in the eighties. Now I am one of the rats in the maze.

Straight ahead, a large Plexiglas enclosure holds several officers in blue uniforms in front of computer monitors that sit on a sixteen-foot-long half-circle desk. One gestures to one of three cells along the off-white concrete wall to the right. “In there.”

I am in jail.

• 31 •

I SURVEY MY CELLMATES:
a motley crew of prisoners dressed in drab-red cotton pants with elastic waistbands and matching T-shirts. No belts here. Belts are weapons and make very effective nooses. Who here has potential to hurt me?

“Pond, come with me,” orders an officer with two stripes on each of his powder blue
sleeves. I estimate that he is in his mid-fifties; he has grey receding hair—close to retirement. Do I detect a nugget of empathy for a fellow old warhorse?

“You don’t belong here, Pond,” he says as we walk. “Thank the fuck it’s only thirty days. Do your own time. Don’t piss anyone off, and you’ll get outta here in twenty without getting shit-kicked or ass-fucked. Some of the perverts
like old fuckers like you.”

Do your own time.
I first heard that expression from kids I counselled in juvenile detention, jail-slang for “mind your own business.” Take care of your side of the street and don’t interfere with or bother anyone else. Keep your nose clean and it won’t get busted.

The guard escorts me to another wing, with a cordoned-off area. A twelve-foot-by-four
green laminated counter separates two officers from the rest of the population.

“Strip naked, lay all your clothes here and shower from head to toe.” Drumming his palm on the counter, a young officer about Brennan’s age begins to process me.

I am mute. In shock, I dump the ancient suit on the counter with the rest of my belongings and submit to the humiliation of a public shower.
I know worse is to come.

After I pat dry with an institutional white towel, the close-to-retirement officer appears again, this time sporting powder blue vinyl gloves. With practiced precision, he inspects me head to toe. First front. Then back.

“Bend over. Spread your cheeks, and not the ones on your face. We want to see if you’re hooping any contraband.”

Hooping is the
preferred way of bringing drugs into jail. And any old hoop will do. Guys like me are prime hooping candidates for the heavies to mule drugs and money into the joint. We’re low risk of being busted. And besides, they can rent a hoop real cheap when accompanied by the encouragement of a framing hammer applied full force to the kneecap. For a man whose life has been law-abiding, this indignity is
indescribable.

Freshly showered, inspected and newly attired in my red
BC
Corrections garb, I follow the officer back to the holding cell. It is full now with several men recently transferred in from other facilities.

In waddles Tom “Guns,” accompanied by two rather large gentlemen, all dressed in red. Like a periscope, Tom’s head swivels on his thick neck—past me, then a sharp
jerk back. “Holy shit! Mike Pond. What are you doing here?”

Tom keeps popping up in my life, first as a troubled fifteen-year-old in client in youth detention in 1991. Then, last year when he introduced me to the couch of willingness in the We Surrender recovery house. And finally, just a few months earlier, when I’d returned to work at Surrey Memorial, where he was hobbling down the hall
toward me: tiny, frail and strung out on crack, beaten to a pulp in a drug deal gone bad.

Now he’s back in prime fighting form. Tom stands five foot two, made up of two hundred pounds of solid muscle. He is built like an oak tree trunk, and I know for a fact he can one-punch anyone into unconsciousness. But Tom shows no mercy; he rarely stops after one. Like so many addicts, he has an
uncanny capacity to survive.

Once again, with that same engaging smile, thirty-four-year-old Tom asks, “How much time did you get, Mike?”

“Thirty days.”

“No way! For sure I thought you’d have gotten at least six months. The judge musta liked you. Just do your own time, dude. I know a lot of guys in
FRCC
. Just tell ’em you’re a friend of Tom ‘Guns.’ Before you know it, you’ll
be out. Sucks we’ll be in here for Christmas, though, eh?”

A guard comes to the cell and calls out, “Pond. You’re going upstairs.”

“See you again, Tom. Good luck, eh?” I pat him on the shoulder.

“Luck’s got nothin’ to do with it, Mike,” says Tom. “You’re a really smart guy. Just keep an eye out for the fuckheads—you know who they are.”

I force a smile and flash
him a peace sign as the guard leads me to an elevator around the corner. Tom smiles back, shakes his head and gives me the finger.

“Here. You’re going up. You’ll stay the night, then straight to
FRCC
in the morning.”

Cradling my only belongings—a towel, toothbrush and soap—I step into an elevator with several other guys. All in drab red. No guards in elevators. I discover later
that some guys step out of jail elevators with broken noses or curled up in the fetal position with smashed testicles. The doors open and we all file into an open range with cellblocks circling a central guard desk. A muscular young blue-shirt assigns us to our cells. A blue shirt signifies a lower-ranking officer, white shirt—senior officer.

A large round schoolhouse clock behind the
blue-shirt reads 5:02. A stainless steel, six-foot-high institutional hot food cart on little wheels arrives, and all the men clamour toward it. Two inmates hand out the trays. I remain sitting in one of the plastic chairs. I don’t want to eat. A skinny guy in his mid-forties with dirty blond, close-cropped hair approaches me with two trays in hand.

“Hey, man.” He motions for me to take
a tray. “You, me and couple other guys are heading to Fraser Regional Correctional Centre in the morning. Have something to eat. It tastes like shit, but you gotta eat. Get used to it or you’ll starve.”

“No thanks.” I shake my head. “No appetite.”

“You’ll get used to the food. No better at
FRCC
. I’ve been there, twice. My name’s Lee.”

“Mike.”

“What’s your story?”

“Drunk driving.”

“They put you in jail for that!”

“It’s a little more than just that.”

Lee informs me that he has spent half of his life in jail. In and out since he was fourteen. All non-violent crimes, B & Es, theft, trafficking—all drug-related. He’s easygoing and friendly. For the first time today I relax a bit. Lee is about six foot two with the build of a swimmer
but the dental work of a crackhead. His mouth smells as bad as it looks.

“There are some real sick sons a’ bitches in these joints, Mike.” He doesn’t need to speak the name. The notorious serial killer Willie Pickton is upstairs on the top floor, an entire unit to himself. Everyone wants him dead.

“You and me,” Lee says, “we’ll get a cell together at
FRCC
. I know most of the guards.
We’ll both go to minimum security. A lot more freedom. Open cells most of the time. Not as many goofs and
GT
s.” That’s prison speak for gangster thug.

“I’m pretty wasted, Lee. I’m going to my cell.” I stand up to leave.

“In here, call it your ‘house,’ Mike. You won’t sound like such a fresh fish. A greener.” Lee grins.

The houses haven’t changed since I worked with adult
inmates twenty-five years ago. Battleship grey, semi-gloss, oil-based paint on the walls, ceiling and floor, including the steel bunk beds, with the all-too-familiar two-and-a-half-inch-thick black vinyl workout mats for mattresses. The sheets never fit, bundling into a wrinkled roll somewhere between your hips and armpits. No matter how tightly I cinch them under the mattress, I wake with my face
plastered to the sticky vinyl.

You don’t belong here, Pond.
I echo the guard’s words to myself. But a part of me knows I do.

Chin propped on the heel of my hand, my fingers anxiously toggle my cheek. My elbow goes numb as I peer out the narrow barred window. It’s open to the max, three-and-a-half inches. Outside it’s dark, raining hard. A variety of vehicles volley in and out of
a spot-lit parking lot.

I lie on the bed and unbidden memories pounce. Taylor wakeboarding on the calm water. Six-year-old Jonny perfecting his slapshot. Brennan and I flying down Big White on freshly waxed snowboards. The chocolate-sweet smell of Rhonda’s ranger cookies baking in the kitchen. The searing sand at Skaha Beach.

How will I get through this?

Pond the professional
does a quick inventory. Four months sober, no longer craving a drink, yet plagued by persistent and unhealthy levels of anxiety. Mike Pond, the cocky little bastard, has flown the coop, replaced with some pathetic shell of a man wallowing in self-pity.

When it looked like prison was in the cards, Taylor was pitiless.

“This is the result of choices you’ve made,” he said on the phone.
“Get some balls.”

I’m sober now, but Taylor won’t talk to me. I want to make it better between him and me, but I don’t even know where to begin. I once asked Dr. Acres why Taylor had cut me out of his life. Dr. Acres didn’t say anything, just took a Sharpie, scrawled one word on his notepad and held it up to my face:
FEAR
. Fear that this period of sobriety will end and the whole crazy
cycle will begin again. Fear of answering the phone in case it’s the cops telling him I drove drunk again and this time I hit somebody. Or killed somebody. Fear that I’d killed myself. Or worse, I didn’t kill myself, but I’m thinking about it, again, and he has to talk me out of it, again, but part of him doesn’t want to.

Lying here, I have too much time to think. It’s so quiet I can’t
even hear snoring. The bunk below me is empty, a small blessing.

I must find a way to get through this. I need a plan. I repeat the
AA
slogan: One day at a time; one day at a time. Roy’s lady has a place waiting for me when I get out, a tiny attic suite in her old house in White Rock. I am slotted to start work back at Surrey Memorial on January 3, 2010, three days after my release date.

I lie awake that entire first night—nineteen more to go if I get the standard one-third off for good behaviour. And I’m going to be very, very good.

The cell door clicks to signal morning. I slide to the cold floor and peek out into the range. Men exit their cells scratching their heads and crotches. An old inmate pulls the food wagon into the dining area to serve breakfast.

A clean-shaven Lee hands me a plate of fresh toast and peanut butter. The round analogue clock on the far wall reads 8:02 as the thin second hand sweeps across the twelve.

“We’re heading for
FRCC
at nine,” says Lee. “We’ll go straight to medium security then to open after a day or two. I’ll try to get us a cell together.” Lee always knows what’s going on before it happens.

We sit in silence and I force down a piece and a half of Lee’s toast, coated with his private stash of peanut butter, a valuable commodity in jail.

A female blue-shirt calls out a string of names. I hear Pond in the mix. Six of us meander to the front desk.

“All of you line up side by side with your noses touching that wall.”

We find our spots facing the wall. I smell the
old oil-based paint on cinder block and shoot a glance to my left without moving my nose. Three guys down, Lee nods to follow his lead.

“Put your arms straight up over your heads, palms against the wall. Spread your legs shoulder-width apart. Hurry up, let’s go! Your right arm behind your back.”

While two guards take watch, two others ratchet a set of handcuffs onto our wrists,
one click short of too snug. They reach up in unison and pull our other wrists down. Both arms cuffed behind our backs.

“Bend your right leg at the knee,” the blue-shirt orders. Shiny shackles ratchet-click around our ankles. “Put it down. Now the other leg.”

“Okay, you guys, stand over there by the door and don’t move. You other three next.” The process repeats. I think back to
old prison movies.
Cool Hand Luke. The Longest Yard. The Green Mile.

We chain-gang single-file out a rear bay door and are greeted by a blast of cold wet delta farmland wind. Even after just one day of institutional air, I gulp its freshness.

“In the vehicle, one at a time, and sit down,” says an arm-holstered brown-shirt. The tan paddy wagon interior is pimped out with stainless
steel interior wall panels. Heavy-gauge chicken wire reinforces bulletproof glass all around. No blind spots in
this
rig. We perch like wingless redbirds in a cage neatly constructed within an armoured car. The secondary cage door clangs shut. Only Hannibal Lecter could escape this one.