Wasted: An Alcoholic Therapist's Fight for Recovery in a Tragically Flawed Treatment System (31 page)

As the armoured van glides off the property, the guards engage in the idle banter that’s the talk of
free men.

“How ’bout them Canucks, eh?” says the driver.

“Yeah. Luongo couldn’t stop a beach ball last night.” The brown-shirt sitting shotgun shakes his head in disgust.

“And he’s going to be the number one goalie for Team Canada in the Olympics.” The driver shoulder-checks onto Highway 1 East. “It should be Marty Brodeur. He’s a proven veteran. He’s got more experience
in Stanley Cup finals.”

“And he’s consistent. That’s what we need—consistency.”

The fact that life continues outside prison, that the 2010 Olympics are just a couple of months away, that people are shopping for Christmas presents, that my boys will be planning the holiday with their mother—all these facts flash through my mind.

The paddy wagon cruises down the freeway.
The driver exits at 200 Street, Langley. One of my fellow jailbirds observes, “Hey, we’re taking the new Golden Ears Bridge to Maple Ridge.”

The brand-new bridge spans the mighty Fraser River. I stare out the window and take it in as we drive over. To the southeast I spot majestic Mount Baker across the border. As my eyes move west toward Vancouver, I recognize Maple Ridge. The small river
mill towns of Haney, Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows now sprawl together into a connecting string of malls, car dealerships and the grand homes of commuters.

I see the Pitt Meadows airport and pinpoint the exact location of my ex-in-laws, the boys’ grandparents. They’ll all celebrate Christmas there in a couple of weeks. My boys will be there with their cousins and all the rest of the extended
family. I always roasted and carved the turkey. I made my special gravy. Many years ago the kids nicknamed me Captain Gravy. Who will be Captain Gravy now?

Within minutes, the van turns left off the mountain road into a large cleared area with manicured, frost-covered lawns. A massive six-storey beige brick structure sits awkwardly in the middle of the clearing. Thirty-foot-high heavy
caging encircles the property. Large coils of razor wire crown the cage. Spotlights and all-weather scanning cameras are strategically mounted in every direction.

“Welcome to the joint, boys,” says Lee. We pull into Fraser Regional Correctional Centre and the van stops at the bay doors. As the main door unlocks, guards release our shackles, remove our handcuffs and march us into a holding
cell. We stand there just a moment while the holding cell door opens and two other young men stumble in.

“Hey, ol’ man. How’s it goin’?” chirps a handsome grinning dude, about six foot four and twenty-three years old.

“Holy shit! Jarred! How are you, son?” Lee and his son hug and slap each other’s backs. Lee’s eyes well up and redden. “I can’t believe it.”

Both of Lee’s
sons are in prison. Twenty-year-old Lonnie is into his second year of a six-year sentence at Matsqui for aggravated assault—drug deal gone bad.

“This is Mike,” says Lee to Jarred. “Fifty-six and he’s never done time before. He has three boys about your age, Jarred.”

“Nice to meet you, Jarred,” I say. “Quite the place for a family reunion, eh?”

“Yeah, crime is a family trait
for us Williamses,” Jarred nods. “My grandpa started us off, I guess. He did a lot of time in the sixties and seventies, eh, Dad.”

So much for the war on drugs. Addiction is also a family trait for the Williamses. Clearly, incarcerating three generations did not convince anyone to kick his habit. My clinical brain kicks in once again, and I see these next twenty days in
FRCC
as a unique
opportunity: a living laboratory, if you will. How many of my fellow inmates are here as a result of an addiction?

“Williams, Pond, come with me,” orders a blue-shirt as she unlocks the cell door.

“See ya, Jarred. I’ll be out December twenty-ninth.” Lee waves goodbye.

Once again, we are led down a corridor around a corner to a setup with a large counter facing three open
shower stalls. The guard orders us to strip and shower.

Our pants and shirts are bright red with
FRCC
stencilled in white on the back. We wear white socks and low-cut, no-name white canvas runners that close with two little Velcro straps. No laces here. Laces make good garrotes—extremely effective at cutting off the airway.

Lee and I step into an elevator. I’m almost getting the
routine. Up three floors, the door glides open. Another wide hallway, and an unseen voice directs us via speaker.

The range is big, like in the movies. There are two tiers in the unit, with ten cells per floor—a set of bunks in each, forty men when full. Men sit at square tables playing crib and big two, a long-standing prison card game. There’s a
TV
room. And behind the correctional officers’
desk, a large communal shower.

“Hey, man, come over here.” An inmate in charge of laundry hands us some folded clothes. “Here’s some T-shirts and pants. You get two of each, and keep the ones you’re wearing. A couple of long-sleeved thermal undershirts and some work socks. It gets cold in the yard. You’ll be working outside in a day or two.”

I climb the stairs to the second tier.
I’ve been assigned the first cell, number twelve. An open mezzanine looks out over the range. Several men lean on the railing and look down. I peek into the tiny cell. A young First Nations man with a long black braid sits cramped at the desk facing the two-by-three-foot window, bars bolted to the outside. He turns in his chair to face me.

In a low, deep whisper he says, “My name’s Nelson.
Welcome to my sweat lodge. The guy that left this morning didn’t like Indians.”

Well, I like Indians, a lot. My work with the Okanagan First Nations makes me Nelson’s ideal roommate. Acne scars pockmark his face. He scans me from toe to head. “You’re in pretty good shape for an old white man.”

“Thanks. My name’s Mike.” I offer my hand. Nelson’s hand has thick, stubby fingers that
are slightly webbed. His grip is tight.

“I have a cousin Mike in Kamloops,” says Nelson. “He doesn’t look anything like you, though. Ha ha ha!” His too-small eyes are wide set, with no fold in the lid. His forehead is high and broad. He has no indent in his very thin upper lip, all telltale signs of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. He’s yet another inmate whose life has been defined by
alcohol, even before he was born.

A sketchpad sits open on the desk. An orange
HB
pencil rests ready in his left hand. An exceptional detailed drawing of a naked woman, gagged and tied in bondage, stares up at me.

“Nelson, you’ve got some talent.” I gesture to the sketchpad. “Why are you in here?”

“I beat a guy up on Main and Hastings. I curbed him. He stole my crack.”

“I see you got the bottom bunk. I’ll put my stuff up here. Talk to you in a bit.”

As a therapist in the Okanagan, I’ve seen first-hand the ravages of alcohol. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is rampant on Okanagan reserves. The physical impairment is mild, the mental impairment devastating: impulsivity, impaired judgment, attention deficits, limited sense of cause and effect. In
my two decades of working with the Okanagan bands and my previous experience providing therapy in prisons, I’ve never known incarceration to act as a deterrent to anyone with a fetal alcohol diagnosis. My empathy for Nelson overrides my self-pity. I am out of here in twenty days. Nelson will likely spend most of his life in places like this. Not because he’s an inherently bad man, but because he’s
been damaged by alcohol.

I leave the cell and walk down the steps to the range. Lee studies a commercial coffee maker that gurgles and spits on a small table, flanked by two four-slice industrial toasters. These and Asian rice makers are highly valued small appliances in the Big House.

“This isn’t real coffee,” says Lee. “It’s chicory or some shit. Jail coffee. We’ll have to buy
real coffee with our canteen. We put our orders in tonight. You put money in your account, didn’t you?”

Some experienced convicts in the recovery house said I would need money to buy necessities. Grant lent me forty bucks yesterday just before we went into court. I had twenty-eight of my own, leftover from my welfare cheque. I put it all in my corrections account when I came in.

“Go over the list,” says Lee. “Check off coffee, choneys”—chocolate bars—“chips, soya sauce, curry powder and Asian hot sauce. Buy ten phone calls to start this week. It costs ninety cents for every call, and they add up fast.”

I pour a coffee and sit in the
TV
room with Lee and several other guys. You can tell which guys have been here a while. Their hair is either long or sheared close
to the skull. I need a haircut but couldn’t afford one before court. I feel old in here. There are a lot of Asians, First Nations and East Indians. White guys are the minority. A guy with snow-white hair down past his shoulder blades, both arms covered with tattoos of pot plants, sits in the corner and watches the Canucks–Kings game. He is the only one close to my age. Early sixties, I estimate.

“How long you get?” he asks.

“Thirty days.”

“Sixty. Grow op. I’m Norm,” he says.

The dinner wagon rattles onto the range. Convicts line up. Two young Vietnamese guys serve up the food and fluids. I notice several rice makers on plastic chairs plugged into various outlets in the cinder-block wall. I am second-last in line, with Norm. As each man grabs a tray, select
inmates take their baked ham to a couple of other Asians sitting at table nearby. A pile builds, and they proceed to cut the ham into bite-sized pieces with tiny white plastic knives. They deposit the meat into a rice cooker. It sizzles and a head-shaved Vietnamese man dumps a quarter-bottle of sweet hot sauce into the cooker. Close my eyes and I’m in Chinatown, the air redolent with exotic smells.

The men line up at the other rice cookers and another Asian scoops out perfect steamed rice onto each plastic plate. His cooking partner layers the sweet, spicy, stir-fried processed ham on the bed of rice.

I finally get my tray and look for Lee. There he is, his back against a wall, tray in hand. He scans the dining area. He beckons me over with a jerk of his head. I zero in on
a table of several men with two empty seats. Lee follows my line of vision and shakes his head vigorously.

I sit down with three East Indian men who are scooping up hot spicy ham. Two concentrate on their food. The other one peers under heavy black eyebrows in my direction, but somewhere beyond me. He grins without opening his lips. I turn my head and a very large, heavy, muscled Middle
Eastern guy sneers down at me. “What the fuck you doing in my seat, old man?” he growls. “Who told you to sit here? You lookin’ for fuckin’ trouble?”

Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind I hear, “Ya lookin’ fer trouble, lil man? Well ya got ’er right ’ere, mister. Come on, git yer dukes up.”

In a flash, I’m catapulted back to 1961, Canadian Forces Base Hemer in Germany, where
my dad is stationed as a mechanic. Dad loved to play-box with us. I’m glad I paid attention, because I fear those skills are about to come in handy.

Dad’s fists came up frequently in a perfect poster-pose, Rocky Marciano–like. “Yer gonna be nuttin’ but a greasy spot on da floor when I’m done wit cha,” he’d say. “Come on, le’s go. Le’s go.”

Roger and I, six and seven-and-a-half
years old, would get our dukes up and dance around shadow-boxing each other, imitating Dad—“Ptew, ptew.” Dad would laugh and laugh.

“Come on, Cassius Clay. Let’s go, Sonny Liston. Keep those elbows in. Body shots will kill a man. Rupture yer spleen.”

I’d be thinking, “What’s my spleen? What’s a rupture?” All I knew, it must not be good. So I’d draw my elbows in tight and keep my
chin down until it almost cut my airway off. One time Rog accidentally clunked my jaw with a nicely thrown right hook. It stung and shocked me. Then the fight was really on. I nailed him hard with an uppercut and he flew back, landing on the floor sitting up, his arms braced behind his back. His eyes big, he started to cry. Dad stepped in and broke it up.

But Dad is not here today. Real
fear grabs me. Two officers watch in silence.

“Sorry, I didn’t know,” I say.

Lee, with urgency now, says, “Mike. Over here.”

I slink over to Lee. We sit together at a table with another new guy.

“You can’t sit at a convict’s table until you get the nod,” says Lee. “Those are Surrey
GT
s. Mean bitches.”

I stay put the rest of the evening, playing crib and
looking over my shoulder. At 9:30 it’s time to lock down for the day. I dread going to that cell. I walk up the stairs and push open the door.

“Hey!” Nelson yells. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

Nelson squats on the steel toilet. The door slams shut and I notice a foot and a half of toilet paper tied to the outside handle. The sign.

I lean on the railing as the men head for
their houses. I’m learning fast, the hard way. How did this happen to me? I’m in prison. Prison. Living with murderers and rapists. I’m one of them. My arms tremble as I grip the railing. Two guards check the unit twenty feet below. What will wake me up from this nightmare? A quick vault over the rail and it would be done. Head cracked open like an old egg. One more day is almost done, Mike. Eighteen
more to go.

“It’s okay, man,” says Nelson. “You can come in now. Watch for the sign from now on.”

The cell is six by eight feet. A small flat-screen
TV
hangs from the corner above and to the right of the window. From my top bunk, I can see out the window.

I can’t sleep. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. Big snowflakes float silently down from the black sky. I imagine the
stars beyond. Nelson’s snores are so loud, they reverberate off the walls of the cell. If I had a knife I’d slit his throat. There’s the night-shift guard again. Our eyes connect. The nightlight is too bright. Don’t murder a murderer, Mike. Nelson has a mental disorder. He doesn’t belong in jail. He belongs, like the majority of the population here, in treatment.

I wait all night for sleep.
Nelson’s snoring is like the throaty drone of a
WWII
Spitfire fighter plane climbing into the clouds, up, up, up. Then the silent stall at the peak and the whining whistle of descent. Then up again. Over and over.