Wasted: An Alcoholic Therapist's Fight for Recovery in a Tragically Flawed Treatment System (9 page)

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WELCOME TO THE HANDYDART
bus of mentally retarded alcoholics.” I wake with a start.

A kid no older than my youngest son is bellowing at me from another seat.

“We’re a bunch of losers living in a condemned old folks’ home.” He snickers. “Hey, old man, you’re gonna feel right at home. Ha ha, you old fuckin’
loser.”

“Lenny, sit down and shut the fuck up,” yells the driver.

“You shut the fuck up, Monk,” Lenny sneers. “You big fat bag of shit.”

Monk is a big man in his mid-thirties. He stands six foot three and weighs in at 310 pounds, and that’s on a day when he’s watching his weight. He keeps his head shaved and holds a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do. For his heft,
he moves with the stealth and grace of a cat.

On cue from Monk, a guy in a jean jacket and black Dayton boots springs up, grabs Lenny in a chokehold and drags him back, hard into the rear of the bus. Lenny’s arms wave frantically, and within seconds he slumps unconscious into the back seat.

Monk peers into the rear-view mirror.

“Thanks, Brad,” Monk nods. “That’s one way
to shut that mouthy little fucker up.”

This is my introduction to life at We Surrender.

I find out later the kind of guy Monk used to be: a feared drug enforcer who moonlighted as a bouncer in one of the highest-end strip bars in Vancouver. When he was twenty-one, he lost his best friend to a drug- and alcohol-related suicide. He was a wounded raging bull until he quit boozing
and partying and found God two years ago.

The seven-minute ride to We Surrender feels like an eternity. Twenty-five men crammed in, swearing and yelling. My head aches and my stomach growls. The bus rolls to a stop in a snowy gravel driveway. We pile out and trudge through knee-deep heavy snow, pounding a path to the back door.

The recovery house sits on a large corner lot overlooking
Semiahmoo Bay. It hides behind a six-foot brown wooden fence and massive Douglas fir trees. The white 1960s single-storey main building sags under the weight of too many sad-sack stories. Off the front entrance sits a two-storey section—an add-on that houses staff apartments. A large yard dominates one side and the back. In the back beside a shed is a rusty metal swing set.

As we cram
inside, the floors smear with slushy mud. Overheated, moldy and musty, the air stinks of stale cigarettes. Several men crowd a small foyer, drinking coffee and eating toast.

As I soon learn, though it’s a relatively short drive from South Surrey, We Surrender might as well be a million miles from the safety, security and medical supervision of the Phoenix Centre.

A young short
stocky guy in his early thirties extends a large, muscular arm to me. “Welcome to We Surrender.” He shakes my hand. “They call me Tom ‘Guns.’ I got here ’bout three months ago. You don’t look so good.”

“My name’s Mike, and yeah, it’s going to get worse.”

“Detoxin’, eh? Hey, man, you look really familiar. Have I met you before? Surrey? Newton? No, I know. Kelowna!” Tom scrutinizes
my face.

“I’m from the Okanagan.” I shrug. “Maybe from there.”

We stare at each other as he hands me a coffee. My foggy brain flips through thousands of case files until I find him: “Tom ‘Guns.’”

“I worked with you in juvie,” I tell him. “You were just a kid.” I first met Tom as an adolescent at the Youth Detention Centre in the early nineties. He earned the nickname from
his juvenile delinquent peers, who stood in awe of his massive biceps.

“Yeah, I know. I’ve been fucked up a long time.” Tom laughs and shakes his head in disbelief. “Holy shit, man.”

My presence here in front of him in this rundown recovery home is out of time and out of place.

“How did you end up in this hole?” Tom looks shocked. “You’re a professional shrink. You helped
me a lot back then.”

“Looks like I could have done a better job, eh, Tom?” I sip my coffee. “On you and myself.”

“Yeah, man.” Tom laughs humourlessly. “This building should be condemned. Other than on the streets, this is as bad as it gets. Actually, sometimes I’d rather be on the streets.” He surveys my skinny body.

“You should have something to eat,” he says.

“I’m hungry but I can’t eat. I’d puke it right back up.”

Tom nods. He knows the detox drill.

“Eli will put you on the couch of willingness,” he says, with a dark note in his voice. “Do you know what that is?”

I take a guess. “Where the new guy bunks out so the staff can determine how willing he is to get clean and sober? Like a probationary period?”

“Yup. Let me
show you around. Then just rest for a while. You look like shit.” Tom takes me on a tour. The halls are narrow and dark, the rooms small. Single-sized rooms are crammed with two, sometimes three beds. Dust layers upon grime upon dirt. I stop at a closet-sized bathroom to relieve myself. Even for a guy straight off the streets, the filth disgusts me. I postpone my pee and rejoin Tom’s tour.

“Who’s Eli?” I ask Tom.

“Eli Wagner is the director of We Surrender. He’s ex-army. Sobered up when he was fifty and opened this place. His way of giving back, I guess. He’s a diehard
AA
old-timer. Runs this place like a drill sergeant. Don’t get on his bad side.” Tom shoots me a look of warning.

We walk into a small lounge with glass doors leading out to a patio and generous
garden area. Massive cedar trees, heavy with fresh snow, stand sentry over the sprawling lot. With his bulging arm, Tom gestures to two old sofas in the lounge.

“Those are the couches of willingness. You’ll be sleeping on that one. There’s another one outside in the smoke pit. Too cold out there right now. But when the weather’s good, it’s the best couch. I know. I’ve been on them all.”

Several men sit smoking on sixties-era living-room furniture in an area off the kitchen. Butts fill an ancient standing glass ashtray.

“Practically everything here has been scrounged or donated,” Tom explains. “We get a lot of the food from the local grocery stores and Cobs bakery. It’s expired and just gets thrown out.”

I’m starved but my stomach recoils at the thought
of food, and it shows on my face.

“Lie down and rest, Mike,” Tom says. “Maybe you’ll feel like eating in a bit. I’ll get you some sheets and blankets.”

I collapse on the vacant couch. My butt sinks deep into the worn brown corduroy cushion. The springs complain with a rusty whine. I rest my head on the round arm and get a whiff of the pillow. I bolt upright. It stinks of booze-tinged
sweat, vomit and urine. Tom returns with an armful of linen, blankets and a stained pillow. “The couch is a test of your willingness, Mike, your willingness to surrender. Your willingness to do what it takes to get sober. Eli and Josh will be watching you. If you don’t follow the program, they’ll kick you out. You could be here a couple of days. You could be here a couple of months. You could
be out on your ass.”

I make up my couch of willingness as men meander in and out of the patio doors and down the dim hallway to their respective rooms. The couch is situated in the busiest access route in the house. Men come and go continually from outside, the dining room and the main living area. There will be no peace, no quiet and absolutely no privacy.

“You gotta surrender,
buddy. Or you’re gonna die. Guaranteed,” growls a raspy-voiced old guy shovelling a bowl of Corn Flakes into his three-toothed mouth. He drags his shirtsleeve across his face to wipe a dribble of sugary milk off his chin. “Eli will kick your ass outta here if you don’t. You’ll be back on the streets suckin’ cock to make ends meet. Ha ha ha!”

I shudder to think what Rhonda or my mother
would think of how the guys talk here. But that’s the way they talk in my new world. We the bottom feeders. If there was any other way to sober up, we’ve exhausted it. Failed at it. The desperately poor, mentally ill alcoholics and addicts, the brain-injured and traditional rehab rejects like me all rub shoulders with genuine psychopaths, convicted killers, gangsters and drug dealers who prefer to
serve a conditional sentence here than in prison. I conduct another clinical assessment.

Progress Notes—Mental Status Exam:

Appearance and Behaviour: Patient is a short Caucasian male in his mid-fifties with grey hair. Clothing dirty. Incontinent and smells of urine. Avoids eye contact.

Speech: Rapid and disjointed.

Mood and Affect: Affect is anxious and depressed.
Reports depression and feelings of hopelessness.

Thought Content and Process: Obsessive thoughts to obtain alcohol. Belief that life is not worth living anymore. Passive suicidal ideation. Paranoid ideation with psychotic features.

Cognition: Time disorientation. Poor concentration. Short-term memory deficit.

Insight and Judgment: Insight fair, judgment poor. Minimizes
seriousness of illness.

DSM-5
Diagnosis: Alcohol Use Disorder—severe. Major Depressive Episode. Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) score: 40/100—Major Impairment.

A lot of guys here suffer from what mental health professionals call “concurrent disorders,” an addiction and another mental disorder. They are an alcoholic with bipolar disorder,
or a crackhead with schizophrenia, or a heroin addict with acute depression. They probably began drinking or taking illegal drugs in their teens, some kind of self-medication. It’s unlikely they will ever kick their habit until their mental disorder is under control. Both conditions must be treated at the same time. That will probably never happen here. Because the cruel irony here is that just
when these guys need medication most, it’s forbidden. We Surrender only accepts clients who are not on any medication. No selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, no lithium, no trazodone. Which makes it damn near impossible to truly recover in this recovery house.

But for now, it’s warm and dry. Since I spent half of last night passed out on White Rock Beach, I’m still chilled to the
core. It feels good just to sleep on something soft. It feels good, but I am afraid. What if I can’t stay here? What if this man Eli kicks me out?

A chorus of laughter bounces through the common area as I close my eyes to shut out the commotion. Memories of our beautiful home on Skaha Lake flood in. The boat bow slices open the sandy brown and green mountains reflected on the glass-topped
water. The hot sunny wind presses my Ray-Bans against my suntanned face. I’m young and vigorous, with a cold bottle of Corona clasped in my left hand. Bruce Springsteen rocks through the Harman Kardon speakers. I gaze into the oversized rear-view mirror as Taylor cuts across the wake and launches fifteen feet into the dry desert air.

“Do a three-sixty, Tay!” Jonny whoops.

“No,
Taylor! Do a Raley with a grab!” Brennan counters.

Life doesn’t get any better. We live in paradise.

“Hey, buddy! Eli wants to talk to you.”

I open my eyes. Two faces peer down at me.

“I’m Josh, the manager. Me and Eli wanna talk to you.”

This is my first introduction to the power duo in charge of We Surrender.

The taller guy in his late sixties,
with the greying red close-cropped hair, is Eli. The boss. He’s got a big nose and beady eyes. Next to him stands Josh the house manager. He’s squat, trucker-like, mid-fifties and cocksure.

The three of us go around the corner to a tiny, cluttered office off the dining area, which looks like an old nursing-station medication room. On the wall hangs a framed collage of snapshots of maybe
a hundred men. A significant number of them are randomly circled with a black fine-point marker.

“Those guys?” Eli says. “They’re dead now.
OD
’d, suicided, murdered. That’s what happens to alcoholics who don’t surrender.” Eli talks like he’s got a mouth full of marbles.

I’m transfixed by the images of these dead men; dead because they couldn’t surrender. My therapist brain wants
to protest: “dead because they didn’t get proper treatment!”

Eli sits at the small desk facing the window that overlooks the tiny dining room. He speaks in abrupt, sharp-muttered utterances. Worships the Big Book of
AA
—the only way to recovery. He’s convinced.

“Josh tells me you have quite a story. Well-educated professional, eh? Psychotherapist. This disease takes no prisoners,”
he says.

Oh good. At least he calls it a disease.

To Eli I’m just another down-and-outer. No status here. It dawns on me: I
am
just another down-and-outer.

“It costs $550 a month for the program here,” Eli explains. “That covers everything. How are you going to pay, guy?”

“I’m broke. I don’t qualify for social assistance. They say I have assets. I’ve been out of
my home in Penticton for a couple of years.”

“That’s what happens,” Eli nods. “Alcoholism is the great subtractor. You lose everything, then jails, institutions and death. Josh will take you in to Social Services. If you can’t get welfare, you’re going to have to find work. We’re not a charity.”

“I’m going to get my wife to send my degrees and
CV
down. I hope I can get work psych
nursing or a social work position somewhere.”

Eli stares at me like I’m not getting it.

“Hey, guy, your degrees don’t get you sober. Are you ready to surrender yet? Start reading the Big Book, and when you’re done detoxing, start working on your steps. No, start working on Step One right now: Admit you’re powerless over alcohol—your life’s become unmanageable.”

I wobble
on shaking legs. The harsh reality of how far I’ve fallen has just sunk in. As a psychotherapist, I’d always been vaguely aware of the sliding scale of treatment options for addiction. If you’ve got money or are lucky enough to hold a job in a profession protected by a powerful union, or you’re a lawyer in a genteel firm, you’ll be sent off to a high-end treatment centre, not once but likely several
times, followed by intense follow-up care in the community. The back pages of a magazine to which I subscribed,
Psychology Today
, are full of ads for such places. Some charge
$90,000
a month.