I Made a Good Friend in Rehab

And he died during the first week of quarantine

His name was Matt. He was just a few years older than me.

He was the only one I’d met who could put away as much vodka as me. He too knew what withdrawal from heavy dependency was like. He said he’d detoxed around 50 times, which I simply did not believe.

The one time I went through a major detox from heavy dependency the nurses had to shoot me up with so much Ativan that I lost the next 18 or so hours. Apparently, at some point, I was hallucinating. My initial BP was something like 230/140. I felt like my heart was going to explode or that my brain was going to cramp up and quit.

He called me a couple days before he died, and I didn’t take the call.

Brothers in the Resistance

The first time I saw him was in an AA meeting at Silven Hill. He was a yuppie kind of asshole like myself, but a little older in his mid 40s. For some reason, he stood up when he shared in that gymnasium. No one else did. I felt like he was looking straight at me.

He came down to our transitional living program house a couple days later. It was a dual-diagnosis program. Most of the patient suffered from generalized anxiety or depression in addition to our substance(s) of choice. My roommate liked to dabble. I think he got “extra points” for poly-substance use disorder.

Matt knew the bullsh*t corporate jargon that I had become fluent in over the previous ten years. His pick of poison made us thick as thieves. Once you build up a tolerance, it’s not difficult to put away a handle in a day, but the key was not to finish it all so that you could tide yourself over until the liquor store opened the next day.

Of course, rather than focus on putting ourselves back together, we decided we would make some recommendations to the administration to help them improve. Apparently, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Many people who weren’t ready to give up their will had tried this before. A CEO even once made a full hour-long PowerPoint presentation outlining all of his recommendations to the chairman of the facility. Needless to say, his recommendations fell on deaf ears.

We weren’t ready to give up the fight either. He was angry for having his blood drawn in the middle of the night in detox against his will. He kept saying that the “Storm Troopers broke into my room at 3 am while I was sleeping and held me down.” He wanted a copy of the video tape. He threatened to call The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Apparently, he had friends there who would write an expose for him.

I worked in the public relations industry so I knew he was full of sh*t.

I came into rehab hot. When they called the morning of my afternoon intake, they asked me when my last drink was. I looked at my hand and said “right now.” I was polishing off a vodka soda that I’d hoped would carry me through the ride up from Manhattan and the hours long intake process.

And then they kept me in detox for five days. I’d only been binging for a week. This time wasn’t like the year before. Either way, I’d completely broken before I came in. I had too much pressure. My job was too much, my family was too much, my girlfriend was too much. I just wanted everyone to leave me alone.

Once I was down in TLP, the days were tight, back-to-back group blocks. Some days we’d have 3 AA meetings. I made it clear to the administration that the recovery program was getting in the way of my recovery…I had no time to decompress and quiet the goat rodeo in my mind. I made this point repeatedly.

And then I decided that we needed to get rid of one of the guys in our transitional house. He was pissing everyone off, and, since I always played the role of change agent in my career, I took this one on gladly.

We’ll call him Ted. I know I should have sympathy for guys in recovery, but this guy didn’t try at all. In every group meeting, all he did was deflect. No responsibility, no accountability, no admission of even being the slightest bit guilty. Others were doing this to him or others were doing that. Well, there’s one thing I’m damn sure of…no one put an 8 ball of blow up his nose on the daily but himself. No one stole money from his family, friends and wife but himself.

Ted was studying to be a psychologist — so he had to prove his intelligence during every group (and try to argue with the licensed clinicians). He’d been hopped up on the white candy for far too long; he needed to let those brain cells do some regeneration before trying to argue any points. He also tried to say I was borderline (which I am not).

Suffice it to say, he got no sympathy from me. In addition to the above, he never changed his clothes or took showers. Something was wrong with his nose (likely from the blow), and you could hear his Darth Vader breathing from across the room. It was disruptive. Certainly not conducive to our meditation sessions.

And then there was the eating. If you had food in the fridge that wasn’t marked, it was gone immediately. You could find the wrappers scattered in his room. He was prone to midnight grazing while everyone slept. He never sat down. Just shoveled as much food in as he possibly could. The next day he’d complain about his weight and go to the gym to “work out,” which was really just him floating in the pool like a manatee.

As you can tell, it was quite the distraction for me. My counselor finally ended up telling me that I should probably just focus on myself, noting that rehab environments are not intended to be perfect. Instead they’re intended to help develop the tolerance and conflict resolution skills that you need out in the real world. Seemed like a convenient and lazy excuse to me at the time, but I knew that he was right.

So, I bailed on my mission to distract myself from focusing on myself and accepting the difficult truths that I needed to endure to begin to recover.

Matt, however, continued to fight. They wouldn’t give him the video of the blood-draw incident, and he threatened to get a lawyer involved. About a week later, the organization finally conceded to give him a written apology.

In the meantime, most of that week was wasted on various meetings with administrators, repeatedly battling his point and outbursts of frustration. During this time, I kind of receded from the picture.

Resistance Is Futile

I was done fighting. I needed to let the reality sink in that I would not be drinking again. That my comfort blanket would be yanked away. That I would have to deal with hostility and anger, disappointment and depression, anxiety and panic on the outside by myself.

I knew I needed to sharpen my mind as much as I could and pick up any new coping tools I could learn along the way.

I stopped cracking as many jokes in our groups sessions and tried my best to participate honestly and ponder the lessons when I had smoke breaks. I withdrew a little bit into myself, as though I was chewing this new reality over and I needed time and silence to process it.

I’d still let loose some anger every now and then…like when our “alumni” speakers came to the house and put on the holier-than-thou, authoritarian routine. Shoes of the tables! You’ll sit up and listen when I’m talking. Like really bro? F*ck off.

As far as I’m concerned, no one in recovery is better than anyone else. We all fucked up. Doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO or a bum on the street. Get over the high and mighty act. If you want to differentiate yourself from everyone else because you need to be a beautiful and unique snowflake, then good for you. But it doesn’t mean that you’ve learned much of anything from the program.

I did not attend his repeat speaker session two weeks later.

I also didn’t appreciate it when a crotchety counselor tried to use fear to make us stop laughing during one session. Someone started calling her Nurse Ratched, and I think it was a fairly good call. The session asked us to recall some of our worst memories of our addictive behavior and share some of the most painful ways we’d hurt others in our lives. From time to time, a little levity can help the sting out of said emotional trauma. She didn’t want to have any of it.

She told us flat out: “Look to your left and look to your right. One of you will be back here in two months, and the other one might not even have that chance.” That lit a fire in me right there. It was a pretty sh*tty thing to say, but I guess statistics were on her side.

Every patient needs a different kind of treatment. We’re all f*cked up in our own different ways. We all bring our own baggage to the party. Some are stubborn. Some are defiant. Some are only there because they’re trying to lower their sentence. Matt unfortunately didn’t take it to heart that day.

Psychodrama Qu’est-ce Que C’est?

If you had one particular counselor at this fine establishment, you had the privilege of participating in more innovative counseling sessions. Brent happened to manage all the group sessions. I’m convinced that he selected specific people to be in this particular group, but that was neither confirmed nor denied.

A psychodrama is a kind of therapeutic exercise that encourages patients to recover through role play and observation. Brent would give us all a homework assignment in our private session, and everyone’s homework assignment was directly related to what he viewed as the most important to our individual psychological recovery — so specific stressors from our past, experiences, people, places, things, etc.

It was an opportunity to focus on one person’s past for an entire hour within a group dynamic. For me, given that I’d told him about my history as a serial monogamist, I needed to list out all of my long-term ex-girlfriends, how the relationship went awry and how it ended. As a result of my having quite a number of very stressful and awful work experiences, I also needed to write those out (apparently when we role played that out I could be heard screaming from the hallway…).

You’d bring this sheet of paper into the group, and you’d hand it off to him. And then he’d have you pick people to play different characters in your psychodrama, each sitting in a different chair and representing a different experience in your life. I spoke first as though I was each of the ex-girlfriends and then the person I had selected repeated the role while I watched from the outside looking in.

The idea of the psychodrama is to help you confront feelings that you may have never dealt with and also identify patterns in your past that led to your history of substance abuse.

The guy who played my young Russian ex decided to put paper cups under his shirt and talk like a dominant, sassy Russian woman to add a little spice. Not surprisingly, my overarching trend was that I was more in love with the bottle than I had been with any of my exes. Yet another sad but true fact along my painful path to recovery.

Matt had me play one of his ex-girlfriends in his psychodrama. She happened to be the ex with a history of mental health issues. She had tried to commit suicide several times. She tried to stab him once. She tried to slit her own throat in front of him another time, but he managed to grab the knife away. Once, when she found out he’d been lying about drinking, she broke a rocks glass on his granite bar and came after him with the jagged glass. Knowing my role in advance, I brought a coffee cup that I had cut out into jagged edges. I gave him all my emotion when I played that role.

I remember one time Matt and I played ping pong. He said he was going to kick my ass. But he, of course, had hurt his knee the day before and was gimping around. I took advantage by painting the corners and whooped his ass.

As the weeks wore on, he got a visit from his girlfriend. He bragged about getting some action in her car during his day pass. He seemed to have gotten over the anger hump and was getting with the program.

His roommate was another story though. He was in for the Vodka as well, but his history came with a side of Benzo abuse. Jim used to do some weird sh*t in the middle of the night on Seroquel. Once Matt went to use their bathroom around 2 am, and Jim had been standing there in the dark…It was quite the surprise when Matt flipped on the light. “What’s up dude?” is all Jim said and then stumbled off to sleep.

Jim would be sleep eating trail mix in the middle of the night and would wake up the next morning with M&Ms melted into his back and bedsheets. He’d also sleep smoke cigarettes hanging out their bathroom window, which was quite the risky play. His ass was already on the warning list for inappropriate contact with a younger female patient. If they’d caught what he did back in detox, he would have gotten the boot for sure.

Part Two Coming Soon…

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