I Took a Break From Meth and Sex to Help My Bro Detox

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 4 Part 3

As the plane lifted off from LaGuardia Airport, a calm began to melt through me.

I had taken a microdose of Tina just before getting into the cab to the airport. Just enough to have me lightly buzzing along with the vibration of the plane’s engines, but not nearly so much as to have me forced to drink decaf against my will.

From my window seat, I watched the Appalachians give way to the Plains, the Badlands, then the mighty Rockies. As we made our descent into SeaTac Airport, I marveled at the snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier as it dwarfed the surrounding landscape. I gazed down at the Emerald City draped across a glacier-formed mountain side with piers reaching like fingers into the bay. Seattle was a metropolis with problems common to any big city. Only here, the endless evergreen forests that blanket the Pacific Northwest stood right outside its front door, inviting an easy escape.

As the buzz from my tiny bump faded away, the tweak reassured me. “Don’t worry. It’s only a break. Rest up. Just like Reid said. I’ll be right here when you get back.”

I was ready for this break. This trip was my first chance to clear my head in the four months since I had started bombarding it with Tina. Though I was happy to be out of NYC and into a safe environment with family, I had no intention of telling Jeff what had been going on. This was only a break, and I was all about getting right back to it… after regaining some weight, of course.

“Hey fucker!” Jeff met me outside baggage claim and gave me a quick guy hug. “Got everything?”

“Yup.” I had packed light with one small suitcase in tow.

Jeff was taller than me at a little over six feet. He was lean but not slight, clean shaven though he could grow a full beard when he wanted to. His sandy brown hair was receding, looking more and more like Dad’s. He grabbed my suitcase out of my hands and said, “This way, mon frère.”

Jeff walked with an uneven rhythm, a result of a stroke that incapacitated the entire right side of his body when he was 13. He had long ago recovered and was proudly independent and fully capable. Only his mild gait and his right hand lacking full range of motion hinted at signs of past trauma.

Jeff was still driving his $100 clunkers. He unlocked the trunk of an absolute boat of a car — long, wide, and solid black. She must have been quite a status symbol in… the ’70s? On this day she was a whale of a land yacht. As we got in, I fought with the ceiling lining, also black, which had come loose and was hanging down on the passenger side.

“Oh, sorry about that.” Jeff grabbed a thumb tack and struggled to pin the lining back up.

“You’re all class, you know that?” I quipped.

“Hey,” he responded, not offended, “she runs and she’s mine. That’s all I need.”

I had been worried Jeff would notice my weight loss, but he didn’t say a thing about it. I thought it was strange, remembering how I reacted to the death mask that filled my computer screen, but if he didn’t notice, I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up.

A short time later we arrived at the apartment he shared with an old college roommate, Greg. It was a small two bedroom furnished with mismatched pieces that had survived moves from their several apartments over the years.

We had barely settled in the living room, me in a recliner, Jeff on the couch, when he said, “So I have something to tell you.”

The fuck? Nothing that starts with “So, I have something to tell you,” could be good.

He continued. “I’m being picked up tomorrow morning and taken to rehab.”

The fuck?!

“Yeah, I’ve…I’ve been having some … some issues. So I’m being picked up first thing tomorrow morning.”

My shock started to give way to a confused panic. Jeff was the only person I knew out here and now I was going to have to spend the entire month in a strange place without him?

“How long…” I started to ask.

“Only for two weeks,” he quickly reassured me.

“Oh. Wait. A two week rehab? I thought rehabs were usually like 28 or 36 weeks or something like that.”

“Yeah, this is a special program. It’s only two weeks. So I’ll be back and we’ll still get to hang out and stuff, but…yeah.” He sounded embarrassed and defeated. I realized he felt like he was letting me down.

The panic of being left alone subsided and my entire mentality switched gears. My brother needed me. I was happy, even excited, to shift my focus away from my problems and onto how I could help him.

“Ok, what do you need from me?”

Jeff relaxed, like he had been expecting me to be disappointed or disgusted or something.

“Well, one thing you can absolutely do is clean the apartment and get rid of any remnants of alcohol.”

“I can absolutely do that,” I said, happily accepting my task. The apartment definitely needed cleaning . Stale beer and cigarette smells saturated pretty much everything.

That evening, Jeff’s last before sobriety, I did what I, a user, thought was the compassionate thing to do: I went and got a 12 pack of beer and shared a last drink with my brother. I watched astonished as he proceeded to pound nearly the entire pack. Watching him binge drink made everything even more real.

The next morning I gave Jeff a hug before he was picked up — by his boss no less — and driven to rehab.

“By the way,” Greg said to me shortly after my brother left, “you’re welcome to anything in the fridge.”

This would have been a more meaningful gesture if there was actually any food in it. If I wanted to make a meal of condiments, I would have been fucking set!

I closed the fridge and turned to face a mountain of dirty dishes in the sink. Next to it sat a perfectly good dishwasher. I was personally offended, on behalf of the millions of New Yorkers who live entire apartment-dwelling lives without a dishwasher, that anyone would allow this kind of build up when there was miracle of modern convenience right fucking there.

As I started sorting and rinsing, Greg plopped down in the living room recliner and lit a cigarette, making no move to assist, perfectly happy to let someone else do the cleaning.

“So, what’s the story?” I asked as I scrapped what I guessed had been a hamburger helper — at least a few days ago — into the garbage.

“Story?”

“With Jeff. What happened?” What the fuck other story would I be asking about?

“Oh, well…” He took a drag off his cigarette. He did a thing I remember guys at the bar did at the Knights of Columbus, taking drags off their cigarettes but not immediately exhaling so that the smoke leaked out of their mouth and nose as they talked.

“Just some bullshit. You know your brother is one of the hardest workers there is right?” he asked, blowing out the remaining smoke.

“I mean, yeah.” I rinsed out glass after glass, whatever liquid they previously held congealed at their bottoms.

“Well, shit, they’re all pissed off cause he went off on some customer who was being a dick.”

“Ok, but why rehab?” I needed Greg to unbury the lead.

“Bullshit, that’s why.”

Whatever Greg was, helpful he was not.

“He doesn’t even have a fucking problem. And if he did, it should be his fucking choice to go, not theirs.”

Greg clearly had strong feelings about the whole situation, but continued avoiding going into any detail. Maybe to protect my brother? Maybe to avoid implicating himself in whatever activities that had got Jeff sent away? I didn’t know. So I dropped it and continued with my task.

I would later learn from one of Jeff’s coworkers who didn’t think it was all “bullshit” that Jeff was using cocaine to get through his intense dinner shifts as a head bartender, and then using alcohol to force himself back down. This began to spiral and led to noticeable changes in his behavior which resulted in altercations with other staff and, the final straw, with a customer.

Greg believed Jeff didn’t have a choice. But in fact his boss gave him a choice: rehab or be fired.

I cleaned the apartment as best as I knew how, making sure to give the kitchen and areas where any liquor and beer had been spilled — of which there were more than a few — extra attention. I had to make sure there was no trace of the devil’s juice when my brother returned home.

As I shut his bedroom door to vacuum behind it, I found a hole in it. I put my hand up, made a fist, and found it fit perfectly.

I started work the next day as a lunch host. It was the perfect job. No preparing food, no busing tables, no carrying trays of drinks I would inevitably spill. Just a simple, “How many?” and “Please follow me” and “Your server will be right with you, enjoy your meal.”

My first couple shifts were a bit of a struggle. Not because they were difficult but because I was crashing. By the end of my first shift I was so tired I could have laid down on the floor and fell happily asleep. I thought about asking to be let go early, but aside from it being my first fucking shift, what was I going to say, “Sorry, I’m crashing from meth, can I clock out?”

I hadn’t forgotten the shock of my weight loss. As if my smiling skull picture still burned into my memory wasn’t enough, I caught a look of my ass in the mirror after a shower and it looked like a pair of deflated balloons.

That simply would not do.

So after every shift I helped myself to discount employee meals. I would sit at a high top in the bar and order myself three or four sides, which were free, and almost entirely made up of carbs: Wild rice, garlic mashed potatoes, seasoned fries, mac and cheese, roasted brussels sprouts, along with the occasional burger or even a steak that I would pay for if I was feeling myself, topped off with a couple — but never more than a couple — beers. At the end of four weeks, thanks to my anti-Atkins diet, I was back to a normal, healthy weight.

For two weeks my brother endured a rehab centered around aversion therapy. They had him drink non alcoholic beer mixed with a liquid that induced vomiting. They hooked him up to electrodes and periodically shocked him as he cut lines of fake coke.

As barbaric as this therapy sounded, by the end of the two weeks he was solidly on the wagon.

They eased him back in at work, not as a bartender at first, understandably, but as a server. I went with him as his supportive friends took him for some post rehab pampering, his first mani-pedi ever. He even got his hair colored a fun auburn. Greg, on the other hand, wasn’t around all that much when Jeff returned. Maybe he was trying to be respectful of Jeff’s recovery. Maybe he was mad at losing a party buddy. Mayne both. It was hard to tell.

We finally got to hang out for my last two weeks. Though much of his time and focus was on his new world of sobriety and what that meant for him, we still got to know each other at least a little bit as adults. We would chill at home with me feeding him steady doses of Robin Williams and Mike Myers movies. Things I knew would make him laugh. Jeff trying and failing to mimic Myers’s Scottish accent in How I Married and Axe Murderer, “Head! Pants! Now!” is one of the funniest damn things I’ve heard in my life.

It wasn’t much time, but we bonded. I was glad I could be there during one of the most difficult times in his life.

By the end of the four weeks, I was clear headed and back to normal. With my return to NYC approaching, I felt a growing excitement and a pressing weight. I hadn’t planned on telling Jeff anything, but in those last few days, part of me was fighting for a change of heart.

I did want to tell Jeff.

I wanted to tell him all the things that had been going on for the entire summer. After all, who was in a better place to understand than Mr. Fresh Sobriety? I remember sitting on the couch while Jeff did something in his kitchen. I was looking right at him, wanting to tell him, trying to will the words to come up out of my stomach, wanting very much to reach out and connect with him, to ask for help.

I didn’t.

As much as I wanted to, I wanted to continue using Tina more. I wanted to slam again. And again. And again.

So, I didn’t tell him.

As September came to a close, my brother gave me a ride to SeaTac, gave me a hug, and sent me on my way back to NYC.

My break was over.

Next Chapter

Chapter Guide

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