A year was not a long enough time to stay away. Even three years might not be, I would find out. One of the many things June got right.
Is it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? No. Just the hardest one I had any choice about. Getting clean is like taking care of a sick person, versus being the sick person. They get all the points for bravery, but they’re locked in.
You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?
Rehab is like being married to sickness in a lot of ways, really. Disgust comes into it. You try to deny that, swapping it out for a kindness you may not feel. You fake it till you make it. You watch other people being smug, because they made better matches than you did. You let them say all the stupid things, God never gives you more than you can handle, etc. You get comfortable with vomit.
So I had a head start, being well used to the no-toucher lifestyle before I started into the program. Dalit, is the word he was saying all that time. The untouchables of Mr. Golly’s childhood are for real. I’ve read all about them now. It’s amazing how much time you may find on your hands, once you’re freed up from tracking down your next fix, chasing the means for your next fix, bootlegging scrips, dipping out, ganking, pheeming, chewing chains, raving with Jesus, trying to find a new dope boy, and steering clear of the old ones that would eat your liver with gravy if they could be bothered. The perks of sobriety.
The Halley Library branch on the north end of Knoxville was the other half of my halfway life, after I graduated from detox-and-therapy boot camp, learned respect for properly dosed Suboxone under the tongue, and
settled into my residency situation. Sober living home is the preferred term of professionals, hard-knocksville among the natives. My roommates came and went to some distressing degree. Triggers are seeded into the dirt of your every day: a song on the radio, a taste in the mouth, the cherry-soda smell of methadone that can be injected straight from the bottle. Drug tests are easier to fail at than any other subject. We weren’t even allowed to have mouthwash in that house. I thought a lot about my mom’s months- and years-sober chips I used to screw around with like play money instead of
the damn gold doubloons they were. I thought of Maggot, how dutifully he would apply himself to fucking this up. June and Mrs. Peggot were right, getting him sober would take a higher power than Maggot had in his list of personal contacts. Would and did. Juvenile detention was his worst
nightmare and best shot. After two years he was out, living with Mariah now in Bristol, Tennessee. Outcome to be determined.
The pillars of my sanity in hard-knocksville were three guys named Viking, Gizmo, and Chartrain. Gizmo and Viking were from two different Kentucky counties, Bell and Harlan, both closer to Lee County than the nearest outlet mall, similar broke-ass localities up to their ears in oxy fiends with no place to go. The Knoxville treatment enterprise draws from a wide watershed of humanity. These two were not much older than me, and an unmatched set. Viking being this big, blond specimen, foulmouthed as they come, and Gizmo a little guy with funny teeth and a mild stutter, polite as a live-in aunt. They both shared my life’s crushed ambition of never living in a city. Our house, as June predicted, was on the outskirts, in a neighborhood of folks that didn’t mind junkie has-beens in their midst. Not rich. Houses were small and close-set, fences were chain link, dogs had outside voices, and none of this was the problem. What set us on edge were all the human eyes that wouldn’t look at us, out on the city streets. The continual sirens,
the pinkish light shellacking the windows all night long. We were wonderstruck at the idea of anyone at all, let alone ourselves, staying sober in such a place.
Chartrain would be our savior. A Knoxville man born and bred, street genius, guiding light. We would not be aware of any of this for some while.
Don you go no mofuckin Beaumont, boi, my bruh got kilt dae, fa real dey
gone show you what dey got, Chartrain would tell us, and we would nod our heads as one. If at’n up air don make ye wood burn, ain’t naught will, we
would say to him. At some point around six months in, we made contact. All good after that.
Chartrain explained that city people don’t look each other in the eye
because they’re saving their juice. A person has only so much juice, and it’s ideally kept for your homeboys, not all pissed away on strangers before
three in the day. Simple as that sounds, it was a game changer for me. I taught myself to save the juice. It’s a skill, like weight training, you do reps. Tell yourself ten times each night, don’t spend your juice on those sirens, worrying about the life screaming past on its way to getting tanked. Don’t spend it on the customers around you at Walmart Supercenter, just do your job without feeling the madness or sadness, the moms on the brink of snatching their kids bald-headed. The carts loaded with cases of PBR and Pampers. The carts with nothing but off-brand beans and marked-down
stale bread. Not even on the guy I watched once while I rounded up carts, outside in the parking lot, trying to stuff his huge armload of pink birthday balloons into his hatchback, damning them to goddamn hell as they kept
bobbing back out in his face, finally pulling a coping blade out of his pocket and stabbing every balloon but one. He slammed the hatch and drove off with it, home to some sad, one-balloon birthday girl, and I confess to spending some juice on her. Rehab possibly in her future.
Chartrain didn’t fully follow his own advice, he gave of himself freely, but it worked out because he had more juice than any normal human. He’d been a star athlete in his formative years, and it’s not something I’d planned to talk about again, but we ended up bonding over high school sports.
Chartrain was basketball, already the A-team shooting guard as a freshman, averaging twenty or more points per game. A meteor, to hear him tell it, Division 1 scouts with eyes on him. But no college offers were good enough to keep him from a quick tour of Afghanistan, and he came home without his legs. The shuttle van that took us to our jobs and our meetings also rolled Chartrain twice a week to the East City Y to play wheelchair basketball, and once again he slayed. I went pretty often to see him play. As a guy that played football only until I lost my natural advantage, I had great respect for a guy with no legs that still played basketball. In my new life of feeling all the feels, the cesspool of self-disgust felt like a deal breaker. The whole existence of Chartrain shouted: Watch and learn, my brother. In addition to juice, he had front teeth incomprehensibly edged in gold, and calloused hands like vulcanized tires from charging and pivoting his chair
around the court. None of this did he owe to the Veterans Administration that was paying his way.
One thing about sober living facilities. You come in thinking you’ve lost all there is to lose, then find out there are things you never knew were on
the table. Chartrain still had his mother alive out there thinking Chartrain hung the moon, but he was otherwise nearly my equal as far as dead dad, dead brother, dead baby mama, and had seen a whole lot of guys shot dead in front of his eyes, not just overseas. Plus the no-legs. Gizmo, for his part, had been in a car that wrapped itself around a family of five, turning them into a family of one. Gizmo’s girlfriend, the only girl he’d ever dated and hoped to marry, left her good looks on the windshield and was doing time. She was driving because they had a fight and he’d deliberately crunked out, so. Lots to live with there. And Viking had lost something still more unexpected, his ears. He was tall and broad as a tree trunk and about that deaf. Thanks to oxy. He said it starts as a ringing, then one day you wake up to find the ringing is all you’ve got left. We all had the ringing. This fact
was sobering in every regard. Viking wore hearing aids the color of dirty pink crayons and was impressive in that he still talked pretty well, just way too loud, and caught a lot of what you said if you spoke to him face-on.
Doctors had told him it might come back if he stayed sober, and this was his higher power. He had a baby back in Bell County. He’d never heard her say “Daddy.”
Viking and Gizmo both worked in a warehouse, where they shouldered the yoke of labor like good-natured mules. No questions to ask or answer, and at least one of them was unbothered by the all-day whine of the
forklifts. They were allowed to smoke on the job. It’s the one addiction they let us keep, don’t ask me why. Maybe because it won’t inspire you to rob a liquor store or wrap your vehicle around foreign objects.
I wouldn’t have minded the warehouse, but lacked a mule’s good knees. I had been looked at now by more doctors than existed in Lee County, and advised that at such time as I ever found myself in a job with good health insurance, I’d be a candidate for knee replacement. Meantime, I followed my mother’s footsteps and got hired as a stocker at Walmart Supercenter.
Unlike Mom, I was probably the soberest cracker in the whole big box, and quickly worked my way up the career ladder to produce. I avoided the
employee smoking room aka drug-exchange HQ, and found no real
downside to the job. People buying apples and green beans usually have
some degree of joy in their hearts. I counted down the fifteen-minute
intervals and watched them flinch and shudder like wet dogs every time the machine came on with the fake thunder and spray to mist down the goods. I told myself I was laughing with them, not at them. But really, I was sad. It was the closest they probably got to real rain on a vegetable.
I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor, and there’s city poor. As much of my life as I’d spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, I was seeing more to the picture now. I mean yes, that is where they all grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them. Chartrain was always discussing
“hustle,” and it took me awhile to understand he grew up hungry for money like it was food. Because for him, they’re one and the same. Not to run the man down, but he wouldn’t know a cow from a steer, or which of them
gave milk. No desperate men Chartrain ever knew went out and shot venison if they were hungry. They shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about.
I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the
holes where you’ve lost teeth. I don’t just mean cows, or apple trees, it runs deeper. Weather, for instance. Air, the way it smells from having live things breathing into it, grass and trees and I don’t know what, creatures of the soil. Sounds, I missed most of all. There was noise, but nothing behind it. I couldn’t get used to the blankness where there should have been bird gossip morning and evening, crickets at night, the buzz saw of cicadas in August. A rooster always sounding off somewhere, even dead in the middle of Jonesville. It’s like the movie background music. Notice it or don’t, but if
the volume goes out, the movie has no heart. I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or
purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.
I understand this is meant to be a small price to pay for the many things you do get to have in a city. Employment. Better entertainments, probably, if you’re not living in a recovery house with a curfew. City buses, library
and grocery stores in walking distance, check, check, check. Here’s another one: house keys. I’d never lived any place where people locked the front door at all times, whether inside of it or gone from it. Usually, we never even knew where the door key was. Chartrain did not believe this. We tried to explain, after the sixth or tenth time Viking or Gizmo or I left for work and forgot to lock up. He just thought we were idiots. He called us
hillbillies and yokels and all the names, unfit to live in the real world. We knew Chartrain loved us. We’d all had turns at carrying him and helping with bathroom business, the legs being not the only part of him messed up
down there. The names we could have called him back are not approved, so we didn’t. But never did get what he thought would happen to an unlocked house like ours, so plainly short on things to steal. We weren’t allowed drugs, couldn’t afford electronics, and our only jewelry was hardwired onto Chartrain. Regardless, we learned that much about living in the so-called real world. How to lock up a house.
I’ve tried in this telling, time and again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there’s also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to
grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing’s going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.
It had mainly fallen to Angus over the years to crack some of the harder nuts of Demon, due to her always being around and putting up with me.
Also Mr. Armstrong, notorious serial-nutcracker of Jonesville Middle brains. But the one you’re never going to guess: Tommy. Going all the way back to woeful Tommy in the paper office pulling his hair, crushed by the news of us hill folk being the kicked dogs of America. Leading to the
shocking demise of Stumpy Fiddles, the pencil thrust in challenge: Let’s see you do better. We were just a couple of time-hardened foster boys shooting the shit. What good could ever come of that? You wait.
Tommy was lonely at the paper office now, that much I knew, based on how much he was emailing. Still reading books, and emailing me about the
books and ideas he got from the books, just like he used to tell me the entire plot of his latest Boxcar Children, down to the last detail I heard before conking off. Now he was all into the history of Appalachian everything.
This Dog of America thing being a major sticking point, Tommy was not
moving on. But we were good, like old times, discussing his girl Sophie, my new rehab pals, both of us in the same boat now as regards girlfriend action. Our Red Neck strip went on ice for a time. We got some grace from Pinkie, as long as we promised to come back eventually and finish the twelve-month agreement. This option was written into our contract by Annie. Evidently she saw my downfall coming.
As far as the books he wanted to discuss, I can’t even tell you what they were about. I honestly wished for a good Boxcar with a beginning and end, because these went nowhere. Theories. I told him about the hard and surprising knocks of city life, and he explained it all back to me in book words. He said up home we are land economy people, and city is money economy. I told him not everybody here has money, there are guys with a piece of cardboard for their prize possession, so pitiful you want to give them the shirt off your back. (Which Tommy would.) And he was like, Exactly. In your cities, money is the whole basis. Have it, or don’t have it,
it’s still the one and only way to get what all you need: food, clothes, house, music, fun times.
Maybe that sounds like the normal to you. Up home, it’s different. I mean yes, you want money and a job, but there’s a hundred other things you do for getting by, especially older people and farmers with the crops, tomato
gardens and such. Hunting and fishing, plus all the woman things, making
quilts and clothes. Whether big or small, you’ve always got the place you’re living on. I’ve known people to raise a beef in the yard behind their rented trailer. I was getting the picture now on why June’s doom castle had freaked me out. Having some ground to stand on, that’s our whole basis. It’s the
bags of summer squash and shelly beans everybody gives you from their gardens, and on from there. The porch rockers where the mammaws get together and knit baby clothes for the pregnant high school girls.
Sandwiches the church ladies pack for the hungrier kids to take home on weekends. Honestly, I would call us the juice economy. Or I guess used to be, up until everybody started getting wrecked on the newer product. We did not save our juice, we would give it to each and all we meet, because we’re going to need some of that back before long, along with the free
advice and power tools. Covered dishes for a funeral, porch music for a wedding, extra hands for getting the tobacco in. Just talking about it made me homesick for the life of unlocked doors that Chartrain called Not the
Real World. You couldn’t see him sticking around one day in Lee County. We all want what we’re used to.
Tommy and I discussed this nonsense way too much, with all my emailing at the library involving some degree of shenanigans with a hot librarian named Lyra, more on her later. I expected nothing to come of it. Mostly, it was Tommy being aggravated. He pointed out how a lot of our land-people things we do for getting by, like farmer, fishing, hunting, making our own liquor, are the exact things that get turned into hateful
jokes on us. He wasn’t wrong, cartoonwise that shit refuses to die. Straw hat, fishing pole, XXX jug. Kill Stumpy Fiddles, along will come Jiggle Billy on adult swim. But all I could say was, Tommy, you know and I know, neither way is really better. In the long run it’s all just hustle. So our hustle
is different. So what?
And he said, I’m still figuring that part out.
