Chapter 2: Domestication

Sample chapter of my upcoming book, "Crooked Smile"

Chapter 2: Domestication

People who aren’t experienced with addiction often fail to wrap their heads around how truly difficult it is to get sober on your own accord. I know a lady who smoked crack throughout all nine months of her pregnancy, and when her water broke inside of her crack dealer’s house, she sat outside on the curb with a pipe in her mouth until an ambulance arrived. Just because you know you absolutely need to stop in order to save your own life, or even your baby’s life, it simply doesn’t matter. We’re hogtied and locked in the trunk while our addiction sits behind the wheel. It often gets to a place where being temporarily forced into submission would be in our best interest, and until we are, we’re merely vessels of lethal consumption.

At the age of twelve in late August of 2001, Aunt Betty and I flew from Boston to San Francisco, about two weeks before 9/11. I mention this because ever since I’ve perverted the catastrophe as a demarcation between my parents and me. This is just as nonsensical as it is egocentric, but you must understand that this tragedy coincided with the most traumatic experience of my childhood.

Self-obsessively, like any drug addict in the making, I took the world-changing event personally, and adopted its margin in time as my own. There were the good times before, and then the bad times after. Just like those that thought everything in this country was just fine until September 11, I was equally delusional about my docket. The times with my parents had been good, the times with my aunt and uncle would be bad, and there was no changing my mind until I found myself slowly dying in the gutter seventeen years later.

Global historic events aside, I didn’t handle the transition to California well. Despite being told that this change would be short term (everyone assumed my parents would get their act together after their arrest and probation), I was completely dispirited and refused to accept Aunt Betty and Uncle Tim as temporary parental figures. Aunt Betty didn’t have any children, and my uncle’s daughters from a previous marriage were well into adulthood, so their quaint middle-aged lives were suddenly shattered by a twelve-year-old feral child. I don’t mean to downplay their monumental sacrifice. I’m simply stating that, understandably, no party was excited about the situation. After all, it was deeply traumatizing for them as well, which I never took into consideration until years after our eventual schism.

I was supposed to enter seventh grade that year. School started shortly after my arrival, but I refused to attend for the first several weeks because I saw no point to it. I figured my parents would be out of jail shortly, and we would chalk this all up as a mistake; everything would simply return to the way it had been before my parents started smoking crack. All they needed was to sit in jail for a little bit, dry out, and realize that they shouldn’t get high anymore, right? Certainly, no parent could go on with this kind of behavior after experiencing the consequence of losing a child.

This is what I believed, as many family members of drug addicts do as well. I can’t tell you how many young women I’ve sat and got high with in my adulthood that were one dirty urine test away from losing custody of their kids, and yet the needle still finds a way into their veins. Quadruple that number and you wouldn’t even be close to the amount of men I’ve known who haven’t seen their children in years as a result of getting high. It didn’t slow them down a bit.

Having a decent amount of dirty money left in the reserve, my parents were able to hire a good lawyer (unfortunately), and neither of them having a serious prior criminal record also played in their favor. Because of this, they got released from jail with nothing more than informal probation. In my opinion, there shouldn’t be a punishment for using drugs in your own home if it’s not endangering anyone else. But smoking crack in public, combined with the fact that my parents’ addictions were ruining the life of their child, should have been enough for them to get mandated to a long-term program. Instead, they were sent back to their drug den and required to pay a fine. During their brief time in jail, they missed the check-in for the rehab my family had set up, and with getting to rehab now in their own hands, they of course couldn’t defy their addictions.