Pitiful and Incomprehensible Demoralization (Requiem 7)

After another week in detox, I came out with a renewed vigor to stay sober. Unfortunately, it did not last. The next 3 and a half months saw me in and out of treatment centers, the relationship with Jess disintegrating along the way.

Out of the third hospital, I made it to 29 days and got drunk. I drove out to Wendover again and got an ambulance ride back. I made it a week and got drunk. I started hitting emergency rooms with phantom symptoms of pain fishing for pills. I entered a psychiatric hospital that also handled substance abuse. I was in a lockdown ward for a couple of days and then got transferred to the open adult ward. I met a girl there and fooled around with her one night in a room where we thought everyone was asleep. A day or so later I faked a seizure. I was rushed to an emergency room where I was loaded with all types of painkillers. A few hours later after a bunch of tests determined I was faking, they took me back to the open adult ward. I was released and thrown out on my ear. I was reaching depths of demoralization I had never dreamed of and all the while Jess was slowly detaching herself from me. A few days later I was getting drunk again.

It wasn't too long before I was searching for coke again. One night I ended up at a dealers house. I scored and spent a surreal night driving around from coke house to coke house. By the end of the night I was broke and had let a dealer borrow my car for one rock of coke. I didn't see my car for 2 days. I couldn't keep on like I was, so I checked myself back into the place I first went through rehab. I spent 3 weeks there again. By the time I came out, I knew that nothing was going to change. Jess and I never really fought, but we never really talked either.

One Sunday I stole over to an old drinking buddies' house and had a couple of beers while watching a movie. When I made it back home I was thinking that a break would probably be a good thing. That week I went to a meeting and ran into a guy I had known since I first came to recovery. His name was Rob and we talked about how things at home were pretty bad. Rob's wife had just moved out and taken the kids. He was about 45 days sober and talked about how he was alone in this huge house. He was walking around kicking his kids' toys out of the way. He looked at his walls and saw dusty rectangles where family pictures had hung only days before. I felt like a ghost at my house and we talked about maybe moving in together to help each other through this tough time. That night I went home to Jess to talk about maybe taking a break. When I brought it up, she said she was thinking the same thing. I called Rob to see if he was serious about moving in together. He was. That was a Wednesday. We made plans for me to move my stuff out on Friday. Friday marked one year since I had been found outside of the strip club. When the day came, I got off work and called JM. He came over and helped me move my stuff. The first night at Rob's he got a call from a friend of ours named Dave. Dave was drunk and was looking at a possible divorce. The next night Dave joined us. Not long later, a fourth guy named Bruce came. He, too, was going to be starting a divorce. The house was quickly becoming known as "The Heartbreak Hotel" after the place Homer stayed when he and Marge were getting divorced on The Simpsons (which, of course, came from the Elvis song).

Determined to stay sober, we all sat in his living room one night. One person pulled out a recovery book and read the daily thought. We went around the room and told about our days. The highs, the lows, how our cravings were. After we had all shared, we felt a little better. Just knowing that there were 3 other guys new in sobriety trying their hardest to stay sober through relationship woes felt good. We decided we would continue these 'closing meetings'. We also decided that we should try it in the morning, but that only lasted a while because we all had different start times in the morning. Without trying to, but thanks in no small part to Rob's generosity, we had started a sober living environment. Things were beginning to look up again.