ONE

THE RAILROAD TRACKS

I HAD BEEN IN AND OUT of three drug treatment programs by the time August 2005 rolled around. I was thirty-eight years old then and still struggling to get my life together. My mother had passed away, and I had caused so much hurt to my family that they could no longer be a resource to me. I was not the same person that they were accustomed to seeing; my addiction to crack cocaine had caused me to behave erratically. The previous two treatment programs I had enrolled in were reputable, and it was me who couldn’t stay the course. The one I was in that August was a sham.

I’ve been in the recovery business for a while. I’ve helped manage three quarter-way houses, so I’ve seen the whole process: all of the tricks, all of the different challenges, all of the fights that people are going through within themselves.

I know a lot of times we addicts will put the blame on other people and circumstances beyond our control. But I’m telling you, as a sober person looking back on the program I was in at that time, it was a sham. They were more concerned with what they could get out of you, like your food stamps, than with helping you. You had to turn over your food stamps to them, and if you didn’t have food stamps, they wanted to make you apply for food stamps. It wasn’t even necessarily recovery focused. But either way, I was there, and I was trying to stick it out.

Then I injured my back. The people in charge of the treatment center told me that I could not go to the doctor. If I left the premises, I would get kicked out of the program. To this day, I have no clue why that was. Would they lose funding if someone were off their rolls for a few days? Did they think I was faking my injury so I could get some pain medication and use that as a gateway back to using more heavily? I actually got kind of pissed off. Why would someone deny me the opportunity to get medical help when my back was really hurting?

I chose to go see the doctor, and the program told me I couldn’t come back. So I went to a homeless shelter where I had been housed before.

One of the counselors recognized me and said, “Wait a minute. Didn’t we send you to a program?”

I said, “Yeah, but I had to leave, and they kicked me out.”

And the counselor told me, “Well, you can’t stay here.”

And so I got kicked out of that shelter as well. I was back out on the streets. I found a different shelter where I was able to stay for one night. At this particular place, you have to be back by a certain time or you lose your bed. I went to visit my sister, and I came back about five minutes late and I had lost my spot. Now, I was really out of luck. I found a spot behind a dumpster and I crashed for the night.

THE NEXT DAY, I CALLED A FRIEND OF MINE ON THE PHONE. HE WAS A GOOD FRIEND, AN old friend.

I said, “Man, I need some money.”

He told me, “I don’t have money. But I think I might have something a little bit better than that. I know this pastor of a church. If you let her pray for you, your life is gonna turn around.”

I remember when he told me that, something came over me, so I developed a great yearning to do exactly that. I wanted to meet this pastor. I wanted to have this pastor pray for me because I was just frustrated and tired of the life that I was living. I was so tired of using drugs. I was desperate. I was ready for anything.

The church was quite a distance from where I was standing at that moment. I looked through my pockets, to find the last bits of change I had to my name. I figured that if I was going to spend this money, I was going to step out on faith, because this person was going to pray for me and my life was going to change. It was gonna be worth it. I believed that something special was going to happen that day.

As it turned out, I didn’t have enough money to both take a bus and get the transfer to another line that I needed to take. I only had enough to just take one straight shot, so I walked to one location to catch a particular bus that would drop me off not too far from this church. I walked a mile from the bus stop, following the directions carefully.

When I got there that night, they were having a service. I thought that was a good sign. In fact, they were just beginning when I walked in. I went to sit all the way in the back, because I wasn’t the best dressed. But I enjoyed the service: the music, the singing—it kind of brought me back to my younger days; I’d been raised in the church where my father was the pastor.

By the end of the service, I had been uplifted by a combination of the preaching and my childhood memories. I felt inspired with a certain confidence, so I walked to the front of the church and approached the pastor. I told her I was homeless and desperate, but I wanted to qualify that for her.

I remember telling her, “Pastor, I’m not looking for money. I’m not looking for clothes. I’m not looking for anything but prayer. A friend of mine told me to come to you and ask you to pray for me because my life has just been out of control.”

She put her hands on my shoulder in such a loving way. I thought for sure she was getting ready to pop out the olive oil and anoint my forehead with one of those life transformational prayers. Instead, she pointed to another guy that was in the church.

“You see that gentleman over there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go talk to him and have him set up an appointment for you for tomorrow.”

In my mind, I thought: Woman, don’t you understand what I’m telling you? Don’t you understand my level of desperation? Tomorrow? Do you understand the space that I’m in right now? That I just spent my last cent to come here and all I wanted was a prayer, and you’re telling me to come back tomorrow? How the hell am I going to get home? Where am I going to stay tonight?

I didn’t say any of this. I just told her yes, but I walked right past the guy and out of the church. When I stepped out into the humid, night air, the thought that stayed with me was,

Man, even God has abandoned me. Even God has turned His back on me.

THAT WAS A VERY LOW POINT IN MY LIFE, THINKING THAT NO ONE LOVED ME. EVEN GOD, the all-forgiving God, didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I didn’t know what to do when I walked out of that church, so I walked the mile back to the bus line from where I had come.

And as I got near the stop, I remembered that my mother had a good friend who owned a restaurant nearby. My mom was a waitress back in the day, and there were these two cooks who were real close with her over a period of about fifteen years. During that time, one of the cooks ended up leaving and starting his own restaurant, and that restaurant was not too far from here. So I kept walking, thinking, Maybe I can go to him, because I’m stuck, and see if I can get a few dollars based off his friendship with our family, in particular with my mom.

Thankfully, he was there. He gave me twenty dollars. Typically, I get twenty dollars, the first place I’m going is to the drug hole, right? But I was tired. I really didn’t want to use drugs. And I didn’t buy any alcohol. I used that money to get some snacks to eat, and a grape soda, and to catch a bus back toward downtown Miami. I got off near the major hospitals and the Miami-Dade County jail. It was now the middle of the night. And that night, for the first time in my entire life, I slept on a bus bench.

I was tired. Before, maybe even the day before, I would not have thought about sleeping out in the open. I would have slept inside an abandoned building, or if it had to be outside, it would have been in a park or behind a church, someplace where people wouldn’t see me. But that night, all my pride was gone. I just wanted to lay down, and I didn’t care where. I went to sleep in full view of the public.

THE NEXT MORNING WHEN I WOKE UP, I THOUGHT, OKAY, I’M GOING TO GET SOME HELP. I tried to get into one more drug treatment program. They did a urinalysis, and I still had cocaine in my system so they couldn’t accept me. The funny thing about some of these programs is that to get in, you have to be clean, which didn’t make any sense to me. I was there to get help because I have a drug problem, but I can’t have drugs in my system to be there.

That’s when I thought about Central Intake. Central Intake is a facility that’s part of the Jackson Memorial Hospital program, almost like a clearinghouse for drug and alcohol treatment centers. It deals with abuse at a crisis level. It’s a place where you can go to be evaluated, and then, based on the assessment, they recommend you for different types of programs, whether inpatient or outpatient.

Central Intake was another two miles away. I was walking in this thick humidity under a hot sun and I was frustrated as hell. I had never eaten out of a dumpster before that day, but I had no more pride. Another homeless guy told me where there was some Popeye’s chicken, and it didn’t matter to me anymore that I was diving into the trash to get some for myself. Before—sure, I would have had my standards. But with the sweat rolling down my back, thinking about last night where God forgot all about me, feeling dejected as I headed toward Central Intake, I just didn’t care anymore.

And that’s how I ended up at the railroad tracks. I had to cross these railroad tracks to get to Central Intake. It was a desolate place. You could tell the area was used a lot by homeless people, with garbage strewn all over the place. People discard their refuse there and that’s exactly how I felt, like I was useless, worthless. I stood there, a broken man. I was homeless. I was addicted to drugs. I had only recently been released from prison, so of course I was unemployed. I didn’t have anything; I didn’t own anything other than the clothes that were on my back. I knew that my loving mother didn’t raise me to be in that position, but there I was. I didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, and I was ready to check out. I was ready to end it all.

As I stood there fixated, I was able to block out the oppressive heat and humidity and become oblivious to everything else. I didn’t hear the traffic passing by on the nearby boulevards. I didn’t see anyone in and around their houses or apartment buildings. I had a laser focus on the railroad tracks.

My mind went back to a story I had read a few weeks prior about a man in Broward County who had committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. I was so riveted by that story, I couldn’t take another step. How did he do it? I wondered. Did he wait until the train was too close to stop in time, and then jumped in front of it at the last second? What did he experience? Did the train kill him instantly? Did it cut him in half? Was it the weight of the train that severed him, or was his body crushed between the steel wheels and the iron tracks?

The only thing that was going through my mind as I stood there was how much pain I was going to feel when I jumped in front of the oncoming train. I was thinking about whether I was going to die instantly, or if I’d have to go through moments of agonizing pain.

I was staring at the curve where the train was going to come around the bend. And I could not leave. I could not cross those tracks. That was the end of the road for me. I was just waiting. And I waited.

I have no idea how long I waited, because I was so empty. I’m sure someone had identified me already out there; maybe there were people whispering at that very moment, “There’s a crazy man out there!” But I was oblivious to their concerns, and I wouldn’t have responded to them anyway. Or maybe I was invisible to them, just like homeless people are to so many of us. Either way I wouldn’t have cared about who saw me or what they were thinking because I was ready to end my life. But for some reason that train didn’t come that day. I waited there for what felt like hours because of the zone I was in, and the train just didn’t come.

Eventually I was able to break my chain of thought and cross the tracks. Central Intake was only two blocks away. Let’s give it that last shot, I thought. I crossed the tracks and walked the two blocks, and they got me into an inpatient program. It’s one thing for them to evaluate you, that’s just one hurdle. Then they have to find space in a program. It just so happened that I was there at the right time, and the program had space, the type of program that they thought I needed.

That same day, they transported me to the site of the program, which I completed over the course of the next four months. I was grateful that I had been given another opportunity to beat my drug addiction, but I was also concerned about whether or not my life would ever amount to anything.