SIX

STAYING SOBER

OBVIOUSLY, IT’S EASIER to study and get good grades when you’re sober. It’s easier to remember things. Everything’s easier. As important as my education was to me, I could not place anything above my recovery. I was very, very strict. I would not engage in anything that was considered a threat to my recovery. I did not want anything in my life that would be a distraction.

Every day at the treatment center, a different person would come to the meeting. It’s generally the same set of people that come every week, but they bring guest speakers with them so they don’t have to speak all the time. So you knew that on a certain day, for example, John was coming. John always brought doughnuts. Then on a certain day, Brian would come. Brian wouldn’t bring anything but his problems. Whether it was his girlfriend or his job, Brian would just complain to us and his complaints were starting to get me worried. Man, I thought, if life is going to be this depressing, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to stay away from drugs forever.

Then this guy Frank H. came in, and he was like a breath of fresh air, a crazy, fun-loving Cuban American who I would eventually consider my brother. Frank’s thing was to bring pizza, but he brought so much more than that—he brought his full self. He told crazy stories that made people laugh, but there was always a message there and he had a commitment to staying clean. Frank was an exciting, adventurous, daring guy, who was at the same time fully committed to whoever needed his help. I’ve seen him take the shoes off his feet to give to someone who didn’t have any and go home barefoot! He not only came to our meetings, but he would take meetings to different treatment centers. Later I would model myself after Frank when I tried to both make the most out of life and be there for other folks.

Frank played the role of sponsor in my life as well. Eventually, he even opened up his house to me and allowed me to come live with him, his wife, and kids. He had a room there that he would rent. I eventually met his entire family, and they took me in like I was their family as well. His mom really loved me. Every time she saw me, she would grab my face and give me a big kiss, just like a Cuban mom would. I remember when the hurricane came through and destroyed Frank’s parents’ house and they had to live in a trailer, we went to make sure their awning was extended correctly. I was also there when his dad passed away. Slowly but surely my friendship with Frank turned into a brotherhood. We were kindred spirits.

Leaving the homeless shelter was a definite step forward for my self-esteem. Then Frank had the idea to take the house behind his and open it as a three-quarter-way house. The difference between a three-quarter-way house and a halfway house is that a three-quarter-way house is geared toward people who are recovering from substance addiction. It’s a different environment. A halfway house is something that the government might run for folks who are coming out of prison so that they can transition back into mainstream society. It’s more correction themed. The three-quarter-way house has more of a recovery theme. Our folks had to go to meetings.

Frank asked me if I wanted to be the manager, and so that’s what I did. My life was living in a home full of recovering addicts. We had either three or four people bunking together, depending on the size of the room—between ten and fifteen people total in the house at one time. Personally, I had two other roommates with me. Everyone in the house was a recovering addict. I made sure that everybody went to their mandatory meetings and that they did their assigned chores.

I got to see all the different personalities of an addict. I got to see all of the different tricks that people try to play, their cunning or their passive aggression or their outright hostility. I got to see the type of impact that drugs and alcohol had on different folks coming from different places. We had people ranging from a person from the street to a professional golfer living in our house. We had people of all colors and ethnicities, we had teachers, we had attorneys—drugs and alcohol don’t discriminate.

BEING THE MANAGER OF THE THREE-QUARTER-WAY HOUSE WAS A GREAT LEARNING experience for me that really helped me deepen my understanding of addiction. For one thing, it created a level of accountability. When I was leading meetings, I might think I was talking to other people, but I was really talking to myself. In my head, I was talking to try to share my experience, strength, and hope with the folks at the treatment center and let them know that they could make it, but what I realized was that whatever I shared with clients ended up applying to my own life.

When I was able to bring up things that happened to me in my past, I was able to actually confront those things, and in confronting those things, I came to find out that even though they happened to me, that didn’t necessarily mean that they defined me, that I was a bad person. Before I would suppress the memory of bad events because I held the belief that I was the one who brought it on. Bad events meant I was a bad person, and because I was a bad person, I didn’t deserve happiness or love. When we’re dealing with our recovery, we have to find ways to approach those issues, the parts of our past that suggest we don’t deserve to be successful. Being able to uncover and confront the darkest parts of my history, I was not only able to engage in an important conversation with others; I was able to convince myself that I had a right to live and even to succeed.

The world will get you. You need to have a philosophy that will keep you clean and sober over the years. Otherwise, if you get laid off from your job, you’re going to go to the dope, or if you break up with your girlfriend or you have a death in the family or there’s some kind of personal trauma or conflict . . . the dope will always be waiting for you.

It’s a battle between our subconscious and our conscious minds. You know how we’ve read books that say we’re only using about 10 percent of our brain’s capacity? I equate that with consciousness; our conscious mind represents around 10 percent of everything that transpires in our being. Your 10 percent might be saying that you don’t want to pick up drugs anymore, but your 90 percent is saying, Yes, I do want to get high. Because your head is a democratic place, that’s what happens. The majority rules.

There is just so much that’s going on in our subconscious minds. Consciously, as an addict, I do not want to destroy my life. I want to live, I want to love, I want to be loved. That won’t turn the tide, however, if subconsciously I hate myself. Then, in spite of what comes out of my mouth to you, I’m going to end up doing something destructive.

The key is figuring out how to get the majority in your head to tell you that you want to live. When I kept going with my recovery, I kept going within myself, and I kept finding more garbage that was inside me, more issues that needed to be worked out, won over, so that the majority of me could say: Desmond deserves to live. Desmond deserves to be loved. Desmond deserves to be happy.

DID EVERYONE THAT I SUPPORTED MAKE IT THROUGH? NO, AND IT’S THE SAME THING with recidivism for people who’ve been in prison. Some of the addicts I mentored got to the other side, and some of them died. Addiction is one of the most harrowing trials a human being can undergo.

From 2006 to 2012, I lived in a house full of drug addicts and alcoholics, so I got to see this ordeal on a daily basis, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I know there’s more to recovery than just willpower. I’ve seen people cry, just break down. They don’t want to get high, they don’t. They really don’t. They try really hard, but they end up relapsing.

It was almost impossible to watch at certain times. One of the things I used to think about to keep myself sane was those television shows when someone’s in a coma. The body has shut down so it can heal itself, and you might hear a doctor in the program utter a line like, “We’ve done all we can.” It’s now up to that individual to heal. When you look at the human body, you can plainly see it is one of God’s greatest creations. For this machine to function the way it does is a miracle. When someone is very sick, the body has a mechanism to heal itself that is outside of what another human could initiate or control. We have to trust that the body has everything it needs.

In a similar way, I think the answers to our questions are located inside of us. That’s that secret place of the most high. It’s not in a building; it’s within us, because that’s where God is. After a certain point in recovery, it’s not about willpower. It’s about how do we tap into our innermost selves, our innermost souls, and deal with what’s inside of there? That’s where we need to look.

And sometimes we get to see that beautiful miracle unfolding. Frank and I used to take meetings at different treatment centers around the county. Some folks would get attracted to the message one of us would bring, and when they were getting ready to graduate from their program and were looking for a three-quarter-way house to slowly ease their way back into their family’s life, guys would give us a call from time to time and ask to live at the recovery house.

There was this one guy, Louis. When he came to us, I remember he had to walk everywhere he went. From walking, he got a bike. Then he got a moped. Then he got a car. Then he was going to school. I don’t want to give myself too much credit, but he told me he was basically following in my footsteps. Now Louis is a successful sound engineer in the movie industry. Did I give him his ear for music? Of course not. Did I give him his initiative? I can’t claim that either. But I was proud to provide a supportive environment while he got his subconscious mind in line with his conscious mind so that everything was working together for the best interests of Louis.

IN RECOVERY, RELAPSES DON’T JUST HAPPEN. YOU ARE EITHER ENGAGING IN A SERIES OF behaviors that strengthen your conscious mind and confront your subconscious, or you are priming yourself for a relapse. You can control the structure and the system you have internally better than you could ever control external forces. Life-changing events will come out of nowhere and slap you right in the face, and your first reaction could be to drink or get high. I had one of those.

It was called the Spider-Man Massacre. Some armed home invaders came to a child’s birthday party in North Miami-Dade and held them hostage. The gunmen mistakenly thought that there was a safe full of money inside the house. But those people were my family and friends. They shot one of my nieces and my other niece’s two children.

One of the armed robbers told everyone he would have no trouble killing them if they didn’t give him what he wanted. He chased them out of the house, shooting at them. A close friend of the family and her son were shot to death.

When I found out what happened, I was on my way to a meeting with Frank.

He asked me, “Do you want to go to the hospital?”

Initially, I thought about going to the hospital. Family members could be clinging to life, and other family members were probably rushing there worried out of their minds. At the same time, I could see a relapse looming. So I was left with a choice: I could either go and be with my family amid the uncertainty of how I was going to respond to the crisis, or I could go to a safe place to protect my sobriety.

I said, “There’s nothing I can do. No, let’s go take this meeting first.”

That is huge in recovery. When tragic things happen, we make choices. In the past, we made choices to pick up. Now, I knew the best choice for me, despite whatever happened to the family, was to make sure I got to a meeting. I needed to be grounded. Then after the meeting, I could go to the hospital.

My niece and the two children of my other niece who were shot survived. They were shot in the head and the arm. One of them is now a criminal justice major in college, and the other one is a budding youth pastor.

FROM THE DEPTHS OF TRAGEDY TO THE HEIGHTS OF JOY, RECOVERY HAD IT ALL IN store for me.

Frank had jet skis, and one day he invited me to go jet skiing with him. We went to a lake by Miami International Airport. The lakes in Florida are dark, and I tried to explain to Frank why I wasn’t too keen on our plan.

Of all the movies I saw when I was a little kid, Jaws scared me the most. That movie terrified me for the rest of my life. As a kid, when I would be in the tub, playing Tarzan or whatever, I would start thinking about Jaws, and making that Jaws sound, and then all the fun would be over. I’d be ready to hop out of that bath because I was too scared to stay in there any longer. Even knowing that would happen, I would always do that.

Well, the thing that topped Jaws was alligators. In Florida, alligators are everywhere. I just knew that no matter what body of water I might be looking at, there was an alligator lurking in there somewhere, waiting to eat me. Add to that the fact that I had never been on a jet ski before and this just turned into a very bad idea. Somehow, though, Frank convinced me to get on a jet ski by myself. I was so scared as we were put-putting out onto the lake. The only thing I was thinking was, Whatever you do, Desmond, don’t fall. There are alligators in there, waiting on you.

I was out there, casually put-putting around while Frank got on his jet ski and went zooming right by me, creating waves. I screamed at him, “Leave me alone! Don’t make me fall!”

I got into the middle of the lake, but Frank kept circling around me. He said, “I’m going to keep on doing this until you ride this jet ski the right way.”

He wanted me to overcome my fear. So I started opening up the jet ski a little bit, and then a little bit more. Gliding over the water, I thought, Man, this feels all right. . . . Okay, this is cool.

Pretty soon I started going faster and making waves just slightly. Eventually, I decided to open it all the way up until I was bouncing off all these waves and screaming at the top of my lungs. “Wooooohoooooooooo!”

All of a sudden, it hit me like a wall—bam—I had to stop. It blew my mind, because that was the first time that I was actually having fun and didn’t have to be drunk or high. That was a life-changing moment. That was the first time I realized I could actually have a happy life without being intoxicated or under the influence of drugs. I started to cry, thinking back on my life and how the good times always seemed like they had to include some kind of substance. It was a transformational moment for me.

When that moment passed, I started riding again. Within minutes, however, the one thing I feared most happened: I fell off the jet ski! Oh my god, I was so terrified! I was scrambling to get back on the jet ski but didn’t know how, and I knew that at any moment this alligator is coming to get me. I finally made it back on, and I did not fall off again that day. But what I did know is that it was an amazing experience. I knew it for a fact, from that day on, that I didn’t have to get high anymore. But I didn’t get over the alligator thing.