Читать книгу Big Love - Scott Stabile - Страница 12

MY BROTHER

One rainy afternoon when I was ten or eleven, I grabbed my red-white-and-blue roller skates and headed to our basement to skate. I often took refuge downstairs when it was wet or cold outside, which was most of the time, in Michigan. With Donna Summer or Michael Jackson on the radio, our basement — clutter-free and gigantic to a boy my age — made for a fantastic roller disco. I’d race around in circles and spin dramatically from the many support poles, pretending to compete for a medal in the Olympics. That day, I was eager to perfect my shoot the duck, which would’ve guaranteed me a gold.

As I began my descent down the stairs, I caught the eye of my older brother, Ricky. He stood with slouched shoulders, in white briefs, shackled by his wrists and ankles to a pole in the center of our basement — the very pole I used to spin around most often while I skated. My brother stood there motionless, too skinny, beside a twin mattress on the floor next to the pole. His eyes looked dark and heavy, his face pale and gaunt. His wrists and ankles were weighted beneath metal cuffs connected to a thick chain that wrapped around the pole, giving him maybe five feet of mobility in any direction. I noticed a dirty bucket a few feet from the mattress and understood that to be his toilet. I don’t remember any foul smells, but they must have been there, blocked out by the shock of seeing my brother chained up like a wild dog. Like a prisoner. Like someone who had already tried everything else to get clean.

I’m not sure if I forgot my brother was going to be taking up residence in our basement, or if my parents had neglected to mention this fact to me. That oversight seems hard to believe but was entirely possible. My parents weren’t always the most adept parenters. I was the youngest of seven children, barely double digits in age, so any important bits of family drama I learned, I found out for myself through eavesdropping or reading between the lines. Or going downstairs to roller-skate. I’m confident I would’ve avoided the basement had I known (or even suspected) Ricky would be down there, almost naked, shitting and puking into a bucket. I wasn’t that curious a kid. Whatever the case, there I was, and there he was, and there we were. Two brothers, one horribly uncomfortable moment.

I froze on the stairs the instant I noticed Ricky. I couldn’t make sense of this incarceration, but I knew it had to do with his drug addiction. I could tell that he had agreed to this horror. He was there by his own will. When Ricky realized I was on the steps, he looked at me, stunned and ashamed, then bowed his head and diverted his eyes. We didn’t speak. What was there to say? I was confused and scared to see my brother like that. I turned around, ran back up the stairs, and closed the door hard behind me. I grasped two things in that moment: Ricky was much sicker than I had realized, and my parents would do anything they could to help him get well.

Ricky was addicted to heroin. He was eighteen years older than I, and as far as anyone knew, his addiction began before I was born or when I was still an infant. I never knew him as anything but a junkie. That was the title I gave him, even before brother. His addiction was the lens through which I viewed him. Always high, or wanting to get high, or struggling desperately to keep from getting high. A character. An actor. Pieces of a real person, I thought, but never an honest whole. Never in control. I pitied him, and I resented him. I prayed for him, and I spited him. I loved him, and I hated him — for the brother he was, and the one he refused to be.

Ricky knew he had a problem. He didn’t live in denial about his addiction, not at all. He talked openly about his inability to kick the habit. And he sought help countless times. He went to AA and NA meetings and worked with various sponsors but always went back to the needle. He checked himself into many rehabs, stayed days or weeks or months, and always went back to the needle. He even agreed to be shackled like an animal in our basement — and a second time, a couple of years later, to our parents’ bed — while he endured cold-turkey withdrawals, and still he went back to the needle. Some of these attempts at going clean weren’t effective at all, while others kept him out of the smack houses for a short time. Inevitably, though, his desire to get high overcame him and ran him vein-first back into his addiction.

As a kid I couldn’t make sense of Ricky’s addiction. I couldn’t accept his inability to control himself or the notion that he was physically incapable of doing so. Along with my anger and resentment grew disgust — with the way he spoke, always with undercurrents of shame and desperation; with the way he looked, unkempt and skinny with track marks in his arms; with the way he smelled, like chemicals and city grime, a body odor that would never wash clean. More than anything, though, I grew to hate Ricky most because of the pain he caused our family, especially my parents.

I saw my father cry only twice, both times because of my brother, because of his inability to help him. I can still see my dad, laid out on our family room couch, his head in my mom’s lap, his sobs filling our home. I wonder if he ever understood that nothing he or my mother did was responsible for Ricky’s addiction. I wonder if any parents of an addicted child can release themselves completely from the burden of that responsibility. I’ve met many parents whose children have succumbed to addiction, and every single one of them continued to wonder what they could’ve done differently and what they had done wrong. I blamed no one but my brother for his choices, and as I saw my parents become more afraid of what would happen to him, I became angrier about what was already happening to us all.

When Ricky came by for a visit — which happened with little regularity and never with any forewarning — relief, and then tension, overcame our home. Relief that he was still alive and tension over why he had come. Because he was in trouble? To ask for money? To steal from us? We hid our valuables and locked our doors. I stuffed my piggy bank in the bottom right corner of my closet and buried it beneath a messy pile of games. We never left Ricky alone, except when he went to the bathroom, and then I wondered what he was doing in there. Was he shooting up right in our home, or was there something in there for him to steal?

My brother was an astonishingly kind and loving man, but he could not be trusted. Like many consumed by addiction, his next score was the main thing on his mind, and he’d steal from anyone — even his family — to get high. I learned this over Christmas break one year, listening in on a phone call between my parents. Ricky had broken into our home the night before and stolen all my mom’s jewelry, every last piece, including the diamond watch my father had given her just days before for Christmas. The surprise on her face when she unwrapped the watch was outmatched only by the joy in my dad’s smile as my mom tried it on; neither of them was particularly fancy in a diamond-watch sort of way. As my parents discussed Ricky’s theft, they sounded more anguished than angry. Hopeless. Defeated. I understood then that the precautions we took when Ricky was around were necessary. And clearly not enough.

Months after my parents died, my siblings and I spent a weekend at our cottage in northern Michigan. Ricky and I stood beside the lake talking. I was fourteen at the time; he was thirty-two and had already lived nearly half his life addicted to drugs. He told me how disappointed he was that our parents died without seeing him get clean, that more than anything he wished he could take back all the agony he had caused them. He said he would try to stay straight as a tribute to them. Even as he said these words, I think we both knew they would never become reality. I realized that my brother’s efforts to get clean had more to do with loving my parents than himself, and that with my parents gone, he would likely never break free of dope. I don’t believe he cared enough about himself to do so. He didn’t know how.

Ricky wasn’t around too much during my high school years, which usually meant he was deep into his addiction. If we weren’t seeing him, he was definitely seeing the needle. My resentment and anger had started to shift, however, and continued to do so once I went away to college. I learned more about addiction and embraced the understanding of it as a disease. I believed that Ricky truly didn’t have control over his behavior, that he in fact didn’t have a choice in his actions. He was a victim to the drug. This belief helped me find forgiveness for the pain he caused our family. I found compassion, too, instead of only judgment.

On September 14, 1994, I came home to my apartment in San Francisco to two messages from my sister Rose. Without revealing any details, she told me to call her right away. Her voice sounded shaky, sad. I knew Ricky was dead. I had known for years I’d be receiving a call someday with news of my brother’s death. It was only a matter of time. And time had run out for Ricky. Rose told me that Ricky had died early that morning from an overdose. His body had been discovered in a bathroom stall in a McDonald’s somewhere in Detroit. Like the vision of my brother shackled in our basement, I knew this image would stay with me forever. And it has.

I was relieved, though, that Ricky had died. Relieved he was no longer shooting up in smack houses and fast-food joint bathrooms, or spending nights in jail. Relieved he no longer had to feel guilty and ashamed or work so hard to escape reality. I’d watched him suffer horribly my entire life, and I didn’t believe he’d find a way out for himself, aside from death. The drug was too powerful, or so I thought. Now he was finally free. He had finally found peace.

My attitude about my brother, and about addiction, shifted again in the years after his death. I’ve had — and have — many recovering addicts for friends and recognize one critical component to a successful life in recovery, a component that wouldn’t have the same power if addiction were, in fact, only an incurable disease: choice. Without choice, sobriety is impossible. And it’s a constant choice, again and again, not to use. Ricky made that choice throughout his life, every single time he went to an AA meeting or checked himself into rehab or made it through a day clean. He just always chose to shoot up again. I don’t know what it was about his life he couldn’t find the courage to face. Even though I was his brother, I didn’t know what was causing him so much pain.

I used to think heroin was more powerful than my brother, but I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I don’t believe any drug — any addiction — is stronger than the person using, or we’d never see addicted users stop. I think Ricky was too unhappy to deal with the reality of our world as it was. He needed to create a different reality for himself, and he found a way to do it. He made his choice. Again and again. Ricky was lost but not powerless. No addict is. No person is. We all have the power to choose. Do we use, or do we abstain? If there is no choice in the habits that lead to addiction, then how can so many people choose to go beyond it? Every day, all over the world, people are moving beyond their addictions. They are choosing to free themselves.

That’s not to say sobriety is an easy choice, or that alcohol and drugs aren’t addictive. Of course they can be. And I don’t want to in any way suggest that addicts are somehow flawed human beings if they don’t get sober. Whether or not we believe those with addiction have an incurable disease or are consciously making unhealthy choices shouldn’t matter in the way we talk about and treat them. Stigmatizing people who struggle with addiction certainly won’t help them heal. I spent too many years looking down on my brother because of his drug problem, seeing him as broken and less than. As only a junkie. He, like all who battle addiction, was no less deserving of kindness and compassion, whatever the reason for his addiction and his inability to break free of it. There is no greater than or less than where people are concerned. We’re all equal, all worthy of the same love. And aren’t we all addicts to some degree? Don’t we all make unhealthy choices, more often than we’d like, with the sole purpose of escaping discomfort and pain?

I’ve numbed myself with alcohol and drugs and sugar and sex and television and social media, all of them in excess, for periods in my life. I’ve never felt completely out of control in my habits (save social media), but I’ve certainly tasted addiction. I wasted many days chasing after empty sex online, knowing it wouldn’t fulfill me but being unwilling to stop seeking it. I’ve downed countless pints of ice cream, as well as every dessert in existence, in failed attempts to ease my sadness. I smoked pot so regularly that I felt uneasy going to sleep without it. Addiction tempts us all. How many of us spend hours upon hours glazed over as we check our social media accounts or binge-watch TV at unhealthy levels, just to keep from having to face our real lives?

All these escapes reflect nothing more than some missing piece of happiness and connection in our lives, a deeper peace of mind that so often isn’t there. It’s easy to see, in this world with such anger, violence, and pain, how so many of us feel safer losing ourselves than we do finding ourselves. Escaping, rather than working to heal our realities.

I still escape sometimes, but much less often than I used to, because I always return to the same place I left behind. Don’t you? And it usually feels even worse than when I left it. Whatever it is we’re running from doesn’t go anywhere. It may not chase us every second, but it won’t disappear, either. The truth remains. Which is why drug addicts and alcoholics — and frankly, many of us — don’t like to be sober, consciously aware of ourselves and the planet. The whole truth lives in sobriety, and the whole truth is never pretty for any of us. It can, however, be tolerable. It can become something we’re able to live with, even accept and honor, without needing to numb ourselves to do so. With our willingness, and with support.