“I love you, Scott,” she said. “Keep coming back. It works—”
“If you work it,” the room finished.
A week prior, Scott had woken up from his three-day bender, broke and hungover. To still his nerves, he dressed and left his apartment. It was early Saturday morning, and Scott walked as the city slept. He made it all the way to Pito’s house and got him out of bed. Two years sober himself, Pito knew what to do with a detoxing junkie who wanted to get clean: plenty of water, coffee, vitamins, cigarettes, food, and, above all, constant monitoring. Pito stayed with Scott all day and that evening took him to meet his brother, David (fourteen years sober), and his wife, Anna. Anna lit a fire in their backyard pit and sat up with Scott until the bars closed at two a.m. It was a nauseating, painful, stretched-out day—Scott’s first drug-free in years.
Day five was miserable in a different way. Scott passed it sobbing at Pito’s house. “I can feel my body getting better,” he said, “but when you have years and years and years of not feeling anything from drinking and dope, then it kind of hits you.”
AA had its own binge for people starting to get sober: ninety meetings in ninety days. The idea was to surround the baby, their slang for newcomer, with a support structure that would replace his junkie network. And to never leave him alone. So Scott began showing up at Pito’s before the liquor stores opened at eight a.m. and ending his days around Anna’s fire pit after last call.
Scott was almost three weeks sober when his landlord told him to go. D.P.’s newly acquired pit bull had got out and somehow snuck into the downstairs neighbors’ apartment. The neighbors called the police, who called the landlord, who, wanting to keep his long-term tenants, gave Scott and D.P. the boot. By that time, Scott was basically living at David and Anna’s. They told him he might as well sleep there too.
David and Anna’s working-class home was one of those places that seemed to belong to everybody. People would walk through the door without knocking and open the refrigerator without asking. “This is the Aldea Recovery House,” Anna would say. “If somebody’s not here, somebody’s calling.” She kept large bowls of rice and beans on hand and never locked the door.
Scott began sleeping on the Aldeas’ couch and picking up their children from school. Soon, he began working with David, a freelance mason and, in lean weeks, a metal scrapper. Scott liked the work, especially the urban adventure of hunting for aluminum or steel scraps, even if it did involve the occasional Dumpster dive. A barrel-chested Puerto Rican man with pinched eyes and a ready grin, sometimes David paid Scott and sometimes he didn’t. Scott didn’t complain. How could he, after what David and Anna had done for him?
—
At first, Scott liked cleaning the Serenity Club. The pay was piddly—$7.15 an hour, which would give him around $100 a week—but because he worked alone, from ten p.m. to one a.m. most nights, it gave him time to think. He thought about finding someone, although he didn’t know where to start if not in a gay bar. Craigslist? He thought about his sister’s wedding. Maybe he could make it home for that. He prayed, “Please don’t let me use tomorrow.”
But most of all, he would dream about returning to nursing. He thought that would be a “great way to stay sober because you start thinking about other people and not your poor, pathetic shit.” But the road ahead felt daunting. The nursing board didn’t just take Scott’s license away. Understandably, it made it extremely difficult for him to earn it back. He would have to submit to “the testing of urine specimens at a frequency of not less than 56 times per year,” which would cost thousands of dollars. He’d have to stay clean for five years and attend biweekly AA meetings.1 Scott recognized his weaknesses. He didn’t know if he would have tried harder to get clean years ago if the nursing board had not put license reinstatement so far out of reach. But giving up did come easier when things seemed impossible.
The “impaired professionals” gathering had left him discouraged too. One nurse said it had taken her over a year to find a job after being sober for about two years and passing all the requirements. And she had a master’s degree.
There were stations between having a revoked nursing license and having one with full privileges. But to get a nursing job with a restricted license—one that didn’t allow you to handle narcotics, say—was rare. Scott knew people. Over the years, he had stayed in touch with several nursing pals, and some had moved into positions of influence. He even had an aunt who was the dean of nursing at a large state university nearby. But staying in touch with these people had meant hiding his addiction and poverty, so approaching them for help was complicated. The last time Scott spoke with a friend who was the director of a local nursing home, he said he was doing fine. “So now I’d have to go back and say, ‘Oh no, I really wasn’t doing well. I was still a junkie. I totally lied to you.’…I guess that’s where a lot of my reservations would come in.” Scott didn’t feel he could call in any favors.2
After four months of cleaning the club with only one night off in total, Scott began to grow weary. He was sober and bored. He would empty the ashtrays, scrub the toilets, and, at the end of the night, grade his performance: A–, C+. Then twenty-one hours later, he would do it all again. At least when he was a junkie, his life had purpose: get dope. Now he felt as though he were pacing in a small, dull loop. Anna had asked Scott to pay $200 a month to sleep on the couch and to put his food stamps toward groceries, which made it difficult for him to save much.
It was more than just his work at the club. As the initial high of sobriety wore off, Scott began to sour on AA in general. This post-honeymoon sensation was so common that AA had a phrase for it: “falling off your pink cloud.”
“Ambivalence has turned into animosity,” Scott said. It embarrassed him, spending nights in folding-chair semicircles with washed-up drunks and cokeheads, drinking Folgers out of styrofoam cups and swapping horror stories. Scott grew to hate the rituals, the stranger’s hand on his shoulder, the hoary sayings—“But by the Grace of God,” “Let go and let God”—not to mention the Serenity Club crowd’s belief that fighting addiction with a prescription—methadone, say—was cheating. Scott was considering going to the county clinic to get something to help with the cravings and depression. But he couldn’t tell Anna or David. Scott had puked and shivered and wept to push the poison out of his system only to look around and see that he was still broke and homeless, logging stupid hours at AA and dipping a mop into a bucket at midnight. “Fucking addicts and drunks,” he would yell into an empty room whose folding chairs had not been put back. “This makes me crazy!”
—