America Anonymous

Eight Addicts in Search of a Life

Benoit Denizet-Lewis

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780743277839
• eBook ISBN: 9781416594376
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Addiction in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

America Anonymous is the unforgettable story of eight men and women from around the country -- including a grandmother, a college student, a bodybuilder, and a housewife -- struggling with addictions. For nearly three years, acclaimed journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis immersed himself in their lives as they battled drug and alcohol abuse, overeating, and compulsive gambling and sexuality. Alternating with their stories is Denizet-Lewis's candid account of his own recovery from sexual addiction and his compelling examination of our culture of addiction, where we obsessively search for new and innovative ways to escape the reality of the present moment and make ourselves feel "better." Addiction is arguably this country's biggest public-health crisis, triggering and exacerbating many of our most pressing social problems (crime, poverty, skyrocketing health-care costs, and childhood abuse and neglect). But while cancer and AIDS survivors have taken to the streets -- and to the halls of Congress -- demanding to be counted, millions of addicts with successful long-term recovery talk only to each other in the confines of anonymous Twelve Step meetings. (A notable exception is the addicted celebrity, who often enters and exits rehab with great fanfare.) Through the riveting stories of Americans in various stages of recovery and relapse, Denizet-Lewis shines a spotlight on our most misunderstood health problem (is addiction a brain disease? A spiritual malady? A moral failing?) and breaks through the shame and denial that still shape our cultural understanding of it -- and hamper our ability to treat it. Are Americans more addicted than people in other countries, or does it just seem that way? Can food or sex be as addictive as alcohol and drugs? And will we ever be able to treat addiction with a pill? These are just a few of the questions Denizet-Lewis explores during his remarkable journey inside the lives of men and women struggling to become, or stay, sober. As the addicts in this book stumble, fall, and try again to make a different and better life, Denizet-Lewis records their struggles -- and his own -- with honesty and empathy.

1     Bobby

The drug is at once pain and relief, poison and medicine; to be an “addict” is to live this circularity, with nothing at the origin but a sickness that strengthens itself in curing itself.

—JANET FARRELL BRODIE AND MARC REDFIELD, HIGH ANXIETIES: CULTURAL STUDIES IN ADDICTION

THE MAIN FLIGHT path into Boston’s Logan Airport takes air travelers over the eastern edge of South Boston, an insular Irish Catholic community best known for its gangsters and addicts (and for its nickname, Southie). Today, the gangsters are mostly gone, but the addicts are as stuck in this neighborhood as they are on the drugs that make living here bearable.

“Sometimes I think God could do us a favor and crash a 747 into this fucking place,” Bobby says, standing barefoot in the kitchen of his parents’ Southie brownstone, smoking a cigarette and loading dirty glasses and plates into the dishwasher. A thirty-four-year-old heroin addict, Bobby didn’t want me to come over until he got high. “I got some about twenty minutes ago,” he shouts from the kitchen. “That’s all I’ve been thinking about since I woke up. How am I going to get what I need? That’s all I ever think about anymore.”

His younger brother, Dan, sits on a red couch in the living room clutching a copy of the book Boyos, a novel set in Southie’s criminal underworld written by a former state trooper who started robbing armored cars. Dan can relate to good guys doing bad things. A few years ago, when Dan was twenty-five, he was arrested for holding up a pharmacy for OxyContin, although the charges didn’t stick.

High on Oxys (as he is now), Dan, who is boyish and handsome, likes to read. “I can read ten books in a row on Oxys!” he tells me proudly, sitting upright on the couch in baggy blue warm-up pants and a blue-collared shirt. Oxys make Dan feel smart. On them, he’s not some Southie loser with no college degree, no job, no apartment, and a daughter he never sees. On Oxys, the former two-sport varsity athlete is a Southie intellectual, even if he doesn’t always have the vocabulary to back it up.

“You know, when Oxys first came out, a lot of people around here thought heroin was voodoo,” he tells me. Dan says “voodoo” a few more times before his brother can’t stand it any longer. “You mean taboo,” Bobby shouts from the kitchen. “Not voodoo. Taboo!”

Dan ignores him. “So the kids that would never dream of sticking a needle in their arm, they thought Oxys must be okay, because a doctor made it, ya know? What they didn’t realize was that it’s basically heroin in a pill. And then when they ran out of money and couldn’t afford the Oxys anymore, they switched over to heroin, because they needed something. So kids either went to treatment, or they started using heroin.”

“Or they killed themselves,” Bobby says, walking purposefully into the living room and scanning the area for any dirty dishes. He scoops up a half-empty glass of Sprite from the top of the television and sits down, his hulking body (6-foot-5, 250 pounds) sinking into a beige sofa. He’s wearing jeans, a gray long-sleeve shirt, and a red beanie over messy blond hair. He looks like an out-of-shape professional football player.

“I remember when I first saw an Oxy pill,” Bobby tells me. He pauses, then takes a drag from his cigarette. “It was ’96 or ’97, and I was down in the projects when this kid came up to me and had these rough-looking pills. They were forty milligrams of OxyContin, but I didn’t know that at the time. He didn’t know what he had, either. He had taken them from some old guy who was dying, and he had a whole fucking container of them! So I was like, ‘All right, I’ll buy a few of those.’ So I bought like ten for $4, which is so cheap, because now they’re $40 a piece. So then I did them, and I was like, ‘Oh, shit, what the fuck is this?’ I started calling them super-perps. So the next day I went back and bought every single one off the guy for $4 a piece. He found out later what he actually had, and one day he saw me and he was like, ‘You fuckin’ motherfucker.’”

OxyContin—a controlled-release pain formula approved in 1995 by the FDA amid the heightened awareness that millions of Americans were suffering from chronic pain—was supposed to be less addictive than other painkillers. But by the late 1990s, people in Massachusetts and in many other states had figured out that if they crushed the pill or dissolved it in water, it created a staggeringly powerful high.

Dan never drank or used drugs until he was twenty-two, and for two years he resisted offers from friends to try Oxys. But when his relationship with his longtime girlfriend soured, Dan moved back into his parents’ house and worked odd jobs. With seemingly little to live for, trying the drug didn’t seem like that big a deal.

“It started as a weekend thing, but then before I knew it I was craving it, and then I needed it to function,” he says, in perhaps the most concise and accurate description of the progression from habit to addiction I’ve ever heard.

Dan stands up and then sits down again. He does this often when he’s high—occasional bursts of movement without really going anywhere. Bobby gets up, too, although he shuffles back to the kitchen.

“Fuck!” Bobby screams a minute later, kicking the dishwasher in frustration. “Fucking thing won’t work. Did you put the dishwasher stuff in the dishwasher?”

“Yeah, Bobby, now let me talk to him, will ya? Relax, we can do it later.”

“I want to do it now,” Bobby says, hunched over at the waist and frantically pushing buttons on the machine. As is his pattern, he goes from calm to enraged in the span of a minute. He grabs the cordless phone and starts jabbing at the number keys. “It won’t work! It won’t go on! I’m trying to tell you it won’t work!” he screams to someone on the other end of the line. I’m curious to know who he’s talking to, but I’m afraid to ask. I’ve been warned by several people who know Bobby well to stay out of his way when he’s angry, or when he’s desperate to find drugs.

“He has mood swings,” Dan explains. “He’s just a totally different person on heroin. You should see him when he’s sober. He’s a great guy!” (I already have. I met Bobby a few months ago at a community meeting about addiction, where he was a few days clean and said he was finally ready to stop using for good. But when it came time for him to get into a friend’s car and be driven to a local treatment center, he changed his mind.)

“Fuck!” Bobby screams again from the kitchen.

“Bobby, relax,” Dan says.

“I hate this stupid thing. I’m trying to fucking clean, you know? Why won’t this thing work? All I want to do is the fucking dishes.”

And then, a miracle: The machine starts working. Bobby hangs up the phone. “Okay, now who wants food?” he asks, opening the oven where he’s been heating up a frozen pizza. The rage is gone as quickly as it came. He tosses the pizza on a plate and joins us in the living room, plopping himself down on the sofa again.

“You can’t really keep a job on Oxys,” Dan says, picking up where he left off before Bobby’s tantrum. “So now I don’t do anything all day, really. And I’m stuck in this fucking town.”

“Our parents are in denial about Dan’s addiction,” Bobby tells me, coughing loudly. “I’m the addict, I’m the fuck-up of the family. They must know about Dan, but it’s like they don’t want to know. You gotta understand, there’s a lot of dysfunction and denial in our family. I can’t think of any family around here where there isn’t addiction. Parents are alcoholics. Kids are alcoholics and drug addicts. Look around Southie. What do you see? You see a fucking liquor store and church on every other corner. So people can drink their life away, and then they can go and pray and ask God to make it all better.”

While Dan has never been to treatment (“It’s just not my thing”), Bobby estimates that he’s been in and out of some seventy detoxes and residential treatment centers. Space in treatment centers isn’t always easy to come by, but Bobby has an advantage. His godmother, Margaret, works for a local anti-addiction community group. Margaret spends her days counseling Southie parents, shuffling their kids to treatment and drug court, and making sure her own kids don’t start using.

Bobby’s longest periods of sobriety have come in jail. He’s been convicted of drug possession and assault, serving a total of three years. “In jail, I’m working out, I’m eating right, and I’m clean,” he explains. “When I get out, I end up back in Southie, around the same people, places, and things. But I don’t want to leave my kids.” (Bobby has two sons—they’re seven and ten—who live with his ex-girlfriend.)

I ask Dan and Bobby if it’s possible to stay sober in Southie. “It’s hard, but it’s possible,” Dan says, standing up and pacing around the couch. “Some of my friends go to AA meetings all the time, and they’re clean. They’re always like, ‘Dan, you should come to a meeting. Dan, you can change your life. Dan, come on.’ But there’s a lot of cliques in AA and stuff. I’m not a person who deals well with cliques and phonies, you know? Plus I’ve probably had a run-in with half the people in the room at AA. Some stupid fight over drugs, or a girl. But I can talk to people I know in AA and basically have a meeting like I’m doing right now with you. You know what I mean? This is sort of like an AA meeting right now, but without the fucking cliques. You know what I mean?”

I don’t know what he means. This is far from an AA meeting, and while Dan desperately wants me to agree with him, I’m uncomfortable supporting his rationalizations. “I don’t know,” Dan continues. “Maybe in the future I’ll go. I want to get into the Marines, and I’ll have to be clean for that. But if I don’t do the Marines, I’ll probably start going to AA.”

Dan sits down and squeezes his book tight. Bobby takes a big bite out of his pizza, smacking loudly as he chews. I ask Bobby if he has plans to return to treatment. “I’ll go back soon enough,” he says. “I’ll get sick of this life, like I always do, and I’ll go.”

“When?” I ask him.

“I’ll go when I go. I don’t know.”

2 Marvin

Alcohol, and not the dog, is man’s best friend.

—W. C. FIELDS

“HI, FOLKS, MY name is Marvin, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Marvin!”

As I survey the crowded room of gray-haired grandparents with hearing aids, walkers, and oxygen tanks, I have to remind myself where I am. This is not Friday night bingo. This is an AA meeting unlike any I have seen. Once a week, the Hanley Center in West Palm Beach—one of the few treatment centers in the country with a program designed specifically for seniors—hosts a Sober Seniors meeting, which is open to both current patients and addicts from around the area. At thirty, I’m the youngest person here by some twenty years.

It’s Marvin’s turn to hand out sobriety chips, and he gets right down to business. (Sobriety chips are coins signifying that a person has attained a period of sobriety.) First is the “surrender chip,” meant for those who want to affirm their willingness to do whatever it takes to stay sober today.

“I picked mine up here two years ago,” he tells the group of about thirty-five seniors. “And thanks to my higher power, I still haven’t had a drink. I rub it every day! So, who wants to start a new way of life today?” An elderly woman with gray hair and a slow, defeated gait makes her way to the front of the room, where Marvin hands her a chip and a bigger hug than she anticipated.

(During AA’s early years, many members didn’t believe women could be “real” alcoholics. In an AA newsletter published in 1946, a male member specified eleven reasons why women shouldn’t be allowed in meetings, including “women talk too much,” “women’s feelings get hurt too often,” “so many women want to run things,” “many women form attachments too intense—bordering on the emotional,” and “sooner or later, a woman-on-the-make sallies into a group, on the prowl for phone numbers and dates.” The wives of some early AA members were so threatened by single and divorced women attending meetings that they demanded that men and women sit on opposite sides of the room.)

Looking dapper in a green golf shirt and khakis, Marvin, who recently turned eighty and has a heavily wrinkled face and thinning gray hair, waves another chip in the air. “Anybody else?” he asks. “Where there’s one, there’s two!” When no one comes forward, Marvin moves on. “Okay, so the next chip is for thirty days. After thirty days, you’re feeling pretty good, the mind is clearing a bit. It’s a green chip, a green light if you will, to keep doing what you’re doing.” He hands out two thirty-day chips and two bear hugs.

“So after thirty days we have a chip for sixty days,” Marvin says, to which he is promptly corrected by most people in the room. There is no sixty-day chip. “Right, right,” Marvin says. “Ninety days. Anyone for a ninety-day chip? By this time your mind is really starting to clear. Your life is getting better. Things are looking up! Anyone for thirty days?”

The crowd corrects him again—he’s on ninety days, not thirty—although this time most people in the room find the mistake hilarious. A woman who’s been knitting quietly in a corner starts giggling uncontrollably, and a frail man slaps his knee.

It’s not the first time this group has broken out into laughter.

In his book Slaying the Dragon, William White notes that the levity of many AA meetings can surprise—even offend—nonalcoholic professionals attending as an observer (some Twelve Step meetings are open to those wishing to learn more about addiction). “The laughter within AA is not the superficial tittering of the cocktail party or the gallows laughter of the actively addicted,” White writes. “This is the boisterous, knowing belly-laughing of healing.”

When everyone settles down, Marvin, who’s still smiling, decides to use his forgetfulness as a life lesson. “See,” he tells the group. “This is what happens when you drink too much in your life! Let me be a warning to you all.”

Later that afternoon, Marvin invites me t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• 1 Bobby
• 2 Marvin
• 3 Todd
• 4 Ellen
• 5 Sean
• 6 Janice
• 7 Jody
• 8 Kate
• 9 Sean
• 10 Jody
• 11 Kate
• 12 Janice
• 13 Todd
• 14 Marvin
• 15 Bobby
• 16 Ellen
• 17 Sean
• 18 Kate
• 19 Ellen
• 20 Bobby
• 21 Jody
• 22 Janice
• 23 Todd
• 24 Sean
• 25 Marvin
• 26 Ellen
• 27 Kate
• 28 Jody
• 29 Bobby
• 30 Todd
• 31 Sean
• 32 Janice
• Conclusion
• THE TWELVE STEPS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS