I was addicted to crack from 1986 to 1990. I had various misadventures but I held a job through most of it. I had lived in mental health housing from 1984 to 1987 in what the agency that rented to me called satellite housing; it was where the agency rented various houses in the community and put 2-4 mentally ill people in them. We were on our own but a counselor was assigned to a cluster of four houses we lived in, two women houses and two mens houses. We all met with the counselor as a group once a week to talk about any problems we might be having with each other or to talk about needed repairs.
In 1987 I got kicked out of my house for doing drugs and for consistently paying my rent late. I moved into a temporary housing situation for people who were in transition and we could live in this house until we found a permanent place to live. It only fit 5 clients and we shared rooms and ate together. I made a friend there, actually we went back and forth between being enemies and friends but in the long run we became friends. He stole from me once and once when I got home late for dinner he proposed that I be punished to the counselors and the rest of the clients. It was right during dinner and what made it so bad was I had smoked a bunch of pot at work before I came home for dinner and I’m one of those schizophrenics who can not handle smoking pot and I was freaking out and paranoid as hell. I wanted to kill him for that (not literally).
Another thing that happened while I was living there is all the clients would wait until the staff went to bed at night and we would watch some porn videos I rented. The women would watch too, lol. The only thing was one night I accidentally left a video in the VCR and the next day the VCR wasn’t in it’s usual place because the board of directors of the agency held a big meeting and borrowed the VCR. Needless to say, they are surprised and shocked when they turned on the VCR in their meeting and my tape started playing. I caught hell from the staff for that mistake, lol.
Anyways, I looked at some places to live and settled on this small studio in a small apartment complex. When I say small I mean it had a bed and about 4 feet of space between the bed and the wall and about 4 feet between the foot of the bed and the from to door. It was tiny, the smallest place I’ve lived in, the smallest place I’ve ever seen. I moved in but I had left a huge jar of salsa I bought from Costco at the house. I went and got it but I had no refrigerator so I was walking past a neighbors studio in the complex and saw two guys sitting in there watching TV. On the spur of the moment, I called out, “Hey, you want some salsa?” they said sure and I made two friends. It turns out everybody in the complex was doing cocaine, in fact the guy next to me was a dealer. I had gone to the group home that my friend from the transition house had moved in and reconnected and he started coming over my house regularly and we would talk and drink beer. I also had a friend from the last satellite house I lived in so I was being pretty social.
The guy I gave the salsa to would come over all the time too, we always hung out. It was through him that I started hanging out at Stanford University. I’m sure everybody has heard of Stanford University, if for nothing else they usually had a pretty good football team. And they were a great medical school. It was said at the time that if you graduated from Stanford, you were guaranteed to become a millionaire. It was about a 15 minute walk from my studio and me and the salsa guy, who was named Mike used to go there all the time. He had weaseled his way into hanging out in the dorms and made friends with the young college students. He drank with them in their dorms and went to their parties and he took me along.
The funny thing was, like I said I was addicted to crack and I got most of my drugs from a city called East Palo Alto. It was a crack infested, dangerous rundown city and I was there at least a few times a week. When I say dangerous I mean the last year I was addicted to crack and going there it literally had the highest murder rate in the nation. Later they cleaned it up with more police presence but it had that reputation when I was going there. I never got hurt too bad but I got in many bad situations there where I could have easily got hurt badly or killed.
On the days I wasn’t there I was often hanging out at Stanford, going to their movie theater with students or hanging out a lake on the campus, going to parties there, driving around. And the city I lived in was Palo Alto, an affluent city with million dollar homes and rich people all over. I lived in that studio for 8 months and partied like crazy, hanging out at clubs and bars and working in a high end restaurant for a time. I mingled with the future doctors and lawyers and businessmen going to Stanford or I hung out with the murderers, ex cons, dealers and street people from East Palo Alto.
Well I ended up at my dad’s. My dad was in the process of divorcing my mom and he was living with a friend that he had worked with for several years. When I got fired from my dishwashing job and kicked out of my studio for owing three months back rent, my dad talked his friend into giving me a spare bedroom in his apartment. He didn’t even really charge me rent but I gave him a hundred dollars every now and then. I was still smoking crack and drinking and while my dad and his friend are at work 5 days a week I spent the time alone in the apartment. I tried to get out but sometimes all I could manage all day was a walk around the block. I do not do well when I don’t have a job and I have nothing to do and this period of my life was no different. I was in the middle of a terrible mental relapse, in fact during the 5 or 6 months I was there I was hospitalized three times. I would call up the cops and have them bring me to the psyche ward until one day a cop told me to stop calling them, that it wasn’t their job to drive me to the psyche ward.
I joined a day program and made a friend and went there for several months. Satellite housing called me up again at the end of six months and said they were opening some new houses and would give me another chance. I moved into a five bedroom house with four other roommates but that’s a whole other story. I made a friend with one of the roommates and we partied like crazy too. Eventually, I got kicked out of there too and went to the hospital and then I moved into a temporary group home where I joined AA and got clean.
My drug use was always a sore point with my dad. I had wrecked two of his cars and lied to him a lot and caused trouble with his neighbors. I know he was happy I got clean but he never wanted drugs mentioned, I couldn’t even talk about the AA program with him or anything drug related. But one time he said, “You really lived life in the fast lane.” I don’t know if he meant it as a compliment or it was just an observation or why he said it but I thought to myself, “Yeah, he’s right.”
I moved into the group home for five years and started going to AA, CA and NA meetings 5 or 6 times a week. Once I quit drugs and drinking I got a job and started attending college. I really got into the AA program and tried to live with rigorous honesty and by the other principles of the program. I tried helping other addicts and alcoholics. I became part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
Drug addiction almost wrecked me but I will say this after having 35 years clean now: it doesn’t matter what drug you used, how much you used, how you used or who you used with: you can still get clean. I’ve seen many success stories in AA meetings; people who used for 25 or more years, who lied and cheated and were violent and went to prison or jail and lived on the street. I have heard their stories and seen them turn into law abiding, productive members of society. People who slept in their own urine on park benches, who foraged in dumpsters every day for subsistence turned their life around and lived by the simple principles of the program. AA and the other programs are free and proven to work. I would hope if you have problems with drugs or alcohol that you at least give AA a try. It sure worked for me.