(Part Two) .. Click here for Part One
(The following events occurred roughly as they are described in a smallish, southeastern city. Names have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent. In Part One, the author, based on no qualification apparent to him then or now, secures a position as a therapist and halfway house manager at a drug program.)
Buster Pete
It is hard not to recoil at some of these memories. The shame and embarrassment we inflict upon each other in the normal course of affairs is often enough hard to bear. But imagine having to take a beautiful woman named Celeste into the mens' room to observe the urine stream from the tip of her penis into the plastic cup, having to witness each time the pain in her eyes as one ripped away the scab of artifice from her perpetual wound. Before the Law, this woman of such great reserve and delicacy, this pious Catholic, was a thrice-convicted felon named Russell. If this wasn't bad enough, LaTanya required me to observe urine samples from actual female clients on the weekend, until I eventually rebelled.
And then there was the case of Buster Pete. Pete was a natural-born leader, charismatic, charming, a talented singer, cook extraordinaire. The women would often squabble over whose turn it was to corn-row his hair during TV time after evening group. I developed an admiration for him because, although he immediately sensed my lack of self-confidence, he always sought to put me at my ease, often deferring, if somewhat wryly, to my purported authority. When the other clients treated me with scorn for being white, or young, or occasionally just plain stupid, Pete would intervene on my behalf.
Pete arrived at the program four months before my hiring. He had been probated to treatment, and seemed to be doing well, reuniting with a girlfriend and with his singing group, an R&B quartet that had shown considerable promise before the lead singer was waylaid by heroin. I arranged it so that the residents and I could go with Pete to rehearsals at at a local studio a couple of evenings a week. There was talk of a single, maybe a contract with a small label. Then came the first dirty urine. No one on the staff could believe that it was anything but one of those rare lab errors. Then came the second dirty urine.
The room was shimmering gray with imminent rain. LaTanya's voice on my office phone was heavy, her words clipped and deliberate. "Buster Pete just got number three," she said. "We'll meet you at the house. He has to go tonight."
Three dirty urines were grounds for automatic, mandatory revocation of probation. A committee of five staff members was required to convene and present our unfortunate Billy Budd with a choice between the state penitentiary or the Federal treatment facility at Lexington, Kentucky, which was enough like a prison to make it a difficult choice. Pete at first didn't know the purpose of the meeting, or, at least, did a pretty good impression of someone who didn't know. LaTanya broke the news to him, explaining that he would have to do his sentence if he chose prison, but that he might get out earlier if he did well at Lexington. At first, Pete protested his innocence, then he begged, then he wept. He finally slumped silently in a chair. "I reckon I'll take Kay-Why, but I'm gonna lose everything," he whispered. LaTanya told him that we would take his wishes into consideration and then dismissed him to pack up his meager belongings.
We tearfully voted for Lexington on that rainy evening, all of us starkly aware that our livelihoods depended upon this pathological conjoining of the law and the chasm in the human soul that demands to be filled with this illicit substance or that. If Pete had had the good sense to become a drunk, even a butt-ugly drunk, he could still have been an R&B sensation, a minister, CEO, senator, or even president. Were we protecting Pete from himself? Society from Pete? Our grant from congressional grand inquisitors?
In any event, Buster Pete went to Kentucky. By the time he got back, he had, indeed, lost everything - the girlfriend and the recording contract. In the spring of '73, Pete took a bullet in the groin and bled out on the floor of a shooting gallery after an argument over a few grams of smack. We had destroyed Pete in order to save him. I was just following orders.
Sodom, South Florida: Drug Therapists Heal Thyselves
It was a dream come true: Sally, an ex-addict intake worker, and I on a plane bound for Miami Beach. We were frequent lunch companions. I was on the verge of breaking up with my girlfriend and she was on the verge of marrying her abusive boyfriend, so we had a lot to talk about. There was an undeniable incipience between us that I hoped would find some consummation during our week of instruction at the Coral Gables Center for Urban Studies. How hopeful I was in those days!
Trouble struck almost as soon as we hit the lobby of our hotel (Sally having promisingly agreed to share a room with me). Sally - if she was to be believed and I passionately wanted to believe - met quite by chance her old roommate from Lexington at the check-in counter. The woman in question was in her early fifties and wore her steely-gray hair in a half-inch crewcut. We dropped off our bags and I enthusiastically anticipated a romantic drink or two by the pool, but when I emerged from the bathroom Sally was engaged in an intense, whispered conversation on the telephone.
The long and short of it is that I didn't see her until the orientation breakfast the next day. As we ate our steam-table scrambled eggs and bacon and listened to the introductory speeches so carefully crafted to enhance the paying participants' sense of self-importance, Sally seemed contentedly vague and indirect about her absence of the night before. I didn't press her, since I really didn't want to know. She pulled her chair close as we examined the agenda for our five-day seminar with the tendentious title of "Problems in Addiction: New Modalities, New Protocols". A counselor from the Veterans' Administration was presenting a program that afternoon called "Notes on an Aversive Therapeutic Approach to Poly-Drug-Use Habituation in a Variegated Out-Patient Population". It struck our fancy. How could it have not?
Our colleague from the VA turned out to be a rather sad, somewhat pudgy fellow of about our age, sporting elaborate sideburns and mustache, and reeking of that para-masturbatory excitation particular to sexually repressed, male sword-and-sorcery enthusiasts. His slide show, which, he explained, he imposed on the "population" with the administration of mild electrical shocks at appropriate intervals, consisted of photos of a large-breasted, heavily freckled young woman wearing a halter top and wide-brimmed leather hat taken as she fondled hypodermic syringes and proffered ungainly, phallic joints to the camera with an on-the-whole rather appealing leer. These visions of hell were interspersed with "appropriate" images: a mother serving pie, children playing in a park, an old man petting a dog. Sally and I laughingly speculated about the possibility of a therapist, either through malice or incompetence, rendering his patients "appropriate averse." Pavlov run amok!
We didn't exactly keep our derision to ourselves, and it proved infectious. The other eight or nine participants, most of whom appeared to be experienced in the Hendrixian sense and all weary from various combinations of jet lag and over-indulgence, began to snort disrespectfully as the images flashed on the screen. Our VA colleague was reduced to blushing, stuttering rout. I'm sure he concocted some beastly fantasies about Sally later that evening.
But then I was something of an expert when it came to beastly fantasies about Sally. And, alas, fantasy would have been my chief occupation those long evenings (after the obligatory afternoon presentation or site visit) had I not discovered a thriving, ad-hoc community of drug therapists down by the pool. (Sally was an amusing and attentive companion through approximately dinner, at which time she retired unapologetically but nonetheless graciously to the arms of her lover.) After a necessarily brief feeling-out process, drug counselors from all over the Southeast brought out their stashes. Pot, hash, mescaline, mushrooms were among the choices with copious alcohol to wash it all down. Mostly male and in our twenties, romantically at loose ends, we were not immune to the irony of the situation, but we were too vain and silly to parse it out. (How soon the giddy narcissism of the early 70's became the smarmy, Clintonoid self-congratulation of the 90's!)
I do not, however, regret my brief acquaintance with a delightful fungus named psilocybe mexicana, and will be forever grateful to the long-haired drug counselor from north Florida who introduced us. The mushroom, ingested late on my last night in Coral Gables, afforded me some of the few moments of clarity I experienced during my brief hitch as a "therapist."
The gentle ascent began about thirty minutes after swallowing the dark, stringy wad that my new friend assured me would be "enough but not too much". I was simultaneously becalmed and exhilarated. Scattered light rippled and ramified on the surface of the pool, inviting me inward. Taking a figurative invitation literally, I leaped in and was soon happily paddling around, actions more than passing strange in that I didn't know how to swim. I lay back against the elastically buoyant flank of the universe, gazing up into a sky laughing with stars, at peace, at one, for once not conscious of my ever-needy self.
I tried to explain the feeling to Sally the next day on the plane, but she just smiled that damnably vague smile of hers. Her fiancˇ awaited her at the airport. I had my elaborately calligraphed document from the University of Miami to console me. I was now a certified "addiction specialist."
(In the concluding episode, our protagonist loses his job at the program, and, some 25 years on, attempts to make some sense of his experiences.)
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Contents this page were published in the July/August, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright (c) 1998 WFP Collective, Inc.