I Never Had It Made (24 page)

XX

Jackie's Prison

I
n June, 1967, Jackie was discharged from the service. When he came back home, he was more confused than he had been when he went into the service. He didn't stay around home much. He said he just wasn't ready to decide what he was going to do and that he had to stay away from us to figure it all out. He kept trying to reassure us that we didn't have to worry about him, that he would be all right. And though we were concerned, we tried to believe him because we wanted to.

The last thought in our minds was addiction.

We knew that things weren't right, but there is nothing that can blind parents as much as loving hope. We talked with Jackie and we listened to him. I felt my communication with him was improved. We were relieved when he laughed off the idea of his ever becoming addicted. He was most persuasive when he frankly admitted using marijuana, warning us that there was no point in our forbidding him to use it, telling us that he liked grass, that he was not going to give it up. He gave us the familiar argument that marijuana is harmless, not addictive, that it only leads weak-minded people into the hard stuff. We didn't have a thing to worry about in terms of his sticking a needle in his arm. He was afraid to stick himself with needles. It would never get to that. Not with him. He was convincing. We found out later that there is something about drug addiction that imbues its victims with a terrible kind of craftiness and ingenuity. Jack sold us on his point of view. We looked around us. We read everything we could get our hands on. We went down the primrose path part of the way, though not all the way, with those goddamned experts that make young people and their parents believe that marijuana is harmless. Look at all the brilliant achievers who smoke it. It isn't any worse than alcohol.

As I look back, I become bitter about people like Dr. Margaret Mead. I am sure that she and many others who call for the legalization of marijuana are quite sincere, but I think they are doing an incalculable amount of damage. What we did—and what thousands of other parents are doing—is so terribly wrong. We depended on Jackie to have the ability and strength to restrict himself to marijuana—an ability and strength that he didn't have, that a lot of troubled people don't have.

The morning of the day the roof fell in on us, I had been interviewed by the Associated Press on the telephone. A few minutes later the reporter called back. I had expressed some strong and controversial views to him, and I assumed he was calling for some clarification. Instead he said, “What about Jackie?”

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“Don't you know that your son was arrested about one o'clock this morning on charges of possession and carrying a concealed weapon?” the reporter asked.

I was stunned. Dully, I heard the information that Jackie was in jail at that moment. He was of age, and when he gave the police instructions not to contact us, they went along with it. That was why we had not heard.

I remember clearly my first gut reaction. If I could have put it into words then, I would have said, “The hell with you, Jack. We've tried to do our best. You've been getting into trouble every time we turn around. Now you've placed us in a terrible position. There's going to be a lot of bad publicity and grief for everyone in the family.”

That was my first reaction, but it was wiped out in seconds. I immediately called Rachel. We had to let Jackie know we expected him to shoulder the consequences of his mistakes but that we were 100 percent behind him and would leave no stone unturned to do whatever was necessary to help him. Rachel and I went to the police station and posted the $5,000 bail required.

After a long talk with Jackie, we decided that the best thing to do was to put him in the New Haven hospital. It seemed logical because Rachel was working near there and could see that he got the proper attention. That was a mistake also and Jack told us so after he had been there a few days.

“This place is doing me absolutely no good,” he said. “You're really just wasting your money. I'm the only addict here. The other people have mental problems. I need to be with some people who have the same kind of problems I have. That way we could learn from one another, help one another.”

What Jackie was saying was sound. He admitted that he had become an artist at lying his way out of virtually any situation. He could simulate absolute sincerity.

“I can tell those doctors anything and they'll believe it,” he said. He was convinced that he could persuade the people in the hospital that he was cured. He did—and he was discharged and went right back to his addiction.

When Jackie went to trial, he was given two alternatives—prison or enrollment in a rehabilitation program. That was when he joined the Daytop program. I don't have the words to pay tribute to what the Daytop experience did for him. The people who run the house at Seymour, Connecticut, are ex-addicts, and their dedication to helping others who have become seemingly hopelessly hooked is total. They have gone through all the stages and phases and tricks of the junkie world, and it is impossible to pull the wool over their eyes as Jackie had done with the hospital doctors.

Jackie was put to stiff tests. He was taken into the Narco Pre-induction Center, and his first assignment was to clean some latrines. All kinds of filthy, revolting, and menial tasks were given him to see how much he was prepared to help himself. The first night he went through the Pre-induction Center, he came home terribly discouraged. He didn't think he could stand the trials. One of the things that hurt him the most was being told he would have to shave off his beloved beard and mustache. That's what they do at Daytop. They find out what you like best and then they take it away from you. It is known as making an investment in the program. They are testing you all the time to see if you have enough stamina to face the awful task of curing your illness mainly through your own self-reliance. There was one time when they had him sitting on a stool for hours just to see if he could observe the rigid discipline he was going to need. He convinced them that he was ready and they took him in. That was only the beginning of his ordeal—and ours.

Jackie was at first admitted to the Daytop installation on Staten Island. The people in charge there immediately warned us of a situation we would undoubtedly have to face. Within a few days or the first couple of weeks, they told us, Jackie would decide that he couldn't stand the confinement and the regimen and deprivation of dope any longer. He would decide he was going to leave. In all probability he would call us up and ask to come home.

“When he does,” they instructed us, “here's the way we want you to handle it. This will be terribly difficult for you to do, but if you want to save your son, you will inform him that he cannot come home; that if he tries to, you will have him picked up by the police the minute he gets to Stamford. You will have his bail revoked and let him go to jail. You will have to say to him that if he refuses, at this point, to do what is necessary to help himself, he's had it, as far as you are concerned.”

The advice was chilling. We listened and just hoped the situation would not arise. It did. One night, sometime between midnight and one in the morning, we received the call. The Daytop people were on the line, informing us that Jackie was threatening to leave. We asked to talk to him. The answer was that he wouldn't speak with us. We asked that the message be relayed that if he left, he would go to jail if he tried to come home. Can you imagine the anguish of being a parent and having to give that kind of a message to a son you love? Imagine the nagging fear that you might have made a terrible mistake—experts or no experts. After all, this was your son. Suppose he didn't have the strength for this supreme test—the slamming of the doors that had been open to him all his conscious life. Suppose a sense of rejection drove him back out into the streets to find retaliation or temporary relief from hurt with a needle.

There wasn't going to be much sleep for us that night. But about three hours later, the phone rang. It was the Daytop people again. They had just finished a long talk with Jackie, and he had been persuaded that it was the wisest thing for him not to leave. We were grateful for the advance advice we had received, which had prepared us to be strong. Otherwise, we would have been right there at the Stamford station, waiting for Jackie to run away from his own salvation.

Jackie told us much about the Daytop way of restoring life. It's pretty obvious that a junkie is an individual on a suicide trip. Daytop uses methods that make it impossible to play games. The individual who has collided with the law because he has broken it to support his habit and whose motive to get into Daytop is to avoid prison very seldom gets away with it. He finds he has to commit himself to self-redemption or lose his opportunity of becoming a part of the program. Daytop is centered in a philosophy of the effectiveness of people with common troubles pulling each other up. Daytop is strict—terribly strict. While addicts are in that program they are constantly being taught to be thoughtful rather than thoughtless. They don't drop a cigarette ash on a floor. They don't leave lights on or forget to check out. And they don't get any drugs to help them withdraw. It's done the hard way—cold turkey. An addict can rant and rave and carry on and a Daytop man will tell him, “Come on, buddy, knock it off.” He can't regard the man as a cynical, unfeeling person who doesn't know how he feels. He knows how the addicts feel. Back in the Daytop man's recent or distant past, when he was ranting and raving, somebody who had once ranted and raved had told him the same thing. The Daytop theory is that the terrible agony associated with withdrawal is not nearly as excruciating as it is pictured on the screen or reported in novels. Within seventy-two hours, Daytop people say, an addict is withdrawn—physically. The body is detoxified and can function without heroin. After that period of time, there are psychosomatic reactions—the runny nose, the watery eyes, the self-pitying conviction that it's impossible to live without a fix. His weakness, his self-indulgence, no longer has free rein because he is in the presence of others who he knows know the score. In the past the addict, like a spoiled child, has been able to get others to do his will by persuading them that he is in a desperate state. The Daytop gospel is that much too often the roots of addiction are the result of receiving too little love—or too much—equally dangerous.

The Daytop philosophy states firmly that no one owes the addict a living. He owes a lot to life. And the task of recovering his life is his alone. Daytop avoids what is called horizontal therapy; the addict goes to a hospital, stretches out and gets shot with dextrose for a certain number of days, and is soon back in the streets and back into heroin. Or he lies on a psychiatrist's couch and equates his needle-sticking with his hatred for his grandmother. Daytop believes in the vertical theory. The addict's therapist is an ex-addict and he challenges his patients to invest in their own recovery. In a Daytop group anyone guilty of the tiniest bit of hypocrisy gets a merciless tongue-lashing. The entire company jumps in. If a little lie has been told, they magnify it all out of proportion. The addict is made to realize the stupidity of being phony and taught that behavior is not as important as the attitude behind behavior. Drugs are not the problem, the Daytop philosophy says. Drugs are the manifestation and the symptom of the problem.

All this Jackie learned. All this he absorbed.

And while he was learning, we were learning that the Daytop philosophy is perhaps the one viable approach to the narcotics addiction problem. It doesn't supply all the answers, but a check of the results it achieves would make any reasonable person wonder why this program receives so little support from government and private sources. Daytop is understaffed and underbudgeted; it has long waiting lists of people wanting to be helped.

I was appalled when I learned how little was being done in the state of Connecticut about the narcotics situation. I wrote to Governor John Dempsey and suggested that a massive program be initiated and that such organizations as Daytop be given more help. Given the extent of the problem, the answer was most inadequate. The governor bragged about all he was doing in the state to fight drugs. His solutions didn't begin to sound the depths of the problem.

I went to the baseball commissioner. I thought that, since the drug problem is a big problem among our youth and since baseball has many young fans, it would be a great idea for baseball to indulge in a creative and constructive program, at least an educational program. I thought that at times when games are not being televised—and even when they are—the baseball idols of young people could say a word about the perils of drugs. I was given great courtesy and attention by the commissioner's office, and I was told what a wonderful idea this was. Later, an educational campaign was launched, but again, given the scope of the problem and the resources of the business, the campaign had not been adequate.

Every moment of agony we had ever suffered, every fear we had ever experienced, seemed worthwhile on one special day—after Jackie had spent a year in the Daytop program. That was the day that Kenny Williams told us confidentially that he believed our son was out of danger, that he was cured. He didn't tell Jackie this and he cautioned us against false hopes. It was necessary that vigilance continue to be observed to insure that Jackie did not backslide, as so many do; the fear that an ex-addict will revert to his old habits is genuine. One or two or, sometimes, ten years cannot guarantee that an ex-addict will not be driven back to addiction by weakness or by circumstance. Experts have found, however, that one of the most successful ways a former addict can keep himself cured is through deep involvement in helping others who are fighting addiction. Knowledge of this fact, added to his tremendous gratitude to his Daytop associates, made Jackie decide to become a member of the Daytop staff. He worked at the same Daytop house where he had been helped and did group work on the outside. He gave talks at schools, to young people's groups, to social clubs, and to church groups. He also conducted a rehabilitation group. We attended some of his activities and felt extremely proud of his development. After Jackie's death we learned from others whose lives he touched how much of an impact he had been having. He had been clean for three years, and he spoke with authority about all that he had been through—about the way he had become an addict, the reasons for it, the hell into which he had been plunged as an addict—stealing, robbing, pushing dope, pimping—anything to get the money for dope. He had learned at Daytop that the core of the cure was in being absolutely and utterly honest with himself and with others. As a result, when he appeared before audiences, he didn't spare himself. He was merciless in laying his own soul bare, and because he was willing to be so open about it, he had a conviction and a sincerity which had a powerful effect on those who heard him talk. Jackie, who had learned to love himself properly, was now able to love others adequately. His capacity for loving had opened up.