Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (36 page)

I’d been hitting myself steady for about three weeks when Valerie scheduled a three-day binge of wedding preparations. Her schedule barely left me time to pee, let alone to hop a train to the Badlands, buy, cook, shoot up, nod out, and get back home without her noticing. By Saturday afternoon, I was pushing twenty-four hours since my last hit. My head throbbed like I’d just been whacked with a baseball bat. My bones ached like I’d just been thrown down a flight of stairs. My whole body shivered uncontrollably. I did my best to mop the sweat off my face before it dripped down onto the seating chart Valerie had me making. But when I felt the vomit cresting the back of my tongue, I had to abandon my post.

“What’s wrong?” Valerie asked as I dashed past her into the bathroom.

“Flu.”

Valerie wasn’t stupid. She was faithful, more to God than to me. He’d let her see something in me I couldn’t see through the haze: the piece of who I could be that made me worth loving. But her faith in who I could be blinded her to who I still was. She nursed me through the night. Sunday afternoon, I convinced her I was well enough to run an errand. I ran to the first dealer I could find. Twenty bucks later, my “flu” was gone.

The entire time I was using, I attended twelve-step meetings religiously, both the kind for alcoholics and the kind for narcotic addicts. Sometimes I hit more than one meeting a day. I knew I needed to go, because I knew I was losing it. I was consciously aware that I was hovering about a millimeter above rock bottom. I was way past the point of denying I had a problem; I knew I had a problem, but nobody else in my life knew. Even my mom thought I’d finally cleaned myself up because I’d stopped buying pills. Nobody knew the truth except me and the other junkies in the Badlands. But even though I knew I was in trouble, I couldn’t fucking stop myself. I couldn’t imagine surviving weeks of the pain I’d endured the one day I hadn’t shot up. I couldn’t bear the thought of living the rest of my life knowing heaven was
one syringe away. I had no intention to stop using, no desire to stop, yet I wouldn’t let myself stop going to twelve step meetings. “Keep coming back. It works,” the recovering alcoholics and addicts promised in unison at the end of each session. I did; it didn’t.

One afternoon, I curled up in bed and prepared to shoot up. I had the timing down. I knew exactly when I had to start my ritual so I’d be past the nod and back to “normal” by the time Valerie got home from work. I assembled my makeshift stove on the nightstand, carefully opened three precious bags of heroin, and reached into my backpack for a needle. I didn’t have one. I didn’t have time to run to the Badlands before Valerie was due home. I had no choice but to settle for sniffing. I grabbed the top book off the stack on the nightstand. It happened to be my copy of
The Big Book
. I ran a line of heroin down the cover and sniffed myself as close to heaven as I could get through my nose. But I was past the point where sniffing could take away my pain. And the guilt I felt at that moment was as painful as a kick in the groin. I was laying in the bed I shared with the most amazing woman in the world, staring at the remnants of the trail of heroin I’d just sniffed off the Bible of recovery. In my daze, I noticed the telephone number scribbled on the book’s cover. It was the number of a recovering heroin addict who’d befriended me at the Eagleville rehab center. He’d said, “If you ever need to talk, just call.” So I did. I told him I finally wanted to get clean for real. Then I explained my predicament: I needed to get clean without my fiancée or anybody else finding out I hadn’t been clean for the past year.

“That won’t work,” he said.

“I can make it work.”

“You’re already lying to yourself. If you keep lying, you’ll keep using. And if you keep using, you’ll keep lying. You won’t get clean until you get honest.”

“But what if …?”

“You ain’t got no what-ifs left. If you’re serious about getting
clean, you gotta get honest with yourself. And you’ve got to tell your fiancée. When are you supposed to get married?”

“Next month.”

“Jesus! She’s walking down the aisle next month and she doesn’t know the guy waiting at the altar is a junkie?”

It sounded so much worse when he said it.

He was still trying to convince me when I heard Valerie’s key in the front door.

Through the phone, my twelve-step buddy coached me, “You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to tell her now.”

I hung up just as Valerie walked into our bedroom.

“Sit down,” I said, tears streaming down my cheeks. “I’ve got to tell you something.”

She looked so frightened while I searched for the courage to say, “I’ve been shooting heroin.”

I’d never seen someone cry as hard as my sweet Valerie cried that afternoon. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and promise her it would all be okay, but I was afraid to touch her, afraid even to move. The betrayal was so deep, her wounds so raw, I knew anything I did or said would only hurt her more.

When she finally spoke, she barked like a drill sergeant: “Pack your stuff !”

“Please don’t kick me – ”

“Don’t speak!” she warned. “You are going to pack your stuff and I’m taking you back to Eagleville. You’re going to do exactly what the doctors tell you to do. Then you are going to go to AA and NA and every other fucking A there is every day for the rest of your life if that’s what it takes. And you are going to beat this addiction, because I will
not
be the wife of a fucking junkie. Got it?”

Yes, ma’am.

VALERIE DOYLE BECAME MY WIFE ON SEPTEMBER 15, 2001 . We almost cancelled the wedding at the last minute because of September 11, but we decided that if there was ever a time people needed hope, it was then. And what’s more hopeful than a wedding?

Scattered throughout the rows of chairs were all of Valerie’s friends from corporate America and all her family members from upstate New York, all the Bertones, all the Meeinks who still spoke to me, staff of the Anti-Defamation League in Philadelphia, my friends from the Flyers front office, almost all of the Second and Porter boys, some of the Third and Jackson boys, and the surviving 68th and Buist boys. Louie Lacinzi stood by my side as Valerie floated down the aisle. A Rastafarian bagpiper named Rufus serenaded us on the way out.

I was a little worried a riot would break out at the reception, not because the crowd was so diverse, but because my mom and dad were in the same room for the first time in close to twenty years. In the weeks prior to the wedding, while I was still detoxing at the Eagleville rehab center, I’d had nightmares about it. I’d see Valerie’s family diving for cover because my mom and dad lit into each other, which set off a Meeink versus Bertone war, which set off a Third and Jackson versus 68th and Buist war, which would’ve been bloody if it’d happened. I also nursed a few wedding fantasies in rehab, especially one about my dad beating the shit out of John, who he met for the first time at my wedding.
But there was no violence, thankfully, and I’ve got the photographs to prove it. At the reception, I asked the photographer to take a picture of me with my mom and dad. They both smiled for the shot, though I made sure to stand between them, just in case. It’s the only picture I have of the three of us together.

I was 100% drug-free the day I married Valerie Doyle. A week later, I took two 40 milligram Oxycontins. A week after that, I sniffed a bag of heroin. The next day, I shot up.

I was lying in bed, wearing one of my hockey jerseys, sweating like a pig, when Valerie got home from work.

“It’s hot in here, baby,” she said. “Why are you wearing that jersey?” Valerie wasn’t naive anymore. When I didn’t answer, she knew the truth. She locked on me like a gun sight: “Take it off !”

“Leave me alone.”

“Take it off now. Let me see your arms.”

There was no point in resisting. I took off the jersey and revealed the fresh track marks.

“Get out!”

My mom let me move back into the rowhouse on Tree Street. Since I was there, I switched back to Oxycontin. But Oxycontin wasn’t strong enough to check my rage. When John called my thirteen-year-old half-sister Kirsten a “little whore,” I lost my mind. My mom chose dick like always. She sent Kirsten to her room and put me out on the street. I wandered down to Second and Porter and scored an invitation to crash at the nearby crack-house where most of the guys were living by then. They offered me all the crack I could ever want, but I refused. I didn’t want to be all cracked up; I was hell bent on heading down, down, down. I ate oxys for snacks in between shots of heroin, hoping the mix might put me out of my misery for good.

One night, Valerie hunted me down on Second and Porter and said we had to talk.

“This isn’t going to work, Frankie.”

I wanted her so desperately, but I had no fight left in me. “Take everything and go,” I said.

I watched a tear roll down Valerie’s face. She said nothing for the longest time, then she stepped in close and whispered, “I lost my husband to drugs.”

I didn’t respond.

“My parents are in Iowa now,” she reminded me. She hesitated a long time before she said, “I have no reason to stay here.”

She pulled an enormous wad of cash out of her purse. “This is your half of what we had.” She shoved the money into the pocket of my coat, then she walked away.

I shot every dime of that nest egg into my veins within a month. It wasn’t enough to dull the pain of losing Valerie. Nothing short of death could dull that pain. But I tried. I was shooting up in the bathroom one afternoon when the resident crackheads called me downstairs.

“Frankie! We need you.”

“Later,” I slurred as the heroin surged through me.

They had to wait a few minutes, until the first wave of the high passed over me, until I could manage to hold myself up against the wall and teeter down the stairs.

“What?” I asked, only it sounded more like “Whaaaaa?”

“You’re outta control, dude. We love you, but you’re losing it.”

“Whaaaaa?”

“Dude, we’re sorry, but you can’t stay here no more.”

You have to be fucked up to have crackheads pull an intervention on you. They were smoking crack the whole time they were telling me how messed up I was and how they couldn’t handle watching me kill myself. I would’ ve told them to go fuck themselves, but it would’ ve come out sounding like gibberish.

I crawled up the stairs to get my stash out of the bathroom. I looked at myself in the cracked mirror over the sink. If only I’d had a needle hanging out of my dick, I would’ve been a dead ringer for the corpse man.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Tears poured down my face. “This ain’t who I am. This ain’t who I want to be. I swear
to God I don’t want to live like this no more. I don’t want to fucking die like this.”

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.

“I’m checking myself back into rehab. All I’m asking is one more chance. Just one. Wait for me. Please.”

“We’ll see,” Valerie said.

When I showed up at the Eagleville rehab center for the third time in less than two years, the staff skipped over most of the normal admission rigmarole. They waltzed me past potted plants and game tables in the common room, not bothering to give me the tour spiel again. They marched me straight to the Dual Diagnosis Unit, which deals with alcoholic-addicts suffering from depression, and hooked me up with methadone.

I always entered rehab sincerely wanting to get clean. Then after a week or so, I’d pretty much get clean, clean enough to realize I couldn’t handle the idea of staying clean. Staying clean meant dealing with me, the me who disappeared when I was high or drunk. Staying clean meant living with the memories, confronting the monsters, wallowing in the fucking misery. Staying clean meant being me, unprotected, forever.

During my third stay at Eagleville, I didn’t even manage to stay clean while I was still there. When the nurses weren’t looking, I stole medications issued for other patients. Some of the dudes in the dualie unit were whacked out for real, regardless of booze and drugs. I didn’t know what they had wrong with them or what pills the docs prescribed for them, but anytime I could get my hands on one of those little plastic cups the nurses passed out, I swallowed everything in it.

Of course, Valerie had no clue I was using inside the rehab center. That was the one place she thought she could trust me to stay clean, or at least trust the staff to keep me clean. For thirty days, she let her guard down. For thirty days, she stopped worrying. For thirty days, she tasted what it must feel like to be married to someone who wasn’t an alcoholic-addict. Those thirty days gave her hope. False hope, but still hope. Valerie
decided to wait for me. She decided not to leave our marriage so long as I would agree to leave Philadelphia with her. She thought if she could just get me away from the dealers in the Badlands and the dealers on Second and Porter and the dealers in my family, I’d make it. We’d make it.

VALERIE’S PARENTS KNEW ME IN ALL MY SORDID DETAIL. They knew their well-bred, well-groomed, well-educated daughter was about to pull into the driveway of their custom built early retirement home with a van full of furniture and her uncouth, uneducated, unemployed husband-the alcoholic ex-con former skinhead heroin addict. They were unbelievably supportive, all things considered.

My in-laws made me feel welcome in their home, even though their house was as alien to me as Jupiter. It looked like something out of the pages of magazines I’d only seen in waiting rooms. One evening, I looked at Valerie draped across an overstuffed loveseat like a Persian cat and thought, this is the kind of life she’s supposed to live. This is the kind of life she did live before I came along. Valerie’s parents told us we could stay as long as we wanted, but we were anxious to get our own place. Valerie polished up her resume and started searching for jobs. I got on the horn with my agent and begged her to book me into any speaking gigs she could find. Going off to speak was a problem, though, because Valerie worried I would relapse every time I left the house, let alone the state.