Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (32 page)

Back in Harlem, many years before, Billie Holiday had said: “I don’t know much
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about psychology and all that, but I do know that there are things that can happen to you during early childhood which can influence your whole life.”

Even Harry Anslinger had noticed the connection with addiction. Addicts, he noted, often “grow up in homes
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that are not homes, with parents that are not parents, [so] they seek escape. Girl or boy, this is a familiar pattern.”

But why would childhood trauma make you so much more likely to grow into an addicted adult? I sit for hours, day after day, with Liz Evans, the nurse who established the Portland Hotel Society. She has spent over twenty years sitting with the most hard-core addicts on the Downtown Eastside. She talks to them, and holds them, and sits up all through the night with them. She asked herself this question more times than she can count. And then, finally, in a café, she told me about one night, about a year after she started at the Portland, when she fully made the connection.

One of the Portland’s residents at that time was an aboriginal woman whom I will call Hannah, because Liz asked me not to use her real name. (This is one of only three places in this book where I have changed a detail to protect somebody’s identity; all are indicated in the text.) She was a tiny thirty-eight-year-old, chronically addicted to heroin and alcohol, and every morning she would stumble down into the hotel lobby, vomit into the trash can, and then stagger out to sell her body for her next fix. Hannah was drawn to violent men who would beat the shit out of her, and she would often fly into drunken rages and hurl things out her window. One day, she threw an entire bike down onto the street.

Liz refused to throw her out. Instead, she had Plexiglas screwed onto her window so she couldn’t open it.

Liz had read Hannah’s files, dating back to when she was a child. She had been removed from her reservation and, like a lot of Native American (or First Nations, as they are known in Canada) kids, shunted from one foster family to another. The police eventually found her, emaciated, locked in a room, where it turned out she had been shut away from the age of seven to eleven, fed nothing but a liquid diet, because one of her foster families had claimed she had a disease and this was the only cure. She tried to cut her own throat for the first time when she was thirteen. Liz would try to bring up the subject of her childhood with her sometimes, but Hannah would only say it “wasn’t great,” and then move on.

One night, Hannah came back to the Portland shaking, with blood seeping from a blow to her head. “I remember picking her up and holding her in my arms like a little child” and carrying her to her room, Liz told me. Hannah stammered that she had been beaten and raped. “And I remember just listening to her say to me, over and over again, ‘It’s my fault. I deserve this. It’s my fault. I’m a bad person.’ ” And on the little table beside Hannah, there was her alcohol, and her heroin, and a needle. And Liz—who has never wanted to use drugs—looked at them and looked at Hannah and thought: “Which of these things on your bedside table can I give you to take your pain away?”

“And that was the moment I understood what addiction did for people,” she tells me. “It was like, in an instant, I made a connection to those black moments in my life where I felt that way . . . when I wanted to die, when I felt that I was a bad person.” The survivors of childhood trauma are often left with that sense of self-hatred all their lives, Liz saw now, and that is why so many of them turn to the strongest anesthetic they can find. It’s not a spasm of irrationality. It meets a need. It takes away the pain, for a while.

As Liz told me this, I thought about how fiercely critical I had been of the people I love for their addictions over the years, and I realized I was crying.

Long before, one of Billie Holiday’s friends, Memry Midgett, told an interviewer: “The reason for her being an addict
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was because she had a tremendously poor threshold of pain.” Another of her friends, Michelle Wallace, said: “People think sometimes
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people use drugs because they’re bad or evil. Sometimes . . . the softest people use drugs, because they can’t take the pain.”

This helps, I realize, to explain the previously mysterious gap between the 10 percent of drug users who sink into addiction and the 90 percent who don’t. A man named Bud Osborn, who was helped to recover from his heroin addiction by Gabor, tells me: “The childhood trauma makes you feel bad about everything. Bad about your family, bad about life,” he said. “And then when you take drugs, they make you feel good about your life, about yourself, about being in the world . . . [People] wonder—why do [addicts] keep doing it? Because it makes them feel good, and the rest of their life doesn’t make them feel good.”

Some people, after absorbing all this, would develop an idealized or sanitized picture of addicts. This was not an option at the Portland Hotel Society.

Gabor was often spat at and told to fuck off. The staff there have had shit—literal shit—flung into their faces.
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One of Gabor’s patients, Ralph, was a middle-aged coke addict with a dyed Mohawk and a Hitler mustache. He was a Nazi, and he taunted Gabor by muttering
“arbeit macht frei.”
When Gabor explained his grandfather died in a death camp where those words were displayed over the gates, Ralph said his grandfather had it coming.
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Sometimes Gabor snapped. One day he said to me, “I’m lancing an abscess on somebody and [the patient] keeps attacking me verbally and I totally lose it. In the end, I’m waving this bloody scalpel around. I wasn’t hurting anybody with it, but emotionally I lost it. That happened a number of times. In those moments you don’t think—you just emote. Frustration. Anger. Judgment.”

He understood how these emotions intrude on the public debate about addicts because even he, after all he has uncovered, couldn’t scour them out of himself. But, he added, “Once I calmed down, shame comes into it, and I want to apologize.”

Some days, Ralph was quiet and reflective and recited passages of Goethe’s poetry
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to Gabor. The next week, he was back to muttering “Heil Hitler.”
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Gabor felt there was much more to investigate about addiction, but he was distracted by something he didn’t like to discuss. He hid it from everyone, even his wife.

Quite often, he would be in the middle of his medical duties when he would feel an overpowering urge. It was a compulsion that forced him to drop everything. He would rush to music stores and compulsively spend hundreds of dollars on CDs. Usually, he didn’t even listen to them: he simply stashed them. This might sound harmless, until you hear that he was in the middle of delivering a baby one time when he felt the compulsion and had to run away to binge on CD buying.
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When his kids were still small, he abandoned them in public places to rush away to buy music. Why was he doing this? He didn’t understand it. He only knew that, as he would write later, “I lose myself when caught in one of my addictive spirals. Gradually I feel an ebbing of moral strength and experience myself as hollow. Emptiness stares out from behind my eyes.”
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At times, it made him feel blackly depressed; at times he felt suicidal.

Yet once Gabor learned that there was a connection between traumatic early childhoods and compulsive behaviors, he began to think about what the doctor told his mother all those years ago: “All my Jewish babies are crying.”

The babies obviously couldn’t know that a genocide was taking place, but they did know, on some level, that their mothers were distraught and not able to meet their needs. His own mother, he says, “was stressed, depressed. She said the only reason she got out of bed was to look after me. So I saved her life. It’s a hell of a responsibility for a four-month-old, to save his mother’s life . . . She carried tremendous pain . . . tremendous grief, and as an infant, you absorb all that.” So he developed differently from a baby whose mother was able to offer calm and consistent love. Now, as an adult,
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he found himself unable to control himself at moments of stress. For him, the outlet was to buy music. He realized that when he was a small child, there was one thing that relaxed his mother, and so, in turn, relaxed him. She would listen to music. Now it was the thing he tried to buy and hoard, as if it held the secret key to being calm.

He saw a similar dynamic at the Portland, only the residents’ experiences were “not like my childhood. They’re much worse,” he tells me. “While the historical circumstances might be more horrifying in my case, the actual personal experience was far more traumatic in the case of my clients.” He says this is “because I wasn’t traumatized by my parents’ psychological dysfunctions . . . The trauma I sustained was the trauma they sustained . . . It came from the outside. But once my parents were united, we had a stable family life. I was not abused . . . It’s nothing like being sexually abused by your father or your mother. It’s nothing like being ignored by your addicted parents who are out carousing while you are left alone.”

Gabor’s trauma was mild, so his addiction was mild: he can bear to be present in the world most of the time. His patients’ trauma was extreme, so their addiction is extreme: they can bear to be present in the world very little of the time. But—crucially—in both cases, something had gone askew, he explains, “before the use of
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mind-altering substances begins.”