Long Past Stopping (19 page)

There was one cute girl at the rehab, but I was such a pathetic, shivering, nauseated, cold-sweating, skin-crawling wreck that anyone who saw anything in me would have to be in even worse shape than I was, at least mentally. But I did intend to go set up my yoga mat behind her.

 

I
T WAS DURING FAMILY
session that I decided I had to get the fuck out of there soon. Mom, or rather Dr. Canfield, as she had introduced herself to the room, was going around the group giving everyone advice.

“You know, Ted has told me before that he would go to meetings and stay sober, and within days he comes home drunk. I just don't know why I should trust him this time,” some woman was saying about her husband, a classic San Jose computer programmer, who hadn't uttered a word during my time there.

“Um, excuse me. Can I say something?” Mom asked Eileen, the facilitator. Before Eileen could answer, Mom looked at the woman and said, “Are you crazy? You need to leave that guy. If he's done it before,
he's going to do it again. I mean, who would put up with that?” Mom punctuated this with one of her condescending laughs.

Kyle and I rolled our eyes at each other. That was just the beginning; she had something to say to everyone in the room. I wanted to walk out right then, but I was still too sick to trust myself. When it came my turn to speak, I announced my intention of leaving as soon as I felt better.

“Okay. Does anyone have any feelings about that,” Eileen asked the group. At least ten hands shot up immediately.

“I wish you could see yourself from where I'm sitting. I wasted forty years of my life drinking, and you've got your whole life in front of you,” said one of the patients.

“I came to my first rehab when I was your age, and I didn't listen to anyone either. Now look at me, this is my tenth rehab, and believe me it gets harder every time I come back. You don't have to go through what I did if you can hang on and give this a shot,” another guy said.

“Look at your mom and brother. Look at them,” added the previous guy's wife. “Can you imagine how devastated, how heartbroken they would be if they got a call that you were dead? I've been going to Al-Anon ever since Steve went to his first rehab, and I see it all the time: mothers who've lost their kids, husbands who've lost their wives. There's nothing like the look on someone's face who's lost a loved one to this disease. And that pain never goes away. Look at them. Could you live with that?”

It seemed inappropriate to point out that I would be dead at that point, so I just sat in silence, doing my best to tune out the rest of them.

When everyone was done, Eileen asked me if what I heard had changed my mind.

“No. I mean, thanks for all the concern, but seriously. If I wanted to go out and use, I would do it right now. That's why I'm staying until I get better. Believe me, I have no intention of ever using again.”

People started talking all at once after that, until Eileen said, “Oran. We all care about you. So can you at least agree to stick around till the next family session?”

“Jesus Christ. If it means we can move on to the next person, I will agree to stay till next week,” I answered.

It was a dumb thing to agree to. The following week, family session was spent solely discussing why I should stay at that place. They tried everything. People I had never seen before cried over my decision. More people testified that they had thrown away their chances of sobriety when they were young and were still struggling with addiction, and oth
ers told me I would die. Defending myself against all that was a drag to say the least. Luckily, I was over being dope sick and had finally gotten a few hours of sleep, which helped me get through it.

When it was finally over, Mom refused to give me a ride home. Fortunately, a landscaper-turned-speed freak from Gilroy had insisted that I borrow forty dollars from him when we had gone on a group outing to the grocery store.

“Don't worry about it, I can get home,” I told my mom.

I said good-bye to a few people and walked to the train station.

M
OM AND I VISITED
three boarding schools, all of which promoted various forms of alternative education in their brochures. The first one we checked out was a Quaker school in California, which looked appealing because it didn't use a grading system. One of the students took me on a tour, showing me the various places in the woods where kids went to smoke pot and have sex. The tour ended when we found a group of kids in a tree house who were passing a joint around. I had a feeling that joining them was a bad idea, but not wanting to come across as uncool, I took a hit when it was passed to me.

“What'd you think?” Mom asked during the two-and-a-half-hour drive home.

“I want to see the other ones,” I said, trying to hide my overwhelming anxiety and paranoia. Although it had a beautiful campus nestled in the woods of central California, those kids in the tree house bummed me out.

We then visited a school in Colorado. I spent the night on campus to get a feel for the place, and somehow ended up in the backseat of a car with three other kids, driving around the suburbs looking for a beer truck. They found one stopped at a red light, and two of the kids jumped out, lifted the roll gate, and grabbed a case of beer. I decided this time that it was okay to be uncool since I had no intention of ever seeing them
again. They weren't having it, though, and I ended up drinking half a beer just to prove I wouldn't tell on them.

“What'd you do last night?” Mom asked when she came to pick me up the next morning.

“Played video games,” I lied, hoping she would cross this one off the list for me.

“Yeah, I didn't really like that place,” she said.

Our next stop was Sedona, Arizona, where I toured the most beautiful campus I had ever seen. Awe-inspiring red rocks surrounded the school on all four sides, and aside from one modern dormitory, nothing appeared to have been built after the 1960s. The white walls and red-tile roofs of the buildings gave the appearance of a Spanish villa. I knew this was the place before I even got out of the car, and I still felt the same way after going to a full day of classes with a kid named Eli, who volunteered to show me around.

There were a few hurdles to get over though. One was that tuition was sixteen thousand dollars a year, and the other was that I still had a year left of junior high. My grades didn't paint the picture of a kid who was smart enough to skip ahead, but Mom kept saying, “Don't worry, there are ways.” I wasn't convinced, but somehow I got accepted, and they gave me thirteen thousand dollars in financial aid. It was cheaper than keeping me at home, especially after Jack agreed to pay for it.

I was happy to be getting out of Berkeley. I pictured my new school as an environment of enlightened kids who were socially conscious, politically active, creative, and misunderstood by the outside world but accepted and loved by one another.

That fantasy was smashed before I even got there. On the shuttle bus from the Phoenix airport to Sedona, a kid sitting next to me said, “I hate niggers.” I had never heard anyone say that in my life and was so shocked I couldn't open my mouth for the rest of the trip.

I was hoping this was an isolated incident, but after getting my crappy stereo system in the mail, two other kids came into my room, without knocking, and told me to “turn off that nigger music.” I turned it off, locked the door behind them, and turned it back on as loud as I could to cover up the racket they were making by pounding on the walls. I'd never thought of myself as having lived a sheltered life, but then again I had never really been subjected to the cruelty of white kids. A few days later almost all my music was gone. The only things left were an Art of Noise cassette, David Byrne and Brian Eno LPs, and my Beastie Boys record. I wanted to cry. Music had always been one of the only things that made
me feel human…that there were other people out there who understood me. Even though I would probably never meet them, it helped to know they existed.

When I put on
Licensed to Ill
at a low volume, the same two guys, who were now going by the nicknames Nipple and Head, appeared at the door within minutes, saying, “What'd we tell you about playing that nigger music?”

“Fuck you…and anyway these guys are white,” I said, showing them the inside foldout of the Beastie Boys album.

“It's still nigger music,” said Nipple, clutching me in a bear hug while Head took the record. They were meatheads, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. Having no use for the record jacket anymore, I pinned it up on my wall. The cover was an illustration of a 747 crashing into a red rock, and it seemed appropriately insignificant facing my roommate Aaron's life-size Yngwie Malmsteen poster. As usual, I didn't feel like I fit in at all, but this time I had zero interest in making friends with these assholes.

Aaron and I had actually been at Camp Winnarainbow together, and I thought it would be a good idea to see if we could be roommates. He sounded hesitant when I asked him, but he agreed to it. It turned out to be a terrible idea. Aaron was a few years older than I was and seemed to resent me. We had never even been friends at camp, and it became clear that he didn't want to have anything to do with me at school either. He was nice enough not to harass me too much in person, but I suspected he had something to do with my music disappearing. A few times a week, I would wake up in the middle of the night with my body being slammed against the wall from my bed being flipped over. I never saw the culprits, as they would be gone by the time I was able to crawl out from under the bed, but Aaron was a logical suspect since he was never in his own bed at the time. Without proof of his involvement or any experience in dealing with this kind of shit, I would flip my bed back over and seethe myself back to sleep. I was the youngest and smallest guy at the school, and there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it.

That changed after an unfortunate incident over Parents Weekend. Mom and Kyle flew out to visit me, and I learned firsthand how Aaron felt about me when I was given the task of hanging out with my little brother for three days. I begrudgingly took him to classes, and he even spent the weekend in my dorm to consider the possibility of going there himself.

The answer to that question was a definitive no when he woke up the
second morning on top of Aaron's bunk bed and found his ears full of toothpaste. Totally disoriented, he climbed off the bed and put on his sneakers, which had been filled with liquid laundry detergent. I couldn't remember ever being so angry as I led Kyle—humiliated and crying—to the shower. He tried to get the toothpaste out of his ears, while I washed the detergent out of his shoes. Kyle was pissed and spent the rest of the day walking around in wet sneakers, saying, “What?”

I couldn't forgive Aaron for that one and called him a fucking asshole. He didn't confirm or deny my appraisal of him, but he adamantly denied putting toothpaste in Kyle's ears.

“I tried to get them to stop, but there was nothing I could do,” he said.

“Then who the fuck did it?” I screamed.

“I'm sorry, man. Really. I tried to get them to stop.”

Aaron did sound extremely apologetic, and a few days later he made arrangements to find another room.

 

I
N AN ATTEMPT
to prove to the school that the thirteen thousand dollars they had given me in financial aid was a good investment, I volunteered to be the freshman representative in the student senate and joined the Model UN. Joining the senate seemed like a good idea at the time, but it didn't really work out the way I wanted it to. The other kids didn't hold us in very high regard, and we were all so ashamed of our involvement that we never associated with one another outside of our weekly half-hour meetings. The Model UN met only once because our teacher, Steve, was always leaving school for mysterious reasons.

Between class, work jobs, dorm jobs, sports, and study hall, we were left with only about four free hours a day, but that was four more free hours than I had ever had before. Feeling awkward, angry, and nervous around the other kids, I spent my extra time in the ceramics studio. In ceramics class, we were told that throwing pots was a kind of spiritual exercise—that centering the clay was an act of centering oneself—but it just made me frustrated. I was more at war with the clay than one with it. I spent four hours a day, and often ten hours on weekends, hunched over a spinning lump of clay that I couldn't center for the life of me. As difficult as it was, it allowed me to be by myself. My back hurt like hell whenever I stood up from the wheel, and when I closed my eyes—even to blink—all I could see was a slightly lopsided lump of brown mud
spinning around in my head. But like the early days of my juggling career, throwing pots gave the impression that I was passionate and driven, rather than antisocial.

I started smoking cigarettes as a remedy for my back problems. My cravings were like an alarm clock that reminded me to stretch my body and take a walk every hour or so. Cigarettes however, quickly began eating up two-thirds of my fifteen-dollar-a-week allowance.

 

I
HAD ALL BUT
forgotten about the Model UN when I found a note in my mailbox saying that we would be meeting to prepare for our upcoming trip to the Model UN Convention in Tucson.

We met up at our teacher Steve's house. As always, he was dressed in military fatigues and a red beret. Over cookies and milk, he announced that, through some kind of back-room deal, he had arranged for us to represent Nicaragua at the upcoming convention. I was psyched because I had been to many United-States-out-of-Nicaragua protests back in Berkeley, and had seen more than a few documentaries about the conflict with my mom. Steve was also extremely excited and was in the middle of a speech about the evils of capitalism and the virtues of the Sandinistas when one of the students interrupted him.

“When is the convention?” a girl named Tara asked. This was her second year taking part.

“It's in a week,” said Steve.

“So, don't we need to prepare? I mean, I've been there before and I don't even understand how it works.”

“Don't worry about any of that. I've got a plan. You see, we're not going to play by the establishment's rules. Che didn't play by the rules, Lenin, Mao, Trotsky, Castro…They didn't play by the rules either. Revolutionaries, by definition, don't play by the rules, and that is the big lesson here. I'm willing to bet that, even though we're going to be the most important country there this year, the United States will use all of its power to keep us from being heard. The whole system is designed to keep the United States on top and everyone else in their place. So don't worry about that. I'm preparing you by giving you a history lesson in revolution.”

 

I
T WAS A LONG DRIVE
to Tucson. For some reason, Steve owned a house there, and I had a restless night trying to sleep on his linoleum floor. I couldn't stop thinking about how insane we were going to come across to the other kids.

Steve had “prepared” us for the convention by teaching the ten of us a few communist slogans in Spanish and English, which we were to yell out at the convention whenever he gave us the signal. Nicaragua was bound to come up whether the United States tried to silence the issue or not, and yelling communist slogans and blowing whistles whenever the United States held the floor seemed like a recipe for trouble. I had a tendency to obsess on worst-case scenarios, but that morning, I found out I hadn't even come close to considering all the possibilities. Steve had gone out to run an errand and returned with a huge box of U.S. Army fatigues and green and black face paint. He hadn't mentioned anything about this when discussing what we were going to do to rile things up at the convention. Even though we were running late, he insisted we get into the fatigues before we left the house. When he started handing them out, I was shocked to find that a few of the outfits had Steve's last name embroidered on them. I exchanged uncomfortable looks with some of the other kids, but none of us had the nerve to ask about it. I didn't understand how Steve, an open communist, could be enlisted in the army, which at the time was conducting covert operations against the same people we were going to represent at the model U.N. It explained his mysterious disappearances from school on little or no notice, and why he owned a house in Tucson, which happened to be a few blocks away from the military base. I covered up his name and the U.S. Army patch with duct tape and did my best not to think about it.

In a way, I was relieved to be wearing a disguise, but the problem was that all the clothes were size Large, and we had to get creative with a spool of twine and a few safety pins he had lying around the house just to be able to walk around without tripping over ourselves. All that effort went to naught when he opened another box full of size-eleven combat boots. The absurdity of it was beyond comprehension. We looked as if we were in a
Little Rascals
film, where they had stolen some military uniforms in a cute but misguided attempt to enlist in the army—hardly the menacing communist rebels we were supposed to be. The face paint we dealt with on our way there.

Indeed, our late entrance to the convention center inspired far more laughter than fear. If anyone was afraid, it was us. When the speaker
introduced us as the “Colorful Delegation of Nicaragua,” we held up a queen-size bedsheet on which we had painted the words
PATRIA LIBRE O MORIR
,
and just in case no one knew what that meant, we yelled “A free homeland or death!” as loud as we could to the thousand or so kids who had shown up to this thing.

Our first chance to blow whistles and yell slogans came when the U.S. representative was defending the SDI program to the Security Council. Following a commotion on the stage, the speaker announced, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics respectfully asks that the Nicaraguan delegation restrain themselves and allow the Americans to continue.” We looked to Steve for guidance on how to deal with this unanticipated turn of events from an important ally.