Warrior Pose (38 page)

I close my eyes and see Morgan. He is standing in front of me, tears in his eyes, begging me to get off the couch. I can hear his little voice, pleading:

Get up, Daddy.

CHAPTER 22

Sailboats and Treasure

M
Y MIND IS STILL RACING with so many competing voices I can't make sense of anything. It's been three days alone in the house. Mostly lying in bed, foraging in the refrigerator, watching the television. I haven't heard from Pamela. Even though I continue to drink and hit the medications heavily, I still can't sleep at night. The trash can next to my bed is overflowing with empty bottles of stout. What little self-esteem I might have had is long gone. I think about my “last supper” plan. Stare at the box of meds in my closet. Then the
Get up, Daddy
mantra comes back to me and I see Morgan in my mind's eye.
You can't do this to your son. If nothing else, get off of everything and die like a man. Give him a chance to remember someone he can be a little bit proud of.

I feel the pain of Morgan's absence most in the morning. He had been punctual and devoted, always running into the bedroom and crawling onto me when he woke up. Each time I would slowly lift my knees and he would straddle them, his back facing me as he whispered, “Please draw on my back, Daddy.”

I have a nail file we call the “magic drawing stick” on my nightstand just for this special moment. “What would you like?” I would always ask, knowing the answer.

“A sailboat, Daddy.”

“This is the mast,” I'd say each time, drawing a gentle line down his spine. “Here is the right sail. Here is the left sail. Here's the body of the boat. The ocean is down here. What are these?” I'd ask as I drew squiggles in the ocean of his lower back. He'd giggle and answer, “Fishies, Daddy.”

“Here's Morgan, the captain at the wheel. Daddy is on board, and our cat Max is right next to us.”

I'd draw little
v
's in the sky above the sailboat and make bird whistles. Before I could ask he would say, “Those are the seagulls flying in the sky!”

Finally, I would draw a circle high on his right shoulder and stream an array of lines down his back. He'd beat me to the punch again. “That's the sun, shining down on us!”

Then we'd take our boat on an adventure with the magic drawing stick, coursing over the high seas of his smooth little back. We would fire our cannons at pirates and make a daring escape. Then we would land on a remote island, hike across the beach, and slip into the tropical forest. We'd peek and poke in all the darkest places, avoiding tigers and snakes of course, and then, behind a thundering waterfall, we'd discover a huge treasure chest filled with gold doubloons.

Sometimes Morgan would ask for rocket ships after the sailboats and we'd blast through space, conquering the dark force. Other times our fire engine would rush to the scene and extinguish the blaze, rescuing all the children. But the sailboat was always his favorite. Before he was taken from me, I had been drawing one on his back every morning for almost a year.

Daydreaming, I can feel Morgan on my knees. I can smell his golden hair, see the soft skin of his gently sloping shoulders, hear his sweet requests for another adventure on the landscape of his back.

I also hear him whispering,
Get up, Daddy
.

Pamela is all business when she finally calls to say she's found a place that will accept a patient with cancer and chronic pain. It's called the McDonald Center, at Scripps Hospital in nearby La Jolla. She'll be here in one hour to drive me to the facility. There will still be no visit with Morgan before I go. He remains the leverage to ensure I keep my promise. It's almost impossible to swallow this, and I have no idea what the clinic offers. But I gather my things, limp into the closet, and begin to get dressed.

You should see the stash of medications I've been keeping on a shelf in here. It's a plastic storage container filled with at least two dozen bottles. There are unopened bottles of Vicodin and Motrin, as large as the bottles on a pharmacist's back shelf, each holding several hundred doses. I have bottles filled with Valium, morphine, and Prozac that are only slightly smaller. This is because my medical insurance contracts with a national prescription company that ships patients three to six months' worth of medications at a time. Even though I've overmedicated myself for years, I still haven't come close to taking the amount of drugs I've been prescribed. As I lift the heavy box down from the shelf, I realize someone could make a fortune selling all these pills on the street. My plan is to take the stash to Scripps, surrender it when I check in, be rid of it for good.

The doorbell rings. Pamela is here. Before I answer, there's one final thing I have to do. Once I'm downstairs, I call out that I need a few more minutes. I slip into Morgan's playroom, find his crayons, and a large sheet of paper. I draw a sailboat. He and I are on deck with Max the cat. Seagulls soar in the sky and fish jump over the waves. The sun is shining down on us. There is a small island in the distance, sure to have treasure hidden behind a waterfall, and the wind is in our sails.

I write on the bottom of the page,
Daddy loves you Morgan, we'll sail again soon
, then pin it to his playroom wall. I take a few more minutes and glance at his toys, a teddy bear sitting on the window seat, one of his favorite blankets lying on the floor. “I love you, Morgan,” I call out softly as if he were here in the playroom with me. Then I trundle toward the front door.

CHAPTER 23

Dark Night of the Soul

I
T'S A SILENT DRIVE to La Jolla. The type of silence so thick you can hardly breathe. There's nothing for Pamela or me to say. No plans to make. No strategies to discuss. We sit about a foot apart in her car, but there might as well be a thousand miles between us. The noise of the highway is deafening. The sound of Pamela tapping her fingernails on the steering wheel is even louder. I'm numb by the time we arrive.

Scripps Hospital is a massive facility. It takes time to find the right entrance. The McDonald Center parking lot is packed. We drive in circles before finding a place to park. Pamela gets my suitcase from the backseat and drags the portable lounge out of the trunk. I have my cane in one hand and I tenuously carry the huge box of medications in the other. When we walk into the reception room of the McDonald Center to register, the staff members freeze and stare at me, wide-eyed.

“What are you doing? You can't bring those in here!” A male staffer exclaims as he runs up and grabs the box out of my hands like it's a drug bust.

“There are patients in recovery here!” He barks, “These need to be locked up immediately!”

Normally I would defend myself. Tell him to back off. Chill out. But I'm in surrender mode. I don't say a word. All the other nurses freeze and watch the scene. I've just arrived and already feel foolish. Less than welcome. After the drama ends, we're allowed to approach
the reception counter. We complete the registration procedure Pamela initiated over the phone. Then she leaves as quickly as possible without seeming rude.

I'm directed to a chair next to the registration desk. I sit down and stare at my feet. My vitals are taken: blood pressure and temperature. Then the nurse has me step on a scale. 225 pounds. Good God, I'm huge. I feel so humiliated I can't make eye contact and I answer simple questions with grunts. Finally, I'm escorted down the hall. A professional-looking strip with my name on it has already been put on the door of my room, like I'm an executive rather than a basket case.

The room is antiseptic. Spartan. Efficient. It has cream-colored cinderblock walls, nondescript linoleum floors, and two gray metal hospital beds covered with tan blankets sitting on either side of a narrow window. There's a ceiling-to-floor closet and dresser combo made of dark brown fiberboard by the entry door. It faces a small sink next to a narrow bathroom, with a toilet and open shower so close together I could almost sit down and run water over my head.

As I arrange my things in the closet, I'm in denial about where I am. A drug and alcohol detox center. A place for people whose lives have fallen apart. Tossing some socks in a drawer, I glance up to see a small piece of paper posted neatly on the wall by my bed.

I wonder how many other lost souls have been in this room and read these words? How many made it back to health and reclaimed some semblance of a life? What were they recovering from? What was their fate? What is mine? A shudder of fear and insecurity ripples through my body.

I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling tiles, trying to get comfortable. After an hour or so, someone from the kitchen staff
brings in a hospital lunch on a lap tray. It reminds me of airplane food. But I'm famished and devour every bite, wishing I had a stout beer to wash it down. Just as I finish, another nurse arrives. I'm so withdrawn I don't even listen to her introduce herself or catch her name. Like the staffer who confiscated my drugs, she's all business.

“Take these,” she says, handing me some pills in a tiny paper cup and thrusting a glass of water at me.

They look just like my pills. “What are these?” I ask with surprise, especially after the scene with the box of medications when I arrived.

“They're your prescriptions,” she answers as if I must be brain-dead.

“But, I…”

She quickly cuts me off. “The doctor will be here in the morning to evaluate you. You have to take your medications now. We cannot take you off them without the doctor's permission. You can ask him any questions you have when he sees you.” Here I am finally ready to face this addiction and I'm ordered to take more drugs. I feel empty and powerless as I reach for the paper cup and toss the pills into my mouth.

“There is no wandering in the hallway at night,” she says firmly, arms folded across her chest. “You are required to stay in your room. Good night.”

She reminds me of sadistic Nurse Ratched, who, in the Academy Award–winning movie
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
, eventually forces Jack Nicholson to have a lobotomy for making trouble in her psych ward. I almost say, “Good night, Nurse Ratched,” but think better of it as she waits impatiently to ensure I've swallowed all the pills. Then she departs with efficiency, clicking off the overhead fluorescent lights and closing the door with exaggerated authority. I'm left in the dark, alone. Ratched has nothing to worry about. I have no thoughts of escaping my room, especially not into the hallway. I don't want to be seen here, nor do I want to mix with the others in recovery. I just want to crawl in a hole and hide from the whole world.