Vladik Cervantes

 

American Hospital


The door reads "YOUR PROGRAM STARTS HERE.”

I take a minute for myself before actually opening it and going inside. For a brief second I feel like I am the vainglorious star of some make-believe motion picture being screened somewhere for a theatre full of imaginary moviegoers who paradoxically possess a sincere interest in my life, and that any minute now the soundtrack will kick in. Most likely, a slow melodic tune sang by a female artist whose lyrics speak of a future full of hope and of rough times now left behind.

After shaking my head out of its delusionary state, I finally go inside and give the receptionist my name. She has me sign in and tells me to have a seat in the lobby. It’s both an enlightening and torturous time to be left alone with my thoughts at this point, especially here in a place like this. I am waiting in the purgatorial lobby of a drug treatment center, the obligatory transitional stage in every dope fiends career where you must decide whether to continue laboring down that dark and dangerous road, whose occupational hazards are jail, insanity, and death, or to take some hints from the people around you that you’ve witnessed expire and choose the virtuous path, however unattainable that may seem.

After a while of waiting, I am called into an office by a short well-dressed Chicano who’s obviously done his share of both hard drugs and hard time. The assumption made from my eyeing his neck and arms, which are completely covered with jailhouse tattoos, not to mention the two miniature teardrops permanently inked in a faded blue, slightly to the right of his left eye--forever declaring to the criminal elite that he’s been hard enough to serve two years in the state penitentiary, and survive. Now he’s a good man I suppose. He has a desk, an office, and most importantly a job where he helps society instead of hurt it. He opens a big blue notebook on his desk that looks worn out from years of use and sticks his face in it, monotonously beginning a series of questions. He asks what drugs I am using, how much of them do I use, how long have I used them, how do I ingest them, etcetera, etcetera. Then he begins to recite me the rules as he inspects my bags.

"If you have any dope or needles, now is the time to give them up because if we find them later, you will be discharged" While he speaks, I imagine how he must have been like before his rehabilitation.

After finishing up with the long process of dealing with the intake forms, he hands me a pair of hospital pajamas to wear, and again he carefully inspects each item as I remove it. Satisfied that I don’t have any drugs or drug paraphernalia in my property, he gets up and I instinctively follow him out the door and up the stairs to the medical ward.

The hospital is reportedly a former large upscale hotel previously owned by Frank Sinatra. What the hell it is doing way out in Pomona, an hour’s drive away from Hollywood, is beyond me. In the middle of the compound is a large swimming pool surrounded by buildings in each direction. Most of these buildings have been trans-formed into dormitories where junkies and alcoholics take residence in, two to a room. This is a six-month residential program, one of the strictest in Southern California, complete with a separate 10-14 day detox unit in the medical ward. Surprisingly, this is one of only two state-funded treatment centers where a true junkie who’s burned all his bridges can go to get help in LA County.

We come up to a secured glass door that he opens with the slide of a magstripe key card and we walk down a long hall until we come to a nurse's reception window. I sit down next to an old hype who is trying his hardest to stay awake. It’s his second day. After they give me my medication, a few orange colored pills, I go to my assigned room and lay out on the bed. I don't awaken until the fourth day.

The staff takes your bags when you come in and only leave you with your underwear and such things. You can only get them back after you've attended six 12-step meetings. You'd think that would only take a day and a half considering there's four meetings a day but no, when you get your medication you're down and you're down good. It makes you feel like you weigh a ton, slowing your every common move to a snail’s crawl. It feels like I am completely walking underwater and it takes about an hour to make the trek from my room over to the kitchen just down the hall. I hold myself up against the wall with one hand and use the rest of my strength to drag my heavy feet slowly across the floor. Occasionally you’ll see people walking through the halls and all of a sudden, it’s as if Satan himself just reaches up and snatches their souls, their eyes roll back into their skulls and they fall backwards with a heavy thump, or they’ll go headfirst into their meals.

The primary medication used, Clonidine, is a blood pressure medication that is supposed to take away the cravings for opiates. The method behind it lies in the effect the drug has in large doses. They load you up with industrial doses of Clonidine for the first three or four days and it’s supposed to put you in a state of profound slumber. It’s basically just a chemically induced prolonged sleep. William Burroughs proclaimed that, “The theory sounds good. You go to sleep and wake up cured.” but then he goes on to state that he considers prolonged sleep “. . . the worst possible method of treating withdrawal.” and this despondent view of his is presumably held only because of the preempted withdrawal from the sedatives he thought the patient would have to go through. With Clonidine there is no dependence, therefore no withdrawal.

After a few days, they start tapering your Clonidine and you begin to come out of your stupor. I still feel like shit but at least I find comfort in knowing (from experience) that the worst part is over. Surprisingly, I find the strength somewhere in me to attend a few 12-step meetings, in order to get my clothes back of course, but I don't quite want to be so functional just yet. So when an old black guy comes around trying to get rid of some ill-acquired meds, I quickly buy them from him. But that doesn't do quite what I was hoping it would do because after taking something so often and in such high doses your body rapidly builds up a tolerance to it.

At the nurse’s dosing window one morning, the sixth one if I recall, I run into a dealer I know from the streets and we go outside to shoot the shit during the first cigarette break of the day. These breaks pathetically become the highlight of our stay in the hospital. The nurse walks back to the door leading outside and yells, "Smoke Break!" The first cigarette break of the day is the most exciting though, everybody comes running out of their rooms to go outside, have a cigarette, and see the new arrivals. They come to see if it’s their long lost partner in crime that has arrived; maybe a dealer that has burned them or that they have burned; an ex-cell mate or someone that they had left for dead one night.

"Fuck man, I thought you'd overdosed!" you’d hear them say.

When a junkie kicks dope with another junkie, something incredible happens. You create a bond that leaves a memory of a million poignant feelings, as if you've collectively survived a terrible event; walked hand in hand out of the perdition that we ourselves individually arrived at and through the chaos and disorder of our own creation. I have never gotten so close to so many people in such a short amount of time as I have in here. For ten seemingly endless days we share almost every waking minute together. We share the same aches and pains as we sit around watching TV or playing cards, with the occasional someone running out of the room to pay the porcelain god a quick desperate visit. The symptoms relentlessly make their rounds from patient to patient, traveling in and out of the sick rooms and causing havoc to the guests.

We sit in the kitchen sharing war stories and peanut butter sandwiches laced with tons of sugar (junkies tend to crave sweets when going through withdrawal, particularly chocolate). All of us pour our guts out at the 12-step meetings. Somebody always breaks down and cries for some reason or another.

"I can't believe I've wasted fifteen years of my life."

"I let my mother die without giving her the satisfaction of seeing me clean"

"I chose heroin over my wife and family".

Colorful individuals they all are. Every morning during the first smoke break, the time of day when almost every patient comes out of their rooms, I speculate on what it would be like if everyone here at this given moment had the dubious fortune of being intoxicated with their foremost favorite drug of choice. If suddenly for some debauched reason, a doctor who’s dealt with one too many a junkie decided to conduct an experiment as sick as the one I sit here in reverie with:

"Okay everybody, gather round. All of you here are very lucky because this is probably . . . no, this is surely the only time that this will happen in the history of medicine. I have decided to indulge you in your wildest dreams! This case that you all see here is filled with ampoules of pure Morphine Hydrochloride. Use it well."

A few minutes later he'd come back with several bottles of hard liquor and another case or two under his arm.

"Here you go people. I think you are all going to very much like what’s in these boxes. These boxes are full of a concoction that has come to be known as a Brampton Cocktail. It is a pure solution of Cocaine Hydrochloride and Morphine Sulfate. We only give it to terminally ill patients, so enjoy it."

I could just picture the whole scene.

Even with all the privileged daydreaming, of which I adjust to my needs from day to day, this place is for the most part unforgettable. Well, not exactly the place itself because it really is truly horrific, but rather the people in it. I sit for hours talking to the whores and thieves, sometimes watching the smoke flow from my cigarette. They are all great sensitive people, though I am sure that in the prime of their addictions the majority of them would have undoubtedly taken me for all I was worth the minute my back was turned. Occasionally someone just does not want to go through with the program. They suddenly wake up one morning and decide not to take the medication anymore. You know by the way that they eat their breakfast--in a hurry to get back to their rooms and pack. They always want to avoid all the people who are going to valiantly but ineffectively try to talk them out of it.

They all have their reasons:

"I'm in pain here. The medication is not working.”

“I'm going straight to the Methadone clinic."

"I can’t handle the medication."

"Fuck all these people and all their rules."

"I'm okay now so why should I stay?"

Yeah, but everybody who goes this route usually knows where they’re going and what they’re going to do the minute they hit the streets. Hell, even some of the people that complete the program for the full ten days go out and use the minute that they get home, considering the success rate that these places have. Twenty five percent I think it is. That’s a one in four chance of survival.

Around the second to the last day of my completion, my counselor finds me a three-month residential rehab somewhere north of Los Angeles, in the mountains near Castaic. Most of the people who transfer to a rehab are advised, if not scheduled, to go straight from this place to a long residential rehab. I have a two-day period before I am to be admitted because out of all the days that I could have been released I am being released on a Friday and I cannot be admitted until Monday. On the day that I am released this chick gives me her gold ring just so I don’t forget to call her (I'm telling you it gets pretty heavy in here).

At home, I’m not there for fifteen minutes before I feel like I’ve been cooped up inside for too long and I decide to take a little walk to get some fresh air. I have my ID in my pocket and a big fat gold ring on my finger. The pawnshop is coming right up on the corner here. Should I go in? . . . Should I not go in? What the fuck, nobody will ever know. Just one kiss goodbye.