Worse for Wear: Chapter 1, Part 3

Editor’s Note: This is the third of three installments from Chapter 1 of the forthcoming serial memoir, Worse for Wear, by Adrian Margaret Brune. To read Chapter 1, Part 1, click here. Chapter 2, Part 2 is here. For additional information on the collaboration between Atticus Books and Ms. Brune, see the Atticus Books press release.

“Ok, here’s what you’re going to do,” Cathy said in her Jersey ‘burbs, Jewish mother accent. “You’re gonna go to the car service down the street, pay them and take a car to the noon meeting to look for Jeff – he’s my sponsor, Jim’s, sponsor, so he’s your great grandsponsor.” Yeah, okay, whatever the hell. My head hurt. “You’re gonna sit in that meeting and listen, then you’re gonna get some numbers. After that, I want you to get in a cab and come here. We’re going to figure out what to do with you.”

I did what I was told and wound up with a number from a lesbian with a Southern accent named Margaret. She seemed nice enough, I thought to myself, sticking her number in my pocket instead of my phone. I didn’t really give it another thought before I headed for the nearest bodega for O’Doul’s and then a cab. When I arrived at Cathy’s, she was, literally, up in arms.

“Adrian, Adrian, what’re we gonna do with you?!” she exclaimed, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking them a little bit rougher than she usually did when I went “back out,” as AA people liked to call it.

“I don’t know, Cathy, but I’m done. I swear I’m done,” I said, trying to convince myself that I meant it. “I can never, ever see that look of disappointment on my brother’s face again.” And I couldn’t, though by that time, the remorse had started to compete with the withdrawal. Even while sitting on Cathy’s tasteful Mitchell Gold couch, staring into her sincere brown eyes and nodding yes to her plans for me, I started to plot. If I could say I needed some Tylenol at Duane Reade and dash to the corner store, then chug, I could put down two tall boys in about 20 minutes, I thought. I could be good for another two hours.

“So, this is what we’re gonna do. I need you to listen, and then you’re gonna run an errand to Post Office for me.” Yes, my way outside! I secretly exclaimed.

“You’re gonna go to a meeting in the morning in Brooklyn, then you’re gonna come here and stay and work with me in the afternoon. In the evening, we’re gonna go to an Atlantic Group meeting and afterward, you’re gonna go home, you understand?” I nodded. “We’re gonna do this for a few weeks and see how it goes until you get a job. Then, we’ll see what happens.” It all sounded fine to me. Just let me out the door; I was beginning to feel punchy and achy.

“Here’s $20. Walk up to the post office on 63rd and mail this overnight,” she instructed.

I walked out of her building as the afternoon traffic began to mount on Third Avenue and stopped at a bodega. As I stared again at the selection before me, something stood in my way – something that prevented me from grabbing the two Miller Lite cans. Maybe remorse was winning the battle over my shaky hands and sweating brow. Maybe the disappointment of others had reached beyond my own disappointment in myself, which always subsided after a drink. Maybe sheer exhaustion from drinking night after night had overtaken the fatigue prompting me to buy beer in the first place. Whatever it was, I grabbed two O’Doul’s instead, drank them with the fervor of an alcoholic at a bar, walked to the Post Office, then walked back to Cathy’s.

“I think I’m going to pull through this time,” I announced, practically running through her door. “I think I’ve hit my bottom.”

She looked up from her desk. “You’re right. You’re going to one of these.” She pointed to a printout of the Stonington Institute and “Choices” rehab in New Jersey.

**********

I squirted more shampoo in my hand and rubbed my head harder as I thought of the last few hours before I arrived at the New London train station en route to my first stint in rehab.

**********

The next morning, dawn broke slowly over Cathy’s apartment, and I began to count the ten-minute intervals before Cathy would nudge me awake at 7 am to make arrangements for my drug-free future. Before the meeting the night before, I grudgingly accepted the fact that I would be rehab-bound if the Stonington Institute had a bed open up by the time I called the next morning. After the Monday night Atlantic Group meeting, a weekly ritual of remorse followed by meditation, and over dinner at the faux Moonstruck diner next door, I made the pact with Cathy.

“Good morning, Stonington Institute,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.

“Hi, my name is Adrian Brune and a friend of mine called on my behalf last night to inquire about free beds in the residential treatment program.” I used the most professional, I-do-not-belong-in-rehab voice I could muster.

“I’m calling to follow-up. Do you have any beds today?”

“Let me transfer you to Veronica in admitting.” Crap, I had to go through this again?

“This is Veronica.”

“Good morning, Veronica. My name is Adrian Brune and a friend of mine called on my behalf last night to inquire about free beds at Stonington.” If only I could have sounded this good after a liquid lunch, I might have kept my PR magazine gig. “Do you have any availability today?”

“What insurance do you have?”

“Oxford.”

“Oh, we take Oxford. And it looks like you would have 28 days under the policy.”

Dammit.

“Well, Adrian, it looks like we have a bed tomorrow, but not today.” Sweet! One more day to put this off, I thought. Maybe I wouldn’t go after all. As soon as I cupped the mouthpiece, however, and turned around to tell Cathy, I saw, then heard her on her home phone. She had called Stonington while I was on hold.

“Cathy, they don’t have beds today,” I told her.

“They do! I’m getting you set up right now.”

“Cathy, I’m not sure I’m ready for this – or that I need this.”

“Adrian, you’re going. This is a gift. It is a fresh start. You need a fresh start.”

“But Cathy…”

“Wait a minute. What?! What?! Speak up honey, I can’t hear ya. Okay, as long as she’s in New London by three, you can accommodate her? Great. She’ll be there.”

Cathy hung up the phone. “Okay, here’s the deal: I’m going to loan you $200 to cover the first week of residency and $100 for cabs and the train ticket. You’re going to take a cab to Brooklyn, pack up, take a cab to Penn Station and get on the 12:30 to New London. You’ll call me when you get there. Now it’s almost 10. You need to get going, if you’re going to make it. And you will make it.”

Cathy didn’t exactly push me out the door, but I took the hint. I followed her instructions to the letter with the fear of losing her sponsorship on my mind, and boarded the train with my green duffle bag full of clothes and a six-pack of O’Doul’s. I took a seat on the train behind a family on vacation – a psychiatrist, her Hedge-Fund manager husband and their two kids – and engaged in pleasant conversation with them about various articles I’d written and my old life in Boston, all the while guzzling O’Doul’s, downing my last Ativan (I couldn’t have Ativan in rehab and I was sure the house Nazis would find it), and wondering how I could carry on a civil conversation riding the rehab train. I chalked it up to my prep-school upbringing.

Two hours later, I arrived at the New London station, still frazzled from the morning and wondering where I would find this Stonington van, my chariot.

Close to a half-hour later and dangerously near losing its latest intake to the bar ten paces away, a large Econo van driven by a short, stout woman whose name I would later learn was Brenda, pulled in front of me. “You Adrian?” she asked in a Connecticut clip. I was, I answered and threw my bag in the back seat. Piling in behind it, I immediately noticed the crocheted cross hanging around the rear view mirror and the large Big Book next to the mug of coffee in the console. Jesus, I thought, what had I done?

Brenda and I didn’t say much on the way to check in, and 15 minutes later she pulled the big van into a strip mall parking lot where I noticed the big blue words “Stonington Institute” next to a drawing of a sea shell: Stonington’s logo. Apparently, I squeaked in just as everyone was headed home for the day and shuffled between the intake woman Loreen and the waiting room where one very nervous, middle-aged woman sat being consoled by a thin middle-aged man with a large dagger tattoo on one arm and a cross on the other. She must be staying for quite a while, I thought, eyeing her large suitcase. Just then, a small, thin bleached blonde woman walked in the room, looking almost as yellow as the bright sweatpants she wore.

“Ma, ma. Don’t worry, ma. I’ll be alright,” the woman said.

“Renee, you know your father and I worry so much. You’ll call us as soon as you get there, right?”

“Ma, I said I’d call and I’ll call. You and Daddy probably need to get goin’ or you’ll never make it back to Jersey.”

Jersey! I knew there was something about the couple that didn’t quite fit the Connecticut mold. They were from Jersey! It, of course, didn’t matter that we were all sitting in a rehab waiting room, trying to figure out how fate was going to play its cruel hand.

“Honey, honey. Do you know if there’s a quicker way to get back?”

“How should I know, Dad?! We’re in fuckin’ Connecticut?”

Well, that’s really no way for a daughter to talk to her father, I immediately snapped to judge, then realized I had somehow turned into a prim-and-proper Connecticut socialite just by crossing the state line. I stopped myself there.

“I can tell you a fast way to get back,” I immediately volunteered.

“See, Dad, she can tell you! Go ahead.”

I explained to the confused man who had probably spent his entire life on the East coast that he could take 95 to New Haven, then down the Merritt Parkway to 287, over the Triborough Bridge, 278 through Brooklyn and then cross the Verrazano. “And you can avoid Manhattan altogether,” I added.

He thanked me, hugged his daughter goodbye and urged his wife to the car, looking more flummoxed than before. “We’re grateful,” his wife said before she started crying.

“Ma, ma. I’ll be ok. Ma, ma, don’t worry. I’m gonna kick this this time,” the woman, whose name was Renee, said before she shut the door of the family’s Lincoln.

As the car exited the parking lot, I asked Renee what she was in for.

“Heroin,” she said. It should have been my first warning that this rehab would not be anything I ever expected, much less look like the pretty picture of the blue beach house Cathy had shown me the day before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian Margaret Brune is a Brooklyn-based journalist and writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times and Chicago Tribune Magazine. In her free time, she writes autobiographical short stories and sells them in the subway tunnel at Grand Central Station. She blogs about her experience with the writing enterprise, Short Stories for the Long Ride Home, on Facebook.