 |
| Fun, fun, fun 'til the bank takes your credit away. |
by Tommy George
Disclaimer
What's Your Addiction?
I formerly taught college-level English, but once again I am a student--set back several grades in life's classroom, to relearn the forgotten lessons of the Fool--a naive dreamer whose snowballing story would cause you to shudder if you knew all. Although I am not freakishly ugly or a doddering old fossil yet, it is only a matter of time until the Fool's wages are totaled and tendered to me--a payoff I foresee as anything but tender. The truths I tell herein may save you from hell on Earth, but they likely will have no effect on the true addict.
 |
| Goin' my way? |
The wages of sin are death, but the price of sin is negotiable for rich and poor alike. Payment in punishment is not limited to the poor. However, persons who have slipped into the homeless class invariably seem to get the lion's share of pain and crepitation. Why?
Homeless persons have one thing in common: a fatal weakness that controls their lives, usually an addiction. Some are helpless in the face of alcohol and/or drugs. Readers have seen these inverted individuals: the booze actually drinks them; the meth smokes them. Others hop between emergency shelters. These are the pathological liars, incorrigible thieves, or wanted men. None are secret millionaires.
Curiously, at the end of the day, when forgotten men return to their shelters for the night, the atmosphere is as restrained and proper as a ladies' tea party. Given the opportunity to shower, eat, and dress in some free clean clothes, these desperados trot out their best manners so they won't be tossed back into the street. You've never heard such a mannerly bunch: please, thank you, excuse me. Oh no--you first! Let me get that for you!, etc. Butter wouldn't melt in the mouths of these indigents, so mild do they become. On the outside, however, it is a different story.
 |
| Jean Bergen, Director Emeritus House of Compassion Marshalltown, Iowa |
Track a homeless person for long enough, and you will discover their fatal attraction. It may take a while, but eventually, your forgotten person will conform to the simple explanation given by Jean Bergen, Director of Marshalltown's House of Compassion: "these guys are homeless for a reason." She ought to know, having cozited many thousands of such lovable reprobate during her tenure at the House of Compassion in Marshalltown.
Those enthralled to booze or dope are the easiest to detect. You can smell them approaching; and presumably, they are the easiest to reform. Abundant resources for rehabilitation exist, probably within walking distance. Their humiliating bouts of drunkenness are observable in all strata of society because alcohol is a legal drug. Drug users tend to conceal their use. The world is full of drunks and druggies. Not all of them are homeless, either. Most can recover, and some actually do.
Tommy George (me) has personally run the gamut of substance addictions, beginning with acute alcoholism, early in my life. As a gift for my 18th birthday, the Federal Government rolled back the legal age for alcohol consumption to 18, due to protests about Viet Nam warriors unable to get a beer on their home shores. I was not a serviceman, but I did take to dark bars in the mid-afternoon, in the company of an experienced floozy, like a duck to water. Within five years, I was having black-outs.
I could not abide the small-talk of Alcoholics Anonymous, so my doctor prescribed a drug called Anabuse to treat my problem drinking. One pill a day makes alcohol consumption so nauseating that I dared not drink. No sweat. I never could take the hangovers anyway--for me, part and parcel of the whole toxic business. I stopped drinking alcohol, and that was 37 years ago.
True to addiction's versatility, I soon had developed a replacement: the mellow habituation of marijuana. Chronic pot-smoking was the least-damaging habit I ever followed, and by present attitudes toward legalization, it appears I was on the right track. Further, I have always believed that the high affective suggestability produced by its smoking (or other means of ingestion) is a foolishly neglected instrument of social rehabilitation, in addition to the other known medical benefits of the ancient reefer.
The draconian approach to drug-law enforcement in Iowa ruled out that chronic lifestyle for me, pronto, when I took a job here. But much like a weasel in a box, my addictive bent easily gnawed its way through reasoned behavior into new areas of disrepute, where it could enslave itself all over again. That's what addiction is, slavery. The next habituation I developed involved abuse of prescription drugs.
Owing to a then-unheard-of case of whooping cough, my doctor prescribed for me those little blue Vicodan (325 mg. acetaminophen and a whopping 10 mg. of codeine phosphate) that would allow me to continue my work without whooping and hacking active bacilli all over my students and colleagues. Thus developed another addiction--this one legal, prescribed, and funded by my health insurance--to opiates. It took more than 10 months before my nasal-swab culture returned negative on the bacillus.
Owing to a then-unheard-of case of whooping cough, my doctor prescribed for me those little blue Vicodan (325 mg. acetaminophen and a whopping 10 mg. of codeine phosphate) that would allow me to continue my work without whooping and hacking active bacilli all over my students and colleagues. Thus developed another addiction--this one legal, prescribed, and funded by my health insurance--to opiates. It took more than 10 months before my nasal-swab culture returned negative on the bacillus.
I developed the unethical trick of procuring twice the prescribed number of pills: first by accepting my electronically transmitted Rx from the onsite pharmacy, and then by presenting the paper script given me by my doctor at a different pharmacy. My habit showed an unsavory side of myself that even I found most unbecoming, but in hindsight, I realize that I was never alone.
I witnessed a transaction where his dealer purchased a bag of 1,000 tablets at $2.00 per pill, and five minutes later, sold them to his famous client at $5.00 a pill. Such is the illegal trade in these opiates: outrageously profitable.
And me? Well, I was never caught purchasing 4,000 of the bliss pills in a parking lot as was Rush. Yet before long, the English Instructor (who one day would become Homeless T) was downing 15-20 Vicodin of the extra-strength tablets daily (10mg/325mg!)--to stem the coughing of my resistant whooping cough--and enjoying the ride. With an assist from my steroid inhaler, I flew through my life as a college instructor for nearly a year.
Even that serious drug-abuse was not impossible to escape, or even very hard. By a calculated stepping down from my Limbaugh-sized doses over the course of 8 - 10 weeks, I was able to give up my pill-head status with a relative lack of withdrawal symptoms. Since then, I have never looked back--at least as regards legal narcotics. Curiously, it is the ingredient acetaminophen that makes Vicodin-abuse potentially lethal and motivated me to save my own life by sparing my liver.
*
It's the pure addicts, like the one I have become who have the hardest time recovering. None of the aforementioned substances is what rendered me homeless, jobless, friendless and generally unbeloved. No, my present lack of address, job, car, clothes, food and friends is due to a purer sort of addiction--pure, because it requires no ingested substance, and springs from the natural neurochemistry of the brain. My years of impoverished wandering might never have been, were it not for my continuing fatal attraction to compulsive gambling--an addiction that knocked me down to below zero on the socioeconomic scale.
Others were affected by my selfish descent too: children, friends, employers, and others whom I sometimes dunned for money. Alas, my second, much younger wife shared my habit of "self-destitution" in the casinos--the thrill of betting that never spends itself. It retires to dormancy only when the gambler has exactly no money left. $00.00. As you may surmise, an impecunious state rules out activities like eating, gassing up the car, paying bills, or buying gifts for kids.
It is also a fast way to lose weight, if you can take starvation, but it is necessary to lose absolutely everything first. This includes the jar of pickles in the fridge, the half-consumed box of saltines, and often, the entire kitchen. Between me and my wife, we were slim, if broke all of the time.
Maybe you caught sight of us aimlessly wandering around the parking lot of some casino, apparently looking for something. What we sought were the coins and bills lost by other patrons on the ground. It was great exercise, and a swell way to get some fresh air, but usually yielded us only about eight cents for each hour of searching. Didn't we arrive with over $300.00? How could it be gone after only twenty minutes?
*
Neurological researchers using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brain activity have studied the minds of compulsive gamblers and discovered, paradoxically, that the emotional stimulus sine qua non is loss. Why this is so defies reason, but the dismal catastrophe of a broken gambling binge is what lights up the brain circuits like a never-ending pinball machine in compulsive gamblers. That being the case, my wife and I practically lived in a fun-house arcade. But enough story-telling. Let me feel sorry for myself, and offer some sound, heroin-shooting advice.
When I reflect over the years of poor judgment and my willingness to roll in the muck and mud of silent shame, it makes me want to destroy myself, or at least burn out that low cunning portion of me that directs addictive behavior by any means possible. God help me, it's all true: I had fallen in love with the pain and madness of gambling and loss. I prayed to overcome this most pure of nasty addictions. If I could emerge from this, I could make it through anything.
UPDATE: The truth is that although I am much improved, I still cannot control myself. It is May of 2016 as I revise this piece--first drafted in 2006. I presently have $2.54 to my name, piles of debt, nothing to eat, and not a friend in sight.
So, dear Readers, you have the right to gloat--a little, if you maintain a stable environment. But take this advice from one who has run the gamut: if you feel the weasel of addiction about ready to pop out of your box, take up a safe habit, like heroin addiction or outrageous sexual perversion with strangers in public restrooms In the long run, you will be better off with some milder form of poison such as these.
To Return to Multipost Homepage, Click Here |
