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I call my Parents at a Hotel in Chicago and my Mother answers the phone.

Hello.

Hi, Mom.

Hold on, James.

I hear her call my Father. My Father picks up the phone.

Hi, James.

Hi, Dad.

How are you?

All right.

How is it there?

It’s fine.

What’s happened so far?

I’m being detoxed and that sucks, and yesterday I moved down to a Unit and that’s been fine.

Are you feeling like it’s helping?

I don’t know.

I hear my Mom take a deep breath.

Anything we can do?

I hear my Mom break down.

No.

I listen to her cry.

I gotta go, Dad.

I listen to her cry.

You’re gonna be okay, James. Just keep it up.

I listen to her cry.

I gotta go.

If you need anything, call us.

Good-bye.

We love you.

I hang up the phone and I stare at the floor and I think about my Mother and my Father in a Hotel Room in Chicago and I wonder why they still love me and why I can’t love them back and how two normal stable people could have a created something like me, lived with something like me and tolerated something like me. I stare at the floor and I wonder. How did they tolerate me.

I look up and I see most of the men leaving the Unit to go to dinner so I stand and I walk through the Halls to the Dining Hall and I get in line and I get some soup and a glass of water and I sit down at an empty table and I eat. The food tastes good, and when I finish my bowl I want more. My body is craving and wanting and requiring and though it can’t have what it normally has, it needs something. I get a second bowl and then a third and then a fourth. I eat them all and I want more. It’s always been the same, I want more and more and more and more.

I finish eating and I leave the Dining Hall and I go to the Lecture Hall and I sit with Leonard and I listen to a woman tell her life story. The woman has been to seventeen Treatment Centers in the last decade. She lost her Husband, her Kids, all of her money and spent two years in Jail. She’s been clean for eighteen months and says she’s happy for the first time in her entire life. She says she’s devoted her life to God and to the Twelve Steps and that each new day is better than the last. Good luck, Lady. Good fucking luck.

She finishes her story and People clap and I stand and I go back to the Unit and I go to my Room. I want to go to bed but I can’t so I play cards with John and Larry and Warren. Larry, who has a Wife and newborn twin Girls waiting at home for him in Texas, is grief-stricken. He found out this afternoon that he has the HIV virus, which he probably contracted during ten years of mainlining crystal meth and fucking whores. He wants to tell his Wife but he’s scared to call her so he sits with us and he plays cards and he talks about how much he loves his Children. I want to try to comfort him but I don’t know what to say so I say nothing and I laugh when he makes jokes and I tell him his Girls are beautiful when he shows me their picture.

It gets late and we put away the cards and we get into our beds. My body still wants what I cannot give it and I’m unable to sleep so I lie on my back and I stare at the ceiling. I think about where I am and how I got here and what the fuck am I going to do and I listen to Larry cry and pound on his pillow and curse God and beg for forgiveness. At a certain point my eyes close and at a certain point I fall asleep.

Chapter 6

I sit alone at a table. It’s dark and I don’t know where I am or how I got here. There are bottles of liquor and wine everywhere and on the table in front of me is a large pile of white cocaine and a huge bag of yellow crack. There is also a torch, a pipe, a tube of glue and an open can filled with gasoline.

I look around me. There is blackness, there is alcohol, there are drugs. There is an abundance of all of them. I know I’m alone and there is no one to stop me. I know I can do as much as I want of whatever I want.

As I reach for one of the bottles, something inside of me tells me to stop, that what I’m doing is wrong, that I can’t do it anymore, that I’m killing myself. I reach