# Treatment at St Elizabeth Hospital ## Background Notes What's the arc here? Arc is maybe how I decide to pledge myself to AA / treatment etc, and accept the premise I'm an alcoholic, and "god" was doing this to me to save me. Feeling bewildered and horrified. Realizing they only want to let me in if I pledge myself to this ideology with my whole heart. So... do I do it? Do I start a treatment program where I'll be praying everyday, and referring to myself as an alcoholic? What other choice do I have, really? The whole thing feels like church again. Like I'm back at church listening to sermons about being a sinner. I'm in the waiting room at the treatment center. I'm waiting, bored, and I replay in my brain what all just happened in my life. i got arrested, I spent night in jail. This was after a mild weekend of drugs with friends. Then I go through the screening process maybe. I talk to that jewish lady doctor. She says the AA book is a useful guide even if it doesn't fit perfectly. I talk to that other woman, hooked on crack, hoping to get in. She tells me about how in prison, everyone is a carrot or a pumpkin. I get my blood drawn by that other guy for an HIV test and he treats me like shit and then he drops the needle and it stabs his leg. I can tell he is really scared. Then I go home. Maybe arc is around whether I'm going to give this 12-step stuff a try, and how. Like, I'm gonna go in with both feet. I need this place to tell me how ## Story ### Scene: cops search my dorm room In February of 1995, one week after I turned 20 years old, I was in my college dorm room on the 10th floor. The building was an awful cinder block building. I think I was awake and playing computer games when several police knocked on the door. One yelled at my roommate to go into the hallway. I wondered what the hell he had done. He and I didn't know each other very well but from what I knew, he was a creepy frat guy. I wondered if he was getting arrested for some sexual assault. The way he talked about women sounded like a dude that would catch charges for assaulting some woman. But that wasn't what was happening. He left the room, then the three or four uniformed cops blocked the door. The guy that yelled at my roommate came back in. He was in plain clothes, with a badge on his belt, and a gun in a holster. I guessed he was some kind of supervisor or detective. He looked at me and said "Where is it?" At that moment, I realized I was the focus. Not them. I realized a lot of things in that blink of a moment. I had been out of the dorm all weekend. I had spent the weekend with some guys outside Austin. The last week, I had bought 25 hits of LSD from a guy that another guy knew. On Friday, with some guys that I liked to get high with, we tried it, and nothing happened. I realized I got ripped off. The stuff was bunk. I had spent $100 on a sheet of blotter paper. I was angry but I knew I'd never make that mistake again. Besides, buying illegal drugs from strangers back then in the 1990s came with a fair amount of risk. A guy I knew had violent diarrhea for like two days from bad mushrooms one time. The night before, when I got back late Sunday night, I remember noticing the whole dorm room was scrubbed clean. I could have realized in that moment the night before that they had searched my place, but I had the blotter paper with me, and so they wouldn't have found it. I had decided I was gonna use the blotter paper as a bookmark. Then came to my dorm room, searched it, eventually found a sheet of blotter paper in the pages of a book, handcuffed me, took me to the Austin city jail. Was the end of one chapter of my life and the beginning of another. The experience traumatized me. Maybe other people wouldn't have been so upset by it. I got out on bail with a list of conditions for my release. One was to not go anywhere near my dorm roommate. Apparently he was the one that told the police I was some LSD dealer and that's how come I got caught. Another condition was to go to a drug treatment program and go to two 12-step meetings every week. And there were other things too, like go to a probation office once or twice a month, show proof of employment, pay some ridiculous fees, etc. ## Scene: Waiting Room at St Elizabeth Hospital I remember driving to the place in my dad's white plymouth reliant. Place was named "Houston Recovery Campus" but everyone called it St Elizabeth Hospital. In the middle of the 5th ward. That's a neighborhood where Black people were allowed to live. Houston landlords didn't rent to Black people in other neighborhoods for a lot of the 20th century. And banks wouldn't lend them mortgage money either. So Houston has some neighborhoods where you cross a freeway, and suddenly, you're in an all-white or an all-Black part of town. I didn't know the history then. But everybody growing up in Houston knew the 5th ward was not for white people. The place was an old hospital, with a big waiting room and women sitting at a desk behind sliding glass doors. I saw other people standing in line waiting so I did that. I remember getting up to the front of the line, explaining how I had a court order to get into a treatment program. No I didn't have any health insurance that would cover a private center. Yes, I had a safe place to stay. The woman behind the glass gave me a clip board to fill out. She told me to wait and later they'd call me. So I got a chair and waited. This was maybe a week or two after getting arrested. My whole brain was in shambles. In my brain there was a loud voice that said: just kill yourself and avoid the nightmare your life is about to become. For your own good. It's over. Another voice said the same thing it always says: "leave me alone." _Maybe this "how I feel" stuff could be stuff I say in groups rather than just as narrations of my thoughts_ I remember there were little pamphlets about the programs this place offered. They were written for people that were looking for help getting free of drug addiction. I didn't really think of myself as a drug addict. Sure, I used a lot of street drugs, really anything I could get, but I didn't think of these drugs as a negative influence. I loved doing ecstasy for example. It felt GOOD for me, not BAD for me. I felt less dominated by the constant self-loathing I felt all the time otherwise. All these years later, I'm writing this out, and I feel like me taking ecstasy was a positive thing. For a few hours, I felt happy. Really happy. Even if it was synthetic or artificial, I really enjoyed it. I felt like I was a lovable person. Sober, walking around, I was full of self-loathing. No girls were into me. I hated myself for a hundred different reasons. I remember sitting in that waiting room, waiting for them to call me back, and I remember reading the posters on the wall with slogans like "One day at a time" and photographs of smiling people hugging each other and stuff like that. I felt a strong sense that this place was somehow part of a big machine meant to protect the system from changes. This was all part of a gigantic carrot and stick operation. Do what society says and you get the carrot. Otherwise, you get the stick. I just got the stick. Now, I was being offered a chance to get back on the straight and narrow. ### Scene: Flashback to the night in jail The night I spent in jail I talked to some other people in there. I had gotten my charges. I was looking at two years in prison because of "mandatory minimum sentencing laws." I'd be sent to prison in Huntsville. That's where they do lethal injections for people that get the death penalty. I knew about the prison. Heck, a year ago, I had gone to an Amnesty International meeting and written letters trying to get clemency for an inmate that was going to be executed. That night in prison, I heard a lot of scary stories about what life for skinny white kids was like in there. That night I used my imagination a lot to plan out how I was going to kill myself. I wasn't going to try yet. Too many people were watching us. I'd make a plan and I'd for a moment where I knew I'd be done before anyone could stop me. If I could make a poison tooth like that dude in the Dune book, that'd be great, but I didn't see a way to do that. But the important thing was that I was gonna have a way out. There was a 1980s arcade video game, Defender, that I really liked. In Defender, you pilot a spaceship and you fly around shooting aliens. If you don't shoot the aliens, they fly down and capture humans and then they take the humans up to the top of the screen, and at the top of the screen, the humans become monsters that attack you. So you had to shoot the aliens first to save the people. That's why the game was called Defender. You're defending the humans. Anyhow, your spaceship could shoot lasers and it had a few super bombs that killed all the aliens on the screen. And there was also a button labeled something like "HYPERSPACE". If you were out of super bombs and the aliens were closing in on you, you could hit the hyperspace button and you would disappear and then reappear somewhere else on the map. The risk is that you might land somewhere worse. But, if you're about to die anyhow, might as well hit hyperspace. That's what I was figuring out how to make -- my own hyperspace button -- something that would get me the fuck out of this situation. I just didn't know what it was yet. ### Scene: flashback to talking to attorney After my dad got me out of jail, he took me to supercuts and told me he wanted me to get a haircut. I was a ghost. I went along with it. The next morning, we met the lawyer he found. I remember the lawyer explaining how it was possible that I wouldn't go to prison for two years, if the judge could something called deferred adjudication. The lawyer said I needed to do anything I could to show the court that I was scared straight.