and in need of that support, I found it in State College, a little town up on a mountain in Pennsylvania. Until that point, my natural reflex in response to everything challenging in my life was to run, hide, get high, and just escape. This whole idea of facing everything was a new learned behavior, and like any learned behavior, practice would make perfect. But the practice, while exhilarating at times, was also horrifically draining.
State College is home to Pennsylvania State University and not much else. The town thrives on the university, and if you live there you are a student, faculty member, staff, or an unfortunate townie who was born there and somehow ended up never leaving. I joked that State College was a fairy-tale land, a little make-believe oasis way up over a mountain in a valley—“Happy Valley,” to quote the town’s slogan. The town had very little crime, at least little that the residents wanted you to know about, though date rapes and assaults occurred on campus and were underreported or never reported. The town also had very little, if any, homelessness or poverty, unless you counted the small trailer park next to the local Wal-Mart or the one long-haired dude we called the vagrant who wandered the streets. One lady also wandered the streets; we called her the dime lady because she walked around picking up change all over town. The story was that she was very wealthy but chose to live on the streets because of mental health issues. Otherwise, students, professionals, and a bunch of drunks and former drug addicts made up the population of Happy Valley.
There were no drug dealers or prostitutes on the streets at night. I learned later that they hide in the fraternity houses surrounding the campus. After all, there are always drugs to be found; you just have to have the ability to sniff them out like a trained dog. I’d always had that uncanny ability. No matter where I was, I could sniff out a drug user a mile away and would find myself migrating in that direction. It’s a gift, really—just one I no longer have any use for, unless you consider the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). I would be a great drug enforcement agent because my nose for drugs is ten times better than any trained bloodhound’s. Actually, if the DEA agents were smart, they would recruit at rehabs, because who better to hunt down drug dealers than their best customers? Perhaps ironically, you cannot be in the DEA, FBI, or CIA if you answer yes to these questions:
Have you done illegal drugs in the past ten years?
(Okay, if I wait this one out, maybe I can enlist.)
Have you smoked marijuana fifteen times or more in your lifetime?
(Ummm, I’ve smoked that much in a day.)
Application DENIED!
Guess I won’t be joining the force anytime soon. Regardless, State College was a quaint, peaceful town. It truly was Happy Valley to me upon my arrival. I was more than four hours away from my former life in Allentown. Walking the streets, I had a freedom that felt incredible to me. Bad memories and potential dangers weren’t lurking around every corner. Everything was fresh and new and clean, like a crisp piece of white paper just waiting to be filled with adventures. I would later find out that avoiding downtown on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights after about 10:00 p.m. would serve me well, because at those times the streets were filled with drunken students and alumni celebrating the latest football win or drowning their sorrows over the latest loss—reactions that looked oddly the same. Otherwise, it was the perfect place for me to start my life over. It felt safe, for now.
I was flying high on what they call in early recovery the “pink cloud.” The pink cloud is a common place for many newcomers to land in the beginning of recovery, because it really is a different type of “high” to discover how wonderful life can be without chemicals. When you accept the realization that you never again have to live the way you were living in that utter darkness, it is amazing! You begin to feel alive again. For the first time, your skin is breathing. Your senses are awakened in a whole new way. Food tastes different, flowers smell pretty, the sky is just a little bit bluer, and the possibilities begin to seem endless. Everything is so new, so bright, so exciting that you feel like a little kid again, and in many ways, most of us are. Learning to walk and talk again in recovery is such an amazing gift. Tears are genuine, and they flow freely like rain. Feelings are actually felt in their fullest states. Music floats differently into the ears and sounds crisper, and lyrics make sense on a deeper level. Laughter is the real, heartfelt, stomach-hurting kind of pure laughter. Life is lived. A day has a definite beginning and end. Morning gives way to evening and all is remembered and experiences are wholly felt. Lips actually enjoy touching the cheek, while smiles splash across the face and are felt deep inside the heart. Blackouts aren’t an option; missing pieces of the night before isn’t a possibility.
I was loving everyone in the rooms of my twelve-step meetings, loving being alive, and loving my sheer existence. I had the innocence of a newborn and a naiveté that was out of sync with my past “been around the block, don’t mess with me” persona. A new lease on life was what I signed in rehab and it felt wonderful, as though I could breathe a huge sigh of relief because my past was miles behind me. My most horrible nightmares and trashy actions were left sitting on top of the mountain where my rehab was located or were hidden in my sleep or in my mind where only I could see them.
So I was free—free to begin a new life, to start over fresh and, I hoped, to not screw up royally.
KATHY WAS, HANDS-DOWN, MY ABSOLUTE BEST FRIEND throughout my early twenties. We met during high school when I had a job at a local low-end clothing store for teens. She was my manager and was a couple of years older than I was. We both had a love of partying that we recognized in each other during early Saturday morning openings when we would both stumble in hung over as hell. We would glance up at each other and exchange the same glassy-eyed, nauseated expression, which made us fast best friends. We attended rival high schools, so we didn’t know many of the same people. It was nice to have a friend outside my inner circle.
Ours was the annoying kind of friendship where if we weren’t in each other’s immediate company, we were glued to the phone talking endlessly about anything and everything at all hours. The only time we would break from conversation was to shower before meeting up with one another, and I am pretty convinced that if I’d had a phone in the shower, we would have been talking then too. It got so bad that finally my parents got me my own phone line in the house. Kathy also had her own line, so that freed us up to talk incessantly. We talked about everything girls our age talked about: clothing, fashion, boys, friends, relationships, work, dreams, etc. We analyzed everything together and wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving the house to meet up without getting verbal acceptance of what we were wearing that night. At that time, she was the closest thing I’d ever had to a sister. We trusted each other with everything in the way only young girls do.
I was never physically attracted to her, as I had been with some of my other best friends. Not because she wasn’t a beautiful girl, but because it just wasn’t there for me. She was truly my best friend and that was it. We started hanging out every weekend, then eventually that began to bleed into the week, and then we were partying hard-core all the time. Kathy and I could party it up just as hard as any guy we knew. We held our own in any situation and got hammered together to the point of oblivion.
One time we decided to hit an all-day beer-tasting festival, where you buy a twelve-ounce glass and walk from booth to booth trying a variety of ales and microbrew beers. It was like a candy store for an alcoholic. Although beer was my main drink of choice, mainly because of accessibility and cost, I wasn’t a huge beer fan, and I had never really ventured beyond the cheap shit we could afford to drink in high school. When we wanted to really be tacky and tie one on, we traded up for a forty-ounce malt liquor, with Crazy Horse or Colt 45 among my favorites. So this was new territory for me, and I was excited! We arrived around 11:00 a.m., about
