The Bottom Rung
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
The Bottom Rung
22
Petra came to her senses, standing in front of the airport bar. How long had she been staring at the liquor bottles? She contemplated a hazy string of enticing thoughts winding their way around the image of a shot of tequila followed by a frosty mug of beer.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
Instead, shaking it off the temptation, she headed to Starbucks for a coffee, bought a magazine and headed to the gate. Falling off the wagon in an airport bar was a classic rookie mistake. Such an error in judgement, on her part, would lead to devastating consequences beyond her ability to bear. She was not one of the rich wives from the Palace with endless streams of financial security backing every self-indulgent whim.
The Boynton Beach halfway house, in no way, resembled its alluring brochure that claimed it was within walking distance of the beach.
Walking distance for who? A triathlete?
In the South Florida heat, she would have passed out after one block, much less eight of them. After all, six short weeks earlier, she had been riding the razor’s edge of death.
As she surveyed her current situation with burgeoning contempt, she flashed on her days at The Ranch with nostalgic fondness and sighed.
“Has it come to this?”
Two live-in cat ladies, in their late fifties, managed the house.
“How many cats live here?” asked Petra.
Margie, a plump, dowdy woman in what appeared to be a 1950s, pink flamingo print, housedress, attempted a head count.
“Well, let’s see, there’s Simon, the tabby, Princess, the Siamese looking one, she just had five kittens, then there’s Dutch, he’s a real tomcat and…Oh, my Lord, I don’t know. They keep showing up and Denise can’t say no.”
“Is Denise the other den mother?”
“That’s a funny way to put it. Why, yes, I guess that’s what we are, den mothers. She’s the one in charge. I’m more of an assistant. You’ll be bunking with her until we figure out where to put you.”
Two or three women shared each of the four bedrooms. Petra did the math. At $750 a pop, these halfway houses made a killing. Residents had to pay first, last and a deposit. If they relapsed, as most of them did, they were out, forfeiting whatever was left of the $2250. It was the height of the Oxycodone epidemic and Pain Clinics littered the landscape, collecting vast sums of money from active addicts. Halfway houses sprung up on every corner, grabbing the rest of the funds on the recovery side. It was a racket. Services included a fifteen-minute morning meditation, not required, and a drug test, mandatory.
Petra, her elusive sleep interrupted, woke to a frightening sound, something she had never heard before. It was loud and grating, a noise more like a machine than a human. She turned on the light and watched as Denise pulverized her teeth.
“This should be a scene in a horror movie. Jesus Christ! It’s intolerable.”
Smokes in hand, she went out to the screened-in porch; a foul space with sticky, putrid yellow, nicotine stained walls that smelled like ass.
“This is beyond unacceptable!”
It was the middle of the night and all the other residents were sound asleep, everyone except Petra. Same old, same old.
While she busied herself formulating multiple escape plans to remove herself from “this fucked-up shit hole” and get her money back, a black and white cat jumped up on the glass table in front of her. Raising its back legs into a v-shape with the tail straight out behind, and using its front legs for support and propulsion, the cat slid its butthole across the table, leaving a nice, long skid mark along the glass.
“Oh, my fucking God! That’s disgusting!”
She spent the rest of the night on the living room couch. The first thing she witnessed the following morning, through the sliding glass doors, was Denise, a bottle of Windex glass cleaner in hand, wiping up her cat’s poop. It appeared to be a familiar scene. While she never brought up the itchy-ass-crack-cat, she did discuss the teeth grinding with the owner who placed her in another room with what would become a series of revolving roommates. No one else’s idiosyncrasies came close to the freakish gnashing of teeth.
If Petra intended to survive her imperfect surroundings without driving herself insane, she had to discover a way to adjust her attitude. In the end, she modified her behavior by never sitting down at a table to eat. Instead, she stood in the corner and consumed her meals standing up.
The only way out, having resigned herself to the idea of losing the money she had invested, was a decent job. She found one the same day as the manager of a hotel gift shop.
“Can you start in four days?”
The only thing standing in her way was transportation.
“Denise, I need to fly up to North Carolina and get my car.”
“You can take the bus to work. I don’t have a car. It’s not safe for you to leave right now. It’s a terrible idea.”
Denise refused to budge or acknowledge another point of view. Frustrated, Petra attempted to sway her.
“If not now, when?”
She was running out of resources, had zero desire to walk two steaming blocks to catch a bus, and she would likely work nights. None of her valid points impacted her captor’s firm resolve.
“If I can take a bus, so can you.”
“Denise is clueless,” she muttered under her breath to Margie.
“Maybe, I’ll throw a Hail Mary and make an amends while I’m there.”
Petra was nowhere near the making amends part of her program. So far, she hadn’t been to a meeting, much less found a sponsor or started working steps. Her thoughts were incoherent, and she was making things up as she went. Taking a chance, she followed her instinct, crossed her fingers, threw the dice, and went home.
“You know, you’re a real pain in the ass, right?” said Leo. “Taking time out of my busy day to make an airport run is inconvenient. I have better things to do.”
When they arrived at the house, he offered her a glass of wine and a joint. So much for better things to do.
“How in the world, after everything we’ve been through, do you still believe it’s okay for me to get wasted?”
Deterred by the pesky drug test waiting back in Florida and with enormous effort despite her indignation, she declined. After he was good and high, she offered an amends.
“I’m sorry for everything I did. I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“Oh yeah, what exactly did you do? How did you hurt me? Be specific.”
She couldn’t come up with an answer. It was a blur. He rolled his eyes and went back to re-plastering a wall. The amends process a bust; the following morning, with no fanfare, she got in her car and drove back to the half-way house.
Approaching sixty days clean and sober, with a full day off before starting work, Petra went to an AA meeting. As the room quieted, an unfamiliar calm settled over her. A palpable energy rolled through the room, comforting the brittle edges of her injured soul. The words “lightness of being” came to mind as a thousand-pound weight lifted off her back. In amazement, she watched her agitated emotions slip across the floor and out through the crack under the front door. For the first time in years, she could breathe.
“At this time, if you have less than 90 days sober, we ask you to raise your hand and introduce yourself.”
As is customary, she eked out the deplorable words.
“My name is Petra and I’m an alcoholic.”
She wondered, “How am I supposed to get rid of this disgusting part of myself if I have to keep claiming it?”
What she didn’t realize, the thing no one looking in from the outside understands, is the absolute necessity to avoid the habit of reinvention and, instead, begin the process of reclamation. True wholeness requires the ability to accept and find value in every part of our human experience.
Petra was a master of compartmentalization. If she couldn’t understand or reconcile events in her life, she threw them in a psychic garbage can and moved on, or so she thought. She felt certain that she had eradicated her addictive nature when she joined the church, only to come face to face with it when it reared its ugly head and overtook her.
She required a fresh approach, a different tactic that her diseased, addicted mind could follow. Reaffirming this lowly part of herself, a part she despised, for years on end, would force her to stay in a relationship with it, until integration became possible.
Some may wonder why Petra was identifying with Alcoholics Anonymous? Why was she claiming to be an alcoholic when it was obvious she had the ear markings of an addict? It boiled down to how she felt sitting in the room.
All the cool, hip, stylish people seemed to flock to NA. They reminded her of the poets, artists, and actors she sold drugs to in New York City. Without the prestige of a coveted product propping her up, she felt out of place, self-conscious and insecure. Her “cool” factor had long since evaporated and her physical appearance, devastated by opioid use, excluded her from participating in what she perceived to be the fashion runways of Narcotics Anonymous.
Bottom line, she felt less judged and more seen in a room full of drunks. As far as alcohol consumption was concerned, she drank to excess, if that was all that was available, and she had a desire to stop drinking, which was the minimum requirement for becoming an AA member.
The people in what would become her home group had long-term sobriety and a spiritual fitness level that was palpable. The room felt like a thick, warm blanket. Petra wept her way through her first meeting. Afterward, some members gathered around her.
Rena, a transplant from Dublin, lifted her face by the chin, looked directly into her hopeless eyes and in a glorious Irish accent said, “We know what’s wrong with you. We’ve seen it countless times before. We know how to help you.”
The Fabulous Five, as she would later call them, Rena, Debbie, Bill, Rich and World War II Jack, were well on their way to saving her life. Because of his nickname, (Jack was by far the oldest man in the room), she envisioned them as a mash triage unit from the 1940s. The two women wore vintage Red Cross nurses’ uniforms, and the men had on doctor’s coats with stethoscopes hanging from their necks.
As they wrapped imaginary bandages around her diseased mind, they assured her that, “Everything was going to be alright.”
Had she understood how sick she was, she would have envisioned them as police detectives wrapping her head in crime scene tape. That first day, Petra ticked off two of Cheryl’s boxes. She joined the Home Group and secured Rena as her sponsor.
The job at the hotel was a lifesaver. They were short-staffed and, several days a week, she worked thirteen-hour shifts. Under normal circumstances, people in recovery frowned upon anything that appeared like workaholism, especially if it interfered with the recommended ninety meetings in ninety days for newcomers.
The Fab Five discussed the situation. They agreed Petra had a serious over-thinking problem. As if on steroids, her mind, busy analyzing everyone and everything, perceived constant ill omens coming from every direction. Thirteen hours on the job forced her out of her head. It kept her concentrating on customers for extended periods. If she could manage five meetings a week, that would be acceptable to all concerned.
At the beginning of every meeting, they read a page from the Big Book entitled, “How it Works.” Petra listened and noticed the atmosphere of the room shift from boisterous chaos to focused serenity, but her compromised intellect was incapable of comprehending the meaning of the words. One day, when she was around three-months sober, a turn of phrase captured her attention.
“There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.”
The idea wove its talons under her skin, and she spent another meeting in tears.
“What’s all this about?” said Rena.
“I think I have the grave emotional and mental disorders,” sobbed Petra.
The discovery, made much worse by Rena’s lightheartedly chuckling, tormented her.
“If that were the case, if it were truly ‘grave’, you wouldn’t know to ask about it. As for mental and emotional problems, we all have those!”
After a month at the hotel, she discovered that the wedding planner, Angelina, also in recovery, had a room for rent in a luxury apartment building with a pool. She was a wonderful, kind person, always on the go and easy to live with.
Petra developed a healthy, sustainable daily routine. She swam laps in the pool every morning for an hour, attended a mid-day AA meeting, ate lunch and went to work. She took Friday’s off to attend her Home Group’s Living Sober 7 pm meeting. She loved that meeting because they went out to dinner after.
Life normalized and at nine months clean and sober, something extraordinary happened. As she sat on the second-story landing, looking out on a marshy landscape with tall reeds, (her favorite spot to relax and smoke a cigarette), a flock of Egrets, white angelic-like creatures, spread their wings and took off through the sapphire sky.
She gasped in awe at the sight. Even more significant was the genuine positive emotion that burst from her heart and reverberated through her throat. She could not remember ever feeling anything like it. Until that point, all she felt in sobriety was pain and anxiety tempered by a brutal sarcastic wit.
Was it possible that life could feel beautiful, even without drugs? Better, in fact? Who knew?
She continued going to meetings and worked all 12-Steps. When she sat down with her sponsor and shared her 5th Step, Rena had an unexpected response.
“I see that you’re adamant about not wanting to play the victim. It’s commendable, but… from what I’m hearing, you very much were a victim.”
The idea of embracing victimhood was like a tripwire to Petra’s momentum. She held an unsubstantiated belief, more of a vague feeling, that she was the architect of her life, or, at the very least, a collaborator in its design.
She questioned God in prayer and reflected on her near-death experience. What about all those people behind the curtain? Why was her life so important? In her previous decade of sobriety, sure, she had helped people, but not in any life-altering way that she was aware of. Not discounting the possibility of ripple effects, she concluded that any real influence on humanity must be ahead of her.
Deep in thought, she replayed her fall down the ladder, through the various rungs of the Underworld, and wondered why her descent invariably led to the very bottom. Other addicts could turn their lives around well before it got out of hand. She had splattered on the basement floor of hell not just once, but twice.
How was it possible that she never saw it coming? Was it because she remembered that first rung with a deceptive euphoria and affection?
She contemplated the early stages of her heroin use. In her imagination, those days had the feel and appearance of the most amazing rave on earth. Vibrant strobe lights bouncing off mirrored walls, traveling through crystalline sculptures; a spectrum of colors that shot out in every direction, illuminating all the gods and goddesses on the dance floor. It was reminiscent of what Studio 54 must have been like back in the day. She felt the beat of the music as it vibrated through bodies, swaying like an enormous herd of exotic animals. It was a state of utter bliss and unadulterated ecstasy.
Not unlike the first, the second rung exuded pleasurable sensations, but an imperceptible sooty haze dimmed the dazzling lights. The rhythm of the dancers seemed off, disjointed, just a wee bit, here and there. The music had developed a jarring, dissonant edge that was difficult to discern. People seemed to enjoy themselves but, upon close examination, it was obvious they were going through the motions to ignore their mounting distress.
By the third rung, everyone was out for themselves. A perverse edginess replaced the previous euphoria, and a growing sense of desperation filled the atmosphere. As she continued her descent, each rung became more unpleasant than the last until she landed, in a heap, on the basement floor. There she wallowed in pain, imprisoned in a windowless dungeon, alone with her thoughts; besieged by self-condemning voices that pummeled her night and day.
She wondered if an individual’s bottom correlated to the depth of their trauma.
A lyric from The Jim Carroll Band song, “City Drops into the Night” got her thinking that maybe, just maybe, she was here on Earth to help other addicts.
As the song says,
“It’s when the body at the bottom,
That body is my own reflection,
But it ain’t hip to sink that low,
Unless you’re gonna make a resurrection.”
A resurrection implied redemption. Again, she contemplated her near-death experience. In the vision, only the man was passing through the narrow gate into the afterlife. Her entire human experience was a wash, an epic failure. No resurrection, no redemption. All that childhood trauma and drug-addicted suffering wasted. The thought blew her mind. In her heart, she decided right then and there, that come hell or high water, she would investigate until she understood everything that had happened to her. She would retrieve the memories she had lost and welcome back all the parts of herself that she had thrown away.
But first, it was time to retrieve her son.
At one of her very first women’s meetings, a mom, in agony, shared.
“My children need me. I can’t stand it. How will they survive without me?”
“The last thing in the world they need is a mother in your condition,” a seasoned AA member replied. “You’re not helping, you’re hurting. Concentrate on you. Get better and they will come back to you.”
Petra heard the truth in that statement and flashed on her encounter with the crazy bitch who owned Cat Daddy’s. As a mother, she had failed him. It broke her heart. Filled with guilt, shame and remorse, she was terrified by a lack of clarity concerning where she was, or wasn’t, in her recovery. His time at the wilderness camp would soon end. How was she ever going to support and care for him? She tried to get affordable employee housing from the hotel, to no avail. She wanted to stay with her Home Group and believed Daniel would love Florida. Angelina, aware that she would never find a place for the two of them to live on her income, handed her $1000 in cash and forgave her last month’s rent.
“Take this and find a nice place for you and your son, up there in North Carolina.”
The Fab Five took her out for a farewell dinner. In Alcoholics Anonymous, people frown upon giving advice. They offer instruction as a suggestion, leaving the final decision to the individual. However, Rena’s parting words were not mere suggestions, they were law.
“Don’t you dare make another amends to that ex-husband of yours. You made your amends. He didn’t accept it, that’s fine. It’s not about him, anyway. It’s about you.”
Thinking she had finished, Petra motioned for the check and began collecting her things.
“And, one more thing, if you have an overwhelming negative emotion, go to God with it. If the feeling doesn’t lift, call another alcoholic. If God does provide relief, call another alcoholic. In pain and in glory, always call another alcoholic. This is a ‘we’ program.”
Petra felt as if she was leaving her family. A clean and sober family, at that. She had never felt so connected to a group of people. If she didn’t know any better and looked at it anthropologically, she would have labeled her Home Group as a tribe. The process of detaching was excruciating. Thank God Daniel was on the other side of it.
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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.
This autofiction (autobiography and fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.
It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.