A Stab At Rehab
Biff Buckhead
loved watching football, and the day of the first game of his senior
year in High School had finally arrived. Unbeknownst to him, however,
his father, who moved to the Southeast four years earlier, had also
shown up late the night before. After exchanging awkward greetings,
Hamer Buckhead proposed the unimaginable: missing that night's game.
"Hey, wanna
take a trip to Minneapolis with me?", he abruptly asked.
Normally a
no-brainer proposition, Biff's answer was not so easy this time.
Football is very important in Ohio---almost as vital as the partying
that surrounds the games. Biff ran with the "in" crowd, and
many of his friends played on the team, so this was a huge weekend.
On the other hand,
blowing off a day of school with his parent's blessing and a
plane ride to visit a new city was a very tempting alternative.
Joining Hamer on business trips had always been fun, and Minnesota
sounded exotic to the seventeen-year-old. Besides, there would be ten
more football games in the season.
"Screw it," Biff decided. "Let's ride!"
Biff threw some things together and bid his Mother farewell for the
weekend. She was particularly insistent on a long hug, which seemed
strange seeing that he was only going to be gone for a couple of
days. Biff quickly forgot about it, though, and father and son
enjoyed an uneventful flight north.
Upon
arriving, Biff emerged from the jetway first, encountering a man who
was a dead-ringer for Ned Flanders from The Simpsons
straight away.
"Are you Biff?", the squirelly character asked.
Biff confirmed this, then the guy looked to Hamer, who was next off
the ramp.
"Then you must be Hamer.", he said, a bit too
enthusiastically.
Confused, Biff wondered aloud: "Wait, you two don't know each
other?" He then turned to his Dad.
"I thought you were coming here for business."
The senior Buckhead suddenly turned somber, looking tired. "Son,
the reason we're here is your Mother and I feel you have a drug
problem, and this place will help us assess it. This man works for
the treatment center."
Flanders seemed taken aback at Hamer's deception, and said nothing.
After emerging from a brief shock, Biff filled the awkward silence:
"Wait,
how in the hell can you assess
my drug issues from nine hundred miles away? Don't you mean Mom
thinks I have a drug problem?"
His Dad had no comeback for that one, so he started small talk with
Flanders instead as Biff pondered his predicament. He figured he
would spend the weekend convincing these people that he was normal
and then get back to his happy life, thank you very much.
Right about then another teenager emerged from the same jetway the
Buckheads had just used. Incredibly, it was Jim Linder, a High School
classmate of Biff, and he was wearing a cast on his wrist, along with
his usual impish grin.
"Linder?!
What the hell are you
doing here? Where have you been?", Biff nearly hollered.
The friends slapped hands as Jim said: "I'm coming from one drug
rehab, going to the next one. What about you?"
"I guess I'm going to rehab too. This guy here said Fairview or
something?"
"Yep, Fairview." Jim replied. "Me too."
Flanders then introduced himself to Jim, and the foursome began
walking, the kids trailing.
"So what's up with the cast?" Biff asked, pointing to Jim's
wrist.
"Oh, I was in rehab in Akron, and I punched through a window at
the security desk," he explained, "so they're sending me to
a more secure place."
"What?!
OK, this is getting too weird.", Biff replied. "I don't
need to be in any secure
place! How long is this going to take, anyway?
"At least a month, probably." Jim predicted.
"No, I mean for someone non-violent, like me.", Biff said,
hopefully.
"Don't matter, dude. This ain't no weekend thing. Get used to
the idea you're going to be here for a while."
Indeed, Fairview Deaconess Recovery Center was a full-on, serious
institution that drew clientele to "treat" into submission
from far and wide. It was a "big boy" facility. The kind
of place worthy of John Wayne's daughter, or the son of a prominent
drug counselor---like Biff's mother, for instance.
For his part, Hamer Buckhead sat through the welcoming and
orientation for the rest of the day, said a few words of
encouragement and general bullshit, and bid farewell to Biff, who was
happy to see the asshole leave. He was livid with both of his parents
for screwing up his life like this, after all. The kid was on his own
now, in a daunting new micro-society.
Part of a hospital complex, the locked unit for adolescents was not
screwing around. Thick, impenetrable screens guarded the windows,
effectively doing the work of bars. The patients were clothed in
pajamas and slippers, and movement was restricted to small segments
of the building. Going outdoors was out of the question, and both
cigarettes and music listening were no-nos. ostensibly to concentrate
fully on the patient's issues.
Biff and Jim were assigned to the most restrictive part of the
treatment center, the evaluation unit. The main tool for assessing a
patient's status here were personal "drug histories",
presented by a patient in a group setting. This was usually a
humiliating exercise, because everyone under-reported their usage the
first try, and they were openly criticized by their peers and
counselors.. Some might call it "tough love." "Coercion"
could be another way to describe it.
As the days wore on, the "head games" of Biff's new reality
emerged. He presented a couple of his own drug histories---one which
was actually accurate---but it was rejected anyway. In the meantime,
he could see the other side of the unit through a small window. This
was the "treatment" area. Patients there wore their own
clothes, smiled a lot more, and rumor was they even got to listen to
music and go outside now and then!
An "open and honest" patient quickly moved to treatment,
after accepting hugs and kudos, and all but being carried off on the
shoulders of the counselors in celebration. Those who failed at
presenting an "honest" abuse history, by contrast, were
persona non-gratas, stuck at the starting line, bathed in shame.
Biff quickly tired of hearing "who are you kidding?", and
"you wouldn't be here if these are all the drugs you did!"
In the process, Biff somehow forgot he intended to show these people
he wasn't chemically dependent in the first place. He truly wasn't;
his Mother had pushed the panic button after noting heroin addicts
she worked with started by smoking pot---all he was guilty of besides
drinking like everybody else. In any event, all Biff wanted at that
point was to get over to the treatment wing, to hang out with the
"cool kids." So he started making shit up.
Cocaine? In reality Biff had never seen it before, but for his
current purposes he did plenty of it. As far as these people knew his
friends used to call him "Hoover." Acid? The "new"
Biff ate that shit like Pez since eighth grade! He also claimed he
drank so much he was lucky to not have cirrhosis, even though he was
only seventeen years old! Now, could he get congratulated and hugged,
and get his own clothes on the way to the treatment side already?
Thank you very much!
"You've come such a long way!", they gushed after Biff
"came clean." "We're so proud of you! It's not easy,
what you've done!" Actually to Biff it was pretty easy, because
almost none of it was true, and making up stories came easy. Whatever
the case, he was that much closer to enjoying a cigarette, which were
also permitted on the "other side." The kid was finally on
his way! But to what?
Silly
rules, for one thing. Like the last person in the shower prior to
morning group must leave the stall completely dry. Even more annoying
was the pesky initial step of the twelve in a standard recovery
program: "We admitted we were powerless over chemicals, and that
our lives had become unmanageable." No way Biff was getting past
that one. He needed:
"We believe our parents jumped the gun and we haven't lived long
enough to know what an unmanageable life even means."
So began ten days of utter failure coming to terms with the first of
the twelve steps. Try as he might, Biff increasingly found faking
such a thing to be pointless. He also wondered why he was doing it to
begin with, now that "evaluation" was in the past. He still
knew he was powerless over not much besides effectively hiding weed
smoking from his Mother.
Also, "family week" was fast approaching, and three family
members about to pay for expensive travel for no good reason. In
light of this, Biff finally talked his Mother into calling the whole
thing off. No more tedious group meetings full of whining
psycho-babble and trying to convince a bunch of strangers that he was
something he was not. He was finally going home.
Biff
may have continued through life vindicated, but sadly the world will
never know. Ironically, Biff's friend Jim was in the jealousy coping
class at Fairview when he heard of his friend's early release. He was
gravely upset that Biff was leaving instead of him, but unfortunately
the sub-lesson Jim really needed---dealing with homicidal
rage---wasn't scheduled until the following day.
As
poetry would have it, Jim decided to fashion a shank from a hard
cover of an Alcoholics Anonymous book, and use it on Biff to slow his
exit. After all, Jim thought, how much damage could a stabbing cause
when they were right next to a hospital, anyway? This logic failed,
however, when it turned out an aorta got shanked. Biff's wound proved
to be mortal, but there was an
upside: a solution to his daily pot smoking problem.
