And Grace Will Lead Me Home

It was a surprisingly temperate Saturday evening for a February, and I was sitting out on my front porch at 2276 N. 8th St, having just finished the tail end of my stash. I was enjoying the last of the daylight on a bench that my roommate Michael had built so I could smoke my cigars outside, as opposed to in my room where he and his girl Monica would have to smell them all the time. It wasn’t unusual for me to smoke a joint right out on the front porch as well, in the shade and cover of the Japanese Maple. Of course, it wasn’t unusual for me to smoke a joint almost anywhere. Seriously, I once got high in the parking lot of a clinic on the way in to take a drug test. I failed that one, although I had successfully passed three others while I was high as a kite, so I felt I had reason to be confident. That’s how a lot of mishaps and calamities in my life begin, with a feeling of perfect confidence. That time it cost me a temp job as a forklift driver. Oh, the humanity.

That February 7th evening, 1998, I was suffering a kind of travel hangover from having just completed a nonstop sixteen hour drive from Los Angeles by myself. The 90’s included a lot of epic trips to and from LA for me. Sometimes on planes, most often in cars, but and few times on the train, and once on a Greyhound bus. On the whole, I prefer the train. The company is better and, for all its failings, Amtrak has sublime coffee service. I do believe I’d prefer to drop a bowling ball on my tongue than to spend another minute on a southbound Greyhound. The Sacramento Greyhound station is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and they are exporting felons and drug dealers just as fast as the correctional system can spit them out. I guess I should have felt right at home. I didn’t, though.

Most recently, I'd driven, spending a week visiting my two best friends from High School. While I was there I saw “Scream 2,” “Titanic,” and “Fallen.” I rode my bike along the shore. I smoked a ton of pot. My buddies and I tripped our faces off on some magic mushrooms for a whole day down in Trabuco Canyon, just outside of San Juan Capistrano. But the thing that really sticks out about that trip was that all of my friends expressed concern about the epic quantities pot I smoked. One of them was a drug dealer. How bad do you have to be to be singled out of a group of musicians and dealers as the guy with the drug problem? I assured them it was just because I was on vacation, kickin’ up my heels. It wasn’t, though.

I smoked my first joint on October 31, 1991. 

Messenger House Care Center, Bainbridge Island, WA

My friend Wanda Rose Tingelstad had died in a car accident on her way to Moses Lake, Washington, where she had enrolled at Big Bend Community College in their pre-med program. Wanda Rose, as we called her, was just beginning as a Freshman there, and had been my very first friend, of the two that I had, in Washington. She and I met in September at Messenger House, a care center for those with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. I’d moved to Washington that July, on the day of my twentieth birthday, and had to beg, borrow, steal, and kill to get a job mopping up urine in the locked dementia wards, thanks to my credentials as a Certified Californian looking for work at the height of anti-California hysteria.

Downtown Long Beach, CA

I’d previously held down a nice office job as Division Secretary for the Southern California Rent-A-Center franchise chain. Not a milestone career, but pretty nice gig for a guy in Community College, and a damn sight better than dealing in adult incontinence for a living. But there I was, having spent three months of impenetrable solitude looking for a job in a town that literally had fewer people in it than my graduating class at Long Beach Polytechnic High School. Not just fewer than the High School itself, mind you. Fewer than the group of seniors I matriculated with. I’d been job hunting four hours a day, five days a week for three solid months before I got that shit detail, and had not made even one single friend while stranded in the lush no-man’s land of Kingston, Washington. Not until Wanda Rose.

Downtown Kingston, WA. Jewell of the Middle of Nowhere.

If you think Alzheimer’s is bad from the outside, you should try watching the gears turn on the inside of the locked wards. Tragedies churned out daily. It’s demoralizing even at the best of times, but somehow Wanda Rose took it all in stride. She had her plans, her exit strategy. She was the first person that didn’t look down and spit on the ground every time my name got mentioned, and the only friend I had for a thousand miles in any direction. Day one, she'd been assigned to train me on how to properly mop up lakes of diarrhea. Turns out it’s all in the wrist.

Wanda Rose

Wanda Rose and I didn’t hang out much, outside of work. The odd cup of coffee here and there, the occasional smoke out on the jetty. She took me to the DMV once, after I got a ticket for expired out of state plates. Mostly it was just shift work and an hour a day between breaks and lunches. But after the months of seclusion, even that was like an oasis in the desert; a balm for loneliness, if ever there was one. Though Wanda was a bit of a wallflower, kind of mousy and unassuming, she had a sweet, easy laugh, and an uncommon grace about her. She welcomed me when literally no one else would, and she was just a good egg, through and through. The kind we really could’ve used more of in this world. 

She introduced me to her crazy boyfriend, Chalon, who came to work at Messenger House several weeks later. He was an affable hippie type; a bit of a douche, but harmless enough and generally well-intentioned. After Wanda headed to Moses Lake to secure a job and an apartment in advance of school starting, Chalon and I kind of fell in together, both just waiting for her return. I never had a lot in common with him, but three months of solitude in the wilds of rural Washington make for strange bedfellows, believe me. I was into the Smiths, the Cure, and Depeche Mode. He liked Steve Miller Band and the Doors. He had brown hair almost to his shoulders and seemed like the living embodiment of Shaggy from Scooby Doo. One citified kid, a stranger in a strange land, thrown in with a hippie stoner behind the locked doors of a tragedy factory. What could possibly go wrong?

Chalon got the news of Wanda’s death at work. It’s funny how seeing someone you love somewhere they don’t belong can immediately fill you with dread. His mom showed up while we were sitting at the ersatz break table on the loading dock. It was really just a discarded wooden spool from a high-voltage line roll, but with a couple of crates to sit on, it made for an OK place to catch a smoke out of the view of the powers that be. Plus we could keep an eye on all the cute CNA’s that came by. I happened to be looking at Chalon as he caught sight of his mom approaching from the parking lot, and saw the change that came over him. He knew something was wrong before she even spoke. When she said, “It’s Wanda,” he disintegrated instantly, his whole world over. I’d known him for four days.

Circumstances kind of dictated the strange sequence of events that put me in Chalon’s house listening to “Riders on the Storm” in the gloaming of October 31, 1991. There’s a set protocol of events that kicks into gear when someone dies in a single car accident. Questions to be asked and answered, tests to be run. It’s not like a heart attack or falling off the roof. It might be drunk driving, it might be suicide, who knows? And you can’t bury the body until there are some reasonable answers. Turns out her friend, the driver, had simply fallen asleep and driven them into a tree. Which constitutes a reasonable answer, I guess, and so it came to be that by the conclusion of these inquiries Wanda Rose was buried on Halloween Day. There are no good days to bury your child, your sweetheart, or your only friend. But there are worse days. 

Halloween has got to take the cake. Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. All of his friends and hers came to the funeral, and then every single one of them had somewhere else to be. Life goes on. After all, it wasn’t just any Thursday. It's Dia de los Muertos, man. Got my best suit and my tie, a shiny silver dollar on either eye. So off they went, and there I stayed, having inherited Chalon and his grief, bequeathed to me by Wanda Rose as the vig on the loan of her friendship for the six weeks I’d been sustained by it. I try to be a stand-up guy, but even when I’m not, I never forget the debts I owe. So I drove Chalon home to his parent’s house on the edge of the Suquamish Reservation.

It overlooked Puget Sound and took advantage of the view with floor-to-ceiling windows on one full wall of the house. I remember thinking that the water was the exact same gray as the clouds that day, and then grasping for the first time that the color of the sea is a reflection of the sky. It had never occurred to me until the moment I saw them meet at the iron gray horizon-line out those windows. So I sat there as an ambassador from the faraway Land of Decency where one's friends—not virtual strangers—bore burdens like this, prepared to console a dude I'd known for forty cumulative working hours, total. How, I knew not. Chalon cued up a CD from the stack Wanda Rose had left behind.

Puget Sound, as seen from the Suquamish Reservation

“Into this house we're born

Into this world we're thrown

Like a dog without a bone

An actor out on loan

Riders on the storm”

Then Chalon offered me a hit off his joint.

I’d seen him roll a joint before, but never smoke one. I’d grown up in LA and been offered it tons of times, but had never touched the stuff. I politely demurred, assuring him that I understood and didn’t care if he smoked. Who could blame the poor bastard? But he was plaintive in his desire to not be alone. Not in anything. So I did it. Out of pity, or empathy, or some shit like that. Hell, maybe it was just curiosity. Either way, who could blame me? Having come unmoored from every touchstone of my life, I was through the looking-glass and adrift in a world I hadn’t dreamed existed. One where I was a hated minority, a pariah mopping up sewage in a filing cabinet where people stored their loved ones while they waited for them to die in slow motion. So hell yeah, I hit that thing.

Nothing happened. 

We toked it all the way down together. It was small and twisted up pretty tight. I had no idea at the time, but it was a pretty pathetic joint. Tiny, desiccated, and full of seeds. It tasted like a mixture of coffee grounds, skunky German beer, and ashes. My throat felt like I’d gargled with a mouthful of burning gravel. I wouldn’t have thought my lungs could tell the difference between pot smoke and LA smog. They could, though. I knew I’d stepped off the straight and narrow, and had the vague sense that I should feel bad about it. I didn’t, though. I wasn’t really sure what to feel, but I definitely did not feel high. If I’d stopped there, I might be a psychologist today. I’m not, though. Because it worked the next time I tried it, which was fifty-seven days later when I had exactly one more friend.

2,171 days after that, I was sitting on a bench in a marginal part of a crappy town, contemplating what it meant that a drug dealer thought I had a substance-abuse problem. Could it be that no one thinks it’s normal to be high literally twenty-four hours a day for years on end? Maybe not everyone who smokes pot has a bong hit before their feet hit the floor in the morning? Or for that matter, when they wake up to take a piss in the middle of the night, lest they be conscious for even one second of the day in an accidentally sober state. 

Looking back over the previous seven years, there was virtually no sobriety in there. I mean sure, sometimes I ran out. Once or twice I went for a week, just to prove I could. Though it’s way easier to do that when you’ve got a finish line in sight; I always went right up to the minute I had set for myself, and not a second longer. Not. One. Second. I would smoke out at 12:01 AM, having fulfilled my contract to the letter. By and large it was pretty much one long, uninterrupted bender. One that had begun when I was twenty and was still in wall-to-wall effect at twenty-seven.

Assuming you’ve passed that window of years, think of the changes that occurred in that time. Finished school, got your first serious job? Got engaged, got married? Maybe you even had kids. Now imagine it passing as a slow-motion hallucination where none of those things happened. They say pot is a gateway drug, and sometimes it is. I think it most often leads to a life of sweatpants, Cheeto-dust on everything you own, and a perennially lost TV remote. But for me, it lead to Mushrooms, Acid, Benzos and other miscellaneous pharmacological cocktails of opportunity, Coke, and Crank. Not that much of the last two, as I’m not fond of post nasal drip, but plenty of the rest.

There was a lot of water under the bridge in that seven years. And by “water under the bridge," I mean felonies. It’s probably foolish to enumerate them here, especially since I don’t want to burden my attorney and law enforcement friends with some kind of responsibility to drop dime on me. I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has passed on most of them, but who knows? Suffice it to say, I’ve spent at least ten fewer years under correctional supervision than I deserve, and probably more. A couple of times owing to a police officer with a sinus infection, or one that didn’t crane his neck three degrees further to his right, and so missed the incriminating evidence by inches.

It’s preposterous how many raindrops I tiptoed between without getting wet. I’d lied, stolen, cheated and engaged in questionable accounting practices. And I wasn’t even running for office. Eventually I even found myself on the business end of some nut-job's shotgun. And while that did prompt some serious thought as to my career choices, it never even touched my habit.

A college education up in flames. Literally.

Some people wake up in a gutter, a jail cell, or a hospital and have their moment. Some people come home to a semicircle of their friends, family, and coworkers and find themselves ambushed by love. My moment came on a home-made bench at 2276 N. 8th St, in Springfield, Oregon. Minding my own business, watching the sunset on a surprisingly temperate evening on Saturday, February 7, 1998, at 5:22 PM. Feeling a nice lassitude brought on by the end of a long trip, and thinking to myself that I should arrange for the procurement of my next ounce. Not thinking at all about the reality of chucking another $100 onto the pyre of $38,400 that I’d already burned through in the previous seven years. The facts never even entered into my thought process. But as I was considering whom I would call and when, I had a moment of interior voice-over like the kind Morgan Freeman would read in the movies. 

It simply said, “No. You’re done.” 

In response, I said aloud, “You know? I think I am.”

That was fifteen twenty-two years ago today. The end of a long trip, indeed.

Two months later I was living on my own, clean and sober. I didn’t make a deal out of it. Most of my friends were recreational users, and I only mentioned the change if they asked about it, which wasn’t until they noticed, weeks later. We still hung out; I still passed the bong to next guy when it came my way. This isn’t a sermon; I’m not even morally qualified to deliver one. It’s just my story. To this day, I’d estimate that half of my friends use recreationally, including the two guys who got me to consider that I might have a problem. I did, but they don’t. I can tell the difference between an actual problem and something that is simply a problem for me. 

I’ve thought many times over the last fifteen years about why I reached out and took the hand that Grace offered me. I think in the end, I decided that I wasn’t lazy enough to continue on like I was going. Because the reason I gravitated toward the kind of drugs that I did—the ones that impose meaning and create connections between all things, whether real or imagined—is that I’ve always wanted the world to feel a certain way. For there to be a thread of logic, order, and maybe even redemption running through the sea of chaos we’re adrift in. Not to make sense of it all, per se. Simplistic dogma and bumper sticker philosophies are of no use to me. I just wanted to believe that the vast machine that turns the quantum clockworks, whose intricacies and mechanisms I could never hope to grasp, might occasionally tell me the time of day. Pot especially made me feel that it would, and that it did. But there on Michael’s bench, I started to think that it might actually be that way already, all on its own, and I didn’t need to help it out anymore. Maybe I could look at the world and find my way without the assistance of those kinds of shortcuts. So I decided to try. More to the point, I took up the dare that was put in front of me. 

In that fifteen years, there have been three occasions when opportunity, conditions, and temptation all came a callin’ together; when there would be no one to see or care, and no consequences. And for several very long moments I actually forgot what it took to get me here. The last one was in August of 2009, when I’d already been sober for more than eleven years. Like Carlin said, “Just ‘cause the monkey’s off your back, don’t mean the circus has left town.” 

That’s the thing. The Circus never leaves town. 

I didn’t twelve-step it, though I have a lot of empathy and respect for those that work the program. As with so many cycles of the blunder-to-consequence-to-rescue scenario that have run through my life, I took the hand that was held out to me and was pulled through by something that has treated me with ridiculous care and protection all of my days. From car accidents, to drunken walks through Crip territory in LA, to riding 2nd story ladders all the way to the ground, all with nary a scratch. I’m embarrassed sometimes when I consider how many people have not been so fortunate. Better people than me. They do get arrested, or disabled, or shot. They struggle every day of their lives to stay sober. 

I have no lamentations of which to speak. I may not be a psychologist like Mom wanted, and I’m nowhere near as good at math as I used to be. Brain cells do not breed in captivity. When they’re gone, they’re gone. But I’ve been happily married nineteen years to the best person I’ve ever known, and I love my life. All because I followed the voice that said, “Come with me if you want to live.” Gratitude is all I have to offer.

“Grace has brought me safe thus far, and Grace will lead me home.”