Dedicated to my friend Zack B., who passed away in 2020.
I’m so tired but I can’t sleep
Standin’ on the edge of something much too deep
It’s funny how we feel so much but we cannot say a word
Though we are screaming inside oh we can’t be heard
I will remember you
Will you remember me?
Don’t let your life pass you by
Weep not for the memories
"I Will Remember You," by Sarah Mclachlan
I always say that if you need to fall in love with humanity all over again, check into rehab.
The courage, the camaraderie, the charisma.
Watching people who have spent years running from pain, trauma, and their own bad decisions go head-to-head with the bullet train of reality as they try to turn things around, some of them discovering unexpected hope and some reconciling themselves with the ways in which it's too late.
I met Zack B. in rehab in Delray Beach, Florida, a balmy city in Palm Beach County on the state's southeastern coast.
This was during the for-profit rehab boom of the 2010s, during which Delray Beach became known as the "recovery mecca of the U.S. and the relapse mecca of the universe."
It was a wild time.
If you had decent insurance, you could call one of dozens of Florida treatment providers - there were in some in Jersey and California too - and they would pay for your plane ticket to Florida for treatment that very day.
Their chirpy call center salespeople advertised bougie detoxes with low-carb food where you'd be stuffed until comfortable with Xanax bars and buprenorphine (in reality, these sketchy detoxes sometimes left people on the side of the road after failing to book them longer-term inpatient care).
If you were inclined to relapse after your 30 to 60 days in inpatient and / or a few weeks to months in a halfway house or sober living environment, there were shady treatment providers that would quite literally give you money to relapse with so that they could then justify billing your insurance for a whole new treatment cycle.
Everyone was in on the grift, it seemed.
If you wanted to get clean, you could certainly do that, but if you weren't ready to get out yet, there was a place for you, too.
These treatment providers were smooth operators; they knew how to keep parents and probation officers pacified.
Zack was my roommate at a treatment center called Palm Partners, which offered apartment-style living arrangements on the grounds of a converted motel.
The facility's common areas boasted tiki huts for outdoor meetings, a sand volleyball court, and other beachy amenities.
The color scheme was Florida pastels, mauve and teal; what I think of as benzo colors.
The clientele was mostly drug addicts in their 20s and 30s, and - although the facility was later shut down amid allegations of billing fraud, if I remember correctly - I actually think that it offered a strong program.
Although most of us were opioid addicts, due to a quirk of Florida rehab regulations, there was no buprenorphine or methadone maintenance available.
Instead, the facility's philosophy relied on copious gabapentin and the healing effects of plenty of exercise, sun, and healthy food.
In addition to the core treatment activities, we had wake-up sober raves / sobriety hype sessions, sweat lodges, Kundalini yoga practice.
There was a focus on positive psychology, setting and achieving life objectives, and social connection* that I've found totally absent in other treatment programs, especially those that are focused on the 12-Step philosophy, which can tend toward the austere and moralistic.
*It was the strong social nature of the experience that really helped so many people to get and stay clean, I'm convinced. As British journalist Johann Zari notes, "The opposite of addiction is connection." Almost all of the patients at Palm Partners were transplants from other states, and most of them stayed on in halfway house or sober living programs after 30 days of inpatient rehab (60 if you were from New Jersey, as the joke-that-wasn't-quite-a-joke went). People got jobs, cars, apartments. They continued their 12-Step involvement together; became close friends; dated. There was real, continuing recovery community around Palm Partners and this area of Florida in general, which is almost impossible to find as a young opioid addict elsewhere because the recovery rates are so low.
So, strong program.
Unfortunately, due to the high concentration of taut, glistening, scantily clad young bodies, keeping the male and female patients from becoming too friendly took up a good quarter of each day.
In fact, the facility's no-fraternization policy was so enthusiastically enforced that it inspired our motto for it: "Palm Partners: Where your palm is your partner, and your finger is your best friend."
***
I'm not going to say too much about Zack because I know that the video speaks for itself.
Zack was a shining human.
He was my roommate for most of my stay at Palm Partners, and - as he was a few years older than me and had been at the facility for longer - somewhat of a rehab big brother.
He was the quintessential Florida surfer guy: Laid back, funny, mischievous.
He knew when to poke fun at authority without detracting from what we were there to accomplish recovery-wise.
Zack's kind of chill wasn't a result of being checked out, either.
Rather, his cool was his contribution - something that put other people at ease and balanced out stronger personalities among the patients and staff.
He was a prime example of a totally sane, balanced, popular person who became an addict after being overinvolved in partying as a young person. (I'm not saying that he didn't have family history of addiction or his own psychological challenges, but compared to someone like me, Zack just seemed so normal, so unneurotic outside of his addiction problems).
Zack's health had already begun to decline by the time that I met him.
Like 90% of IV drug addicts, he had viral hepatitis, and the toll on his liver was starting to age him.
I remember one conversation we had while laying on our twin beds as early-morning Florida rain thumped down outside.
Zack described how shooting dope had begun to hit him differently in the past few months, especially in terms of the mental effects.
"It's started to make me delirious, almost."
He described driving home on the freeway one night after shooting up.
Apropos of nothing, he began freestyling nonsensical, vaguely rhyming phrases.
"I'm going crazy. Like, I'm actually starting to lose my mind," Zack realized that night.
He continued head-bopping to the nonexistent soundtrack, nonetheless.
This kind of story is why I hate when loved ones of mentally ill people say things like "he's not there anymore" or "he's not himself" or "there's nothing left."
Most of the time, this is a total cope on the part of people who don't want to confront the much more frightening, painful truth: That at least some of the time, their loved one knows exactly what is happening; that they are the same old person trapped inside an existence (no longer a life) that has become nothing less than a waking nightmare.
As I mentioned above, life after discharge from inpatient rehab was a golden time for many Palm Partners treatment grads.
Free from the exhausting, impossible-to-satisfy demands of active addiction and the equally limiting restraints of being the black sheep of their families and hometowns, they became the young, free, responsibly irresponsible twenty- and thirty-somethings that they had always been meant to be.
Many sustained over a year of clean and sober time.
Several became counselors and began working in the treatment field.
At least two couples got married.
Eventually, they began to migrate to other parts of the country on all sorts of errands - cheaper cost-of-living, work opportunities, being near to family and friends again.
Because I didn't stay in Florida after my weeks of inpatient treatment at Palm Partners, I missed out on the months of early-sobriety hijinks that Zack and my other friend, Mike (Zack's best friend), had in the halfway house that they stayed in after leaving Palm Partners.*
*Mike was clean and sober for years after finishing at Palm Partners; he became very involved in the 12-Step community and was certified as a counselor. Right now, he's in Indianapolis - relapsed, death camp skinny, and covered head-to-toe in ulcers from xylazine (tranq dope), which I wrote about in this post and will be covering again in a fact sheet / emergency announcement coming later this week. I am direly afraid that I am about to lose another friend, and I'm trying to help him in any way that I can at the moment.
Zack and I kept in touch via Facebook.
I know that he had a solid year-plus of recovery, that he moved to California, that he began struggling again.
I don't remember when we spoke for the last time or what we said during our final conversation.
***
Mike sent me this video of Zack at the same time that he informed me that Zack had died of an overdose in 2020.
Mike had met Zack's mom while he was in the halfway house with Zack.
Mike let me know that, around Christmas and Zack's birthday each year, he still communicates with her to share music and memories.
This kind of relationship is a common experience among addicts who have lost friends to OD.
One day about six months after he died from an overdose, a former friend / hookup of mine, another Mike (this one from my hometown), messaged me on Facebook.
It turned out that it was Mike's mom, who I had met once very briefly while he was still alive.
Over the coming weeks, we occasionally chatted through his account - about Mike, about me, about life in all of the sh*ttiness that we wouldn't trade for anything.
I can't imagine what it feels like to see someone else's child taking themselves away from their family in the same agonizing, permanent way that your child took himself away from you.
There is a passage from I-don't-remember-where, which I shared with Mike's mom.
In it, the mother of a departed child arrives at the gates of Heaven, where she notices two long lines of women waiting at the gates. One line, she discovers, is for mothers who have lost a child, and the other for those who haven't.
It's the thing that matters most to a mother, the fundamental division.
I won't know the pain of losing a son or a daughter, but I've lost more friends than almost anyone else my age.
Out of a group of four roommates from another rehab that I was in, I'm the only guy who is still alive.
It's hard to grok that every single one of the guys who I shared months' worth of daily life with was gone from this world forever within 18 months of us leaving the facility.
You don't process or make peace with grief on that level.
Loss like that becomes a part of you.
I'm not even sure that I identified what I was feeling as grief or even sadness.
I remember that, for a time after losing Micah and Kris, I became a genuinely angry person for the first time in my life.
I had always hated that my mom and dad yelled so much when I was growing up.
Nevertheless, I found myself filled with rage and acting out in similar ways.
I became physically violent in the sense of breaking objects and looking for occasions to get into "justifiable" fistfights.
I sometimes think that I have more in common psychologically with soldiers and denizens of war-torn republics than I do with most of the Americans around me.
May they never, ever be made to realize how good they have it.
The thing that brings me a little peace is remembering the smiles, the laughs. The hugs, the pranks; the confessions, the apologies.
The night when the staff forbid us from congregating outside to celebrate New Year's at midnight, so I declared that we would celebrate a San Fran New Year's at 9 p.m. instead.
(It was two days until any of us realized that we should've picked a time zone in the other direction).
The time when my group's Gingerbread Baby Jesus came in second place in a Christmas decorating contest*, after which I was butthurt for half a day.
*Due to nepotism influencing the counselors who voted for Number 1, of course.
None of us could ever sleep, so there was always someone else up in the middle of the night to talk to.
So much artistic talent: Every day a fresh sketch, a new story, an impromptu performance.
Hidden talents revealed when cars broke down, wiring went crazy, somebody needed stitches.
Relapse, too, as a group enterprise. Seeing the darker side of all of these people who I had met at their best.
Them seeing my dark side, too, and continuing to love me anyway.
Hatching bigger dreams than many people could even conceive of.
Just so much condensed life, mainlined humanity.
The good times. The close times. The clean times.
For each of my friends who is gone, I have a mental montage of video like this clip of Zack.
I try very hard to remember how lucky I am to have known such people at all.
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