THE FIRST TIME I WENT TO REHAB

I remember the first time I went to rehab. I didn’t go alone like I did the last time. The sun was up long before I awoke. July was about to concede to August. However, it wasn’t that hot out so I went out and played some golf. My home was in the middle of a golf course. In fact, our backyard bordered a par five and sat just opposite where most players’ first shot would land. I was pretty hard up on funds though so I didn’t play legitimately. I would just shoot over the heads of the paying customers to scare them a bit.

Eventually and predictably, playing golf began to bore me and I went inside to find something else to do. I didn’t live near anyone I knew socially so the options in the dog days were pretty limited: West Wing reruns or White Sox reruns. The Sox were hardly good enough to be considered a major league team around then, so I normally turned over to Bravo to check up on my favorite (fictional) president. I dreamed about working in such a place one day. I read history books and watched CSPAN preparing for it. This was before I realized that dreams were like tickets to a baseball game and I didn’t have enough money or connections to get into either.

When Bartlet’s term ended for the day and Real Housewives took over the channel, I normally clicked the television off and ventured back to my room. I threw my headphones on, cranked up the volume, and drifted into the 1960s: Led Zeppelin, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Haight-Ashbury, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, and more. My mind floated up into the air and landed in a different time where I could roam around and adventure free of the demons that surrounded me.

After a while prowling around the past, I got a call from my father and jumped into action. Before I headed out, I took a glance in the mirror. My hair fell down to my shoulders. My face was riddled with acne but shielded by a goatee. My neck held a hemp necklace. My left ring finger carried a moon ring. My little fingers on both hands were covered with nail polish. This was not the GTL (Gym, Tan, and Laundry) era just yet, but it was knocking on the door. When I left my house, surrounded by basic homes filled with basic people, I put my weird head down, hopped in the van, and bolted out of the cookie cutter crap community.

Before I stopped by to see my mother, I had one stop to make. I cut through the main streets, flew through the tree-canopied backroads, and slammed to a stop in a preschool. Like an outdoor cat, I squeaked in the building hoping not to be noticed. After a long, frightened gaze in my general direction, the lady working at the front desk asked what I wanted. She might as well have been talking to Darth Vader. I murmured that I was here to pick up a kid. The woman looked down, went and got her, told the kid goodbye, and went back to her desk never taking her eyes off the floor to meet mine. For the first time at any time that day, I loudly said something: “Goodbye.” I nearly shouted at her as I walked the little girl out of the preschool and passively-aggressively shut the door. I wish I had the courage to aggressively shut it. I was too kind back then.

I liked driving the kid places. She was older than her age, something that people used to say about me, and she didn’t complain. When she wanted something at all, she would only suggest it in a roundabout way, like when we passed Steak ‘n Shake. She’d ask me, “Hey! Remember those shakes we got there?” I promised her that we would go there later. I had figured she would ask about that, so I scrounged around the house for some money before I picked her up.

For now, we had to head east. Our home sat on the far edge of the suburbs, straight west of Chicago. Some people might have thought it was where the sidewalk ended, for if you went west, you’d think you might have landed in Iowa near the set of Field of Dreams. We were going the opposite way now, though, and heading right through the jungle of suburbia. The cars, homes, and people all looked the same as each other and at me: scared as shit. Undeterred, I put my head down and kept going. I didn’t want to be there any longer than I had to be. I didn’t like them either.

Finally, we arrived at our destination. I turned the van into a parking lot, parked it, and waited. It was surrounded by a bunch of nondescript buildings in a way that reminded me of some trees that bordered a pond near where I lived. I would hang out there on Friday nights when the roars from the local high school would send me scurrying out of sight as scared as the woman from the preschool was of me.

Eventually, a woman walked out of one of those vanilla buildings, and I gulped as she approached. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. I hadn’t seen really anyone in a long time, but that didn’t make it easier. Right before she opened the door and got in, I looked back at the kid and told her to cheer up and be friendly. She never needed this instruction. She was always nice, but the occasion prompted the instruction.

As soon as the lady stepped into the van, she began speaking a hundred miles an hour. It was like someone unscrewed a fire hydrant. Her words burst out faster than she could corral them or direct them in any sensible course. However, I didn’t try to keep up either. I put my head back down and slowly meandered the van back out of the lot and into the surrounding neighborhood. We circled the area a few times as the woman kept talking and talking, never asking us about our lives. I didn’t respond, not once. I didn’t meet her eyes with mine, not once. I listlessly gazed down the road as mansions walled both sides of us like a tunnel of wealth that I could not escape. I clutched the quarters in my pocket so the kid could have a shake.

After our third or fourth lap, I swung around and headed back for our starting point. When we pulled into the parking lot for the second time, I said goodbye coolly. I did not say the word love. The woman politely and quietly said goodbye back to me and to the girl in the back seat as she exited the van and walked back into the sad building. I wonder if my mother was as sad as I was when I watched her go back into rehab.

I looked back and told my kid sister, “Finally, time for those shakes!” She exploded with laughter and excitement in a way that warmed me up like the sun after a cold and cloudy day. It’s funny how sunlight can find you where you thought it never would, lost in a jungle of sadness. Harnessing the energy of her youth, I drove as fast as I could out of that area without getting arrested. We beelined back to the place we belonged, the edge of town and other people’s minds. I chased our neighborhood as you might chase the sun falling beyond the horizon.

Finally parked, beverages in hand, I started explaining the ins and outs of flower power, protest songs, San Francisco, and other things from times I had never been to my kid sister while she gulped down her “Strawnana” side-by-side shake. I don’t think she understood a word I said, but I kept going anyway, almost reaching the same verbal speeds as my mother had reached earlier that night. I guess I needed to distract myself as I slowly raised my eyes above the level of the dashboard to spy a whole throng of kids from my high school class who were opposite us in the same parking lot, for I was only seventeen years old. It was in fact Friday night, and I assumed that they had just got back from the football game. They all seemed excited. “Maybe they won,” one side of my brain shouted aloud in my mind. “Maybe they are talking about the dance next weekend,” the other side of my brain mumbled back in a pissed off tone of voice. I could not remember seeing a girl in months, let alone asking one out to a dance. I spent most of it playing babysitter as the summer and my life wore on while I bitterly watched the world turn without me. At some point in those hot months, my gaze settled upon my mother, and my heart filled with the whitest and hottest rage that I could not put out for years. Later in life, this rage would rocket me through oceans of alcohol, forests of weed, and mountains of cocaine.

Once I saw my sister finished her drink, I rolled up the windows and slunk us out of there. I don’t think they saw me. It didn’t matter, I figured, because I doubted they knew who I was anyway. I kept going west until my heart slowed and we pulled into our driveway. My sister jumped out and ran into the house. I could hear Spongebob Squarepants escaping out of the windows not long after she broke the close. I sat there thinking about the events that had just transpired. Yet, when I think about them now, I understand my mother’s anxiety. How could I face my kids if they had to visit me there? I would be so ashamed. I would probably put my head down and talk so fast they could barely keep up, like I did later that evening. It’s ironic that the youngest kid in the car that night, my sister, was the most mature and treated all of the scared adults she drove around with on that short trip in the same, loving manner.

I wondered what I lost along the way that made me forget where to find forgiveness in my heart. I only found it years later when I stumbled down a road she had taken years before me. I wish back then that she had someone to go in with her or at least tell her they loved her before she went back inside that building of demons which I’m sure awaited her. I wish I acted differently. I wish I was nicer. We cannot travel back into our past and undo our mistakes. We must look ahead, hold our heads up, and be brave enough to be forgiving, if for no other reason than one day we may hope others will show that kind of strength and mercy to us. In fact, I was the same age as her when I would look around for it myself as I left a similar house of horrors: rehab.