Michael - Recovery Circle Facilitator

by Kate Willette

When I decided I wanted to stop I had 37 years of using--and I was sick all the time.

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He didn’t know how to stop, though. He was functioning, sort of. He had some relationships in the community, including one with a doctor who knew him better than he’d imagined.

I went to the doctor and told him about how I had back pain. One day he said, "Michael, we need to deal with your addiction." And I was like, "Ah."

I didn't know anybody else knew about it. I didn't tell him. I panicked.

And then I was supposed to be going to court and saying that I signed up for a program. You can't sign up for a program unless you test clean. And so I'd go to court with my attorney and the attorney would come to the courtroom and say, "You got it? You got it?" And I'd say, "Got what?" He goes, "Your paperwork." And I said, "No, you don't understand. I can't get into the program because I can't test clean."

"I'm addicted. You don't understand. I'm addicted."

The attorney may or may not have understood addiction, but he clearly saw that Michael needed to be in a treatment program, which is why he tried again and again to persuade a judge to let him in, clean test or no clean test. The judge wasn’t having it, though he did grant three separate month-long extensions--three chances for Michael to prove that he needed help getting clean by somehow getting clean on his own. It wasn’t going to happen, but Michael solved that Catch 22 by persuading a friend to give him a clean urine sample. Done. But for many people--for Michael--there’s nothing straightforward about recovery, even with the benefit of a good treatment program.

I couldn't stay clean. Somebody told me I needed to give back and I was like, "Okay, give back. How in the world do you give back?" Late one night I was buying diesel for my truck and a kid came up to me and was asking for money. And I recognized his disorder: it was an opiate disorder.

And I told him I couldn't give him cash, but I definitely could buy him dinner, and we could sit and have a good talk. I ended up taking him to a detox and the energy that it gave me when I dropped him off, the feelings that I felt, it sure took me out of my own head. That was about twelve years ago.

Members of recovery groups all over the world will recognize the profound and simple message of that moment: helping someone else helps you, even when you think you don’t know how. Michael, it turned out, had a gift for this sort of intervention. His work with others is how he managed, over time, to put together some months free of heroin.

It took me seven, eight years to get clean and stay clean. The most time I got was a year, and that was because I started working with other people--in Hollywood. I was starting outreach programs, including one that still runs today.

On Friday nights, youth that get in trouble in middle class neighborhoods, the sheriffs had them report to me and then they had to go down and serve dinner to other kids that are homeless and runaways. In Hollywood there could be as many as 7 or 800 kids on the street, from all over the United States. They all go there because they want to be a rap singer, movie star, something.

Within one month, they would be drug addicted.

We would set up seven or eight tables, and I would have these middle class young people stand and serve dinner to the other youth that are on the other side of those tables, that are homeless, drug addicted, HIV infected.

Law enforcement was there--LAPD officers would bring kids to me.

Back in Jefferson County, the day came when Michael’s addiction caught up with him again. His beloved little dog developed a seizure disorder and had to be put down. Michael’s friends, trying to be helpful, told him that at least he wouldn’t have to use over it.

I said, "Man, that's not true. I am going to go get loaded." Because that's what I knew to do. I buried my dog, went and scored the dope, got a cheap hotel room. And for the first time I walked into the hotel room and looked around and thought, "Oh crap, is this where I'm going to die?" And then I went ahead and went inside--to me that was progress because the thought was there. I knew that I was doing something that was pretty dangerous.

“That was progress because the thought was there.” One thing that makes Recovery Café appealing to Michael is that it’s a place where this sort of comment makes sense. Recovery is understood to be a process both personal and communal, but above it’s all self-driven and self-defined. It’s a process that involves finding your way to just that sort of insight: I am not just getting loaded right now; I might be about to end my life. Sustaining active addiction rests, in part, on refusing to face facts like that one.

For Michael, the last year of involvement in bringing the Café into being has meant confronting some of the harshest truths about his life. It hasn’t been easy.

The woman that gave birth to me, who was a heroin addict, I never met her, I don't know if I was taken from the hospital and put into foster or something, but I never had parents.

I wasn't a real good kid. I had hearing loss that nobody knew about. And first, second, and third grade I couldn't hear. So I didn't understand. I remember looking around trying to figure out how other kids knew what books to get out of their desk, you had to lift your desk up. I couldn't figure it out.

His hearing was finally tested and treated at the end of third grade, but by that time a lot of damage had been done. He’d been tagged as a difficult, slow, angry child.

I was in a boy's home for quite a bit of the time. And they would come in and tell us to be on our best behavior because someone was coming to look at us.

And then when the people would leave and not adopt us, we would fight. I remember everything escalating. It was very rough.

Michael describes his son encouraging him to visit the Humane Society and find a new dog, something he definitely didn’t want to do.

I'm like, "I don't want to get another dog. I just, I don't want to fall in love with another dog." So we ended up going there and man, I was in tears because it reminded me of the boys home. Every dog sat there and looked and was saying, "Take me, take me, take me."

This is a story about what it means to believe that nobody deserves to be abandoned. It’s a story about how even half-hearted and tentative steps can lead somewhere good. Michael tells it with blunt humanity, sitting calmly in an office chair with a little dog in his lap and more than three straight years clean under his belt. Asked how he sees the Recovery Café in 50 years, he replies without hesitation.

We haven't even opened the doors yet, but my vision for the cafe is that it's so booked that we have to have a calendar and people have to follow the time. I just see it as being, the lights are on all the time. I just see it being a necessary building seven days a week.

That's what I really, really want. And I want people to feel safe and to feel comfortable coming there. I want them to feel ownership because they're volunteering and they're giving back. Addiction is not a choice, but recovery is. We choose recovery.