Dopefiend. Tim Elhajj
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Publisher: Central Recovery Press
3321 N Buffalo Drive
Las Vegas, NV 89129
Publisher’s Note: This is a memoir; a work based on fact recorded to the best of the author’s memory. CRP books represent the experiences and opinions of their authors only. Every effort has been made to ensure that events, institutions, and statistics presented in our books as facts are accurate and up-to-date. The opinions expressed are those of the authors only. To protect their privacy, the names of some of the people and institutions in this book have been changed.
The chapter “Honesty” first appeared in Brevity as “Jimi Don’t Play Here No More.”
Author’s photo by Kennedy Elhajj. Copyright ©2009. Used by permission.
Excerpt from This Boy’s Life, copyright ©1989 by Tobias Wolff. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Cover design and interior by Sara Streifel, Think Creative Design
For
Timothy, Aaron, Kennedy,
Jasmine, and Jade
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 3 FAITH
CHAPTER 4 COURAGE
CHAPTER 5 INTEGRITY
CHAPTER 6 WILLINGNESS
CHAPTER 7 HUMILITY
CHAPTER 8 BROTHERLY LOVE
CHAPTER 9 JUSTICE
CHAPTER 10 PERSEVERANCE
CHAPTER 11 SPIRITUAL AWARENESS
CHAPTER 12 SERVICE
Epilogue
I’d like to thank Holly Huckeba for her insightful comments and many close readings of this book. In the final days of pulling the manuscript through revision, I thought I was losing my mind. Each time that happened, Holly helped me find it again. What a great friend. I’d also like to thank Gary Presley, Grace Skibicki, Diane Diekman, Kathleen Purcell and the many other participants of the nonfiction group at The Internet Writing Workshop for their support, advice, and encouragement. This is a much better book as a result of their help.
After I got out of rehab this last time, I tried to work the Twelve Steps perfectly. I struggled with the idea of progress, not perfection. A friend of mine took me aside and said, “Each day you stay away from drugs and alcohol, you work one or more of the steps whether you know it or not.” What a relief. I’ve tried to make progress with the steps this same way for more than twenty years now. But some habits die hard, and while writing this book, I again tried to be perfect—getting each detail completely accurate. At one point, my son pointed out that one of the vehicles I had remembered as a truck was actually a compact car. In the spirit of progress, not perfection, I am standing by my own fuzzy memory and allowing some of these discrepancies to stand. For, as Tobias Wolff pointed out in This Boy’s Life, “memory has its own story to tell.”
I want to thank my publisher, CRP, for giving me the opportunity to write about my recovery. CRP bought this manuscript on proposal, which means that the book hadn’t been completed when it was purchased. I think it’s safe to say that we were all surprised with what I eventually produced. I was delighted by how well it turned out. CRP, meanwhile, seemed a little taken aback with some of my experiences and even the way in which I told about them. You’ll find mostly deceit in the chapter titled “Honesty.” A zombie appears in the chapter titled “Faith.” And let’s not even get into what happens in the “Integrity” chapter. We traded emails. We had phone calls. I wasn’t sure what would happen. Finally, Nancy Schenck, the Executive Editor at CRP, told me she would support my vision for this book. I am so grateful for the faith that she has placed in me and in my story.
I am the first to admit that my recovery has not followed the typical path you hear about in most meetings. I am not one for moralizing, nor am I eager to play the role of provocateur. However, I do feel strongly that our stories are the most powerful tools we own. To shape our stories to fit some preconceived mold is unfair to people new to recovery, who may be struggling to understand what changes need to be wrought in their own lives and who may be interested in reading an accurate expression of another’s experience.
More than twenty years ago, I moved to New York City with less than twenty dollars in my pocket to kick a heroin habit. I was leaving behind my beautiful three-year-old boy, who had his mother’s straw-colored hair and clear blue eyes, exactly the opposite of my own dark hair and eyes. I searched for some recognizable piece of myself in his chipper, smiling face but didn’t see much.
I was twenty-six and leaving Steelton, the small town in south-central Pennsylvania where I had grown up amid high school football games, Bethlehem Steel, and the shallow waters of the Susquehanna River. Nine years earlier I had first shot up heroin here. No drug I tried in high school had ever made me feel the way heroin did. After finishing with the military, I returned home, eager to resume using this drug. My friends and I mocked the older heroin addicts we knew, many of whom still lived in their mother’s houses, slept in their childhood beds, and rarely dated or did anything other than chase heroin. Unlike those guys, I soon married a girl a few years younger than myself. My addiction seemed to stir some strange mix of benevolence and fascination in her. She would set little abstinence tasks for me to perform, and these I cheerfully subverted or undermined. I felt confident that once I found a comfortable groove, I would throw off my expensive habit.
When my wife got pregnant, I knew I ought to stop. But as she gave birth in the hospital, I raced from the waiting room to purchase Dilaudid, a fancy name for pharmaceutical heroin. In our bedroom, I would stare at my infant son’s tiny fingers and delicate nails, so pink and magnificent, and realize I hadn’t a clue how to be a good father. Soon my wife took him and left.
I rallied to win them back. My mother suggested a drug treatment program with her Charismatic Christian Church. But I ended up as unenthusiastic