Miracle Story #16 (Part 2 of 5)

“I got through high school. I had a great teacher who had a breakthrough with me during my freshman year while I was flunking every single class. Her name was Sybil Brewster, Mrs. Brewster. And she had me read a book called Great Expectations.

I just liked that book for some reason when I started reading it. And of course since I read it, I knew the material and I passed those tests and she saw that. So she went around to my other teachers and she told them that they weren’t challenging me enough and that I was getting bored. That’s what the ADHD is, it makes your mind race.

When I was younger, my mom thought I had a real problem and so she took me to this place to get tested. They said that I was scoring at a high school level, and I was in grade school at the time. But the only way to capitalize on that was certain schooling that we couldn’t afford. So I stayed in public schools.

The result was that I got bad grades because I couldn’t sit still. And of course on top of that, I was doing drugs and alcohol to get away from things. I also had a best friend in high school who killed himself.

Death just started to be a recurring theme in my life.

After Mrs. Brewster went around to my teachers, they started challenging me more and I started getting on the A/B honor roll, and I stayed on it. But I was fighting every year, all the time, because I got picked on.

A friend of mine had a long rat tail and one of the senior jocks took a zippo and lit his rat tail on fire, so I jumped on him and kneed him. And then the football team decided to jump me for it. So it kind of became a recurring thing. And after one fight I decided I was going to show them, that I was going to lift weights and get big and beat that guy up. Which I did, except for beating him up, because he graduated that first year and it took me a while to get big.

So I kind of became a protector of the people that got picked on for a while. But then of course when I would drink and I would be at parties, I was a monster. People started planning their parties around me because I would cause trouble, fights.

The progression was there.

I got in trouble with the law a few times when I was still in high school. I got expelled two weeks before graduation for a fight that didn’t even happen on school grounds, but the principle was waiting. I had done enough and he was just waiting on the straw that broke the camel’s back basically. He expelled me for making two hundred kids late to school because they chose to stick around and watch a fight.

And none of the schools around would take me.

And so I was off free and running. I had all of this time then.

I remember breaking back into the high school and I stole computers out of it. And I got caught. Then I got put in Bob Johnson’s. And then when I turned eighteen in there, they transferred me over to the jail.

When I was in jail I started fighting in there. I got put on community corrections. I couldn’t stop smoking weed. I was extremely addicted to marijuana. It took over my whole life. I still did other things and I hadn’t touched any real heavy drugs at that time yet, other than acid. And alcohol was definitely playing a bigger role in my life.

When I got put on community corrections as an adult, I couldn’t stop smoking weed. I remember getting in a fist fight with someone and their mom went and told my corrections officer. So she called me in and because I had been drinking the night before, I had a dirty breathalyzer.

So I got sent off to prison boot camp.

I did five months and a week in this prison boot camp, and I excelled in there. It was physical. It was enduring. Part of it was what I was missing, which was structure and a way for me to utilize my energy. I had an excess of energy that was just unbelievable. And I used it negatively because I didn’t know how to channel it at all.

So in the boot camp I really excelled. I got all honors in there. I was flag platoon commander, honored platoon commander. I got the red hat, which is the final level you can get. And I got a flight school certificate to go to flight school, and only one person got it while they were there. So I did all this stuff.

I was told that I could get off of corrections if I did really good in boot camp. And then I went back to Hutchinson to see the judge and he said that they had changed some law, so it was mandatory six months corrections after boot camp. And of course, it was all their fault again. So I was anti-system and anti-authority.

And I took off running to Arizona.

My sister Sam and my brothers, all four of them, had moved down there with their mom a few years before that. So I ended up staying with my sister and I was on the run.

I was living in Arizona, making good money. The neighborhood we lived in wasn’t very good. It was south Phoenix and there were a lot of Mexican gangs around there, but we knew this guy named Oger who lived in that neighborhood. He was having a party and I had gone to it. And I spilled beer on his boot or something and so we ended up fighting.

And the whole party ended up chasing me back to my brother’s house, and when I got in there they tried to kick in the door. It woke up the whole house.

Then I saw them pulling up with their lights off and it was like, ‘Hit the dirt!’

And they shot the house up.

The police came and my brothers didn’t want anything to do with me. It was a huge ordeal. It sent shock waves through the family because somebody could have easily died that night in that house. And I would have died if I hadn’t have gone back to that house. Because the only thing behind it was an open parking lot and they would have ran me down and gunned me down.

And that just deepened my denial. And I ran.

So I went to another part of Phoenix. At that time I was twenty and I had been in Arizona for about two years. And one night I got into a fist fight at this house party.

I remember that the police saw us leaving and they pulled us over. They ran my name, of course, and they found out that I was wanted back here. Well come to find out, I had a nine month sentence that I was on community corrections for. And I had paid like $130 more on my fines than I was supposed to. And with the boot camp included, and all my jail time, I had done like twenty-something days more than my sentence actually was, and so the cops had to drop me because they couldn’t hold me.

And I lived in Phoenix for another year.

And then my mom got cancer. She had gotten cervical cancer once and they had gone in and cut it out, and she was told it wasn’t going to come back. Well it came back and a few years later I heard about it. And so I moved back here to Hutchinson. It was 1998 when I moved back and I was about twenty-two.

And it was a bad, bad move.

My mom got the cancer taken care of, removed. And things just went real downhill from there.

All my friends that I grew up with in high school, my really close friends…I just jumped right back to them. But they had progressed too. They were shooting drugs. And in Phoenix I had gotten into some methamphetamines, cocaine.

My brother, the same one who was always off and running, had this wife that was just bad news too. He was bad enough by himself, but with her, they were real bad news.

I told him that the one condition of him staying with me was that he couldn’t have any contact with her, because I knew that she would rat him out. She had already ratted him out and got him like four years in prison.

And that was when he introduced me to crack cocaine. And I liked it. But at that time it didn’t get me. I didn’t have the monkey on my back.

Alcohol was my love.

And when I moved back here, even with the guys shooting dope…it was cocaine at first and then it turned to methamphetamines. One of my friends ended up robbing a Quick Shop over it and got ten years in prison. Other friends were just decrepit and going downhill, and none of us were getting better. Nobody was getting treatment or help or any of that stuff.

We were just all falling off.

I had another addiction. Late at night after drinking a lot, I would go out and break into cars and see what I could find. And half the time I didn’t even really care what I found. It was kind of an adventure and I could duck, dodge, and roll around and just get that thrill. It became an addiction in and of itself. And I couldn’t drink without doing that.

Every time I would drink I would go do that.

I got caught several times. I got put back on community corrections.

And I just couldn’t stay sober.

I had a thirty-month sentence sitting over my head and I ended up doing all thirty months in prison. While I was in prison, I went through treatment. I had been through treatment many times before that, every time I would have a dirty UA or something. But none of that stuff really stuck with me through all of that process, right?

So prison, to me, was like getting stripes.

It was like, by the law of the streets, you went to prison and then you were even more hard core. When you got out, you had some clout and stuff like that.

It was just stupid. Really stupid.

Prison wasn’t hard but it definitely sucked. I wasn’t around my family. And of course when I was sober I worried about that stuff but as soon as I would get out, I was back and running my friends.

I got out in 2002 and I was only out for four months before I caught another charge of breaking into a car. I went back to prison and I had to max that sentence out and start a new one.

So between 2000 and 2005, I did four years in prison.

I was released on February 2nd, 2005.

Through this time, my older brother Donnie had been in and out of prison also. All my brothers that lived in Phoenix were addicts. It was weird in my family. Everybody cared and they said stuff, but nobody was really getting the help that they needed.

I had been introduced to meetings when I was seventeen. The judge had ordered me to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and stuff. And there was women in the meetings and so I was like, ‘Cool. I’m gonna go there and meet and talk to women.’

And that became another addiction in my life, in and of itself. Especially just the relationships. It wasn’t so much the physical things, it was the relationship, the newness of the relationship. You know, ‘I can’t live without you. I’ve got to be by you.’ All of that stuff. And when it faded, I was on to the next one. Sometimes that lasted for a little while. Sometimes it lasted for a couple of months.

But no long-term anything.

So I had been through four years in prison, thirteen in-patient treatment centers, and countless years in the county jail all combined.

Institutions.

When I had gotten out in 2005, I had been in work release with ten months of my sentence left and I had saved up all of this money. Music was another passion of mine. Hip hop. I had written a lot of hip hop songs about all of the pain and misery I had been through. To me it’s poetry.

And I was good with keyboards. So I had saved up like $7,000 and I had bought all the equipment I needed to make music. And when I got out, I went right to it. I started doing shows and making CDs. I was doing really good in that area.

But I also went right back to drinking again. I just couldn’t stay away from the alcohol.

And then crack cocaine came back into my life.

I don’t remember exactly how it got re-introduced. It was one of my friends, I’m sure. And so I did that occasionally but I thought that I didn’t have a problem with it because if I would drink alcohol and then spend twenty dollars on some crack, I would do that twenty dollars worth and then I would drink. Because a come-down from crack cocaine is absolutely miserable. It’s horrifying. You feel like killing yourself. And I mean literally, every time.

And for me, to take the edge off of that, I would just drink more so there was a smooth transition right into the buzz from alcohol. And it let me drink more too because I could stay up longer and drink more. That stuff’s really just…

I thought I was better than people that smoked crack a lot because they would rob, steal. They would do everything they could to get it. And they had to constantly do it until they just passed out. My brother was that way. He would steal from family. He would steal from stores.

Anything.

And I didn’t. If I spent twenty bucks I could drink and I was good. I didn’t need to go hunting for it or look for it. So I thought I was better than people like that. It was stupid because if I would’ve seen it for what it was, maybe I could’ve gotten a handle on it earlier.

But I didn’t..

It was 2009 or 2010 when I got a DUI and ended up having to do six months in the county. I had a sponsor that had been going to see me in the county and he and I were really good friends. I was in the room when he had come in on his first day. And it’s funny because now he has eleven years clean, and I just have three. So I watched him come in. But we stayed best friends through that.

God had a plan, you know what I mean?

He kept coming in there and I started working steps from inside of jail. I can see it now for what it was.

But I had to go through everything that I had to go through for a reason.

I had done an in-patient treatment inside of the prison called Therapeutic Community. They would teach us this thing called ‘Thinking For A Change.’ It’s cognitive therapy to where you’re supposed to be able to think better or change your ways of thinking and stuff.

That was all well and good except the one thing that it was missing was the spiritual aspect as well.

You can put all the books and schooling and all the psychology into something that you want to, but if it doesn’t have a base substance of spirituality, it’s pointless and it doesn’t work. For me.

But I didn’t know that at the time obviously.

So I started working these steps in jail and I was real adamant about staying clean. I had gotten married before I went to jail and my wife was addicted to methamphetamine intravenously. She liked to shoot dope. She went through my bank account. She ended up sleeping with a bunch of guys that ended up showing up in jail. So I was fighting guys in jail that she had been with.

That was the worst time I ever did, those six months.

And when I got out, I got even with her. And it was just stupid. I was talking to her friends a lot. And I was drinking again and totally disregarding my relationship with my sponsor, which was really a friendship.

But he would still come around.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the drug-induced psychosis that methamphetamines can have on people. When they’ve been up for days, they start having hallucinations. They hear and see things. Well alcohol is no different.

For me, I could stay up for three days straight drinking, without any drugs.

Just alcohol, pure.

I became a binge drinker and that’s what I’d do. I’d drink for days on end.

And I’d pass out for thirty or forty minutes at a time when the alcohol took over too much, but I wouldn’t stop drinking until my body just rejected it, when it couldn’t take it anymore.

And that’s what I started doing....a lot.”

Part 2 of 5. To be continued….January 26th, 2017.

© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.

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My name is Matt, and I live in Hutchinson, Kansas.

In the midst of addiction, death and recovery, I AM Miracle Story #16.