Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead (34 page)

My mouth dropped open, but no words came out.

“You must be Frank,” Valerie saved me. “Angelica’s told me about you.”

Angelica had told Valerie everything she knew about me, like how I’d been a skinhead and how I’d been in prison and even how I had a baby. There were just a few little details Angelica didn’t know, like that I had
three
babies, that I was still seeing one of their moms as often as she’d let me, and that my home address was a halfway house.

The whole ride to the restaurant I just stared at Valerie Doyle because I figured it would be my only chance to burn her into my memory. I fully expected her to come down with a migraine or maybe a stroke or whatever she had to do to ditch me before we got seated at a table. A chick like Valerie Doyle didn’t need to know all the nasty details of my life to know she ought to run. Valerie and Angelica and her boyfriend looked like they belonged at the best table in the best restaurant in Manhattan. I looked like I belonged in the alley behind the restaurant dumpster-diving for their leftovers.

Valerie didn’t ditch me at the restaurant or at the club we went to after dinner. She spent the whole evening tucked up right next to me, leaning in close to whisper little comments in my ear, lightly touching my arm when she laughed at my jokes. I wasn’t even tempted to take a drink that night; no way I was going to risk blacking out on this hotter than hell date. And it kept getting steamier as the evening wore on. On the ride back, Valerie and I were shooting each other looks that could’ve melted concrete.

We slept in the same bed that night. We kissed, but that was all. She fell asleep in my arms. I stayed awake as long as I could just so I could watch her breathing.

I’d gotten her story over dinner. Valerie had grown up in a quiet little town in upstate New York. Her parents were rich, still together, and totally devoted to their kids. They’d given Valerie every advantage and she’d put them all to good use. Since
earning her bachelor’s degree, she’d been climbing the corporate ladder. When she wasn’t hobnobbing around Manhattan with her pal Angelica, Valerie was a systems analyst for a big company in Washington, DC.

Laying in that bed watching her sleep, I thought, “This woman is the major fucking leagues. What in the hell is she thinking hanging out with a dude like me? Hell, on my best day, I’d be lucky to make the Special Olympics. Drink in the memory, Frankie, because this lady’s going to come to in the morning and kick your sorry ass back to South Philly.” But she didn’t. We spent the whole next day together bumming around New York. I bought a disposable camera and asked complete strangers to take pictures of us together because I knew there was no way the dudes at the halfway house were going to believe how gorgeous Valerie was unless I brought proof.

When the time came for me to catch my train back to Philly, Valerie kissed me so passionately that the thought of walking away from her made me feel like I was dying. I wanted to beg her to drop everything in her life and run away with me to anywhere, nowhere, so long as we could be together forever. But I couldn’t find the words to say what I felt. I couldn’t find any words at all, especially not “goodbye.” I just held her in my arms and prayed some miracle would happen to keep her in my life.

“Promise me you’ll call if you ever come to DC,” she said.

I was afraid to believe it was really happening.

“You really want to see me again?”

“Of course! Why?”

“I’m speaking in DC next weekend.”

I LEFT VALERIE IN NEW YORK ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, less than twenty-four hours after meeting her, thinking I’d never survive seven days waiting to see her again. She called Sunday morning and said she couldn’t wait that long either. She’d already checked the train schedules. If she caught a train from New York to Philly, we could have a few hours together before she had to catch another train back to DC. I met her at the station in Center City. She took my hand and I led her onto the streets of my hometown.

“Where should we go?” she asked.

Good question. Where in the hell could I take this amazing woman without scaring her away? The halfway house? Tree Street? Second and Porter? I decided South Street was my best bet. Of course, we weren’t there ten minutes when we ran right the fuck into Nina pushing Matt in a stroller. For the record, there’s no good way to introduce the twenty-eight year old systems analyst you’ve just fallen in love with to the seventeen year old mother of one of the two kids you haven’t told her about yet. Amazingly, even that didn’t scare Valerie off. But it pissed Nina off royally. The girl who’d been refusing to get back together with me for months, the girl who broke up with me in the first place because I was too jealous, went freaking berserk once she saw the competition. I did my damnedest not to rub Valerie in Nina’s face, but I couldn’t hide my feelings. I was fucking stupid in love. Every thought of Valerie Doyle that passed through my mind left
me forty IQ points lower than usual and I didn’t have forty points to spare. I walked around Philly in a daze, grinning for no good reason, saying things that made no sense. I’m sure people thought I’d relapsed again.

Valerie and I talked on the phone for hours every night that first week. Then I went to DC, and it was all over after that for both of us. We vowed to spend every weekend together. The days between visits were torture. We survived as best we could on phone calls and e-mails. Valerie’s e-mails read like high-class romance novels; mine read like discount porn. Nina busted into my account and read the whole collection as evidence that some bitch was trying to steal her man. She sent Valerie an e-mail to that effect, complete with South Street style teenaged punk-diva threats.

According to Nina, Valerie’s reply was the most polite and professional ass-chewing Nina ever got. That’s when my former girlfriend realized something about my new girlfriend that I’d known all along: Valerie wasn’t a girl; she was a woman. An amazing woman who, after receiving that e-mail from Nina, told me no matter how much she loved me, she wouldn’t keep seeing me if it would hurt any of my children or their mothers. An amazing woman who, after putting Nina in her place for sending that first nasty e-mail, reached out to Nina with an offer of friendship and a promise both she and Matt would always be part of the family Valerie and I would build.

Valerie wanted to make the same promise to Maria, but she didn’t get the chance. Maria had replaced me with Muffin Ass and wanted nothing more to do with me. And she sure as hell didn’t want to talk to my new girlfriend. Jessica did, though. A few months after I met Valerie, Jessica and Riley made their first trip to Philadelphia. With Valerie’s blessing, I stayed with them on Tree Street to keep an eye on things while my mom got to know her granddaughter. Riley was too young to really notice her surroundings. Jessica noticed, though. She pulled me aside the first night and asked me why there were hundreds of tiny
holes in the carpet in front of the living room couch. Nina had asked me the same question after her first visit to Tree Street. So had Valerie.

Three times, I had to explain that serious Oxycontin addicts nod off just like heroin addicts do. All three times my explanation was met with confused stares. So I used my body to demonstrate exactly how John situated himself on the couch every night after he swallowed his last oxy of the day, how his hand would go limp, his lit cigarette would drop, his head would fall forward onto his chest, his body would roll forward onto the floor, and his dead weight would snuff out the smoldering cigarette, every fucking night, like clockwork, before it could burn more than a tiny hole in the rug.

Except for special occasions like Jessica and Riley’s visit, I avoided Tree Street. No matter how many times I told my mom I was trying to stay clean, every time I stopped by, she offered to sell me whatever she happened to have. I didn’t trust myself to say “no” alone with my mom and my demons, so I rarely visited and never by myself.

 

I WAS STILL staying clean and sober, except for pot, once the second season of Harmony Through Hockey ended in May. I packed up my room at the halfway house and moved in with Valerie in DC for the summer. Three months later, Valerie followed me back to Philly. She scored a cushy consulting job in Center City, and I coached the hockey program and gave speeches. We rented what Valerie called a “shabby chic” rowhouse in a secluded section of South Philly. Valerie decorated the interior to look like something out of a magazine. I fixed up a koi pond a previous tenant had installed then abandoned in the postage-stamp backyard.

Then I learned an important parenting lesson: it’s hard to keep toddlers out of koi ponds. Nina and Matt spent tons of time at our place, and Matt developed a dangerous fascination with the fish. I spent entire afternoons fishing him out of the pond.
In the meantime, Nina and Valerie gabbed away in the kitchen like sisters, making plans for dinner that night or for Jessica and Riley’s next visit. Just as Valerie had promised, we’d all become a family. Except for Maria not letting me see Jake, my life was more perfect than I’d imagined it could be. I was in love with Valerie, involved in Matt and Riley’s lives, friends with both Nina and Jessica, making my name as a professional speaker and being paid to play hockey. I was living the dream. That’s when my life fell to shit.

It started with Percocets. I wasn’t drinking anymore, but I still always wanted to go out with Valerie and our friends, who all drank socially. I knew I couldn’t, but I wanted to feel something, too. So one afternoon I stopped by Tree Street and bought ten percs off my mom. That evening, while Valerie got dressed to go out, I took one. Valerie didn’t know I’d taken a Percocet; she also didn’t know nine more were hiding in my sock drawer. I swallowed the second one the next Friday, the third and fourth, the Friday after that. Two more for Saturday night. The rest on Sunday, for the football game, since we were having people over. Monday, I visited my mom again.

Valerie and I had been together for one amazing year, my most sober year since I’d snuck my first sip of beer at age nine. Valerie had only ever seen me smoke pot, and she had marveled at how little effect it seemed to have on me. To Valerie, “Frankie the Addict” was just a crazy character from stories of my wild past, like “Frankie the Nazi.” Valerie had never actually met the belligerent, violent drunk so many people feared. She’d never seen me raise a single beer to my lips. She’d never seen me snort hundreds of dollars of cocaine up my nose in a night. Nothing in our first year together, nothing in her life, prepared my sweet Valerie to look for the signs that scream, “Next Exit: Rock Bottom.”

I was up to about a dozen Percocets a day by the time Valerie realized something wasn’t right. I went to bed early, slept late, took naps every chance I got. I didn’t eat as much as usual. I didn’t
talk as much. The first time Valerie mentioned the changes in my behavior, she asked if I was coming down with something. I said, “I don’t know, maybe.” A few days later, she asked if I was depressed. Again, I said “I don’t know, maybe.” It took several weeks before it dawned on her to ask me if I was using. When she finally did, I told the truth, sort of. I admitted I occasionally took one Percocet, if I was hurting.

“Why are you hurting, baby?” she asked.

“It happened in hockey,” I said, rubbing an imaginary injury on my shoulder. “I pulled something in practice.”

“Should you see a doctor?”

“I’ll be fine.” Who needs a doctor when there’s a pharmacist in the family?

One Monday morning, my mom was out of percs. But she had a fresh supply of Oxycontin. I’d been thinking about that oxy high every goddamn day since rehab. And every day I’d told myself no. But that day I compromised: Okay, one. Just one, since she’s out of percs. One won’t hurt. Nothing hurts when you’re on Oxycontin.

After that, I took one 80 milligram oxy every morning. “It’s just one,” I’d tell myself. One oxy seemed like so much less than the fistful of percs I’d been swallowing. All I took was one pill in the morning, like a multivitamin. One little 80 mg oxy. It was just one. Then there was the one I needed to take in the afternoon to get me through the evening. Then just one more after that for a nightcap. Some weekends if I was certain Valerie wasn’t going to be around, for an extra special treat I’d score liquid Oxycontin. I’d drizzle it over my favorite snack food. I’ve always loved peanut butter TastyKakes; I loved them even more when they carried me into the land of nod.

I never let Valerie see me that whacked out, though. She only saw me on my maintenance plan, about 240 milligrams per day, perfectly timed so I never felt any pain but never nodded out. I didn’t act stoned; I didn’t act depressed anymore either, like I had on percs. I thought I had all my tracks covered: nothing
about my behavior could give Valerie any reason to suspect I was using. Except, of course, for the withdrawals from our joint bank account. Being me, I didn’t even know which bank we used: I just signed all my checks over to Valerie-if I needed cash, I used the ATM card she gave me. Miss Corporate America paid a little more attention. She analyzed the fuck out of those monthly bank statements, and after a couple months she saw the pattern: $30 three times a day. Or $90 once a day. Or $270 every third day. It only took her one visit to Tree Street to do the market analysis: 80 milligram oxys went for $35 on the street then, unless you got the family discount of thirty bucks a pop.

I did my second rehab stint at Eagleville. The oxys had done a number on me. Over just a few months, I’d become so physically dependent on them that “just say no” wasn’t an option anymore. The Eagleville doc tried to explain why Oxycontin is actually harder to come off than heroin, but I couldn’t follow what he was saying. It had been damn near twelve hours since my last dose. The sickness was overwhelming. The pain was unbearable, like nothing I’d experienced. I was praying for death, but all I got was methadone. The doctors spent the first week weaning me off Oxycontin onto high-dose methadone, then three weeks walking me off methadone back to reality. After thirty days, they stamped me “clean” and sent me home.