In his lifetime, Ray had done a number of things for which he was not proud, things he’d like to see just as well stuffed down a dark hole. Everybody had things of which they were ashamed. Everybody has committed their share of sins that they wish they could take back. But this wasn’t one of them, and he resented the implication that it was—the implication that someone would dare to judge him for something they did not fully understand.
It was a good thing, a right thing, like the time he had given emergency CPR to the woman already ten minutes dead and gone, the woman whose mouth tasted of chocolate death and scrambled eggs, just to spare her horrified children the sense of helplessness while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. That had been a noble thing like this one was. Should have been.
Perhaps it was always less difficult to have things fail here, with the living, than it was with the dead. The dead had no opinions, no agendas. They weren’t sensitive. The dead did what you fucking told them to do and didn’t complain. Right?
The living simply did not understand that there were rules. They didn’t want to understand something so banal. Someone who didn’t take the time to understand the rules had no right to pass judgment on him. Not that it ever stopped them.
“I hear that you are unhappy,” he said into the phone, then had to pull the receiver away from his ear so the woman on the other end could scream at him some more.
Conflict de-escalation technique number one was invariably affirmation. Make it clear that you are aware of the individual’s feelings and frustrations, that you are at least listening to their side, whether or not you personally may eventually have the authority to validate or alleviate those feelings. People liked to be listened to. The illusion of having a voice was almost as good as actually having one. Isn’t that why people still bothered to go to the polls on election day and vote?
And it worked on most people. This woman was not one of them.
“Your anger is perfectly appropriate in this situation. In your shoes, I would be livid.”
Advancing to commiseration now, crafting his voice so she would believe he was giving the shit which he in fact was not. This was much more than conflict de-escalation technique number two, it was what people commonly called professionalism.
“Really, hey, I understand. I do. I’m on your side on this one, but as I said previously, we are a medical facility. I have both a legal and ethical obligation to protect the confidentiality of our clients. Federal law prohibits me from divulging any information regarding or even confirming or denying the existence of the individual to whom you have made reference.”
Blah, blah, blah.
The colineation of the words “federal law” and any following set of polysyllables usually worked when all else failed, giving the caller the distinct impression of the big rock (prosecution, six figure fines and termination) and the hard place (i.e. the caller’s desire to get him to ignore the consequences of the big fucking rock) between which he was caught.
Lawyers were the exception, of course, as they daily circumvented both the federal law part and others’ deterrent polysyllables. Ray preferred not to talk to lawyers whenever possible.
The woman on the other end was not a lawyer, but as always just a mother or sibling or concerned friend, and in the absence of other weapons, would more than happily arm herself with simple stupidity for her assault. It was not an entirely ineffective approach.
“Look,” he continued. “What I can do—_all_ I can do—is offer to take a message. If the individual to whom you wish to speak or about whom you are inquiring is a resident of this facility, I will post a note next to the phone and that person will contact you at his or her earliest convenience.”
It was a purely rote response. The exact text of the message was even scrawled on a smudged and slowly disintegrating 3 x 5 card thumbtacked to the bulletin board above the office telephone. He didn’t need to look at the card. His mouth knew the shape and taste of the words by something akin to race memory. The seeming concession had a clear and simple purpose. It was designed to make the caller feel that he, the telephone gatekeeper, had made an exception, that he was surrendering something of value to their persistence.
It also had the very real benefit of getting him the fuck off the phone and away from the mindless, corrosive patter of the chronically concerned and certifiably obsessed relative with whom he happened to be sharing this conversation or one of the hundreds exactly like it in which he had participated over the years.
At last, the woman conceded and began to repeat her name, telephone number and the inevitable pleas to her loved one for a quick return call.
Ray hummed and nodded at the phone to display his sincere focus, conscientiously pretended he was writing it all down while he directed an imaginary symphony with his index fingers. He thanked her for calling, hung up the phone and shook his head.
Idiots. Every one of them.
*
Ray had a dingy little office in a large dirty building. Dirty not because the facility was poorly kept—on the contrary, he seemed to be calling the maintenance crews every other damned day to take care of one thing or another—but because a century and a quarter of more or less constant occupation tended to lodge dirt in corners where it couldn’t be reached and warp walls beyond the true until everything looked vaguely ramshackle. That this sordid structure had housed a somewhat boisterous brothel in the roaring twenties, then the homeless and hapless in the fifties and had lately (in decades) catered to drug addicts and alcoholics beyond even the scope of AA’s reasonable hopes did not help. People used to pissing in parks, sleeping beneath overpasses and drinking isopropyl alcohol when they could get their hands on nothing else were not naturally inclined—let alone hygienically capable—of assisting with the upkeep of any notion of decorum.
The regulars called it Last Stop Detox. In reality, it was just a warehouse for battered souls. A place for the fallen beyond redemption to roll in, dry out, stave off liver calcification for another day. There was no help here. To pretend so would be ludicrous. Instead, they offered “services”, a generic and faintly mortuary term for a site midway between the chilly streets and the rigid consequences of jail.
They had a rotating roster of “clients” (a fine double-speak word for deadbeats and transients and career addicts who would look at you in an appalled and insulted fashion if you even mentioned the concept of a Bill For Services Rendered); Ray sponsored a monthly staff pool on which client would end up with the next obituary. It was the closest to compassion he could bring himself to feel. He made something over seven dollars an hour, but the benefits were good. He maintained as little contact with the facility’s patrons as he could legally and ethically manage.
As jobs went, it wasn’t so bad.
As workers in a job like this went, he wasn’t either.
*
“Who was that?” the girl asked, even as she prepared herself to leave. Her shift was over. “On the phone?”
Ray made a show of attempting to recall the details. “Somebody. Some woman. Wanted to talk to one of the clients. I said I’d take a message.”
“One of ours?”
Generally, the chances were somewhat less than fifty-fifty that a distraught caller actually had located the landing zone of their desperately sought susan. The call itself was often a last ditch effort aimed at any facilities that were not sponsored by the state and therefore barred, or sponsored by the good Lord and therefore very heavy, very dark and more than a little full of worms.
That these callers would have been relieved to discover their husband-boyfriend-son was only blasted way beyond coherency and slagged away in a third rate detox program where he would be, at best, miserable with withdrawal for the next several days was something of an indicator of the general mental health of the population to which the facility offered its services.
Still, he shrugged at her question, reluctant to answer her straight for whatever reason. She was young, twentyish and pretty, with dark red hair. Stunning green eyes. Breasts that practically stood up and walked about on their own, that made a man think of the word “perky” (though she, as a rule, did not conjure that image with the rest of her demeanor. Probably would have slugged you had she even thought you thought it). She had been clean for most of four years, he knew. About the staff average in terms of recovery time, and not an uncommon figure in this line of work. The resilience of her faith in the ability of others to recover (with a big ‘R’) was somewhat atypical after four years of service, at least when compared to other mental health professionals specializing in clients of this same socio-economic level, but probably still on the same planet.
She was two full years past being an annoying borderline codependent and probably a full half decade from emotional burnout. He was willing to give her a little more benefit of the doubt with regards to her longevity and tolerance of this population than he would have given the average person. Recovering addicts in his experience were mostly full of one of two things: hope was the non-obvious one, and she was, in fact, loaded to the eyeballs with it and chipper as a woodpile nine days out of ten.
She had been a prostitute for awhile, purely to support her habit (though he forgot what precisely that habit had been. Cocaine most likely. Cocaine and hooking are flip sides of a whole pocket full of change. That’s why they call them crack whores as opposed to Schnapps whores).
It was apparent that his lack of forthrightness had disappointed her. “She’ll call back,” he said. “They always do. Too codie not to.”
She laughed, a sound like wine glasses tinkling. “You have such a big heart. Try not to save the whole world, okay?” Then she winked at him, and he thought about asking her for sex.
“Anybody on the verge of death?” he asked.
“Not immediately.”
A nod. Good enough. He wished her good evening and watched her all the way out the door.
*
Cynicism is a way of life in the drunk and sober business. One learns to expect nothing, to doubt success as a temporary achievement, to assume failure. It isn’t so much a defense mechanism as a result of years of anecdotal evidence. The few who succeed, the average odds being about one in thirty, vanish without a word. Mental health workers frequently (and with statistical safety) assume that the individual is dead. In AA circles, they refer to the newly sober idiot’s feeling that he’s got the alcohol demon whipped as “pink clouding.” In the same fashion, addictions professionals do not pink cloud their prognoses. If anything, they dark cloud, they hunt in packs, and they look for shitty little parades.
Thus, when Ray referred to the sole value and purpose of the addiction and recovery milieu as “warehousing” and nothing else, no better or worse than that, he had a decent epistemological authority for the label and the cynicism which the label suggested.
He’d stolen it from his superiors. Specifically, from the facility’s director herself.
He had made the mistake one day of asking exactly what the hell they thought they were accomplishing after the same drunk had shown up for the seventh day in a row smashed out of his mind. That he had shown up was not the issue. That he had no pants on, was a gibbering schizophrenic perilously short of voice-controlling medications, and smelled of spoiled condiments from his latest bout of dumpster diving was close to the actual issue. That he was in this condition and it had fallen to Ray to do the admit was exactly what was going on. Jail, he thought, would have been a better answer. Hospital psych ward or some other non-voluntary commitment would have been almost as good. Long term cemetery visitation would do in a pinch.
Anywhere that wasn’t a place like this one, like Last Stop, where the client could slip in for a few minutes, hours or days—as long as he damned well felt like staying—then tromp off to drink a bit more when he felt like it and start the whole desperate and pathetic round over again.
There were no bars to keep the helpless in or out. It was a voluntary program. Voluntary, from the Latin voluntarius: to will. Addiction in a nutshell.
What good are we doing?
His boss had looked him dead in the eye and said the magic word. “Warehousing.”
For what the fuck for?
And the list began: for a family who has had to deal with this waste of life for forty years and deserves a break. For another anonymous family coming home from the grocery store or the movies or just a walk in the park who would have a better chance of making it home on this one night because this particular drunk was off the streets rather than behind a wheel. For a case manager who had done everything short of pulling her hair out by the roots to convince this yahoo to take his meds, spend his disability check on something other than booze, and somewhen other than the first damned week of every month. Assuming the client hangs around for the duration, detox is a two week vacation, which gives an untold number of people the strength to carry on with the incessant bullshit this guy ships out the other fifty, ruining their lives, their happiness and their peace of mind.
Warehousing was a metaphor for making the world in general a happier place. Think, she said, of all the random acts of violence due to simple, mind-numbing, endless life frustration you prevent every time you show up to work.
It was, he had to admit, a pretty good answer.
*
Except then he had looked at the guy, strapped on a smile that felt halfway sincere and said, “So, Bob, what happened to your pants?”
Just as friendly (probably because the voices were as drunk as he was) Bob had replied, “I don’t know, Ray. What happened to them?”
It had taken Ray six months to convince Bob that he hadn’t stolen his pants as some kind of joke.
Some concepts worked better in theory than in practice.
*
Ray was not, and probably never had been, an addict himself though he frequently attributed the demise of his marriage to alcohol and cannabis. As in “once I stopped using, I realized she wasn’t nearly as interesting as I had been led to believe.” It usually earned him a few chuckles.
If asked (which he was not), he couldn’t have given a reason why he worked with this population. He had no history of family addiction, no grudges to work out, no impulse to redeem—all of the usual reasons. He cared as little about the welfare of his clients as the average hotel desk clerk. It was probably just as well that no one examined his motivations. In fact, he had only taken the job because four years of half-time college attendance convinced him he needed a job in which he could both work full time and attend school full time to wrap up his degree. Night shift had offered him that opportunity. The fact that he still remained some three odd years post-degree was not adequately explained.
Still, he was the consummate professional, notoriously competent and fully aware that if anyone was going to attempt to slide on the rules, they were going to do it on his shift. His determination that they adhere closely to the Community Agreements which they signed upon admission to the facility was not so much militaristic for his own sadistic satisfaction as it was symbolic of his realization that any allowance he made for a rules violation created hassles for everybody else.
He had never allowed anyone to die on his watch (drawn from the basic assumption that living was an implied stipulation on the Community Agreements for continued residence in the facility). He joked that there was simply too much paperwork involved to entertain the option of allowing a client to get stiff on him. On the other hand, he still insisted on calling garbage can liners “low rent body bags” whenever a client asked for one, and the dumpster was the “funeral waiting area”. He had considered that really funny until one of their clients actually did freeze to death in the dumpster behind the Kroger. It was still B-list material, though.
He was, however, the last person in the world who planned on informing the name-forgotten caller that her nineteen year old heroin addicted son had abandoned treatment two mornings ago and stepped in front of a city bus. That was more of a police matter, a coroner matter, or maybe even best left up to the local newspaper. The police, of course, were probably still trying to establish identification and locate next of kin. Ray himself only knew because the AA grapevine was that good, that efficient, and full of people who rode city buses for a living (practically) and knew everybody who had ever been at any meeting anywhere in the tri-county area by face and first name. The recovering community usually had a ten to twelve hour scoop on any other agency regarding information on their own people. Newspapermen really should give them their own beat.
Ray didn’t really give a shit about any of that. His concern only ranged far enough to wonder if the mother would be stricken or relieved when the news finally came. The latter was a safe bet.
*
On most nights, he smoked too much, drank too much coffee and spent too many hours thumbing through his dog-eared copy of Career Options for English Majors. It was that kind of life. Night shift workers know entropy as an almost physical force, but they do not complain. They don’t have the energy.
The phone rang at midnight, just as it always did.
“So there’s this guy,” she said. She never stayed, but called the moment she got home. Just to talk, which typically left him wondering if the relationship was then more complex than it appeared on the surface or so grindingly, platonically simple that he was the only one too stupid to understand it.
“What’s his name?”
“Does it matter?” He supposed it did not, and she agreed. “He’s here now. Asleep in my bed when I got home. I guess I gave him a key.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
“Of course, but just a few times.” She paused. “Or did you mean tonight? There’s hardly been time.”
“No, just in general.”
“Why do you ask?” She was flirting.
That was, in fact, why he had asked, but he said, “Because I can’t give decent advice without a concept of the relationship dynamics.”
“Who said I wanted advice?”
“Anyway, go ahead.” She never asked for his advice, he always gave it, and she never stopped him. He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it felt like progress.
“Well, he wanted anal. I’m not into that, and I told him so. I said, how about you let me stick something up your ass? He thought I was joking, of course. He won’t settle for just, you know, doggie-style—which I’m not too fond of with him, anyway, because he tends to have both a problem with slipping north and knows virtually nothing about clitoral stimulation. I think I’m going to have to let him go, but he’s still in that grace period when I’m deciding if he’s teachable. I was leaning toward an extension of the probation, but he’s here, and I find that bugs me.”
“I believe a key implies an open invitation, unless you specify otherwise.”
“I don’t want to give him the impression that I don’t like him, but I’m not going to let him do that.”
“Which that, showing up unannounced or the other?” He couldn’t blame the guy. She had a great ass (though, of course, his only evidence in support of that opinion was extensive visual surveillance).
“That that.”
“Oh. Then sleep with him tonight, and dump him afterward. It’ll make things easier and send a nice ambiguous message. As a gender, we’re much more prone to suggestion after we’ve been laid.”
He could hear her rolling her eyes. “That is so stupid.”
“Guys are stupid. It’s a thing. Don’t ask me, but women seem to like it so we keep it up.”
She laughed gently, faintly mocking.
“That call you took right before I left,” she said. “Was it about—Jesus, what was his name? Ron or Tom or something.”
“Don. Donald.”
“Right. Was that for him? The dead kid?”
“Mother.”
She was silent for a moment, looking for something to say, he supposed.
“It wasn’t your fault, you know.”
He closed his eyes, tight shut. Visualizing. “What are you wearing?”
She giggled, a young girl sound that was pleasant, almost innocent. A catholic school uniform sound. “Just my panties, Ray.”
Then she hung up.
*
The facility itself had one regular nurse, an RN who supervised the paramedical stuff, reviewed all of the clinical charting and only worked day shift (and even then only when she had the energy). Occasionally, they managed to scam down-on-their-luck LPN’s who could have made more money at nursing homes, and frequently left to do so or to find other careers altogether. Ray and his counterparts were the uncertified equivalent of Certified Nursing Assistant’s who ran around under the weighty nomenclature of Addictions Technicians. As with most titles, it sounded more impressive than the reality which it was supposed to reflect.
He could take blood pressure, deal with bodily fluids, understand the rudiments of withdrawal symptoms for a score of narcotics. He could handle being vomited on (or even pissed on in some circumstances) and had a very high threshold for aggravation in general. Above all, he could estimate that critical line between unassisted withdrawal and critical withdrawal. He had the skills to call an ambulance if necessary.
They were not a hospital. They were not even an adequately stocked triage center. There was nothing about the staff or the disposition of the building itself which even vaguely suggested a medical competency.
In business parlance, this situation is described as getting what you pay for.
Ray could honestly say that his pay was commensurate with his medical skills.
There was, of course, more to it than that.
During his initial training, the nurse had once told him: alcohol withdrawal can kill. Everything else makes you feel like shit, like you want to die, but alcohol kills.
Actually, sedatives as a class were capable of killing during withdrawal, but most of the transient, blasted scarecrows Ray saw day in and day out couldn’t afford or wouldn’t take pills. They liked whiskey and vodka, preferably by the liter. Not much beer by the time Ray saw them. Too slow, too expensive, too much pissing—pissing on the street being the number one cause of Public Intoxication arrests.
Alcoholics outnumbered the coke heads, stickers, pill poppers, huffers—everybody else—easily ten to one. Drunks consumed most of the staff’s attention. Because they were loud, they threw up, they fell down, they had seizures, hallucinations, DT’s. Above all, they could die. And there were always more of them. The others, the drug addicts, were merely miserable. Misery was something you could live with, that you (at least if you were a staff person) almost applauded—it was good for the addict to see what kind of grinder they had been putting their body through, to know how sick they were. It might (theoretically) keep them on the wagon a while longer (though, by that logic, women who had delivered one baby would be extremely hesitant to ever do it again. The human brain has an amazing capacity for amnesia with regards to physical suffering…which is good in terms of population growth, but not so good if one is attempting to enter the recovery community).
Misery was valuable, another weapon in the treatment arsenal. Death on the other hand, well…it was at the very least a lot of paperwork. In a business that extended a hand to all kinds but helped virtually no one, the squeaky wheel adage made for a good rule of thumb. There were, after all, funding issues. Grant agencies frowned on corpses, at least on-site corpses. Street deaths were more or less invisible and largely uncounted, even if they had been a client of yours earlier in the same day. It was felt that as long as no one actually perished in a way that was noticeable, prosecutable or involved the arrival of blaring sirens and staccato red lights, a given treatment center was doing its job well.
Ray’s natural allotment of compassion tended to conform to industry standards.
*
Last Stop Detox (officially the Center for Addictions Treatment or CAT, which the bottom end methamphetamine camp viewed with side splitting irony) was run out of an old farmhouse in Bloomington, Indiana. The plot which remained of its previous acreage rested on a corner of two busy streets which formed the accepted “tracks” upon which detox sat on the wrong side, thereby setting the tone for an entire neighborhood.
The house had once been a depot for the Underground Railroad (so it was rumored). Ray had been shown the bricked up tunnel entrance. The dank shaft’s terminus had been in a now absent barn which had once sat across the street—before there was a street—but lately replaced by an elementary school and its requisite playground. There was no terminus now. No other side to escape to. Should any slaves happen by these days, too bad for them. This depot, Ray had observed, led only to a dead end spur.
The mental health center’s Board of Directors leased the property from the city for a dollar a year plus property taxes and upkeep in return for an unwritten agreement to accept overflow clients from the city jail.
It was ostensibly a not-for-profit operation. Even that assessment was probably optimistic.
Ray wondered sometimes if the former slaves heading for freedom in Canada or wherever had ever offered to pay the farmers, the original homeowners, even a portion of the cost of their redemption. Maybe the expectation of a free ride, of entitlement after suffering, of taking a handout from someone willing to offer it, had been seeded into the soil then. Could a site be poisoned by kindness?
He had no one to ask these things. The five years he had been the official night shift guy had been mostly lonely years, working by himself. Besides, it sounded racist to even think it and Bloomington, Indiana was a collge town, which meant liberal politics, liberal social programs and entirely too much willingness to feel the plight of the poor and downtrodden with a sincerity that stopped just short of having to actually see those programs in action. A liberal public wants social ills and loud mouthed drunks warehoused discreetly. Out of sight is, indeed, out of mind.
Ray didn’t say such things. People would have looked at him funny.
Being the frequent receptor of funny looks was not a wise choice in the mental health profession.
*
At one o’clock, Ray worked room by room through the building’s six client areas. Fifteen beds, all of them in use. Everyone seemed to be asleep. He carried his manual blood pressure machine, his oral thermometer and his clipboard on which he would write the readings he took and the complaints he was given by the four he had to wake up for vital signs. The three who had been there before and knew the routine grunted and flung their arms indulgently at him. The one who was new tried to hit him (which was why Ray always woke them up by shaking their feet), then got it together enough to ask if he was due for Ativan yet.
He even demonstrated a lugubrious if unconvincing case of the shakes to prove his case. Ray told him to shut the hell up and go back to sleep.
At least he was better than the women. Most alcoholic women had been at one time or another victims of extremely vigorous and chronic sexual abuse (often because they were too drunk to effectively resist drunk men who thought resistance was a form of foreplay). Alcoholic women tended to scream really loud and go for the eyes with their fingernails when strange men came into their rooms at night.
One time, Ray had a client who had been military special forces for a very serious and very long time. That guy had at least warned him that if he had to wake him during the night, Ray should just say his name from the bottom of the stairs and the guy would come down on his own. Ray tried it, in a whisper, at two a.m. The guy came down. It was awe-inspiring in a Manchurian Candidate scary sort of way.
It was, the guy said, was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can do for you.
Tonight’s experience was not atypical.
*
He had trained for six weeks with Hank, the man he was scheduled to replace. Hank had some unpronounceable Italian name and a mafioso body to go with it. He wore his long, black hair in a braid that reached the small of his back. He had a tattoo of a cannabis leaf on his left arm and therefore always wore long sleeves when at work or in the presence of officers of the law.
*
On Ray’s first day, Hank had given him a pair of sound pieces of advice. He said, “Ray, guy, you have to do two things to succeed in this job. You have to smoke, number one. That’s to kill time, of which you will find you’ve got far too much for your own good. This job is ten days of spreading your ass on the seat and five minutes of adrenaline. Your whole paycheck is that five minutes, so you get paid too good to fuck it up.
“That’s the gravy. Point two and most important is this: avoid at all costs giving any kind of shit about these people. It’s going to be hard at first, believe me. We’ve all had ground into us this Protestant schmeep line about helping the unfortunate and giving till it hurts. That’s fine, I’m not saying it’s not. Here you’re going to find a whole class of shitholes with the sorriest and most unfortunate lives you have probably encountered. You’ve got your raped as children, you whored off to mom or dad’s friends, your ‘my grandma put whiskey in my bottle to shut me up’, your ‘my mom put cigarettes out on my arm’. It’s a whole lot of sadness in very dense packages. It’s gonna kill you at first to not give the shit your pastor told you all the time you were being reared that you’re supposed to.
“But that is the fastest way to burn yourself out. Jobs like this eat people alive. Altruism flies in the face of a gazillion years of human evolution. Why? ‘Cause people are spark plugs, Ray. We’ve got all this latent energy coiled up inside us to care about something. We go pop, pop real bright over all kinds of crap day after day. Then suddenly you hit fifty, sixty and find you’re all out of juice. Used up. That is, if you’re lucky. You let yourself, and these turds here will suck up your caring, your energy, your capacity. A whole life of passion in what? A year or two, and they don’t give nothing back. They can’t, they got nothing. They used themselves up and just want to steal your fire.
“Don’t let them do it, Ray. Ain’t a one of them worth it. But that spark, it’s worth everything. Passion keeps a man breathing. It is divine. Read the Gnostics, boy. They knew.”
Of course, Hank hadn’t bothered to tell him that the Gnostics had all been dust by the fifth century. Them and their sparks with them.
*
Hank had taught him the most about professionalism, what he called the Illusion of Caring. All show, no substance. Hank had made him read Machiavelli, then quizzed him to make sure he got it.
“They’re pieces of shit,” he said. “The one group of people about whom generalities always apply. They have the same histories, the same stories, the same experiences. They are variations on a theme. You go to an AA meeting—one guy yaps and everybody nods. That’s what I mean. Only the faces are different.
“That’s why I say don’t care. The whole trajectory of their lives will be the same. The ones who get out, get sober and write self-help books do it in spite of guys like us and places like this. If we can take no credit, it’s only fair that we accept no blame. But that means absolute neutrality in all things. We must be the moral equivalent of Switzerland.
“Put simply, we should strive never to drive anyone back to the bottle. That is our Prime fucking trekkie Directive. They should believe that we are rooting for them, supporting them, helping them. They must believe we are their best friends, but we must never actually be that friend. A friend is someone you lean on, and we try to get these idiots to stand alone, though they will invariably fail.
“The difference is exacerbation. You help kill anybody you befriend in this business. You cannot be their crutch without inflicting greater harm.
“Neutrality is the most harmless compromise. Recognize their humanity without touching it; listen to them without hearing; be kind without meaning it. Above all, pretend to care but do not do so. Follow these rules and they’ll think you’re a fucking saint.”
*
Every day for the first six weeks, Hank would stare at him, stare hard with his eyes icy and bugged out until Ray looked back. Then he would say, “Ray, you are the man.”
You are the man, every day.
It took him a week to answer. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you’ve got to hear it until you believe it.”
“That I’m the man.”
“The man, Ray. The only man.”
Ray chewed his lip. “I don’t get it.”
“Look, above all—” Hank tended to speak in superlatives. Everything was above all without anything ever getting to the top, at least not that Ray had ever discerned. “You got to realize that you are alone. You are the cheese. We’ve got three shifts here. Three techs on day staff, two evening people, but only one night guy. On the one hand, that makes sense. Doors’re locked, the folk are all sleeping. No trouble most of the time.
“Downside is little access to cops and docs and any form of immediate help in emergencies. They’re on skeleton crews, too, which beats the hell out of their response times. That means you have to control any potential situations. You assess quickly and you decide what happens. No deals, no backing down, no wavering. For fifteen guys every night, you are the only structure, the only safety that exists in the world. If they see you scared, they’re gonna be scared. If they see you as a pussy, they’re going to treat you like a pussy.
“You are the god of their universe when you are here. You recognize no higher authority. No one can question you, and you better act that way. If they don’t respect you—the most vulnerable because you are alone—they ain’t gonna respect nobody.
“So, you don’t listen to cops, family, doctors—nobody. You make a decision and make everybody abide. Live or die with the consequences—it’s your ass, of course, but make sure you’re the guy who puts it in the sling if it ends up there, not some dumb fucker who doesn’t know the on-site situation and therefore has his head up his ass as far as you’re concerned. You have to be firm on this, I mean rock solid in your mind that you ain’t gonna let nobody bully you into backing down, because they’re all going to try. ER docs who want to dump some piece of shit on you, cops who wanna hand you the paperwork instead of doing it themselves, even our own emergency services therapists who want to play Dr. Feelgood over the phone. None of them mean shit to you, remember that, because if their fuck up gets somebody dead here on your shift, it’s totally your liability.
“You have these people’s lives in your hands. They’re trusting you to stave off the chaos they know too well so they have a legitimate shot at getting sober, even if they always and eventually choose not to capitalize on that opportunity. You’ve got to be the man and act like it even if you’re totally wrong. Believe anything else and you’re killing somebody.”