“Hey, guy.”
“No, this is Ray.” He smiled, leaned back in his chair.
It was, of course, Pete. Pete was the night shift guy at Crossroads Detox across town. Ray called it the Jesus Shop because it was wholly supported by a contingent of local churches who saw addicts as a potential ministry.
Apparently Jesus saved—not only from sin and hell, but also from Dark Eyed Jim Beam.
Pete was a relatively innocuous born again fundie who volunteered his time two or three nights a week. When he was not saving the world, his Clark Kent was actually a steady CPA job with the local H&R Block. He’d been pulling shifts for about six months, knew nothing about drugs beyond that bad people used them to escape their problems and that they were tools of Satan, and he always needed Ray’s advice about one thing or another. This arrangement was not problematic as Pete had long ago given up trying to convert him. Pete was also the only guy in the city who was, as Ray figured it, making less money than he was at such an hour. In return for Ray’s magnanimity, Pete had done Ray’s taxes for free last year.
They had never actually met, though Ray had faxed him the tax forms and Pete had faxed back a photo of his two pre-teen daughters and his geriatric Lab.
“What’s the problem?” Ray asked.
“I have a recalcitrant.”
That’s what he called them, the drunk and definitely disorderly. Pete’s vocabulary did not include the word shithead either in its singular or plural.
“Pete, they’re all like that. Alcohol is bad medicine. That’s why places like ours are in business. To make them calcitrant.”
“I know that.” Pete sounded a little annoyed.
There was some commotion in the background, a knocking on doors.
“This is a little different, Ray.”
“How is that, Pete?”
A garbled shout came over the line. Pete made a distinct eek noise.
Ray put his feet on the floor, listened.
“Where are you exactly, Pete?”
“I’m in the office here, with the doors locked. Just like you said.”
At the very beginning, his very first night, Pete had called Ray in a flurry of panic because one of his clients was in the process of simultaneously vomiting all over the walls and promising graphic incidents of bodily injury because Pete seemed to be doing too little for him. Ray had thought, at first, that it was a joke and consequently advised him to close himself in his office, lock it tight and sing the entire score of Les Miserables until the idiot went away. That is, he had said, what you do in this business when you feel your life is in danger.
Pete was not currently even humming, but Ray was prepared to accept two out of three.
“Have you called the police?”
“Three times. They’re not here yet.”
He had probably called twice in the span of five minutes, Ray assumed. He had done that himself once, early on in his career, and wondered what the hell was taking them so long. Panic stretched the seconds into hours.
More banging, some random shouting.
“I think he has a knife,” Pete said. Ray noted that he was making an admirable effort to stay calm. Just a quaver in the voice. Not too bad.
“You think? Either he has a knife or he doesn’t.”
“He said he was going to cut me if I didn’t give him some drugs.” Finally, Pete’s voice cracked, but just the once. “Ray, I told him we don’t have any medications. I mean, some Tylenol, yes. But…he won’t believe me!”
Offer him Jesus, Ray thought, but said, “Look, here’s what you need to do. Hang up on me. Call the police again—”
“I’ve done that!”
“—Tell them you have a body on the floor. You think he might be dead. Then hang up.”
“But he’s not dead.”
“You might be by the time the cops get there.”
“What!”
Ray rolled his eyes. “Seriously, Pete. A rampaging drunk is not news. A possible homicide, though—that’s newspaper stuff. It looks bad if the cops don’t reach the scene before the police beat reporter, and that guy does nothing but sit around all night listening to his scanner for shit just like this. The cops hurry then, believe me.”
“Tell them there’s a dead body…” Pete still sounded uncertain.
“No. Tell them only a body that you think might be dead. You say dead and that’s false reporting. You say might be and you can slide on the fact that you’re not a qualified medical practitioner capable of making such an assessment. Understand?”
Pete said, “Yeah, Ray,” and got off the line.
*
To some extent, Ray found the idea of the Jesus Shop and its doppelgangers ludicrous. They tended to have an enormous lost sheep mentality, largely because, honestly, they didn’t have much damned choice given their mission and affiliations. They didn’t have the option of turning away the unmotivated because Jesus didn’t take no for an answer and saw the good in everybody. If they were technically full, they just parked ‘em on the floor until the fire marshal said enough (and then resented him for getting in the way of the harvest).
They had no psychologists, no licensed and NADAC certified counselors, no one who knew anything about addictions theory. They avoided AA like it was a hotbed of Catholicism or a secret arm of the Tri-Lateral Commission. They had a leaner budget than even a local mental health center, borrowed their building and guilted their congregations into donating time rather than actually paying a real staff. They gave no medications (unless you counted prayer) to get some sorry bastard through withdrawal and consequently called more emergency ambulances than an old folks home full of Alzheimer’s patients.
All they really had was a desire to do something nice, what they perceived as a calling straight from the Almighty, and a Director of Services who had once been a serious biker and narcotics pusher (as well as serious user) who knew more than a little about what it meant to be fucked up when you were trying to go straight.
But they kept their beds full and their waiting list bursting because they hawked the Jesus likes you and wants to help angle as well as Madison Avenue pushed disposable goods.
All you need, after all, is Jesus. Deliverance from the sin of alcoholism and addiction. The colineation of addiction and sin (both having well documented moral consequences and therefore logically connected) sat well with the average alcoholic, who by the time he was thirty or so had elevated guilt to an art form.
But Jesus saves.
Except, as Ray looked at it, Jesus hadn’t made anybody take the first drink and was under no obligation to stop them from taking their last. To lay all your drunken burdens at the feet of Jesus was just another form of denying personal responsibility, foisting the work of recovery off onto somebody else.
(Though the argument could be made that Jesus, at least, had shoulders broad enough to bear the weight, it was still a form of cheating. Ray did not believe Jesus was that codependent, despite the Sunday morning pulpit rumor mill.)
The fact that most of Ray’s clients had attempted the happy Jesus high doled out at the Jesus Shop attested to its popularity. The fact that they were still Ray’s clients attested to its clinical and psychological bankruptcy. The fact that, at least according to Pete who had a fetish for keeping numbers on this kind of thing, the Jesus Shop had the same one in thirty lifetime recovery rate as the rest of the industry either attested to something very admirable about its efforts or something very depressing about the industry at large. Ray had declined to form an opinion.
The problem was that the addict dependent on the disease concept for his relapse rationalizations only felt bad because he had let himself down. The addict who found out that Jesus had not, in fact, kicked the hell out of his demon of addiction, felt like he had managed to let God down.
And that was a whole other league.
It was after all, one thing to completely fuck things up in this life. After you had screwed the pooch of the next one—really, what was the point of trying after that?
Believing you have let God down is some pretty high caliber sluggage in the shame weaponry of the addictive cycle.
*
Ray gave Pete thirty minutes by his watch before he called the Jesus Shop to check up.
Pete said, “The police were not amused by the body thing.”
“But they got there.”
“They did. Thanks, Ray.”
He shrugged. “Who else would I have had to share my accrued wisdom with if I let you get whacked?”
“They took him to jail,” Pete said, and sounded strangely disturbed by that. “I have to go in the morning and swear out a complaint. The officers said they were going to charge him with assault.”
“What did you expect them to do?”
“I don’t know…calm him down. But assault, that’s pretty serious, isn’t it?”
“People who carry knives have that happen to them, Pete. It’s one of the risks of being armed and obnoxious at the same time.”
“I think he would have calmed down. I mean, maybe I over-reacted.”
“Jesus, Pete. Do they give you guys classes in codependency? ‘How to be a professional doormat—the advanced lessons’.”
“Ray—”
“Look, Pete. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here because you have a real life. You’re stuck in this mode that the customer is always right. They gripe with a reason. But in this field, you have to make a transition. The customer is always wrong here. The customer only wants things that are bad for him.”
Pete sighed at him, heavy and depressed. To an extent, it was normal, this second guessing of your performance once the level of adrenaline had subsided.
Ray said, “Pete, that had better not be the sound of you re-evaluating your life, your manhood or your mission. Because if it is, I’m hanging up and getting caller ID.”
“The grace of God extends to the lowliest of sinners,” Pete said, in that same sing-song voice Ray used for his arsenal of rote responses. Ray wondered if they had that written up on a poster on their wall.
“But he wouldn’t listen to me, Ray. I tried to tell him that if he’d just open himself up, Jesus would help him deal with his pain. Ray, they taught us to reach for the soul beyond the addiction, beyond the cloud of narcotic haze to touch the child of God within them.”
“Sounds more and more like bullshit when the nut has a knife at your throat, doesn’t it? Makes all of those saints and martyrs that much more amazing when you think about how stupid that shit sounds in real life.”
“But I still thought he’d listen, that he’d see my sincerity and listen. I was trying to plant a seed.”
“Pete, they don’t ever listen. If they did, we’d have to spend all our budgets on advertising to attract a dwindling clientele.”
“Then what are we doing?”
“We’re contributing to the delinquency of mental and emotional minors. We’re facilitating their ability to get healthy enough to go back to whatever poison it is they prefer. How’s that?”
“You’re just being glib.”
“I’ll tell you what, Pete. You find a better way of reaching them, one that actually works, not just works in theory or in textbooks, and I’ll stop being glib.”
Exasperation. “This is supposed to be a better way.”
“And since Jesus never fails but frequently your program does, or seems to, you want to know just what we’re all doing wrong. What they say on Sunday morning about how it’s really just people rejecting the overtures of God, or it isn’t the right timing, or God just hasn’t moved on this idiot’s spirit yet to convict him of his sin—you’re thinking that sounds pretty damned lame right now.”
“Yes.”
“That, Pete, is the million dollar question. Find the answer, write a book, go on tour.”
Pete was silent for a time, which Ray took to be a bad sign. He cleared his throat to indicate that he was still present, still listening.
“I don’t understand you, Ray. The way your mind works.” He sounded tired. “It must take a very special person to do your job. This job, I mean. Ours.”
“Right. Like MR/DD special. Like tard farming special.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Ray could not say how many times he had heard that line. Special person. He’d heard it from people who seemed genuinely impressed, from people who had been clients at one time or another but still held on to the delusion that Ray or one of his counterparts had actually done something for them. From drunks so far above .40 they should have been by all accepted standards stiff in somebody’s morgue, but at three a.m. came across as more alert and coherent than Ray himself.
It was that diversity of backgrounds which convinced him the belief was pure crapola.
The truth was, people thought that special person business in the same way Ray supposed he thought about cops, doctors, spies. He couldn’t imagine himself doing any one of those jobs, but had a sort of admiration for the type of person who could. But as he had never been a cop, doctor or spy, he didn’t know if the stupidity of the comment held as equally true for those professions as it did for his own. Maybe they were special people.
But the tech position (whatever you actually called it) was not one of those types, not in reality, or at least any reality Ray had discerned. It required a high school diploma, access to your own transportation and a working knowledge of the English language. Nowhere in the newspaper advertisement had it suggested they only accepted “special” applicants. Really. There were not throngs of breathless, aspiring technicians waiting to mud wrestle over the first available opening. More likely, there were long armed, thick necked italian guys hanging out at the unemployment office waiting to snap up any unsuspecting vagrant they could threaten with bodily injury until he agreed to take the job.
It wasn’t that there weren’t people who wanted to help address social ills, just not enough people willing to jump on the long, slow slide to penury to help at this particular place and in this particular way. If they wanted to feel good, they could donate time to Jerry’s kids and still keep their day jobs (where generally they didn’t have to worry about getting screamed at by undermedicated sociopaths, cried on by crack whore mothers who were having their kids taken away or thrown up on by pretty much any random individual you might come within five feet of). Ray had that kind of job.
Certainly, it took a special person, he wanted to say. As in fooby special. Arkansas IQ special.
But special in terms of divinely inspired compassion or Assisi-like obedience to Lady Poverty—that was pure bullshit. If you could last six months, you had the innate skills basic to all human creatures to get jaded enough to do the job. After that, you had seen it all, done it all, been taken advantage of enough and degraded out of your humanity to the point that nothing could surprise you, dismay you or bug you in the least.
Then, they were no longer clients, no longer people, just commodities, more or less intransigent machines (depending upon their attitude and motivation levels) which required your attention.
Nobody looks at maintenance guys and says: Jeez, it takes a special person to do your job. Ray pretty much felt the same way about his own, about Pete’s. Pete would see it too, if he got over this whole helping the beleaguered soul business. And Ray told him so.
“I don’t think I should talk to you anymore, Ray,” Pete said slowly. “At least for tonight.”
Ray accepted that, even understood it. Addicts and codies didn’t listen to anybody. Besides, the realization that you could not save the world, and that maybe Jesus wasn’t all that interested in it either, was undoubtedly a serious central nervous system depressant in Pete’s universe.
“Read some Calvin,” Ray said to him, then hung up the phone.