The Forge was my third drug and alcohol treatment center in two years and the first one I was able to make it through more than 72 hours. Actually, I wound up languishing at The Forge in extreme pain and discomfort for the full, mandatory 30 days—not for lack of trying to leave. While others were examining the state of their broken lives and souls, I was planning a jailbreak the entire time.
There was a bigger force at work holding me there, preventing me from leaving. Actually, four forces:
I’d spent all my money on Mentos and didn’t have cab fare back to The Valley;
My girlfriend Taryn would leave me if I cut out early, and she was Elizabeth Hurley’s doppelganger;
No one I knew would pick me up from rehab a third time;
Another Forge inmate, a college professor named Susan Wilder, had her own version of Tales of 1001 Nights—about her life in Virginia with her husband, John—which she delivered on schedule night after hilarious night . . . but only if I’d stay one more day.
So, being completely fucked, I had no choice but stay for 30 days. And please, let me be clear on this: When I say 30 days, I mean...30 days! At my intake the registrar concluded with these peppy words: “So you’ll be with us until the 24th!” Followed by the suddenly serious: “Is there anything else you need to know about your treatment plan or our facility?”
I had but a single, burning question.
“What time can I leave on the 24th?”
The intake lady paused and gave poor, sick, mixed-up-priorities me a gluey, sympathetic look.
“Technically you can leave at five a.m., but most of our patients like to have a nice”—read: free—“breakfast and say good...”
I cut her off.
“I need a phone—now!”
Her eyes popped. I’d actually managed to stun an intake person, and I’ve met quite a few. I needed to tell Taryn to be here at 4:45 a.m. on the 24th and Not. One. Second. Later. But my cell phone had already been locked away in the contraband box along with my perfume, mouthwash, tabloids, and disposable razors. I understood the thinking behind locking up the razors, but the tabloids remain an unsolved mystery to this day.
“Okay, Cara, I think I covered our phone policy,” said the intake lady, whose name I’d noticed was Laura Claeys, “But, again, you can sign up for a ten-minute phone call from the [only one for 30 chatty women] pay phone on Sunday.”
I might have been a sick drug addict but I certainly wasn’t a sick 4-year-old drug addict. I wanted tell her to can the patronizing reminder. Of course I remembered The Forge’s idiotic phone policy from back when she read it to me three seconds ago. I wanted to tell her to shove it ... but decorum prevailed. While I might have looked like the only person who hadn’t gotten the memo that Woodstock was over, having come straight from the hospital in a food-stained T-shirt, torn jeans, with a hospital pallor and some teeth missing, but I was also a professional and a lady. So in that sweet, measured tone usually reserved for unsuspecting lovers about to be dropped, or very naughty puppies, I said,
“Well look, Miss . . .” I paused and decided to forgo the unpronounceable Flemish last name. “Well look, Laura, that really isn’t going to work for me, so unlock my things, I’m leaving. See ya.”
I bolted from the office, sped through the waiting room and out to the parking lot—which was an asphalt inferno in the burning heat of the late-June desert. Once in the hellish parking lot I remembered, of course, that I had no way to get home. A small speed bump, really, because neither rain nor snow (highly unlikely in any case) nor sleet (ditto) nor dark of night could have stayed me from tramping through the desert to my house in Encino.
Call me Moses. I was going home.
Sensing that I meant business, Laura Claeys ran after me and relented. She let me use her phone to call Taryn, my S.O. ( “significant other” in Forge-speak), and arrange for my pre-sunrise pick-up.
Thus began my stay at the Forge —the place that, after stacked parking, I consider the second manifestation of the devil on earth.
The truth was I couldn’t have made it home. I barely made it from the adobe bungalow that housed the intake office across the yard to Fischer Hall, the adobe bungalow that housed half of the women at The Forge—the sicker half. And I was very sick.
It was 118∞ in the shade. My legs were heavy from methadone withdrawal and the scorching Sunday sun made my muscles heavier times five. As if being in pain weren’t enough, no one had bothered to come out and help with my luggage—a large suitcase and three pillows. In my two previous rehabs there had always been someone to help with the bags. Usually a Crip or a Blood, but at least it was something.
The pillows kept dropping while, with all my might, I tried to slide the suitcase with my knee across the sand and pebbles of the parking lot. I’d secure two pillows under one arm, only to have the third drop out from under the other. This slide, drop, pick-up routine took forever across the vast prairie. My head lowered so that no one (unless there to help me) could see how scared I was. And that I was crying.
I knew how much my best friend Julia had hated to leave me there; she cried like a mother leaving her kid off for the first day of school.
Julia had always been most eager to encourage me to leave rehab; “Just come home and do outpatient.” She’d tell me. But now that particular home was gone and Julia was at a loss, as was everyone, over what to do with me. Julia had been desperately trying to keep me alive—the frantic energy that yields nothing. I knew it well for I had used the same feverish energy trying to keep her alive just three years earlier when she was battling cancer. Futile or not, you don’t stop trying. I wanted call after Julia as she went to her car and tell her to please stop, stop trying to save me, save her resources for herself. I’d already arrived at the contrarian conclusion that all energy was a waste; particle physics notwithstanding.
I eventually made it to Fischer Hall after traversing the yard—that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns, otherwise known as “Palm Springs in the summer.” I opened the door of the dorm to a cool burst of air and a large, well-kept woman named Meredith who quickly ushered me to a small anteroom. I collapsed into a hard plastic chair while Meredith retrieved a pencil and yet another form. Meredith, I would came to learn, had been living on the streets with two small children only eight years earlier.
Fischer was a quiet, if not altogether abandoned, hall. Meredith, reading my mind, explained that it was Sunday and that almost everyone was asleep. Even though it was only 11 a.m., I would come to understand the urgent need for a mid-morning nap at The Forge. Sunday was the only day naps were allowed, so they were a rare commodity. The rest of the week was stuffed—6 a.m. to 9 p.m.—with non-stop activities, lectures and therapeutic groups All of which had to be “processed” immediately afterward. The world as I knew it was very far away.
Suddenly a vision of loveliness burst through the door.
“Where’s my buddy??!!” Loveliness said with a frantic air of “where’s the fire?” She was an elegant fiftysomething, expensively dressed and very Mrs. Robinson but without the edge. She had an air of kindness that filled the room. Noticing me with Meredith, she dropped to her knees to be eye-level with me in my chair, and took my hands in hers.
“I’m Anna,” she said with feeling. “I’m your buddy.” The people at The Forge were an awfully friendly lot I thought to myself.
“Everyone at Forge is assigned a buddy,” explained Meredith. “Anna’s yours.”
I gazed at the kneeling and lovely Anna, and for the first time a sense of peace washed over me.
“Your buddy goes everywhere you go for the first week,” Meredith continued. “She’ll explain how we do things, show you where to do your laundry and give you the frozen yogurt hours.”
This will come as a shock, but I actually have something to say in praise of The Forge: Although their cookie-cutter treatment plan far from meets my standards, there is something oddly reassuring about their militaristic, leave-nothing-to-chance approach. While it pains me to admit this, their seriousness of purpose compensates—somewhat—for their lack of finesse. At every other treatment center I have been to (and departed from early), I had to fend for myself, pulling out bits of information where I could, following the pack, attempting to look as if I knew where I was going. Here I had the lovely Anna showing me the ropes and glued to my side. I had my Buddy ex machina and the whole situation—being dropped into the desert seconds after “coming to” from a useless procedure— seemed less insurmountable
Meredith rose from behind her desk.
“Okay let’s take you to your room...” she began.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” shot Anna, and with that she disappeared as quickly as she had appeared.
It was time to search my bags.
The bag search is something a person can never truly tire of—although it makes even the innocent incredibly nervous. I followed Meredith as she barreled down the hall to my room—my very expensive nun room, slightly larger than a rabbit warren—for the bag search.
If you plan on sneaking drugs into rehab—and god knows The Forge is the only place I wished I had—here’s a tip: Don’t sweat the bag search. Only later did I realize that the search is just a formal “go through”; if getting sober is not an idea whose time has come for you, and you simply must bring along a small supply of Valium or some such, you can smuggle almost anything in by sewing it into a hem or a pocket (they seldom go through all of them; bring lots of jeans). Eventually you will be caught, ratted on or, most likely, you will give yourself up in a moment of clarity, but at least you have options.
I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Meredith paw through my clothes. She pulled out a ragged, torn, faded blue work shirt and held it up to the light.
“Hmmmm, I’ve got one of these too,” said Meredith, examining the shirt.
“Standard issue,” I said in a meek attempt at forging that silent camaraderie we gay, drug-addicted Jews are so fond of. I thought Meredith might be of enormous help in my jailbreak. She could hoist me over the fence.
She went right back to business.
“Your roommate doesn’t arrive until tomorrow, so you’ll have the place to yourself tonight.”
I welcomed the alone time and fell into a deep state of hyper-sleep.
* * *
I came to The Forge straight from the hospital, having endured a torturous procedure misnamed “ultra rapid detox”; as it is neither rapid nor a detox but an attempt to mitigate the excruciating pain of methadone withdrawal. It’s done by putting the opiate addict—sadly, that would be me—into a drug-induced coma for 24 hours. The hope is that you will get through the worst part of opiate withdrawal under ether and kick while restfully asleep.
Right before I was to go into suspended animation to kick drugs, I had a serious and totally unnecessary complication, one that nearly resulted in my death—a fate I’d somehow managed to avoid thus far. My doctor, John Price, having absolutely no ability to grasp in the abstract what the pain of withdrawal is all about, had me stop taking methadone three days prior to the procedure. To make things easier for him. The result being ...
Okay, I must stop here for unsolicited yet incredibly important words of wisdom. There are more people in the recovery field than there are mortgage brokers. And though the field is peppered with godsends, it is way under-seasoned. So before you allow someone from the treatment community into your life or, more importantly, your bank account—do your homework. Be an educated consumer. Comparison shop. Talk to professionals and lay people with long-term recovery from your drug of choice and ask about their experience. If you’re an opiate addict, don’t listen to the suggestion of a recovering drunk. I made that mistake and there I was in the Forge, a completely inappropriate place for opiate addicts, having been designed for and by rich, alcoholic, middle-aged white women.
People being people, no two recoveries are alike—symptomatically speaking. A junkie’s recovery couldn’t be more dramatically different from a drunk’s. A drunk may go through an array of horrors such as migraines, the anvil banging to the beat of a drum, accompanied by projectile vomiting, shakes and hallucinations, very John Philip Sousa. But after two or three days, the misery does, in fact, end. Whereas a junkie, comme Ulysse, might (and probably will) undergo an on-and-on and on-going set of trials and tortures, more like bad (not that I know of any good) twelve-tone symphonies with trillions of false endings that last anywhere from four weeks to a year.
So if a recovering drunk suggests some place like, let’s say, The Forge and you’re addicted to junk—don’t go.
Which brings me back to Dr. John Price, a medical corporation, and his demand that I stop methadone three days prior to going into suspended animation. When Julia came by to take me to the hospital for my Ultra-Rapid Detox (URD), she found me on the floor of the guest bedroom writhing in agony. Saffy, my loyal dog and one of my last remaining friends, peered helplessly from beneath the bed.
Julia arrived not a minute too soon. Take-charge personality that she is, she helped me up, helped me pack, and—having read and absorbed the medical disclaimers regarding URD—noted that one of inconvenient unexpected outcome could be death.
My first full day at The Forge, I arose at 6 a.m. to their very own version of “Reveille”—a loud rap, rap, rapping on your door to a cranky sounding person yelling, “WAKE UP!”
Having pulled the short straw, the wake-up person was doomed to a week of the baddest of all bad house duties, wake-up detail, which meant not having the luxury of sleeping in until 6 a.m. like the rest of us. The abrupt wake-up was so startling that I ran to the bathroom and threw up from nerves. This would be my morning ritual—waking, retching, puking, aching— for the entire 30 days until I walked out the door of The Forge on July 24 at 5 a.m.
I managed to learn a few worthwhile things during my stay at The Forge. The first was: God does give you more than you can handle. I dare anyone to walk into a treatment center and utter the usual version of that adage, first making sure to find someone who is withdrawing from methadone, has just lost most of their friends and all their colleagues, plus a 20-year career, a house, several teeth, and their mother, all while watching their best friend go through nine months of the most horrific high-dose chemotherapy. Other than suggesting they might have a drug problem, there is no quicker way to summon the devil in an addict.
Naturally, it was said to me over and over: “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” And each time I’d, quite weakly, lift my head from my pillow, regard the person before me with a pained puppy dog expression and sputter out a feeble,
“He doesn’t?”
followed by the suddenly combatant: “Define ‘handle!!.”
I was so furious after my ex mother-in-law said it one time that I actually used one of my coveted 10-minute phone slots to call my attorney at home—he was in possession of my hand-written last will and testament—to tell him that, should I decide to be buried (as opposed to the other option, being placed in a shake ’n’ bake bag with my dog, Saffron and scattered along Warwick Road in Bronxville), my headstone should read:
Here lies Cara Coslow, Talent Executive
God Gave Her More Than She Could Handle
When I’d been at the Forge a week, I no longer needed to go everywhere with my buddy. Still, things were bad and continuing to look down. To borrow from Kander and Ebb, a small piece of constructive criticism on the medical care at The Forge:
It stinks!!!
First of all, I didn’t see why the woman dying from cirrhosis of the liver and barely functioning and I, should have to walk in the desert at 6 a.m. (by which hour it was already 120) and do water exercises in the afternoon. That was how they did things at the Forge: by rote, one size fits all. The emphasis placed on following an archaic set of ideas, lemming-like, without finessing the individual’s symptoms, degree of pain, or ability to focus. No heart, all left brain, and there was very little left of my brain. The woman with cirrhosis was in the other hall, in the famous room known as “The Swamp.” Each hall had its own Swamp, the only room in the ward with four beds instead of two. Patients are assigned beds randomly, depending on availability—the only thing The Forge leaves to fate. Mythology had it that Elizabeth Taylor got stuck in the Swamp. By Betty standards everyone needs humbling and punishment and shitty quarters and treatment. Of course Liz did (defying the “no consorting with the opposite sex” rule) meet Larry Fortinsky there. I rest my case.
The poor woman with cirrhosis had sallow orange skin with a waxy glaze, and a gaunt frame with a potbelly—telltale signs of liver failure in end-stage alcoholism. Not only was she stuck in the other hall, the one comprised mainly of O.C. kids, those Gen X’ers on daddy’s dime doing penance for pissing all over their salad days; she’d also been assigned The Swamp—just the kind of room you want to be seriously ill in. After days of bravely enduring The Forge’s ill-conceived 10-hour routines, forged in a Naval hospital during the dark ages of recovery, the woman lost all bowel and bladder function in her bed and was taken to Eisenhower Medical Center by ambulance in the middle of the night. Word of her ordeal trickled back to my hall. Anna had heard about it. We were sitting in the sunken living room after dinner deciding whether or not to brave the heat of dusk and smoke on the patio. “I don’t know how that woman is going to last through this torture. “ I said to Anna. Anna told me that last night she’d been taken to Eisenhower. She also told me that the woman’s roommates in The Swamp, The “Heathers” and the “Britneys” the “Brees” and the “Lindseys” (none of them over 25), having to listen to her call for help while lying in a bed of feces and urine, had laughed at her.
Anna and I agreed that the woman should have been placed in our hall—Fischer Hall—with Linda from Texas with eight kids spaced one year apart, who had been pregnant for ten of her thirty married years all while teaching first grade until alcohol rendered her a danger to children thus ending a 30 year career in education; and Judith with two boys at Tulane, hard of hearing which made her scream out her inner secrets and delicate suggestions, but smarter than smart; and Susan, whom, with her husband, John, an English professor at the University of Virginia, had just purchased the campus pizza parlor from her son; It served a choice of 200 toppings, even rattlesnake. And Anna. And Me. We wouldn’t have laughed. We would have carried her to the hospital on our backs. And many days before The Forge chose to. Before she lost her dignity. We understood the left turns of life.
My situation paled by comparison. Nonetheless, it sucked. I was so sick I couldn’t think straight, and this was the only facility I’d known to strictly disallow time for physical healing.
To make matters worse, I had been prescribed a medication that couldn’t have been more wrong. Only one year later at Rancho La’bris, after being treated by their brilliant, world-renowned owner, Dr. John Milner, did I realize how horribly wrong my treatment had been at The Forge, where I was given a medication called Neurontin (a funny young junkie at Rancho would later dub it “Neurotten,” appropriately). The drug had many horrendous side effects, the worst of which were:
A 23-lb. weight gain in four days on top of the extra 40 pounds of methadone bloat I’d barreled in there with
A sudden loss of vision
Either would have been enough to send me ’round the bend, but the combo of side effects and opiate withdrawal sent me into a state of hyper-anxiety, which then caused my body to over-clench or flood with cortisol or something, resulting in an inability to turn my head more than a few degrees. To this day I can barely turn my head to the right or left.
The severity of my discomfort was in direct proportion to The Forge’s complete disregard for it. I had been sitting alone in our hall kitchen one afternoon, at sixes and sevens over the fact that everything was one complete blur, like looking through a windshield in a downpour. Deb, my counselor, came over.
“What’s going on with you?” she asked, not quite solicitously.
With not a hair out of place, Deb looked like a Miss America, so much so, that I expected her question to be followed by performance of the aria, O Mio Babino Caro. She was quite intelligent, but another thing I learned at The Forge was that the intelligent may occasionally be wrong. In her assessment of me: Deb couldn’t have been wronger—about everything. Later another patient, whose brain was still wet from booze, pointed out that the reason for my defeatist attitude could have something to do with the fact that I’d been sick since I arrived. Only then did Deb admit to possibly being wrong. Not that she deigned to apologize.
What’s going on with me? I was incredulous. I had been discussing my difficulties with any professional I thought could help me.
“ Well” I paused holding back my anger,
“I can’t see anything, I don’t know what’s being written on the board in the lecture halls or what, I’m very sick and...”
Deb cut me off.
“Cara, listen to me,” Then. “You need to worry about more important things.”
I cocked my head and remained silent.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, annoyed.
I told her I was having a hard time coming up with something more important to worry about than my eyesight.
I was tempted to grab the bowl of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish and dump it right on that perfect Miss America do. I told Deb how much I disliked the place, how little affection I held for her in particular, and that I was on my way to grab the papers I needed to sign to leave, AMA—Against Medical Advice.
“I’d rather be in prison,” I said, getting up.
Deb was honestly floored.
“Are you kidding me, have you ever been to prison?” she asked hotly.
“Yes I have! And I didn’t leave there nearly as scathed as I’m going to be after 30 days at The Forge!”
Okay, I hadn’t really been to prison. But I did spend a night in county jail once at 18 for driving under the influence of a controlled substance, and that was close enough for comparison’s sake. My experience thus far said that jail was way more fun than The Forge.
The problem was that I still had no way to get home. In addition, I was now blind.
After that, Deb decided I was way too articulate and demanded that my daily homework for group be submitted in pictograms. The next night’s assignment was “Describe the things you’re grateful for.” I turned in a drawing showing me in stick figure form, blowing my brains out while jumping off a cliff. That was when Deb announced to the group that I when I went home I would immediately die from drugs.
Then Susan Wilder arrived. The most exciting thing to happen around the Halls was when a newcomer arrived. Other than the monotonous routine there was nothing you were allowed to do. You couldn’t listen to music; you couldn’t watch TV, talk on the phone or read newspapers, books or magazines. That last made me crazy because I am a voracious reader and the only thing aside from drugs that calms me down is reading. You were allowed to read books from their bookstore, on recovery, spirituality, embracing your inner child, relapse prevention. Hardly entertaining. I’m also not sure that all this focus on how sick you are, morning, noon and night, isn’t counter-productive. If your friends and loved ones haven’t done their best to make you feel like “a mean wittle kid,” trust me, rehab will. It is the most peculiar form of healing I know. If reading book after book describing your disease doesn’t constitute obsessing over a diagnosis or accentuating the negative, I don’t know what does.
I did, however, find a book on the history of heroin that was not half bad.
The day Susan arrived we were all sitting around the den of the hall in the uncomfortable chairs. She looked as confused and lost as we had. Maybe more so because she wore the thickest glasses I’d ever seen; she must have been legally blind. Like most people new to rehab, she entered on day whatever of a really big bender; she looked as if she’d been shot out of canon. Still, her clothes, the worn penny loafers and the faded skirt and tennis top, coupled with the light blond hair and the way she carried herself, spelled old money. Very East Coast.
Susan was in probably in her mid-fifties, so all the fiftysomething women in the room, finally having something to do, circled and threw question after question at the poor woman. Susan returned each question with enormous speed. Which impressed me. Not just considering her condition, but in any condition.
Susan had been a world champion racquetball player. I listened in amusement as she volleyed with total precision.
“What’s your drink?” Georgia asked.
“Vodka.” Whoosh . . .
“Did you drink on the plane here?”
“Of course.” (As if to say, “Are you kidding?”) Whoosh . . .
“How much?” asked Linda pointlessly.
“Lots.” Whoosh …
I cracked up. I liked this lady.
It turned out that Susan was very close with two friends of mine who were also professors at UV. Our bond was cemented.
Susan was assigned to my small group. I couldn’t have been happier. The forty women in Fisher Hall were divided into four “small groups” of ten that met everyday. Small group always began by going around the circle while each of us expressed how we felt today—using only feeling words—feeling words made me want to retch, they were California touchy feely Eselen-type substitutes for the genuine AMA Harvard MD thinking and talking (which doesn’t help addicts either) that I valued. But the “feeling words” were listed on a big chart on the wall, lest you’re unable to come up with one all by yourself. For example you couldn’t say, “I’m fine” or “Okay.” At which point you could refer to the “feeling word chart” that listed such words as hurt, sad, angry, scared, resentful (really why not just point to an emoticon?). Then we would go around the room and Deb would ask each of, “How do you feel?”
One day during this process, Susan leaned over and whispered, “Do you remember the movie The Bird Cage?”
“Sure,” I whispered back.
“You know that scene where Robin Williams is working with Nathan Lane, trying to get him to butch-up and be more macho? And he’s having no success? So he says to Lane, ‘Look, the Mets just lost the pennant! How does that make you feel?’ And Lane turns to him and says, ‘Betrayed. Bewildered.’”
We exploded in laughter and were asked to leave group for the day. It was the first genuine laugh I’d had in years.
Susan knew I was itching to get out. Aside from her genuine concern for my wellbeing, she would have been pretty lost without me. One day she told me a story about something that happened when her husband, George, was in the hospital. I laughed so hard tears rolled down my cheeks. So she made me a deal: If I’d stay, she had plenty more where that came from. One story per night, guaranteed.
I had to put my escape plans on hold.
The last time I spoke to Susan she wanted me to come stay with her for the summer. I couldn’t, because I wasn’t sober.
We haven’t been in touch since.
“I’d spent all my money on Mentos and didn’t have cab fare back to The Valley.”
That made me bust a gut! 😂 It recalls similar plights that I faced back in my using days. Sober people just can’t understand!
Thank you for these frank, funny, heartbreaking accounts, Cara. I always look forward to the next installment.
How do you have me laughing while reading such a grueling Rehab stay? I feel so upset for you then start laughing at your hilarious take on everything.