"Yeah well, I been here before. This is my thirteenth time in rehab." That was my roommate talking, Jeff from West Bergen, he was laying out some clothes on his bed. "This is my first time," I said, "as a full-time resident, anyway. Been in an out-patient program, two days, total bullshit. Jesus, thirteen times, how old are you?"
"I'll be 21 on Tuesday," Jeff said. "My Mom is sending a big cake." It was Sunday, November 1, 2021, my first day in rehab, first day out of detox. I was 72 years old. We were in Walton House, one of four adult male residences run by Legacy Healing, an expensive in-patient rehabilitation facility--factory is probably a better word for this far-flung operation, which on any given day is treating 50 men and women enrolled in 30-day residential stints, plus 30 more as outpatients on their way to work.
Jeff died on Sunday, June 19, 2022, almost certainly of an overdose, in another rehab facility in North Jersey. This, seven months after explaining to me in hilarious detail his career as a successful dealer and a dedicated user of drugs.
From his standpoint, these sermons were meant as warnings to the naive old white guy who was trying to imagine an easy alternative to the drinking life, one cushioned by recreational drugs. No such thing, he kept saying: "You in or you out." From mine, they were lectures on moral philosophy in the narrative form we call memoir or autobiography. He was this addict's Ben Franklin.
Rehab for Jeff was a respite from life on the streets, mostly dealing, always using. Like taking a month off, heading for a spa, getting clean and sober. Not like the homeless guys who crowded the shelter on 57th and 10th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, where I ran AA meetings back in 2009. No, Jeff was a middle-class black guy from a relatively affluent township in North Jersey, a young man who relied on his mother's health insurance to pay for the regular stints in rehab.
A young man who was smart, fast, and funny, a whole world waiting for him. He teased me mercilessly--"I'm a hafta kick yo ass, old man, you gotta stop sayin' that professor shit in group, nobody knows what you talkin' about, you see what I mean?"--until I said, "You're right, Jeff, this ain't summer camp, I gotta take it more seriously, but hey, you're a funny guy, and yeah, let's do this, maybe I'm gonna fuck you up."
Jeff used the toilet and the shower attached to our room, and he delivered his sermons sitting on his bed, but he never slept there. He slept on a couch in the basement, where he and Bobby, a 22-year old gun-runner and homeless addict, played their video games all night. I asked him about his nightly whereabouts , and he said, "Well, I always used on a bed, you know, so I could pass out and not take a fall, you see what I mean? This way I don't have to sleep, and I don't have to use."
On the streets, Jeff dealt mainly in weed and heroin, nothing dangerous--most of the people at Legcy saw these substances as interchangeable parts in their pattern of use--but he was worried that his sources were lacing everything with fentanyl. That was the cause of the increasing overdoses in his precincts, he was sure, and that was what landed him in Walton House. "They thought I was dead, the EMT guys, but it was just another OD."
The EMT guys got it right on June 19.
I’m always reminded of the narrow line between totally different fates and how a simple unthought choice determines so much. RIP Jeff