Clark B.

Clark is a shell of a man. He’s a tall white salesman with horrible posture and my grandfathers glasses. He’s any neighbor. He’s your friend’s father. Except broken.

“I don’t have a family anymore,” he replied when I asked him if they were supportive. It’s a standard question I ask patients to get them talking.

Family support means a lot to them, but they have extremely limited access to phones at the clinics. Detox patients, those still on prescriptions to ween them or slowly getting their “drugs of choice” out of their systems, can only make phone calls on speakerphone with their therapist. For the rest of their stay they get one ten-minute phone call a day to the outside world. I’m slowly realizing why – this is their time. There’s nothing they can do about crumbling marriages and estranged children inside the clinic. This is time to get cleaned up so they can deal with all that stuff when they get out better than they could have when they were on a binge.

“One of my daughters stopped talking to me six months ago. The other is about to graduate, I don’t know when,” he said in his quiet voice. He’s one of the hardest to understand patients. He speaks very quietly. His libido has been chipped away with each loss. He’s merely going through the motions now. All he can do now is stop the thanatos, further self-destruction.

He, another patient, and I had a conversation about alcoholism once. Rick wanted to know, like a lot of the patients, about my own background with drugs and alcohol. I tell them a stripped-down version of the truth – I did a lot of reckless things when I first got into college overcompensating for having a completely straight-and-narrow high school life. I got out of senseless excesses when I got out of the dorms, though I am still a social drinker.

Rick, the other patient, told me for him it started like that. At some point he found himself getting home from work an hour before his wife got home. He’d pound six beers before she came out. He’d have three around her that evening. Mowing the lawn took two hours because he kept a stash of beer in the shed. Clark agreed, in his silent way, and conveyed his story of keeping a bottle of vodka in the garage and in the shed.

”Alcoholism is really about lying and deceit. I used to pack all my beer bottles at the bottom of the recycling bins so no one could see how much I was drinking,” Rick told me at the end of the conversation.

Late tonight Clark came up behind and put his hand on my shoulder and thanked me for finding out the date of his daughter’s graduation. He had given me the school name the day before and I told him I’d find out online when I got home, so long as he didn’t tell anyone how he got the info. There are a lot of rules stopping me from doing “favors” for the patients that pay my salary. It was the first time I’d seen any warmth in his eyes since I’d met him. He said he thought he might be getting out in time to make the graduation. I told him it was nothing - he would have done the same for me.