Spring Break
Seeing the world through the eyes of a recovering drug addict.
We had just parked our car and entered Starbucks at the corner of Portland, Oregon’s, famous food-trucks block when a woman approached my son.
“Want to buy some methadone?” she asked as he stood in a lengthy line.
“No, no thanks,” he said.
“I just picked it up from the clinic,” she persisted.
“No,” he said, shrugging her off, his red, 90-day-clean, Narcotics Anonymous tag swinging from his jacket zipper.
We were midway into our 12-day tour of the Pacific Northwest, and he, a drug addict in recovery, was having to dodge temptation at every turn. At age 21, he was on spring break from an Idaho school that is focused on helping young adults having difficulty launching their lives. He was attempting some big changes, but his progress was still fragile. This was the first time he’d be away since he enrolled in January.
Where to go? Certainly not back home to the Washington, D.C., area, where drugs were rampant, overdoses among peers too frequent, and acquaintances overly eager to engage in buying or selling.
And so, we began a new journey, one of many roads we’ve taken since we first sent him to a special boarding school on Mother’s Day in 2008, fearful for our sanity and his safety.
With his dad and younger brother slated for college visits, my son and I settled on a scenic 1,130-mile loop through parts of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. I hoped the trip would let him check out some alternative places to build a life, far from the bad influences and bad choices back home.
It soon became clear that life through the lens of an addict is fraught with threats and temptations. His street-savviness left me, at times, impressed and often alarmed.
His task was to stay clean and not wreck the rental car; mine was to keep him close, safe and occupied. Over our 12 days, we would stay in six different hotels or motels, attend 11 NA or AA meetings, meet dozens of compassionate people. And dozens of scary ones, too. It was my first opportunity in three years to spend time with him when he wasn’t, as he called it, “messed up.” This was the delightful son I know; the other one could be terrifying.
I write this with his permission. For him and me, our trip was the start of my education on what it really means to be drug-free.
In his new life, my son began regularly attending NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meetings and, when none were scheduled he went to AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings — although alcohol was never his problem. At his insistence, going to a meeting — all new experiences for me — quickly became an organizing focus of our journey. Even more so, they were windows into the local culture.
On our first night, we set up a dinner with his sponsor, a gentle mountain man who had spent some time living off the grid. Then my son eagerly guided me to my first AA encounter, his home-base meeting.
Here, they knew my son and liked him; they welcomed me. People lingered over coffee and cigarettes. Mothers pressed their phone numbers into my hand. I began to learn the protocols, the language, and, yes, the Serenity Prayer. A personal and welcome reception were the hallmarks of every small town meeting we attended — in Moses Lake, Cannon Beach, Hood River, Bonners Ferry. I gave thanks for whoever created the Meeting Finder app.
Day Three we landed in Seattle. Here it was clear new challenges would be in full force. My strategy was to book highly reviewed lodging outside the central parts of the big cities so that my son could go outside and smoke a cigarette without, I hoped, fending off drug peddlers.
Once we checked in near the University of Washington, we navigated our way to a meeting in the Queen Anne neighborhood. Several attendees were costumed for a ’80s punk party. Another, my son explained later, kept leaving to smoke crack. The odor permeated the room. But, here, the stories that were shared were so dark, we both emerged shaken. “Mom, do you want to drive?” my son, clearly agitated, asked as we left.
The next two nights were better. We found an open meeting in the Fremont neighborhood, well-attended by a closely knit group of gays who welcomed us. Still, my kid got angry when he saw a young man pull a bag of drugs out of his pocket and walk out, only to return after a short while.
It was becoming clear that big-city meetings were complicated affairs. In Portland, on Day Seven, we stumbled into our largest meeting yet, with more than 45 attendees. Many of the younger ones stayed just long enough to get their court slips signed before dashing out.
On our homeward swing, the Hood River meeting consisted of a small, supportive group of men. “I think they would have taken you under wing and offered you a job,” I told my son. “I was thinking the same thing,” he said.
Throughout our days, my son was seeing the world with an addict’s laser vision. He narrated every drug deal he saw going down on the crowded street corners we passed. And there were many.
He explained that the playful black Lab at the Bainbridge Island ferry was actually sniffing for drugs. He would walk past open alleys only if he was in the middle of the street. He was the first to notice the man who had just been mugged off Seattle’s Pioneer Square.
When a Seattle panhandler in a wheelchair pleaded for money to buy, not food, but pot — even he shook his head, astonished.
We had scarcely checked into our Portland motel when he returned from smoking a cigarette to tell me that a woman four rooms down had just slipped the manager a $20 and told her kids, “Mommy’s got to go to work.”
When a trio of dudes flashed him a hand sign, he hustled me quickly away. “Gang members,” he said.
What is it about my son that attracts the very thing he is trying to repel? His school counselor advised: “You need to be aware of the energy you give off and try to change it.”
On this trip, his tattoos are hidden under a new snowboarding jacket, but his sideburns are scraggly. He’s up to 170 pounds from last year’s skeletal 120. His penguin shuffle keeps hoisted, just barely, the gravity-defying jeans. Rave-concert pins pepper his hat.
It was on this trip that he told me the tiny tattoo at base of his thumb marks him as a member of a national gang.
He stopped in a Portland tattoo shop to see if it could be converted into something less ominous. “I’m going in a new direction,” he told the artist, who offered a sympathetic $20 alteration. But he couldn’t commit without my OK; we agreed he would carry no cash.
He is not shy, has a wry sense of humor and can talk to anyone. Within a day, he has commandeered my cell phone (he can’t have one yet at his school). He starts the trip text-attached to one girl and ends it Facebook-attached to another. The barista in our Seattle hotel tries to set up a future date.
Days are easy to fill. My son is an amiable traveling companion who takes in the sights. He adores the Seattle Aquarium, is inspired by the Chihuly glass exhibit and is enchanted by the amazing sea life in the low-tide marine gardens of Cannon Beach. He is an inveterate photographer, refreshing his Facebook page with photos of new things.
Nights are more challenging. He doesn’t eat much and drinks vast amounts of coffee. He’s still too jittery to sit through a 90-minute movie. Sleep doesn’t come easily. He asked to go running and, terrified, I relented, counting the minutes until he returns, sweaty, the phone battery drained.
He wants to take up an old hobby, wire-wrapping jewelry, so we stopped in a couple of bead shops for supplies to keep him occupied at night.
In Seattle, we tried a comedy club, but we had to slip quickly past the group smoking pot out front. When the show ended, we headed to our car, two blocks away. As we tried to pass a small group of guys on the corner, one tried to block our path and asked for money. His buddy then started following us. We are going to be mugged, I realized. When he was three feet behind us, I impulsively (and inexplicably) turned and yelled “Hey, honey!” as though hailing a friend behind him. The guy fled. My son, who had gone ahead, raced back. We quickly sought refuge in our car.
Four days later, we returned from dinner to find our motel blocked by a police barricade. There had been a gang shooting in the neighborhood, one of several such shootings in Portland that year. My son hung out with the police officers as helicopters clattered overhead and arrests were made. We hunkered down and fled the next morning.
Back at his school at last, we stopped in the local hamburger restaurant, where he learned he had landed a part-time job. So, with fingers crossed, he embarked on a new journey knowing nothing was going to be easy.
Jan Schaffer is founder of J-Lab, which funded Midcentury/Modern. A year later, her son is still clean.
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