Clean

Growing up, my mother only made a fuss about cleanliness when we were expecting company. Two days before the visit, the detox would begin. No unsuspecting speck of dust, no petty particulate of grit, grease or dirt. No surface was safe from the purge. Clean floors. Clean toilets. Clean tables. Clean counters, clean dishes, clean clothes. Everything had to be perfect. Every dresser, clean from dust. Every nightstand, clean from excess clutter. Every step was vacuumed. Every grain of the hardwood floor was mopped. Not even the ever-elusive stray dog hair would be left behind.  

“Now clean your rooms,” my mother would say to my siblings and me. 

We would explain that no one would be going into our rooms anyways, to which she always retorted “I don’t care. I still want them clean.” 

* 

The first time I had to get clean was my junior year of high school. I had just been expelled for stealing a few hundred dollars from freshman gym lockers to fuel my drug habits. I was looking at charges of petty theft and third degree burglary, so to have them expunged I was granted probation and forced into the JOINS program—that’s Juvenile Offenders In Need of Supervision. Most of the cash I stole went to weed and cigarettes, but I was also regularly drinking whole bottles of NyQuil for the DXM high, and huffing computer duster like it was nitrous oxide. For three months, the program met once a week for a group session and random drug tests. If I pissed clean and made it through the program, I would have all my charges expunged. The standard urine screenings they gave us usually only tested for THC, methamphetamine and amphetamines, barbiturates, benzos, MDMA and common MDMA analogs, as well as cocaine and opiates. Luckily, the only thing they could test for that I was doing at the time was weed. But there was no way I was gonna stop getting high. I started taking lots of acid and mushrooms. I started smoking a legal synthetic cannabinoid called spice. I wasn’t old enough to buy it, but my friend was. We’ll call him Brandon. Because of his heroin addiction, Brandon had been in and out of drug court and rehabs for most of his teenage years. He would buy the spice for me, and in exchange I would drive him to the methadone clinic. I got him started on duster, and we snorted ketamine and did suboxone together too. Sometimes he would give me some of his methadone, just a sip the size of a bottle cap and I would be nodding out and puking the rest of the day. As long as I could piss “clean” and still get high, I didn’t care what went into my body.  

By the time I was two months into JOINS, the program director became suspicious. We’ll call her Laura. Laura remembered every person who came through her program, she took notes on who their friends were, and she talked to everyone she could to get the scoop. She warned me that she was going to start testing me for spice. Somehow, she found out that I was hanging out with Brandon. She said he was going to get me into trouble. She was right.  

Brandon and I did a lot of stealing to get by and get around. Late at night, we stole gas from open garages, found pay first gas stations and drove off after pumping, things like that. You would think I would have learned my lesson about stealing after getting expelled, but I was more concerned with learning how to not get caught. Thing is, that’s exactly what happened. Soon enough, we got caught trying to steal a can of gas from a barn on the side of Falls road. When we tried to leave with the gas, there was a car with the lights on sitting behind mine. We hid in a bush and waited with heavy breath until the car was gone. Someone got my license plate number and a few days later, two cops showed up at my door asking questions. Now I faced another charge of third degree burglary plus trespassing, but the owners of the barn dropped the charges and said nothing was missing. After that, I cut Brandon off. We stopped hanging out, and the next week Laura tested me for buprenorphine, the active chemical in suboxone. She said she was surprised that I passed. I told her honestly, that this was the first time I had actually been clean and sober throughout the whole program. What I didn’t tell her was that this was the first time I had been sober for more than a day since I was fourteen.

*

When my mother would tell me to clean my room, I would sweep all my dirty clothes under my bed and tell her I was done. This worked a few times, but she caught on. When she started looking under my bed, I got craftier. I would pick up all the clothes from my floor, both dirty and clean, and dump them in the mud room. It wasn’t long before this stopped working too.  

My dad would say “There’s no way all of these clothes are dirty.” Then I would have to smell every single shirt, sock, and pair of pants, check them for spots and sort them accordingly. My room seemed clean, but it wasn’t. 

* 

The second time I had to get clean was a few years and many bad drug decisions after the JOINS program. I was sick, shaking with heroin withdrawal, sweating and constipated. I would have started puking soon if I didn’t have suboxone to help ease the withdrawal. I took small doses of suboxone and after about two weeks, I weened myself off. Once I was off the suboxone, I relapsed. Then I got clean. Then I relapsed. Then I got clean again, and then, no surprise, I relapsed again. This is a common pattern for addicts. NA literature states that relapse is a part of the process and that the increasing lengths of clean time in between relapses shows progress.  

Everyone I’ve ever met at an NA meeting has the same story. Same story, different specifics. I started using, I couldn’t stop, I didn’t want to stop, rock bottom, now I’m here. Most of us have lived through this story more than once, and some live through it every time they relapse. Some people only consider a relapse using their drug of choice. Some consider using any substance to be crossing the line. In recovery, you’ll meet a lot of people who have very different definitions of clean. For some people, alcohol or weed is okay. Some people won’t even use Tylenol. But almost everyone vapes, smokes cigarettes and drinks coffee.  

This is when I learned that there’s a difference between clean and sober. You can be clean from your drug of choice and not be living sober if you’re still using something else. Some people think sober is only for alcoholics, but in NA, alcohol is just another drug. Using any substance can become a slippery slope. If you’re not moving away from drugs, you’re moving toward them.  

When I said I was clean, I meant “clean from coke and dope.” But I still smoked weed. I thought smoking weed kept me safe. It satisfied an urge and leveled my mood. If I ever felt like I wanted to relapse on cocaine or heroin, I smoked a couple fat bongs. The only two places I could think of driving to after that were Burger King and back to my couch.  

* 

Every few months my mother would lock my siblings and me in our rooms. In addition to cleaning our clothes from the floor, we had to make our beds, vacuum every carpet fiber, dust every wooden surface, organize our closets and straighten our shelves. We weren’t allowed to come out until she was satisfied, by which point we were tuckered. We didn’t understand why we had to clean our rooms. “Because I said so,” was the only reason we ever got. Not even a week later, our rooms would once again be “atrocious.” That was the word she always used. 

* 

The third time I had to get clean was from hepatitis-C. I was one year clean from coke and dope, but I was still smoking weed and drinking too much. I was in an open relationship with my girlfriend at the time and we were both seeing other people, so I decided to get an STD screening just to be safe. I went to planned parenthood and they told me I had hepatitis-C, which I must have contracted sometime while shooting up. I was crushed by this blow. My girlfriend dumped me when I told her, but it got worse. The gastroenterologist said that I could be cured over a course of eight weeks with a new pill called Harvoni. The worst was that I couldn’t smoke or drink anymore. Alcohol and hep-C is the quickest way to kill your liver, and I had to stop smoking weed long enough to piss clean so the insurance company would approve my treatment.  

This was the hardest few months of my life. I wanted to smoke so badly, but to get clean from hep-C, I had to stay clean. Clean, clean. Not just “from coke and dope clean.” No weed meant I had to face all my depression. Facing all my depression meant I wanted to relapse worse than ever before. I fought myself not to do the one thing that could fuck up this treatment. But I cracked. I got some coke from a friend. It wasn’t very strong, and I don’t know what he cut it with, but when I shot up, something weird happened. I stayed up all night, writing and drawing between shots, and by morning my liver had swollen to the size of a baseball. I iced it for a while and later that week, when the doctor asked if I had still been staying clean, I lied. He said my white blood cell levels were healthy and my viral load was back at zero. My body was showing no signs of the disease. I don’t know how, but I was clean.  

I never told him about my relapse.  

** 

It was almost Christmas, which meant my grandparents would be coming over for dinner and the house had to be spotless. Spick and span was my dad’s catchphrase. Our house became the perfect model of a Mr. Clean magic eraser commercial set.  

Mr. Clean. Proctor and Gamble’s perfect, shiny bald-headed mascot. The guy who looks like he could be Rosie the Riveter’s husband. The face on the bright yellow jug of Mr. Clean antibacterial cleaner with summer citrus—I’m nothing like him—but oh, if only I could have drunk a bottle of that stuff. I would have stayed clean for sure.  

If cleanliness is next to Godliness, Mr. Clean must be Jesus. 

* 

The fourth time I had to get clean was the final time. I was home in Baltimore for the summer. I was three years clean from heroin, but I had fallen into a deep depression and was up late looking to relapse. Lucky me, I couldn’t find any dope. But I found some crack instead, and I stayed up all night smoking it. I hated myself for the next week. I did coke a few more times while out at bars with friends, I bought my own bag, and the next night I stayed in to shoot it all up.  

A few days later I took a long hard look at myself in the mirror. Only I didn’t see myself. I saw someone else—someone I used to be. I saw someone weak. A man who gave into his demons. A man who let his negativity fester, wallowed in self-pity and played the victim to his own crime. He wore my face—but he wasn’t me—not the real me—not anymore. I wondered what my mom would think if she could see me that way, and I decided I’d had enough. There was no way I could go back to that life. I told myself that this wasn’t the path I wanted to take. I knew where this road was headed. I came clean to myself. I confessed that I had a problem and that I needed to change. This was the first time I decided on my own to really get clean. Clean, clean.  

Maybe being sober is the only way, I thought. Maybe I could truly find happiness. 

* 

It was that time of year again. My mom locked me in my room.  “You’re not coming out until it’s clean,” she said. 

My room was a pigsty. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So, might as well take my time, I thought. I turned on the TV. I threw my clothes in a pile. I would take care of that later. For the moment, sorting through my desk, my shelves and my nightstand, I let myself become distracted. Looking through old notebooks, bad doodles and odd scribblings, anything was more interesting than dusting and vacuuming. I came across an old song I wrote for an ex-girlfriend when I was thirteen. The lyrics were so bad. Forgettable, burn it from the back of my mind, bad. But this memory now reminds me of a happier, simpler time. Before I ever tried drugs. When I hardly even knew what weed was. A time when I was clean, pure, innocent. That’s the funny thing about cleaning, you never know what you might find. 

* 

The thing I learned at NA meetings is that recovery is more than just getting clean from drugs. Recovery is becoming a better person, its cleaning up the messes we’ve made by making amends with the people we’ve hurt and accepting the past so we can grow. At this point, I’ve gotten my body clean, from both drugs and disease. I’ve started to clean up the mess of my past. I’ve started to come clean to myself and others about the mistakes I’ve made and the wrong I’ve done. The one thing that may never be clean though, is my conscience.  

Some write to remember; some write to forget. I write to dull the noise in the back of my skull, the incessant reminder of bad decisions gone one step too far, the voice that never lets me forget how badly I hurt those around me with my own selfish mistakes. I guess I have this crazy thought like somehow, if I write enough, I can turn it off. Maybe if I can trap that voice on the page, then I can own my experience and my past will no longer control me. Maybe it’s not crazy, maybe it’s just hopeful. But maybe those are sometimes the same thing. Just like with bravery and stupidity, the fine line isn’t always clear. But one thing is certain; cleaning up after addiction is more than just getting clean from drugs, and it requires tough work that takes a little of both hopefulness and craziness. It might take a little bravery and stupidity too.  

I was a heroin addict, the gold standard of addiction. I knew what I was doing. I just didn’t care. Every decision I made was conscious. Corrupted by an insatiable drive maybe, but I was still aware. Now I can never forget. How horrible it was, how wrong it was. The shame I feel is a constant reminder, and I have to face it whether I want to or not. But maybe that’s the one advantage of not being able to forget. Because of that awareness, I have the chance to own my story. I get to write the ending.  

** 

“Are you sure you don’t want to come up and see it?” I asked my mom. She had come down from Baltimore to visit me in South Carolina on my twenty-fourth birthday. I cleaned my whole apartment in anticipation. “I think you’ll be impressed,” I said. “I used the Windex you bought me. The scrubbing bubbles. I even vacuumed.”  

She agreed and we walked up the stairs to the fourth floor. When we got inside, she smiled wide. “Wow,” she said as she looked around. “Now let’s see if you can keep it this way.”