Pick an Institution

Recovery Journal 

February 17th, 2019

For me, living in a homeless shelter in a smallish American town is a hybrid between normal life and bedlam. It is akin, I am told by those here who know from personal experience, to living in military barracks, and akin in even more ways to life in prison. 

There is greater turnover here than at the federal correctional facility at the other end of Lompoc, California. And here, there are children, always crying, whining, delightful. They scurry beneath tables and around the rows of metal bunk beds, their hands and faces colored with magic marker or jam, their hair unkempt and damp from rain and vigorous jumping and whirling and twirling on the derelict playground outside the shelter’s main building. The older children go off to school each morning and reappear late in the afternoon. The younger ones are pushed around on strollers or hiked on hips or kept in cribs in the family apartments across from the shelter’s main hall. I stay in the main hall with the men who fifty years ago were known as “winos” and the women who, during the same era, were called “fallen.”

Lompoc is on the Central California coast, an hour north of glamorous Santa Barbara. It’s known as the City of Flowers and Arts. Once the flower seed capital of the world, it’s home to many small wineries. But now that it’s legal, marijuana is exploding as the region’s crop of choice. And three notable institutions, with interests in drugs and outer space, border the flat, sleepy town. 

There’s Vandenberg Air Force Special Command base, part of the United States Space force. Regular launches include a recent send-up of a new US spy satellite. 

Nearby is a low-security Federal Correctional Institution, which holds non-violent drug offenders and white collar criminals. Lompoc prison is notable for a 1980 escape by a convicted spy who sold US satellite information to the Soviets. The story was the basis for the movie Falcon and the Snowman. The prison currently holds a former Boeing engineer who sold classified US Space Shuttle and Delta IV rocket secrets to the Chinese. 

And then, here on the far end of town across the Santa Ynez river, is the Bridgehouse homeless shelter where I stay. At any given time, the shelter is home to a hundred or more men, women and children. It’s a “dry” shelter, meaning we’re given regular, random drug tests. A fair number of the residents have been through the US corrections system. There are Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings held in the shelter on various nights of the week. These meetings are well-attended. In addition, since I got here, I trudge or bicycle or catch rides with my fellow Bridgehouse residents to recovery meetings at several dingy but cozy storefront sites in town. 

Today, I rode a borrowed bike to two meetings in Lompoc, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Both were attended by grizzled, plain-dressed men (no fallen women today) with rutted, ruddied completions but good jokes to tell. The weather was dismal. The coffee was hot, sweet and lousy. And there was a palpable feeling of God in both of the rooms. I got drenched riding to the first meeting and walked in sputtering and late, my shoes squishing and noisy as I crossed the chipped tile floor and took a seat along the back wall. 

We went around the room and each spoke for a few minutes. We were addressed by name. Four weeks into small-town meetings, everybody knows my name. Most of them know my story. I don’t fit it, except yes I do. Based on my blessings and my flaws, which are equivalent to every other single person in attendance.

After my second meeting, it was twilight, and I sat a while on the porch making telephone calls and looking out at the rolling hills of Mission Valley. It was chilly and, somehow, both raining and sunny. And the moon was out. The collision of unlikely weather and celestial bodies was a metaphor, I decided, for Lompoc and my experience of it.

Then it was time for church, where soup and bread are served, and Pastor Brian gave a sermon on how we’re all just here for a short time, in God’s long view of things, and how there’s comfort to be taken in that.

Cherry-flavored gob smack in the kisser

Things move forward slowly. Things move forward. Things move. Things.

Life is a game of wack a mole. Life is also beautiful and, basically, a hug from the universe. A cherry-flavored gob smack in kisser. 

Life is scary and huge and scary in its hugeness and scary in the way it threatens to swallow you up whole and spit you out, drowned. Only with more gravity, both physically and in a poetic way, the kind that makes you heavy all over and all-over heavy. None of the lightness of being underwater. Just the gasping and flailing. And chlorine. I imagine chlorine, even in the ocean. They say you can drown in a cup of water. That’s reassuring--there's always at least that much, isn't there?

This is Lompoc, California, with head winds in both directions. Lompoc, in which every trip is uphill both ways, and even on sunny days, it’s cloudy. This is a dead town. I died and ended up here and I’m trying to be reborn here and that's quite a process. I feel as if I’ve accomplished little of significance today, and right now I don’t have the luxury of days where I, little, don't accomplish a significant amount of things of significance. Time flies by and by the time I notice, it’s already passed. Also, it crawls at a drunken slug’s pace. I do a lot of grumbling. Here and in person. I do a lot of sleeping, mostly in person, but sometimes by just not being here. I do a lot of aching. Which is an actual place. The pastor tells me aching is near Fresno. Aching is my middle name. But no, it's not. Hey, fella is my middle name. 

Benjamin is my first name. I’m the youngest son of my father’s favorite wife, this he used to brag, as a joke, in passing or at parties. Parties were passing and then passed. He was drunk at the parties, parties mostly in French and involving coq au vin, or vin au fin. And then he was sober and there weren’t any more parties, mostly just church and reading things silently or out loud, and plaid shirts and yellowing teeth and unkempt hair and the smell of old man.

And now he is dead. But I’m still the youngest son of his favorite wife, who is also dead. I wish I was dead-sure of this, both their both being dead and his favoritism of her. I’m all for favoritism, so long as I or someone I like is favorite. I don’t actually care much about the significance of my mother being his favorite wife because she was his only wife and thus winner by default, at least in the day to day once the past parties had passed. She told me on the occasion of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, you better love the person you marry because there are going to be times you don’t like them very much. 

I wish I was dead-sure my parents are both dead, which of course they are but not if you ask me at two in the morning practically every goddamned night when I dream them alive, vivid and useless. They won’t sink to the bottom. They are floaters, her especially. The Unsinkable Molly Brown, five foot two, eyes of blue. Pale blue eyes that I got from her, eyes that refuse to close and finally rest, for decency’s sakes. Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you tired of being somewhere between sixty and eight years old and doing the same old same old, night after night after night after night? I want to let you go although, apparently, no I don’t. I keep you floating, not rotting but not fresh. Fresh in my mind, but useless. 

You died in a proper manner, with an appropriate measure of pomp and circumstance (everyone dies with same amount of circumstance, appropriate or not.) I told you goodbye before you died and afterward, too. I stood in tight shoes and a necktie at your memorial and read bits of poetry with my sisters and everybody cried; I cried, too, being a part of “everybody” despite my frequent aspirations otherwise. And I held your ashes in my hands, your actual ashes in my actual hands. 

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. But then we all get up, if you're me, against all reason and sometimes against the laws of decency. Dead people should have the decency to stay fallen, and the dead in each of us living people should have the decency not to get churlish and swirl like leaves around our heads, a head wind in both directions, uphill each way. But that’s Lompoc for you. And that’s everywhere for you. And that’s dead people. And that’s living people. 

And that’s one part of the hug from the universe. And that’s one part of the cherry-flavored gob smack in the kisser.   And I guess I’ll take it.

Quaking

I’ve been to hell and back. Today I’ve been to CVS and back, an hour roundtrip in freezing weather on a county highway on a rickety bicycle that isn’t mine. I got antibiotics I needed but now I’m penniless. Physically and mentally, I’m broke as a sapling after a good windstorm but I ain’t a sapling, I’m an old oak tree and you can’t teach an old oak tree new tricks except, holy shit, yes you can. Turns out. This one is learning all sorts of things. 

When true simplicity is gained 

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed

To turn, to turn will be our delight 

’til by turning, turning we come round right.

What I have learned (among several things, let’s pick one) is that I can bend. And turn. And, in turn, I can bend and when it’s my turn to bend, I can. Until I come round right. Or at least that’s the plan. Hopefully I’ll have learned some new tricks along the way. Like humility. Like what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Like God will provide. 

“Provide what?” I shout at the windstorm and give God the bird. And God says nothing. I wait a while, shaking my middle finger at the sky and holler like this is going to break something loose and it’s going to rain down explanation. And God still says nothing. 

But I do feel a little better. Because, after all, God and I are talking. Well, I’m talking. With my up-stretched arm, I mean. So I wait. And God doesn’t say anything. It’s damned quiet. 

And then I realize that I’m breathing. And I start to listen to my breathing, ugly and ragged. And then I realize that God is talking after all. My breathing is the word of God, kinda sorta. My breathing is the will of God, see, and that’s his funny way of talking. And that’s the whole point of all of this. I breathe therefore I am. And I bow and I bend and I shan’t be ashamed. And the bowing and bending is God talking, too. Loud.

And then, of course, I burst out crying because I’m a sap like that. Blame it on my father. He taught me to cry by example. And to hug by example. And to be an addict by example. The branch doesn’t fall far from the oak tree. 

I should add that after my dad quit drinking, he became a Quaker. To bow and to bend and shake like a leaf. Call it spiritual delirium tremens. He died of pancreatic cancer from the drinking. He got the cancer twenty years after he quit. And a decade after he became a Quaker. 

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. But sometimes it just kills us. I should also add that my father died happy, peacefully, surrounded by those who loved him. 

To turn, to turn shall be our delight

’til by turning, turning we come round right.