A Street Junky’s Nightmare Before Christmas:
Broke & Breakfast With The Mob

Continuing reading from the
Arise Recovery Coaching Addiction Blog

John Makohen
Arise Recovery Coaching in NYC

Without prior knowledge, preparation, or forethought, these 3 events instigated cataclysmic change.

Recovery snuck up on me. 

1 – A taste of recovery

Before I escaped back to the nomadic life of trekking New York City’s streets for dope and coke, I tasted the sweetness of living life in recovery. 

I also had a puny plan for recovery, but it worked for 6 years until a table saw ripped through my hand. 

Like all events, the accident could’ve gone two ways. I could have reached out for support from the recovery community or said fuck it and start getting high. 

I was not so wise and blinded by hubris. I refused to lean into the recovery community. I would go it alone.  At the time, recovery meant distraction and exhaustive. I substituted work for dope. 

My injury forced me to sit quietly with myself. I had not yet learned how to be my best friend, so the demons of my past mixed with the old familiar scene of morphine being worked into my vein created intense cravings.

I never picked up the phone, so my ego defeated me.

Several weeks after the surgeries to repair my hand, I stepped onto the road of active use. First alcohol and marijuana, then Vicodin and cocaine, eventually methadone pills, but we all know what happens when the pills run out. It’s inevitable the pills WILL run out, but heroin is always a phone call away. Once I released the dope into my veins, I couldn’t rear back on the reigns. I was off to the races. 

In a little more than a year, I was back on the streets of New York City drinking methadone to chase the dope-sickness away and whoring, boosting, or begging for my next fix.

But 

A seed was planted

No matter how hopeless and desperate life became, I knew I could live without heroin or other drugs. I did in county jail, prison, during parole, and for 3 years without supervision. And that shit meant something. It planted the seed that recovery is possible. The seed created hope for something better. It didn’t matter how faint the glimmer was. It was there. 

Download a FREE workbook to identify your high-risk situations and triggers that will blindside your recovery goals by creating the urge to use heroin or other drugs.

2 – Harm reduction

I returned to the streets of NYC to get on a methadone maintenance treatment program.

Not to get sober, but to hold off the demon dope-sickness. If you hustled, you could get on methadone maintenance within 24 hours.

One morning I set out to get on a program, so I landed at LESC. I made it to the assessment by 8:00 AM. It took about 3 hours to complete the biopsychosocial.

It took brutal honesty, but it was easy because I felt safe, not judged. I could say anything I wanted and not worry about a condescending look or lecture.

After the assessment, I was given an appointment card to provide blood and urine samples. If I returned by 9:00 AM the next morning with the card signed, I could get medicated. Without a guarantee to make money, dope-sickness loomed over me, si I got the blood work done and was medicated 24 hours later. 

During my 6 year retreat from street junky life, needle exchange programs sprouted throughout the city, so using clean kits and new sterile syringes each time I fixed was guaranteed.

Another new element began to pop-up in various locations throughout Manhattan. Not only did several needle exchange programs offer the use of the restroom to inject heroin or drugs safely, but drop-in centers and other community organizations also began to provide safe, monitored spaces for drug injection.

Safe injection sites didn’t only offer safety and reduce harm, but these organizations worked to shatter stigma, especially self-stigma and shame.

3. Shattering stigma

Do you know what it is like to use a public restroom to shoot up a speedball? 

When I was in getting high, I didn’t think it bothered me, but it did.

The stigma and shame crippled me. 

It didn’t matter how quick I fixed. I had to remove layers of clothes, work up the shot, bounce of the walls from the coke, and wait for the dope to wash over me with the courage to walk out the fucking door.  It’s humiliating walking facing a crowd of angry tourists holding their insides in, especially when the cocaine psychosis is riding at full peak. It sucked. My paranoia mixed with my homeless chic convinced me everyone knew what the fuck I was doing in the toilet.

My appearance concerned me. I did my best to fit in with the masses, but some things don’t wash off. I told myself stigma didn’t bother me. Ha, I also believed I looked good weighing 119 pounds, face sunken in, and eyes pinned.

It’s frustrating trying to warm up your vein so it will pop with people pounding on the restroom door.

Knock, knock, knock -“Hurry up, junky,” someone chants. Another voice chimes in with, “There’s nothing worse than a homeless junky using the toilet before you.” “Fix-up somewhere else, dirtbag!”

Forever grateful for all those who fight to reduce the harm we are blind too!

I’m grateful for those who took it upon themselves to offer us homeless New Yorkers safe places to shoot heroin and other drugs. Their efforts helped me overcome self-stigma and shame. It was a game-changer knowing there was a safe place to go, to not be judged, and where people on the other side of the door cared for my wellbeing.

Workers monitored the time spent in the bathroom, not because other kids need to fix-up, but to make sure you were breathing, safe, alive. 

I always had clean kits and sterile syringes when I used the drop-ins toilets to fix.

The most crucial benefit of safe injection sites was knowing I didn’t have to walk out of the restroom into a sea of judgmental faces looking back at me in anger. 

A safe place to shoot drugs started to break down the wall of self-consciousness, self-hate, and to have conversations with recovery advocates not pushing in-patient treatment down my throat.

It made all the difference in the world for me to exit a restroom and see peers hanging around, smiling, chatting, staying warm while waiting to fix. These people fed us, gave us toiletries, laundry services, Hep C testing… We wanted to show up and escape the reality of life on the streets. 

You might fear safe injection sites, but it’s unwarranted fear. Recovery sneaks up on you in safe injection sites.

I have shot dope in many places, literally wherever I wanted, a public toilet, a park bench, on a set of church steps, subway cars, hospitals, while walking down the street and most of these times, I was alone with no one to help me in the event of an overdose.

A safe-injection site means you, your son, daughter, or loved one will stay alive in the event of an accidental overdose.

Having a chance to find recovery another day is proof enough to claim safe-injection sites work.

Harm reduction works. 

It screams you’re worthy of love, support, and dignity. 

The folks who work harm reduction for little to no pay go to work each day and fight society’s ignorance, stigma, and fear of addiction. 

Harm reduction saved my life. It kept me alive long enough for the seed of recovery planted long ago to grow.

Embrace harm reduction today. 

Recovery sneaks up on you.

This week I spent a fantastic week with my recovery community at THE National Recovery Conference: MPRC 2019. During his closing, recovery historian and advocate William White, spoke about recovery sneaking up on you. When he said this, my ears perked up. It is true. The last monkey wrench diverting my plan of dying with a needle in my arm, on the streets of New York City was recovery – getting in my way.

I’ve been working on a memoir for quite some time. Every time I think I’m on THE final edit, I found a significant part missing.

How I Got Sober?

I found it’s easy to recollect all the stories from my past, but I could never put my finger on when the change happened. On the day I said fuck it, I don’t want to get high today.

I’ve journaled hour after hour reflecting on how I got sober. I have recently found that no matter how amazing my life has become, recovery was never my intended outcome.

When I got on methadone, I didn’t try to facilitate healing. Methadone meant survival. Like all with heroin use disorders, I feared and hated dope-sickness.

Even though I know the sickness comes in the morning, I can’t save a wake-up. I can’t rest knowing I have a 5 bag shot sitting around. Methadone kept me from being scared to wake up.

But recovery, hell I don’t know – it just happened.

After many months of journaling, self-reflection, and meditation, I can say it was many small changes that sparked one significant change. And then to paraphrase William White, the momentum kicked-in and great shit started happening.

In part, my previous taste of engaging with others from the recovery community helped.

Ultimately,  the efforts, support, and compassion of volunteers advocating for harm reduction shattered my self-stigma and shame.

I started defeating my self-limiting beliefs, disputing negative self-talk, and stopped spending all of my time with street junkies seeking the best dope in NYC 5 boroughs.

It was a gradual process.

Instead of spending all of my time hustling to shoot drugs, I only did one big speedball at the end of the day. My toxicology reports from my PG (methadone program) tell the story:

• Toxicity levels decreased,
• Questionable toxicology reports ended,
• Engaging individual briefs became the norm.

One morning, my counselor told me, during a session that I had not screened positive for any illicit drugs in 3 weeks. I laughed and didn’t believe him.

*Sidenote: In recovery, you WILL learn how to take a compliment.

He went on to tell me how excited he was to see I had broken my previous 7-day record by 14 days and counting. He let me see the screen of recent toxicology reports, and I couldn’t remember the last time I shot drugs. As soon as I left, I celebrated the best way I knew how, I copped a bundle of dope, a gram of coke, and got gone.

However, a new seed was planted, and the time between my shots of heroin and cocaine grew further apart, and now I can say through the help of so many others I have had a system for recovery for 8 years.

Today I understand recovery is a process and not a destination, and I am enjoying the ride.

Yes, indeed, Mr. William White, recovery WILL sneak up on you, especially with multiple pathways guiding the way.

What is your plan for recovery today?

You are in recovery when you say you are.
Many times you don’t know when your change was initiated.
It might have been a passing thought.
A night when you felt death was knocking at your door.
Maybe when you were watching a loved one dying, pleading for the Narcan to work, hoping one more blast will be enough to work magic and reverse the accidental overdose. Ugh, 3 hits of Narcan in each nostril and still no breath. Hopefully, the fourth time is the one.

It might have happened one night when you begged your higher power to let you find the money to cop a bundle of dope, take the sickness away, and you promised to stop in the morning.

Or maybe you are like me, and recovery just snuck up on you and bit you in the ass. You didn’t want it, but now you have it, and you’re not going to let it go.
Only you know when your changes started to take place.

Recovery sneaks up on you

Recovery sneaks up on you when you stop forcing yourself to conform to what others believe recovery means and start living life in alignment with your definition of recovery.

Recovery sneaks up on you when you stop listening to what others feel is best for you and start leaning into those who want to help you get what you desire and deserve.

Recovery sneaks up on you when you start reducing the harm and consequences of your substance use.

Recovery sneaks up on you when you start learning to love, trust and value yourself and others. When you shatter how stigma, especially self-stigma block your path to happiness and fulfillment.

Arise recovery coaching in NYC wants to guide your path into a life (of your definition) of long-term recovery.

What makes Arise recovery coaching in NYC different from traditional treatment is:

• You’re in recovery when you say you are.
• Arise Recovery Coaching is an outcome-based coaching system.
• You decide the outcomes you wish to achieve, and we will navigate you towards those goals.
• I will hold you accountable to your goals.
• Support and advocate for your process of change.
• Your uniqueness and individuality will be your guiding light in recovery.

I look forward to the chance to speak with you about reducing harm from your substance use, what recovery means to you, and how we can work together and find a place of happiness and fulfillment for you to live in and grow.

In his book, The 4 Hour Body, writer Tim Ferris describes a Harajuku Moment by retelling the story of CTO, of InfoEther Chad Fowler. Ferris explains that while Fowler was vacationing in Japan, he spent an afternoon in Harajuku. While he was shopping, he hoped to find some clothing for himself, but everything Fowler was interested in didn’t appeal to him because he was overweight. He told his friend, “For me, it doesn’t matter what I wear; I’m not going to look good anyway.”

[ctt template=”5″ link=”ZSP04″ via=”yes” ]Ferris explains that at this moment when Fowler expressed his dissatisfaction with his weight out loud he had his Harajuku Moment.[/ctt]

Events leading to my Harajuku Moment

After the fact which finally led to my sinking a needle full of heroin deep into my veins, I ended up back on the streets of NYC, begging to support my dope and coke habit, living in a squat, filled with regret, and believing I was better off dead.

After the initial pinprick, it took a little than 6-months to burn through 10’s of thousands of dollars. Getting high on heroin made me feel safe, secure, and invincible. For me, it’s similar to swimming in the security of my mother’s womb.  Of course, I’m not sure this is what it feels like to be a fetus, but for me, the time before my birth had to be much better than the life I fell into when I escaped from this bubble.

Nothing quite compares to that feeling of being surrounded in total warmth and safety- the problem is dope stops recreating this feeling. Instead, my days are spent trying to reach this high. But I never get there.

If you have a dope habit, you know what I mean. You understand the feeling and frustration. You reach the door to nirvana but never have the key. It never ends. Eventually, my frustration turns to hopelessness and regret. When I get to this place in my addiction, death seems much more welcoming.

[ctt template=”5″ link=”p2V6Q” via=”yes” ]When hopelessness sets in, I turn up my drive to stay gone.� I cannot find a reason to stop the swirl, nor do I look for one.[/ctt]

The swirl is my goal.

My daily routine, quite simply it is all I have left to live and die for. For me, the only way to reach the point where change is likely is through being enlightened or sickened by the way I  have chosen to live my life. However, this was not my ‘Harajuku Moment.”

The Bloomberg Administration- Ward’s Island- Bronx Warrior and Escape from New York in Real Time

One winter morning, I was sleeping in the ‘F-Train” subway station on 63rd Street. It had to be -20 with the windchill. But this station is buried deep underground. It’s possibly one of the deepest subway stations in NYC. The tiles are fiery orange. It always felt like walking into the depths of hell.

Two cops woke me rudely woke me up. They scooped me up and brought me to a nearby homeless shelter. It was freezing outside, so I played their game and went inside the homeless shelter. Any other time I would turn around and walk back into the streets the moment the police drove away. The cold was too much for me to handle, so I went inside.

Screening and Assessment

Once inside, I was asked a series of questions, screened, and assessed. After the assessment, the intake person informed me that I had to transfer to Ward’s Island. On the island, a new state of the art homeless shelter awaited me. The rumors concerning Ward’s Island defined it like a gladiator academy. It wasn’t a shelter providing care and concern. It was quite the opposite. Wards Island Homeless Shelter was a community of despair, drugs, and decompensation. My over imaginative mind immediately connected this shelter to the futuristic movie settings of Bronx Warrior and Escape from New York.

In these movies, boroughs of New York City have been evacuated and serve as prison industrial complexes. In Escape for New York, the viewer gets to witness the Island of Manhattan as a futuristic -Anything goes-(except escaping) maximum security prison. Ward’s Island is where the modern world meets the future. Instead of working as an agent for change society’s idea for reform is to create a world where hopelessness, savage-like living, drug addiction, crime, gang affiliation, and disease breed far from the eye of the public.

Instead, I would rather go back to Shock Camp– pretending I was a Marine, instead of living on Ward’s Island- a gladiator academy posing as a homeless shelter.

The woman doing my assessment further explained that I was clinically depressed, had a severe substance use disorder, and was chronically homeless. In the morning my next stop would be Ward’s Island. On Ward’s Island, I would get the help I needed. Ward’s Island didn’t sound like a place where healing can begin. It seemed more like Cold Springs Harbor, Alcatraz, or any other hospital for those deemed unfit to commune with the public.

Chronic homelessness- What the fuck was this diagnosis?

She went on to explain that due to my being homeless for more than one -third of my life, it was doubtful that I could ever function in a ‘normal” living situation.  She told me that I was doomed to a life of living on the streets, sleeping on cardboard, and begging. I doubted I’d ever would aspire to much more than a life of squatting, begging, and shooting drugs.

[ctt template=”5″ link=”T0apy” via=”yes” ]Who the fuck was she to tell me what I could and couldn’t do? I knew the cure for my depression, homelessness, and severe SUD- Stop shooting heroin and cocaine.[/ctt]

It was that simple.

The Bloomberg Administration felt that there wasn’t any hope for someone like me. And they weren’t pretending that there was hope.

She would send me to Ward’s Island where I could get the help I needed. I looked up at her and said-” And not be an eyesore.  Or a disappointment to New Disneyland.” The vision for Manhattan. Remove all elements and character that make NYC, NYC. I asked her how she slept at night knowing that she was responsible for destroying the one thing – HOPE, which keeps so many homeless persons living on the streets of NYC willing to wake up and make it through one more day?

My Harajuku Moment

I stood up. I grabbed my clothes and headed for the door. The workers told me that I had two choices – Wards Island or Rikers. I asked on what charge. I advised them to get out of my way because there was no need for me to get violent and stupid. It was my life, and if I chose to live it on the streets without help, I would.

I walked back into the cold. Found a doorway to duck into and fixed up my morning wake up. The dope warmed me up a bit, but not enough. I walked to an all-night McDonalds went inside, cracked open my journal, and started writing.

I was pissed off.

Angry!  

Who was she to tell me that I didn’t have a chance?

I would show them-My anger peaked. It caused me to have a Harajuku Moment. I didn’t get sober immediately, nor did I attempt too. Several times over the next few months, dragging me back into shelters for assessment and placement for life on Ward’s Island became a regular game, the police, and I played.

Each time- I was able to walk out. Every time a patrolman stopped by my panhandling spot on Broadway and Pine, he’d ask my name and scribble it his little black book. The words, Chronic homelessness, defined me.

I was not about to live life in a shelter on Ward’s Island without a fight.

I would change and show these people how they perpetuate the problem. Their stigma was not about to crush me. I started to create a plan.

What is your Harajuku Moment?

If you have kicked, dope-what was your Harajuku Moment? If you are still living life on the streets- stay safe, hydrated, and keep your eyes open for you Harajuku Moment. Most importantly-don’t let someone stigmatize you into believing that you haven’t any hope. That’s bullshit. There is always hope.