Sandy, the girl who had, perhaps unwisely, let me borrow her newly purchased Ford Escort, was completely pissed off in the aftermath of my arrest. I can’t say that I blame her. I had carelessly left her car on the street and I never had the common courtesy to call her from jail. As a result, her beloved and recently purchased ride was considered abandoned and it was impounded by the city in one of the vast lots where machines go to die. Because she didn’t have any money to get it out, it stayed there accruing fines until it was finally repossessed. As might be understandable—to anyone but me at the time—Sandy wanted payback, and so, to inflict maximum damage on me for my transgression, she alleged that I had stolen her car. Fortunately, I was released on my own recognizance and was able to clear up that mess on the outside. I made a beeline to her as soon as I was out.
“What the fuck, Sandy?”
“I lost my fucking car, Bob.”
“But I was going to cop dope for both of us.”
“Bullshit, man. I never would have seen any of that. And now my credit’s fucked up and I don’t have a car.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that, but, look, I’m staring down some time because you’re mad at me. That doesn’t seem right, does it?”
“I don’t care what happens to you. You fucked me over.”
“What if I promise to make things up? Set it all right? Cover your expenses? I can’t go to prison for something like this. It was all a mistake. I’m sorry!”
Those two words, I’m sorry, have a lot of power. She agreed. We cleared things up between us and, more importantly, eventually, between me and the state of California. In the greater picture, the one in which I saw my conflated self-image shrinking by the moment, I had an epiphany. I’m clean, I thought. I’m finally fucking clean. I hadn’t been in a long time, although I had made numerous, ultimately failed, attempts. It was a revelation. The thirty days I had spent locked up had forced me to take a hard, brutal look at my life and my problems. I couldn’t keep going back to rehab. Since that first time at Hazelden, I’d clean up for a while, fall back into using, get talked into another stab at rehab, and then fail again. I was on an endless rehab roller coaster, and the cure never took. I just loved drugs too much. It was just self-defeating. It didn’t work for me, obviously. This should have been clear to me after the first go-round at Hazelden, but I had been in twenty-six programs in total, and I was still a junkie and an alcoholic.
Now, this might come as a shock to somebody who’s never run with monsters, but after that many attempts at self-help—and each one followed by a failure—the despair adds up and starts to demand a price. In my case, it was ego. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without seeing the sad and pathetic clown who stared back at me. It was the same joker who had always been there, but for the first time, I saw him with a degree of clarity and perspective. Twenty-six times in rehab? Was it even possible to be more ridiculous? I was a fool. A jester. A buffoon. The clown of the crack pipe. And that hurt. This time, it was going to be different.
I started to attend recovery meetings again. Sheepishly, at first. I viewed some of the philosophies and concepts with skepticism and disdain—the whole business about a benevolent and all-knowing “power” is still something I have trouble with—but I kept at it because, after so many screwups and false starts at getting clean, another stumble would have been the end of the line for me. The pressure was eased a little because the group was supportive, and if I did slip, it wouldn’t feel like a complete failure to me since I wasn’t actually in another rehab program.
It’s not to say I didn’t have worries. I had plenty of them. The main thing was the need to make money. A job to support myself. My musical career was in tatters, and that hurt. I may have gotten myself straight, but I still had my huge junkie ego. The necessity of a paycheck cleared that up effectively near Easter in 1996, when I took a job at a cozy little Silver Lake diner called Millie’s Cafe that served up comfort food to hipsters, both local and transient, and the occasional music-business people. Millie’s offered a touch of hominess complete with checkered tablecloths, hearty fare, and decent coffee. I became a busboy and a dishwasher.
It wasn’t an easy transition. People I knew would walk in and I’d try to stay in the kitchen and hope they wouldn’t see me. My reputation was shot with so many of my old friends. “Forrest is a fuckup,” was what I imagined many
