“Are you fucking that girl?” Buddy asked again. It was like his brain was stuck.
“Uh, I don’t really feel comfortable with this line of questioning,” the hapless counselor said.
Jack, the counselor’s boss, spoke up. “You need to answer the man’s question. If you’re having a sexual relationship with a MAP client, I need to know about it. Buddy and I both need to know about it.”
There was a pause and I heard the counselor answer. “No. We’re not. But we’re … friendly.”
Buddy’s voiced became high pitched and he said, “You stay away from that girl!” Then the door burst open and I followed Buddy back down the hall to the parking lot. “He’s fucking her,” he said with certainty.
Turns out, Buddy was right. Once it became impossible to deny, the counselor was fired from Cri-Help. The local recovery community can be a small one and I eventually heard the whole sad story. After the counselor spent nearly a year trying to save the famous female singer, she relapsed. Because she had plenty of other problems besides addiction, complete chaos entered into the unfortunate counselor’s life. Cops were called several times to break up their messy spats. He couldn’t find counseling work because everybody knew what had happened. He was ostracized within twelve-step circles. A poorly chosen affair had ruined the guy, and he knew it. It was over. He gave up. He capitulated and started using drugs with the famous female singer. They partied hard and he went through all the money he had left to support their habits. He lost everything. And when there wasn’t anything left to take from the poor sap, the famous female singer left him. Eventually, she pulled herself out of her addiction and got sober. The former counselor was left stigmatized here in Southern California. It was a hard, painful lesson for the both of them, but one that could have been avoided if they had only listened to Buddy, even if he did go a little bit nuts when he told the counselor to stop seeing the woman.
But I liked working with a teacher like Buddy. It struck me as very Zen. Through Buddy, I began to learn a trade. He taught me things that students in a chemical dependency school will never learn. Buddy’s tutelage amounted to a Ph.D. in the business of recovery, but I didn’t really know anything about the clinical side of things. It was all arcane stuff I learned from Buddy. He taught me the importance of building a team. A lot of rehab centers overlook this and it’s crucial to any program’s success. The standard approach to treatment for many places is monochrome. It operates from the top down. There’s an owner/operator who sets up a little corporation and everybody who works there is a reflection of what the owner wants them to be. They’re not allowed to be themselves. The owner is usually not involved in the day-to-day aspects of the place. Profit is often more important than a patient’s recovery. Buddy had a different view. “Bob,” he said, “we can’t all be the same.” Buddy believed that a successful program involved a staff of individuals, each with a distinct role to play. There needs to be an authority figure patients can put their trust in. There needs to be a motivational figure to prod addicts to take difficult steps when they don’t want to. And there needs to be a lovable fool whom substance abusers can relate to and confide in. It’s how the dynamic of a team should work, and that’s what Buddy taught me. I could never have learned that in a classroom. With Buddy’s guidance, I eventually worked my way up to the position of clinical director at MAP.
I knew I had chosen the right career path for myself. It was a career that had longevity. There are always going to be addicts and they’re always going to need help. But I wasn’t going to do it at MAP. Buddy was old and he was sick. I had seen myself as positioned to succeed him at MAP, but it became increasingly clear that wasn’t going to happen. As I was told one day by one of the organization’s directors, “Bob, you really don’t know shit about chemical dependency. You know about treatment, but you don’t know about addiction. You just know what Buddy told you. There’s a whole other side to it.” MAP was destined to become a very defined program once Buddy was gone and I wasn’t going to be part of it. How could I? I didn’t know anything about it. I couldn’t speak in a director’s meeting. All I knew how to do was to be me and how to put the right people together. The writing was on the wall.
In 2001, I enrolled in the chemical dependency counselor certification program at Glendale Community College. I started to come to an understanding of why my experiences with so many drug counselors had seemed so fruitless. A lot of people who enter the field are just … not very bright. I saw this in action one day when I made a comment during a lecture and used the phrase ad infinitum and inadvertently sidetracked the whole lesson when the phrase confused the class and the instructor had to stop and explain the term—which muddied up the class even more. I couldn’t see myself staying for two years to acquire my certification under those circumstances, so I looked into fast-tracking. Fortunately, Crescent College in nearby Huntington Park offered a course as part of its practical nursing program. It would only take seven months. It was a better choice, so I went for it and was certified by the state of California later in the year.
I didn’t learn as much as I should have. Pupils only receive a limited education in a classroom setting. I continued my fieldwork, but the course work came fast and hard and a lot of the technical
