For several months, I lived quietly, staying busy, greeting people at the gym, restoring my own body, coming home, staying clean. Sometimes I’d shift my body on that hard floor, lying on an air mattress, and think about recent days, when I’d had the nice apartment uptown, the finest clothing, and everybody knew my name. I was the hit of the club scene. Now here I was, hustling memberships at the workout joint, living on the floor of a one-bedroom dorm room. Life has a way of humiliating you. Back at square one, once again, but at least I was in the game. I couldn’t say the same for Rodney and a few other friends. Eight passed away from drug- or alcohol-related deaths. Six went to jail.
The summer passed, September began, and I remember one morning especially. It was the eleventh of the month. I drove in early, opened the gym for the morning shift, and greeted some of the regulars. We turned on the TV sets in front of the treadmills and bikes. The morning programs were interrupted with a report from New York City about a plane flying into a building—just awful. The World Trade Center. We turned up the volume and watched. I climbed on a treadmill and stared at the screen with everyone else as it happened again.
That second plane and second crash, of course, was the gut-punch to every American—the affirmation that we were actually under attack. No one in the gym spoke. You could just hear the whir of the machines, as people ran on the treadmills, pedaled their bikes, or worked the elliptical trainers.
A terrible day—one that turned life upside down in Mobile and everywhere else. What a reminder that there are bigger things going on in this world than my issues. Was war on the horizon? Could there be more attacks? For the first time in my memory, nobody knew what lay in our immediate future.
More and more I focused on the weight room, my latest all-out, ninety-to-nothing pursuit. When I worked out, I got into a zone. My past didn’t exist. My body had the best, healthiest stimulation. Sweat was my new drug. There was nothing but the pure effort and exertion of getting stronger and fitter. The worst time of my life had come out of that accident and the injury to my back. The cure to the pain turned out to be worse than the disease. Now I was going to heal my aching back the right way—by exercising it.
I made friends with a guy who was a bodybuilder. “Listen, big guy,” he said. “How’d you like to train with me? I can move you to the next level, lifting heavy. I could make you the powerhouse of Powerhouse Gym.”
“Sounds good to me. Let’s do it.”
Bodybuilders focus on three exercises: the squat, the bench press, and the dead lift. The coach or trainer motivates, assists, checks your technique, and hopefully keeps you from killing yourself. There are plenty of other, more multifaceted forms of weight training, but muscle building is simple: put as many pounds into the air as you can.
One day in December, I was at the squat rack. In the squat, the barbell is below your traps and across your upper back. The movement is to get under the bar and push up. It trains most of the major muscle groups in the body, from the back, down to the hips, abdominals, and thighs. It’s high reward, but like all weight training, high risk. I tweaked my back, and I felt it immediately, easing the weights down and groaning.
After the Mustang accident, which had hurt my back so badly, I’d now spent months building it back up, only to blow it out on one bad lift. I was beyond discouraged.
I talked with Lori about it. “I don’t know any doctors here,” I said. “The ones I know, in New Orleans, have got to be better than here.”
“And they’ll give you pain meds.”
“Well, they may, but I won’t take anything unless I have to. Then I’ll just sell them. Don’t you think I’ve learned my lesson by now? I’m not getting hooked on that stuff again.”
She gave me a doubtful look. “Are you going to talk with Paula about this? What do you think she’ll say?”
I dodged that one. “No need for this to be a big deal. I’ll just go for a checkup. We’ll see what happens. Like I said, I’ll sell the pills.”
“To all your old buddies,” Lori said. “Just great.” She pulled out a cigarette. When she was nervous, she smoked. “If you get back into that life, Robby, I’ll go ahead and kill you myself, get it over with.”
This was the addiction talking, of course. No matter how clean you get, the beast is still somewhere inside you, clawing to get out. It speaks through your bravado. It tells you, hey, you’ve got this. You’re indestructible. You can dip your toe in the water and pull it right back out, man.
And of course, none of that is true.
I really believed I wasn’t going to “start back.” But it doesn’t work that way; you never “start back”; you pick up where you left off. There’s a huge difference. Picking up where you left off isn’t gradual. You take the same dosage of drugs that you were taking before you got clean. You don’t ease your way back into it. You suddenly find you’re in completely over your
