Day 2 - Evening

Intake.  Endless episodes of "Full House" on the waiting room TV.  The sign says no weapons, sharp objects, lighters allowed.

A man walks in.  Tall.  White.  Skynard shirt.  Escapee from Redneck Island?  Desert Storm style combat boots, tall combat boots fully laced.  Matching socks, pulled high above the boot tops up to the knees.  He has a young blond girl slung over his shoulder.  A proverbial sack of flour.   She struggles some, a small voice repeating "put me down, put me down, put me down," but it looks like they could be playing.  He puts her down, points and says "Sit."  She sits, starts sobbing, muttering things under her breath between sobs and raspy gasps of breath.  They are not playing.

A large black woman -- they are all large black women here -- moves them out of the waiting room, through a door, out of sight.  Another black woman gives the order to lock the doors.  "I don't think she'll run."  But evidently they lock the doors anyway.  Now I am trapped with these people.  Trying not to look, not to listen.  Trying to act like Full House is compelling TV.  But I'm fixed on them.  Held in morbid curiosity.  Live "Rehab."

A ruckus from behind the door.  The hysterical voice of a crazy woman.  Screaming, "What did you do?  What the fuck did you do?  What did she do?"  I think whoever she is, she's running.  But now more voices, the black women again, talking about blood.  Blood everywhere.  A razor on the counter.  "Got a biological situation up in here."  So the girl smuggled in a razor, went to the bathroom, and slit her wrist.  I can hear one of the women asking her if she did that to get readmitted for a long stay.  "You didn't have to do that, honey," someone says.  "I was gonna get you readmitted."

It takes an hour for them to clean up the mess.  All the while I"m sitting there, nothing to do but watch Full House.  Three full episodes before I go back.  It's a good thing I'm already committed to going through with this, because otherwise I would have been gone. 

Later, afterward, in my hotel, reading the materials, reading the "Relapse Prevention Plan," remembering how much I hate the term "slip" because a slip is when you hit some ice and bust your ass not when you make a choice to drink and I think about the question of when I relapsed.  And I'm thinking about the term "rigorously honest."  I heard it so many times today and the rigorously honest truth is this: I didn't, couldn't relapse because I never got sober.  Seven years I've been calling myself an alcoholic but I never got sober.  I can hear my wife telling me that I put on a good show and then it would be like groundhog day.  Because I just never got sober.  So that's the truth: no relapse.

Day two.  Two meetings.  Met and accepted my sponser, G.  One fucked up intake experience for outpatient rehab.  Sobriety date still December 2, 2012.