Unemployment, Day 3: There But For The Grace of God

Though obviously the job-search is at the forefront of my mind today, it's sharing space, and if I'm going to be honest, it's shuffling toward the back of the line. (Although logging on to the Illinois Department of Employment site and being asked to list my skills and experience was a bit of a lift, I'll admit--according to their list, I have 182 marketable skills. And those 182 skills? Fit a grand total of SEVEN job openings, four of which pay less than ten bucks an hour. :::sigh:::)

Today it is eleven years since JP died. There are a lot of things about that simple statement that are almost as important as the fact itself. First and foremost, it was a year ago today that I had my relapse.

I can't even adequately describe, or even explain to myself, how far from that moment I am right now. I look back one year and it's like looking into some dark cave--not even a tunnel, because there's no light coming out the other end of it. It just goes back and back and looking back, I can't even see clearly where it ends. And it's not til now, when I'm standing in the light, that I even realize how bad it was.

I don't know what to attribute it to--counseling, Prozac, the passage of time--but I can't imagine what would have happened if I'd lost my job a year ago, whether I would have been able to stand it as calmly as I've stood this. I don't know what would have happened, and I'm glad I'm not there to find out!

I've had several reminders in the past few days of just how lucky I am, even when things are at their worst.

To begin with: A couple of days ago, while idly surfing the net in the middle of the night, I found myself at the Illinois Department of Corrections website. And I put in the names of some of my past and present comrades who might, somehow, have found their way into a bad situation. And lo and behold, I got a hit: for Lou, my old roomie with JP. He's listed as an escapee from Stateville, which I'm not sure I believe, but whatever. I Googled him, looking for a story about this supposed escape, and found nothing--but I DID find a link to an Ohio grand jury press release, named with ten or twelve others as being part of a credit-card fraud scheme. It gave his current address as "incarcerated, XXX County Jail", so I Googled that and there he was. I remember him as this young, classically good-looking guy, with blond hair and wiry muscles...now he looks old, worn-out. He'd never done heroin til he did it with JP and me, and his life was never the same afterward. I don't know why I could clean up and he couldn't; I don't know why I've had better luck and he's had worse. I know I feel a little bit of guilt for being part of his involvement with heroin, just as I know JP felt guilty for involving me, those long dopesick nights.

Then today I went to the clinic for the week's methadone, and I ran into this girl I've seen there in the past. We grew up in the same neighborhood, apparently, though she's a few years younger than I am. You couldn't tell it to look at her, though--she looks much, much older. She goes to the clinic to get methadone so she won't get sick if she can't scrape up the cash for a fix. I used to do the same, many years ago; the methadone kept me together enough to work long enough to get paid, so I could get more heroin. I've given her a ride, occasionally, back up towards where I live, where the drug spots are. Every time I see her she looks worse and worse; today was no exception. She had these big sores all over her face, all over her hands; on the ride back towards my neighborhood, she said the doctor told her she has MERSA, which is a potentially fatal form of staph bacteria. As a junkie I was far beyond lucky; I never had an infection, never had an abcess, despite shooting EVERYTHING into my veins.

On my right forearm, there's a small white scar. When addicts are really broke, too broke to get a real fix, they sometimes do cotton-shots--combining all our little bits of cotton through which we'd filtered the heroin as we drew it into the needle. We'd save them from several weeks of shots, and soak them and press all the heroin residue out of the cotton and then shoot it. I don't know what went wrong exactly, but this shot was full of little threads, and the only reason it didn't kill me or at least make me very, very sick was that I couldn't get a vein and so I did what's known as a skin-pop, where you just shoot the liquid into a little bubble under your skin. For weeks after, I could pull tiny tufts of cotton out of my arm. It probably should have been a lot worse than it was.

That's what I thought of when I looked at this girl. If she doesn't take her antibiotics, there's a fair chance this could kill her; even if she does take them, it could kill her. The "MER" in "MERSA" stands for MEthicillin Resistant--in other words, nothing to screw with. We came from the same background, we did the same things, and then at a crucial point I made one decision and she made another, and the results of that decision can potentially be life or death. It's chilling.

Eleven years. Eleven years is a very long time, but today just this ONE year just passed seems almost as long. Curiously I'm not seeing this joblessness as a step backwards; it's a sort of....pleasant annoyance, if you know what I mean. Like when you're wearing jeans and something's poking you in the stomach, and you realize that what's poking you is a wad of money in your front pocket. It's annoying, sure, but comfortable in its own way. It's so NICE not to dread the sunrise!

I did things differently today than I've done for the other years since JP died. I didn't go to the cemetery; I haven't sat around all day being maudlin and remembering. I haven't cried (though there are still a few hours left in the day!) I went to the clinic, ate donuts, cleaned the hell out of my house. Don't get me wrong: I miss him, no less than I ever have. But that sadness is only one piece of my life, and with most of the other pieces going well, I can't dwell on just that. There is much more I need to think about, right now.

I think, in part, I've learned to accept this truth: had JP lived, I would not be who and where I am--and on the path we were travelling, there's a strong likelihood that the difference would have been negative, not positive. That's not my favorite thing to think about--I've never wanted to be the beneficiary of anyone's sacrifice--but the fact remains: I'm still here. I wouldn't have chosen to make it this way, but this is how it is. The question is, what do I make of it from here?