STORY OF MY LIFE - Not Dead and Not For Sale (part 2)

After nearly 24 hours of violent detox in a shared prison cell at the questionable Mercy Center Hospital, I was finally released after faking that I held down a late night meal. In reality I just gave it to a buddy of mine and said, "Eat that shit! ...or I might never get outta this loony bin alive!!!"

He scarfed down the turkey and mash potato ensemble, I gave the nurse a thumbs up while cursing her under my breath, and we were off.

My time at N.I.U. was done. I had no job and only 1 usable arm. Because it was an elbow injury, my cast was removable so that the joint wouldn't stiffen up. I was shocked and horrified the first time I peeled the cast off. The elbow itself looked like a fat woman's knee, and all of the veins in my entire arm were black and blue due to a procedure they used during the surgery.

I don't remember exactly what they did, but it involved draining the blood out of my arm, tying it off at the arm pit with a giant rubber-band, leaving my arm basically dead for the duration of the surgical work, then refilling it back up with my own blood once I was sewn back together.

Overall, I looked like some sort of drunk tank reject... a hideous monster still slightly sideways from the morphine, my life in shambles.

Take time with a wounded arm, because it likes to heal... it's half the arm it used to be!

STP - "Creep"

At least I thought it would be. I was given a week to chill, then expected back for rehab the following Monday. As noted in last week's session, I had no health insurance, so would be expected to pay for the physical therapy out of pocket.

All it took was one round of that ripoff to ensure me I'd never be attending again.

Upon inspecting my arm for the first time, the physical therapist said, "Well, we'll never get it to straighten completely... but after 6 weeks of grueling stretching... it should be at 80%!!!"

Fuck that! I went along with the ruse for that 45min session and was out, never to return. I'm happy to report that on my own, to the tune of about a $3,500 savings, my arm not only straightens completely, but also hyper-extends with the best of 'em.

I spent the rest of that summer doing jack shit. It was a ridiculously hot summer. I moved back home to my parent's basement for the time, basically to have someplace free to sleep the mornings away, and spent most of my time across the street at my friend Joe's house. He and his brother owned it, were both laid off, Joe's girlfriend (now wife) and a lifelong friend of mine, Kellie, also home from N.I.U. for the summer was residing there as well. Along with another friend John and one of my lifelong best friends Randall, who actually grew up in the house behind my parents.

They had no A/C in that house and it was an inferno of a summer, so we spent most of our time in the garage, listening to the radio, smoking white widow (yeah, the weed game was ON POINT in the summer of 2001), and crushing 30-packs.

And as far as I saw it, it was the only reasonable thing for a recovering short-term opiate degenerate to do.

I guess I don't really know what Stone Temple Pilots has to do with all of this except that I swear to god, every single time we were even remotely paying attention to that boombox in Joe's garage, an STP song was in rotation. It became sort of a running joke to morph the chorus of Creep into a tune about my mangled arm, and I guess deep inside, if only for a brutal day or 2, I actually felt the pain of Scott's problems due to my own horrible adventure with the hospital approved heroin sibling.

STP - "Interstate Love Song"

Reflecting back, the summer of 2001, despite the $30,000 arm that I would eventually have to pay for, was the last summer break we'd ever really know.

By early September everyone else was back off to school and I was slated to start a new job on Tuesday, September 11th... the first time in over 5 months I'd been out of bed before noon.

I watched 2 planes fly into the World Trade Centers that morning live, it was as if I was meant to see it. And as I watched in shock, my initial thought was to immediately call across the street to Joe's house and wake him up to see this horrible shit going down in NYC.

As I grabbed the phone and began to dial, I suddenly stopped myself... If the summer of his life can last just a couple hours longer than mine, then that's probably the best gift I could ever give him.

It was at that moment I knew my youth was over... the youth of my entire generation was over... and our days of being in a Patriotic daze was officially under way. Fuck.

United in debt... the American Nightmare had begun.

**click for Part 1**