What am I gonna be?
It’s a question that produces some cognitive dissonance nowadays since
traditionally, being 31 years old, I should have answered that by now. But of the 20 something odd jobs I’ve had in
the past 10 years, the only thing I’ve consistently been is unsatisfied,
disgruntled, and often disgusted.
Flash back to 3 years ago.
“Jeff Houston,” my boss says in a disinterested tone as his
flops a 10 lb. file on my desk and turns to exit the office.
“Jeff Houston what.”
I ask.
He turns back around, “He’s dead, what the fuck you think?”
Damn, I was kinda hoping the grim reaper didn’t show up for
old Jeff, he was a nice guy. Even
snorting all that coke, popping a gazillion benzos with his methadone, and
stroking out in the office, that old man seemed like he would last
forever. As far as addicts go, he was a
class act. Having grown to be an old,
ugly, wrinkled, flaky skin white man, he played the sympathy card to get his
drugs, not like some of these psychopaths who would do anything to cheat two
dollars out of a supposed friend. I
thought he’d last forever. Tim, the
boss, didn’t wait for my reaction.
I knew what I was expected to do. Re-write Jeff’s file so it didn’t look like a
methadone-benzo overdose death. That
must be why I did my undergrad in English, so I can invent clinical notes for
people who died under our watch.
I was working at ‘the methadone clinic’, which did have a proper
name but we didn’t use it because then you’d have to explain that it was a
methadone clinic and all the politics that go along with that.
Jeff wasn’t in my caseload and I prided myself on that. No one in my caseload had died, but if I hadn’t
gotten fired just a few months later, it would only have been a matter of
time. Today just wasn’t my day to be
falsifying records about someone who had come to be something of a friend. It wasn’t just that I was gonna miss him, but
I was also nursing a mad hangover, and the two sausage-egg McMuffins I had
grabbed for breakfast were putting a choke-hold on my heart, and it was 5:30 in
the morning. I reached down in my green
lunch box which held no food stuffs but was stuffed with medications and pulled
out a beta-blocker and some ibuprofen and took them down with some coffee. Then I got to work.
After-all, I did want to be an addiction counselor, didn’t
I?
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