days. The idea was to surround the baby, their slang for newcomer, with a support structure that would replace his junkie network. And to never leave him alone. So Scott began showing up at Pito’s before the liquor stores opened at eight a.m. and ending his days around Anna’s fire pit after last call.
Scott was almost three weeks sober when his landlord told him to go. D.P.’s newly acquired pit bull had got out and somehow snuck into the downstairs neighbors’ apartment. The neighbors called the police, who called the landlord, who, wanting to keep his long-term tenants, gave Scott and D.P. the boot. By that time, Scott was basically living at David and Anna’s. They told him he might as well sleep there too.
David and Anna’s working-class home was one of those places that seemed to belong to everybody. People would walk through the door without knocking and open the refrigerator without asking. “This is the Aldea Recovery House,” Anna would say. “If somebody’s not here, somebody’s calling.” She kept large bowls of rice and beans on hand and never locked the door.
Scott began sleeping on the Aldeas’ couch and picking up their children from school. Soon, he began working with David, a freelance mason and, in lean weeks, a metal scrapper. Scott liked the work, especially the urban adventure of hunting for aluminum or steel scraps, even if it did involve the occasional Dumpster dive. A barrel-chested Puerto Rican man with pinched eyes and a ready grin, sometimes David paid Scott and sometimes he didn’t. Scott didn’t complain. How could he, after what David and Anna had done for him?
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At first, Scott liked cleaning the Serenity Club. The pay was piddly—$7.15 an hour, which would give him around $100 a week—but because he worked alone, from ten p.m. to one a.m. most nights, it gave him time to think. He thought about finding someone, although he didn’t know where to start if not in a gay bar. Craigslist? He thought about his sister’s wedding. Maybe he could make it home for that. He prayed, “Please don’t let me use tomorrow.”
But most of all, he would dream about returning to nursing. He thought that would be a “great way to stay sober because you start thinking about other people and not your poor, pathetic shit.” But the road ahead felt daunting. The nursing board didn’t just take Scott’s license away. Understandably, it made it extremely difficult for him to earn it back. He would have to submit to “the testing of urine specimens at a frequency of not less than 56 times per year,” which would cost thousands of dollars. He’d have to stay clean for five years and attend biweekly AA meetings.1 Scott recognized his weaknesses. He didn’t know if he would have tried harder to get clean years ago if the nursing board had not put license reinstatement so far out of reach. But giving up did come easier when things seemed impossible.
The “impaired professionals” gathering had left him discouraged too. One nurse said it had taken her over a year to find a job after being sober for about two years and passing all the requirements. And she had a master’s degree.
There were stations between having a revoked nursing license and having one with full privileges. But to get a nursing job with a restricted license—one that didn’t allow you to handle narcotics, say—was rare. Scott knew people. Over the years, he had stayed in touch with several nursing pals, and some had moved into positions of influence. He even had an aunt who was the dean of nursing at a large state university nearby. But staying in touch with these people had meant hiding his addiction and poverty, so approaching them for help was complicated. The last time Scott spoke with a friend who was the director of a local nursing home, he said he was doing fine. “So now I’d have to go back and say, ‘Oh no, I really wasn’t doing well. I was still a junkie. I totally lied to you.’…I guess that’s where a lot of my reservations would come in.” Scott didn’t feel he could call in any favors.2
After four months of cleaning the club with only one night off in total, Scott began to grow weary. He was sober and bored. He would empty the ashtrays, scrub the toilets, and, at the end of the night, grade his performance: A–, C+. Then twenty-one hours later, he would do it
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