“Ha, all right then.”
This Kaitlin girl was a woman I could get along with. I appreciated anyone who didn’t give me bullshit. My whole life was filled with people telling me what I wanted to hear and pretty much sucking up to me all the time. There were very few people that I could trust to tell me the truth.
As we finished putting my room back together, Kaitlin left me alone to contemplate what I had done. The stark walls and calmness in the building weren’t at all what I was used to being around. It didn’t make me feel calm at all – in fact, I felt anything but calm. My life had been mine for way too long to feel comfortable giving up everything to strangers.
My anxiety was reeling, and I felt like I could hardly catch my breath. Why the hell I had decided to check into a damn treatment center was beyond what I could figure out. I didn’t care that much about what other people thought of me. I had just sold a $200-million-dollar tech company; I deserved to party and have some fun.
It wasn’t like Spencer hadn’t been partying, too. He had come to a couple of the same events I had, and although he left earlier than I did, he had been drinking more than me by far. It was the drugs that had him worried about me. But it wasn’t like I was snorting my life away. A couple of lines here or there, a couple joints to calm my nerves and help me sleep, a couple drinks to wash it all down. I wasn’t a druggie…I was just a young guy celebrating the amazing life I had.
Two days prior had been the end of the fun, though. After a full night of partying, I had decided to go for a swim in my new pool. Well, it wasn’t just a new pool; I had purchased another mansion in the hills of San Francisco. Spencer was angry that I had spent so much money and said I wasn’t thinking and was being irresponsible. We fought. He left. I went swimming.
It was my money, and if I didn’t like my first home, I had every right to buy a new one. It was my money. We split the sale 50/50, and Spencer had done nothing but boring things with his money, and I was sure that he was just jealous that I had been having fun with mine. Parties, drinking, women, and drugs had been the bulk of my money, so really, the idea that I had bought some more real estate should have been a relief. But Spencer was pissed off, I had been pissed off, and the whole night got totally out of control.
The next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital with a tube down my throat. Spencer was by my side. He was a good friend; I couldn’t deny that. He was angry as hell with me, but he still stayed there with me.
There weren’t many people in my life that I could call friends. Even fewer who cared about where I had ended that night.
“You’re going to kill yourself,” he had said to me.
It wasn’t his words as much as it was the single tear that fell from his cheek. My family didn’t even care about me as much as that man did. We had been friends since college and more like brothers than I was with my own flesh and blood. So, I agreed to the damn treatment center. Not for me, but for him. So that I could show him I had control over myself and what I was doing.
I promised him sixty days in that damn facility though. That didn’t at all seem possible to me. Sure, it was a comfortable place to be. There was a spa, swimming, a workout gym, and it was in the Colorado mountains. But I already felt like I was going crazy from the silence and the rules. I really wasn’t sure I was going to be able to make it very much longer than the first week.
For the rest of the evening, I lay in my bed and stared up at the ceiling. I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. I was restless, but I didn’t want to leave my room. This place didn’t feel like home. Not that I really knew what a home felt like.
“Are you hungry?” Cassidy asked as she looked in the doorway.
“Nope.”
“I’m getting ready to go home for the evening. I’ll see you tomorrow. Try to get up and eat something in the morning. It will help you feel better. And drink lots of water to combat the withdrawals.”
“I’ll be all right. I don’t use that much. Shouldn’t have too bad of withdrawals. Have a good night.”
Even as I said the words, I didn’t believe them. The truth was that I had brought the alcohol and drugs with me because I knew the withdrawals could be bad. After two days in the hospital from nearly drowning, I had started into full-blown withdrawals. I convinced them that I was feeling well enough to leave, but the first thing I did while I was packing to come to rehab was drink and snort a line. Even on the damn plane to Aspen, I used; I had to make sure I got one last hit in before I arrived.
By morning, I would be nauseous, sweating, and agitated. But I had a plan. I would stick to my room. Sleep as much as possible. Drink water and just hunker down and make it through the next two to three days. Everything would be better once I made it through the initial days.
Or at least that was what I expected. I really didn’t have that much experience because I always went back to using before I could manage to get off of everything.
Sure, I had gotten off of the drugs before – well, the cocaine at least. While my company was in its prime, I was just smoking marijuana at night to sleep and partying on the weekends. I had a full week of working and not much time for partying at all. But after the company sold, I found myself with as much time as I wanted on my hands. I had so much money, there wasn’t a need to work ever again if I didn’t want to. But I had nothing to do with myself.
Spencer seemed to handle the freedom of our company sale a little better than I did. Right away, he was out looking for the next thing we could get into. He still came out to party on the weekends, but all week, he stayed busy with business meetings and his family. At least he had a family who loved him; I couldn’t say as much. He had a lot more control over his life than I did, but he wasn’t having nearly as much fun as I was.
After losing my mother when I was younger, I just never felt like I belonged with my father or brother. They ran the family mortuary business and had planned on me coming in to help them. So, when I went off to college, they put up with it but didn’t like it.
Slowly, as the first year went by, my father seemed to get more and more agitated with me when I would talk to him. So, I stopped talking to him. Eventually, we had a huge argument over some unknown thing, and my father said he didn’t know who I was. After that, our conversations were minimal.
My father expected I would fail and come running home to him. But I didn’t fail. I got into California Polytechnic State University, one of the best and most innovative schools on the West Coast. I met Spencer, and together we came up with a new smart phone app that made selling tickets to concerts easier than buying online. When Ticketmaster bought us out for a cool $400 million, we split the funds and that was that.
My father hadn’t talked to me in over two years and my brother had barely mana
ged a phone call on my birthday. I wasn’t about to tell them about all of my success. If they couldn’t be there for me when I was a simple, college student, I didn’t need them now that I was rich.
But, inevitably, the news had gotten back to them. Newspaper articles in national papers had been shared by family and friends. When my brother called me one afternoon, I was actually excited to see his number pop up, until he started yelling.
“You couldn’t even be bothered to tell us?”
“Tell you what?” I had played stupid.