Kevin called from Hazelden, his parents sent him there. Hazelden is supposedly like some famous treatment center. I just got his message, I hope he stays clean.

Everyone’s strung out. Gio, my old sponsor is strung out, Henry is shooting heroin, Joe Hudson is in rehab, Danielle and Stoop started banging too, Eric got roped, Bobby ain’t doing good, the list goes on and on. Weird that I got clean, like how am I really clean right now…

It’s crazy Gio used to sponsor me and talk about God and now he’s all fucked up… like really bad… I saw him a few weeks ago and his arm looked like a zombie bite.

I don't think I ever told you the whole story with him.

A while back I went to do step work with him. My mom let me borrow the car and I picked him up at his halfway. I really love it there. When I get out of my house, I feel so much better. His halfway is in a little hood in Fort Lauderdale. Publix gives them free bagels and bread and donuts that they were going to throw out, so there’s always tons of shit there… like 40 bagels and donuts on the table. The house is run down, little bedrooms with 2 little cots in each room, sometimes 3. When I walk in, I feel at home. There's some guys who just got out of prison there, they’re not really into NA. Gio tries to get them to go to meetings but they don’t care. Gio made a protein shake, and made me some too. He’s so nice but also like tough, he’s got a bunch of tattoos, good looking kid with a fade and dark hair and super straight teeth and long fangs. He’s like me; he grew up from a good family but just lost his way, he’s been in halfway and drug rehabs and meetings since he was 15. When he sees me he smiles. I go to dap his hand and instead he hugs me —I forgot, we hug now. He hugs me and says, “what up gangsta,” and then starts telling me about this girl he’s fucking and how she was super tight… we drink our protein shakes and then head over to a nearby diner to go over my step work.

Step work is when your sponsor gives you questions and readings and assignments and then you go over them together. We sit down and he’s smiling at the waitress and being flirty with her and I think it’s funny, I guess he comes here all the time. We sit down and I grab my notebook and start reading the answers to the questions, he stops me.

“Whoa, stop, put that down, let’s pray first…” His whole demeanor changes and he closes his eyes and starts praying with me and I close my eyes too but I can’t help to think how fucking weird this is at 11am at a fucking diner with tons of people around. Gio doesn’t care AT ALL, and deep down I wish I was like that too. I bow my head and he prays for us; “Dear Father, I’m here with Bryan and we just want to thank you for being in our lives, thank you God for allowing him into my life and letting me carry the message. Let him be able to share openly and honestly so he can overcome this addiction Father, guide us and be with us while we go over this step work and thanks for keeping us clean one more day... amen.” I say amen like I was just holding my breath for 35 minutes.

We were going over the steps and he was saying that alcohol is a relapse. I was like, “Really? Cause I drank with my whole family a while back.” He looked at me like I had two heads. “So you relapsed?!” He’s sort of laughing in disbelief.

“Nah dude, I just drank,” I said.

He gets all frustrated, saying “Bro, a drug is a drug is a drug, alcohol, weed, all that shit man, when a train comes towards you, and the engineer yanks the horn, he isn’t warning you about the caboose.”

I look at him like what the fuck are you talking about. He takes a deep breath, “look, you relapsed. You gotta get a white key tag.”

I tell him there’s no way I’m starting over, I had like sixty days clean at the time. “I’m not giving up my clean time.”

He laughs and says, “Bro, you already did.”

You already did… that’s what he said, I gave up my clean time when I drank alcohol?? Really…

I got a white key tag that night. I remember Southern Roy looking at me really surprised. So many people clapped for me. I’ve never felt unconditional love like that in my entire life. I mean my family loves me, but this was something different. After the meeting, Charity came up to me and gave me the biggest hug. I’ll never forget that. She was all over me after the meeting, she grabbed me by my shoulders and said, “get your ass back in that meeting, you need to get a basic text, we love you, what the fuck Bryan?” She just kept hugging me and hugging me and I started to cry a little. She grabbed my hand and took me inside like I was a little kid. She grabbed all this literature for me and added, “and fucking read it!”

I love Charity. She’s probably twenty-eight years old, she’s married, and she has like eighteen months clean.

My new clean date is March 23rd, 2008.

Two weeks after that Gio called me and said he’s moving to Gainesville with his boy, and that he’s not an addict anymore and he’s “just going to drink.” I was like ughh… wow after all that prayer and God stuff and how many times he told me he can never use again.

I KNOW he's an addict. I can talk to someone for two seconds and realize they’re an addict. I knew that he’d end up going back to drugs. I went to a meeting and shared about how my sponsor relapsed and how I haven’t even really had a real sponsor yet. I went on and on about how NA sucks and I couldn’t trust anyone.

That’s when this guy, the Mad Russian, came up to me and pretty much told me, “Ey man, just shut up — I’m now your new sponsor, call me everyday for seven days. I’ll give you step work.” I was kinda like fuck you dude, I’m the one who’s supposed to pick the sponsor… but then I was like, ugh—what else do I got to lose.

I had seen the Mad Russian around in meetings a lot, he was crazy. When he would speak he’d scream and yell, it was super intense…. but I kinda liked it too.

The Mad Russian is twenty-two years old. He’s got two years clean. His English is really bad, he’s fit and has giant biceps. He wears all these gay European clothes, like Armani Exchange hats and white Diesel jeans and slip on designer gay shit loafers, but he’s really funny. I remember I would see him around at the Ten but I would never talk to him. I saw him get a medallion once and in his thick Russian accent he said, “You know my co-worker saw my medallion on my keychain and he’s like ‘Dam dawg, is that shit gold?’ and I looked at him and said ‘Yeah right bitch, this shit is two years, it’s better than gold, no gold can get you two years. This shit is priceless!”

He shared about how he was on methadone for four years, shooting heroin in Overtown. How he grew up in Russia and came to the States, how the first time he did heroin was when he broke up with his girlfriend and one of his “awesome, amazing friends” had told him to try this—a line of heroin.

He has this old Toyota Camry on 22 inch rims, with this giant sticker over the back window that says Mad Russian. He has two fifteens in the trunk and he has two bumper stickers on the back of his car, one says Real Men Love Jesus and the other says Ex-Dead Man.