Tag: alcoholics

I am not sure what I can offer. My story is the same than everyone else’s. My recovery is the same as well. So what sets me apart? I have no idea. I am not sure how I got sober either. When Manuel asked me, I answered quick with the AA fellowship and the steps. However I have not worked all the steps yet and I have not talked to my sponsor in months. In fact I do not even have a San Antonio sponsor yet. I do know the entire deal was a process that started sixteen months ago. I was talking to Rudy. I knew where my life was headed, and I knew the decisions I would be making over the next few weeks would effect my life for the next fifteen to twenty years. So I made the decision to rent my house out to my sister-n-law. The sole reason being, the party had to stop. I did not want it too, but I did know it had to stop, and it started with this house. My plan was too rent out the house, and go live at the Haven For Hope, a homeless shelter in downtown San Antonio. This is right about the time I bought a pair of hair clippers and started giving myself fades. I wanted to save twenty bucks a month on hair cuts, so I could do more drugs, because in a year that was over two hundred dollars I would be wasting on things other than drugs and alcohol. I wanted to live free at the Haven For Hope and save the incoming rent money. I also wanted to talk to people living at the center, get their stories. The stories CNN dosen’t have time for. No one has time for in fact. Most the people are going to die addicts. Like Manuel. I give him no chance. Southsider, Mexican mafia, addicted to heroin. We had to finally tell him and his girlfriend they had to move out of the metal shed in the backyard of our rental house on the south side San Antonio, that they were living in. I remember a few weeks ago, when I first met Manuel. I told my Dad someone was living in the shed, my Dad blew me off as to say no way, no one could ever live in their especially with this over one hundred degree heat. My father is a very smart and intelligent man, however when comes to addiction and poverty, is has not the slightest clue. Not that he was born into old money, he has worked hard his entire life and gave my sisters and I everything we wanted and needed. But he just does not know the disease of addiction. So Manuel popped up at our rental after the people moved out, and said he gave the renters two hundred dollars a month to stay in the shed. My Dad could not believe it. I asked him what his deal was, he said heroin, and asked me how I could tell? I told because I was an addict also. Then he asked, then why aren’t you high? Because I am six months sober, I replied.
Then that’s when he asked me how?
I was in the metal shed today looking around at the little property that Manuel and his girlfriend had collected over the year of them staying there. I glass jar filled with lighters, I candle with a picture of Jesus Christ laid on the floor. A dingy full size mattress covered most of the cement slab. A loaf a bread on the make shift shelf that is the top of the tube television. Cigarette buds everywhere, dice, shoe string and a sticker that said SUPPORT YOU LOCAL SOUTHSIDE MC. Empty little boxes of anything and everything littered the entire floor. What caught my attention was a certificate, hanging on a nail above the TV and make shift shelf, partially hidden by another piece of paper that had the word JESUS written in pencil. The certificate said MANUEL DIAZ successfully completed DETOX 2012. I have no idea where he and his girl moved too. I heard maybe across the street to someone else’s backyard, yet I have not seen them around.