Province News

Autobiographical essay by Wayne Richard: Supplement to Partners Spring 2002
Friday, June 28, 2002

Darkness to Daylight
An autobiography: from life as a homeless drug addict to life doing God’s will
By Wayne Richard

From peppermints and Popsicles to darkness
I grew up in my grandmother’s house. Life was pretty routine: go to school; clean up your room, church on Sunday. I was an only child and while I have the faintest image in my mind of my mother’s face looking in to my crib, I never knew her. She died of a brain aneurysm. I later was told that the aneurysm was the result of my father’s beating her. Grandma was my family, and my grand father was too, even though he had re-married. My grandma tried everyday to never let me feel like I was different from the other kids. I was sent to a Catholic grammar school on Chicago’s south side. And so, initially my life was safe and secure - all peppermints and Popsicles.

I graduated from grammar school at the age of thirteen, and in the summer of that same year grandma died. It was the end of warm beds and firm hugs, the death of the person I knew loved me more than anyone else in the world, and whom I loved equally as much. No more peppermints and Popsicles. The light had gone out, and all was darkness.

And then they came for me
I slept in the only bedroom I had ever had for the last time the night she died. In the morning grandpa packed me a bag, I would be going to live with him he said. I was happily relieved, because I loved my grandfather and admired and respected him greatly. It seemed that often he told me riddles that I couldn’t figure out. He told me that it was important that I remembered them. They were riddles like, “how a fish gets caught is it opens it’s mouth”, or What does not bend, will break”. “It’s a poor mouse that only has one hole to run into.” They were only silly riddles to me as a child, but as I discovered later as a man, they were signposts on a roadmap for living.

Grandpa had a wife. Rose. She and grandpa never had any children and I’m not so sure that it wasn’t because she didn’t like kids. My second day there, she entered my room after I came home from school and said something smelt strange. My only thought was that it might have been my gym socks, still yet unwashed from my hasty packing. Later that night my grandpa told me that I couldn’t remain there because Rose said she smelled pot smoke (marijuana) in my bedroom. He arranged for me to stay with a friend of the family.

At that moment, I vowed to hate him until death. It would be nine years until I chose to speak with him again. In my mind, the betrayals were complete. Mom and Dad gone from my life early, then Grandma was gone. And now I was tossed aside by Grandpa. I decided that I would love no one anymore nor would I allow anyone’s love to harm me anymore. Where was the God I prayed to every morning in school? Where was his loving mercy and help? I guess I could add him to the list of lies in my life too.

Life on my own as a teenager
The family I was sent to live with had been friends of my family for a long time, so I was told. Under their roof I learned that people would hurt me for amusement, that people could and would be cruel, and it was a normal part of life in that world. Gregg, their son, got in trouble with the police but he lied and said it was my fault. His family believed his version even though the police didn’t. They blamed me, so it was time for me to leave.

There were many broken homes among my friends at school. So I got to close to a guy who was living in a home with his two older brothers. It seems they were left the house by their mother and I was invited to stay there until I could do better. I ended up there throughout high school. It was there that I got my first look at hardcore drugs and their use. My friend Milton and his brothers used drugs to support their own habits and to make money. I sold some to make money and pay my way too. But these drugs were not for me. I was content with my alcohol, for now anyway.

I moved through high school with as little disruption as was possible for me. I graduated. I thought: now that I’ve completed high school, life would really begin for me. Most of my friends were going off to college; but I hadn’t any money for college or anyone around whom I would have let get close enough to direct me to wiser choices. I decided that I would take a year off and just hang, to sort of relax from all that studying and striving that I had to do in high school. It would be a mistake that would haunt me for the next sixteen years.

Life without purpose
They say that an idle mind and a purposeless life are an open invitation to the devil. That’s the real deal! A few months of just hanging out brought the pain of separation from the school and my old teammates and friends. I lost the stability that going to school everyday brings. Shortly thereafter I met Curtis who taught me many things: how to hot-wire a car, how to ride a motorcycle, and finally how to cook and smoke cocaine. I was nineteen.

Everyone was doing it in some form or fashion and I never noticed any negative or ill effects. This drugging we did was about lust and sex and feeling free from the grasp of “the Man” and His imposing and oppressing ideologies. That’s what we believed.

After several years I began to use more and more, but not enough to recognize a problem. I depended on the drugs more and more to relieve the pain of living, the boredom of dead end jobs, and the lack of nurturing relationships in my life.

One day I got a call. My great uncle who I had kept contact with, my Grandpa‘s brother, was on the phone, telling me there had been an accident and my Grandpa needed me. I responded that my grandpa could die for all I cared, for this was the man who abandoned me when I was most vulnerable. Now my uncle was asking me to help care for my grandpa because he no longer always knew who he or anyone else was. I found out he had almost died in this accident! So I responded to my Grandpa’s need.

I spent most of the next year with my Grandpa. During that year I concerned myself with work and caring for grandpa, and I scarcely used drugs. Then he died. The boredom returned and I picked right up with frequent drugging where I had left off.

Within the next few years, I met a woman whom I would eventually marry. She had parents who were both alcoholics and addicts; she was against drugs so I never fully told her of my drug use. She had a seven-year-old daughter, so I threw myself into helping her raise her daughter and developing a real relationship with a woman for the first time in my life. What followed was the most painful period of my life. Since I never had a real family, I wanted to have a family so bad that I jumped into one and expected all the rewards. But, having led a life of hustle and deception, of separateness and self-pleasuring, I couldn’t enter into the giving that a marriage and a family require. I could give criticism but not hugs, money but not time. Since I hadn’t loved or allowed anyone to love me for so long, I did not have a clue what to do when I was disappointed or felt hurt or betrayed. When my family failed to entertain me or relieve my boredom, or when my sexual desires weren’t fulfilled as I wished, and my need for mental stimulation wasn’t satisfied, I blamed my family.

I had to escape from this entrapment and anguish. Cocaine was there, lying patiently in wait, ready to take me to another land where responsibility and accountability have died. Its a land where pleasure and perversion exalt themselves as gods, where you give everything you have to avoid the revealing light of the sun on a new day. My drug habit increased. I often wouldn’t come home, out all night drugging. Finally my spouse would have no more of my cruelty and disregard. So I left the place and people that had represented home to me and hit the streets running.

On the streets, lost
My first stop was the neighborhood drug dealer to score some coke. That would ease the immediate pain of separation and cloud the seriousness of my situation. The next day brought the realization that I had nowhere to go, after my “host” of the previous evening put me out when I couldn’t produce money or another ‘hit’. I began to sleep in dope’s den, but after seeing someone almost killed for stealing another guy’s crack pipe, I knew I wouldn’t be safe there. I was addicted, but not crazy, not yet anyway. I eventually found an abandoned garage and I moved in. I never thought about the fact that I was living in a garage, with rats scurrying about, with no way to refrigerate food or that I had to burn kerosene for a little heat, that I had no way to bathe or that I went to work everyday in dirty clothes. Finally one weekend after having gotten high for four straight days, I vomited up a glass of water, the only substance other than cocaine that I had ingested during those four days. I hadn’t any money for drugs or anyway to get them. I no longer had anyone to whom I could go to for food or carfare to work. I couldn’t bring myself to return and sit alone with my rat friend in my garage. I was so filthy that I walked through alleys because I wanted no one to see or smell me.

I was ready to end my life. I sat under a traffic bridge with a gun in my mouth, tears in my eyes. Now my descent was complete. My final thought as I was about to squeeze the trigger was “God why wouldn’t you love me?” And then it happened.

“If one sheep is lost, I will leave the ninety and nine and...”
In that instant it was as if time stood still and I heard a voice as clear as my own, although I can’t say whether it would have been audible to anyone else. But it was loud and it said “ get up, leave from here; there is something else for you to do.” I have never doubted for one moment since that day that it was God speaking to me. On that day my entire life changed. I went back to my garage to await the next day, sleeping deeply and peacefully. It was the last night I would ever spend in that garage. The next day I reached for a phone book. I called an addiction hotline and was referred to another number where a man asked me if was I ready to give up doing things my own way. I said “yes” and was given an address to go to meet him. That meeting took place on June 15, 1999 and I’ve been clean ever since.

The man I met with that morning helped me get into a treatment program on that very day despite the fact that there was a three-week waiting list. An unseen hand was directing everything, and I knew whose hand it was. Shortly after I had placed that gun in my mouth, I had been saved somehow. I had absolutely nothing, yet I began to ask God to direct my life. I never looked back.

I began to be re-formed. I sought out God’s Word on how I should try to live. The events that had brought me so much pain I found, under closer reflection, revealed the steps for me to heal and grow. I spent the next 8 months in serious reflection and prayer at a treatment and transitional center for those who have been homeless. I began to journalize as well as write poetry. This writing became a vehicle by which I came face to face with my inner feelings and thoughts. I had to find freedom from the bondage of anger, bitterness, pity and ignorance of self. I desperately needed to live without the fear and loneliness that had guided my actions. And to do it I had to give God the lead!

“Lack of power, we thought, that was our dilemma. We had to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be a power greater than ourselves.” (Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous)

It was at a spiritual retreat hosted by the Ignatian Spirituality Project, that I began to examine the continuous presence of God in my life. There I met Fr. Bill Creed, SJ who through the retreat challenged me as well as the other retreatants to discover a deeper relationship with God. It was at that retreat that I became one of many men gathered within a circle, formed to cherish the Light. In fact, we literally gathered in a circle several times during that retreat. We became honest with ourselves, with one another, honest about our fears. We became honest with God.
Many of us experienced the warmth of a fellowship with men for the first time. We told our stories and we prayed. An opening appeared in my armor, through which I could allow God’s love and mercy to come inside me in a new way. I witnessed this happening in several of my brothers who had been homeless also.

I have learned that whenever we let God love us, then we begin to love ourselves and take responsibility for our lives. It is through the presence of God, his spirit moving in us that we come home!

My first retreat was almost three years ago. Since then, I have helped as a team member on over a dozen retreats. I continue to go on retreat because I see God move men on the retreats to faith and hope. I work to help continue to bring the gift of these retreats to homeless men recovering from drugs and alcohol like myself. I thank God for allowing me the opportunity to be of service, to give back what was so freely given to me. Today I have a full time job, sobriety and peace in surrendering my will to God’s will, in allowing the presence of the Lord in my life to lead me.
Each day now I go twice to my knees, praying to God for two things; the knowledge of his will for my life and the power to carry it out.