Jumpin Jesus!

                I was court-ordered to go to some kinda drug rehab this last time around.  Volunteered, one might say.  Of course, one might be totally delusional.  There are few treatment options available to a drug addict or alcoholic who’s smashed his life to smithereens.  In my experience, if I still had money to go to treatment with, I’d be spending it on drugs.  I haven’t met many crackheads or junkies who were running scams and stealing shit to come up with money for rehab.  Out of the few that were available to me in the city where I happened to be when I washed up on the rocks, I settled on a 6 month stay at the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center.  It’s a Christian place.  Go figure.  It’s the fuckin Salvation Army for Chrissakes.  And I’m not, nor have I ever been a Christian.  If you are a Christian, I may wind up ranting and you may find yourself offended, to which I say too fuckin bad.  I’m offended by Christians all the goddam time.

               

So yeah, I elected to go to the ARC cos it sounded better than the other rehab center around here, some place that’ll make you sit on a bench with a dunce cap while they tell you how bad you suck for a year and a half.  I’d rather listen to some moron talk about invisible people for six months.  Actually, I’d rather not have gotten myself into the situation in the first place but I might as well wish for something more interesting than that.  Like I’d rather be able to fly or to set shit on fire by blinking.  None of those things are gonna happen.  I don’t think.  I keep trying with the fire thing but I just look like I have some mild form of Tourette Syndrome.  If there was a god in heaven I guess I could try praying to satan in hell for pyrokinetic powers, but I haven’t seen any satanists do anything of the sort.  There’s just a buncha assholes running around, god or no god; satan or no satan.  And none of them are flying or setting shit on fire with their minds.

               

Where was I?  Oh yeah, how could I forget where I was?  I was in the goddam Salvation Army ARC, technically allowed to walk out the door but knowing that no good would come of it.  Turned out the place was pretty easy to get kicked out of, but I managed to get through it.  I’m a real fuckin survivor.  Eye of the Tiger.  All that shit.  I could go into what a day in the ARC was like, ala “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” but I won’t.  I probably will, but not right now.  I wanna get to the meat of the story I suckered you fuckers into reading.  I’m not doing a very good job at though, now are I?  No, dear reader, I am not.  Well, here I go.

                I stumbled into the ARC on Friday of Labor Day weekend, so I didn’t get to see what normally happens at the place until the following Tuesday.  Some of the guys who had been there for a while would warn me that I’d be cursing the place in no time, that they just work you like a fuckin dog and try to jam the bible up your ass.  Now that I think about it, that’s what I’d say once I had been there for a while.  Nobody said that to me.  Whatever.  On the Tuesday after Labor Day, I began to work like a dog.  I don’t mean I was chasing cattle or hunting raccoons or pulling a goddam sled.  I was doing normal human stuff.  Or abnormal human stuff.  But I was doing it for my dinner and you better fuckin obey until you figure out what you can get away with.  And if you’re stupid and unlucky, forget it.

                After work, we’d have some kinda class or group or something, depending on which day of the week it was.  Monday was Labor Day so they skipped the normal routine.  By the time the next Monday rolled around, I was already sick of working in the goddam warehouse 6 days a week and being forced to go to church twice a week.  I would eventually realize that I could read “A People’s History of the U.S.” in church and everybody would think I was reading the bible.  I saved that particular book for chapel.  I’d read other shit the rest of the time.  But Monday was “Drug and Alcohol Class”, followed by a bible study.  I didn’t mind the drug and alcohol education, but god I hated fuckin bible study.  I hated every fucking second of it.  Hated it to a level of intoxication, as I’ve heard it said before by some satanic moron.

                The first Monday that I was there that they held a Alcohol and Drug Ed/bible study, we were in for a special treat.  The dingbat who normally lectured us gave the floor to some schmuck in a wheelchair and his dipshit buddy.  It quickly became clear that the wheelchair guy wasn’t even an addict, so who knows why he was talking to a bunch of junkies and drunks.  His sidekick was a member of one of the 12 step programs, and everything he was doing seemed to be in violation of all of the 12 traditions of AA and NA and all the other A’s.

                What followed was completely surreal.  It was like the kinda shit you see on some 60 Minutes segment or on a stupid rerun of MacGuyver where MacGuyver has to rescue some poor family who got sucked into Jonestown or something.  The kinda shit that you doubt actually exists.  It exists.  This doesn’t lend any proof that god exists, like before I doubted it but now I don’t.  What ensued and what we were subjected to that evening was some hysterical bullshit.  The guy in the wheel chair would frequently say “whoa” in a surfer/stoner accent for no apparent reason whatsoever.  Once in a while he’d shout really loud that he wanted to talk about what happened at the cross.  He’d tell  us he was drunk on spirit wine, that we could all drink the spirit of Jesus too.  Then he’d throw his arms in the air and shout “WHOOOO” like some cheesy ghost in some lame-ass’s front yard on Halloween.  At one point during all this, he wasn’t feeling too well so he had his dipshit pal hand him a few pills of some kind, which he promptly gulped down with a beer.  Just kidding.  He didn’t have a fuckin beer.  He had spirit wine.

                So the wheelchair guy did all of the aforementioned things repeatedly, repeated everything he said multiple times.  He only gobbled down pills in front of everybody once, though.  *SNAP*  Finally, he asked if anybody in the room had lower back pain.  Christ, my fuckin back’s been killing me since 1995 so you bet your ass I raised my hand, as did a couple dozen of the 110 or so folks in the room.  The guy in the wheelchair promised to take the pain away with the help of his lord and savior.  I was ready.  If this jerkoff could make my lower back stop hurting, I’d go ahead and drink some Jesus juice or whatever.  But then the wheelchair guy told us all to have the person next to us put his hand on our backs while he said a prayer.  At that point I just sat down.  What the fuck….  It was over not long after that, at which point I turned to one of my buddies and asked him why the wheelchair guy didn’t just heal his own goddam back and walk the fuck outta there.  Nobody had an answer for that.  According to a couple of dumbasses, I guess the reason why all of our backs still hurt was that we didn’t have enough faith.  Your fuckin a right I don’t have any faith.

                There were many good jokes to be had over the next week.  You  could hear slaves shouting “WHOOOO” and saying “whoa” in surfer/stoner accents and shouting about drinking jesus juice.  You could hear it echo through the warehouse for 9 hours a day.