a recipe for disaster (addiction; culture)
Last night I had a dream that I went out to dinner to a five-star restaurant in San Francisco with my ex-boyfriend. I visited Brazil almost eight years ago and had fallen in love with the place, and met this man who turned my eye. I think he reminded me of Brazil: warm and sweet, romantic and affectionate. We started dating over that long, long distance.
Over several months I realized that there was something about him that I didn’t like. I noticed that he was very untrusting of others, always looking for their hidden agenda, always suspicious and critical. I knew he was frustrated with his life and he felt like he was stagnating, professional and personally, and I thought that maybe he just needed a change. I have since come to see this suspiciousness as a trait of Brazilians in general, a product of the vast chasm between the rich and poor here and of the tremendous amount of crime and corruption. You HAVE to be somewhat suspicious of others in order to survive, in a physical and well as economic sense. Nevertheless, he had it in spades.
I invited him to visit me in the U.S. and he was finally able to get a visa to do so. I was curious to see if he would be different once outside of his usual environment. Basically, he wasn’t. Within weeks I knew he wasn’t the one for me – there is enough negativity in the world without surrounding yourself in it – but he wanted to stay in the country and he asked me for help. I told him what I knew about his options and told him that I would help in any way that I could. He has been in the U.S. ever since, legally.
A few months after we broke up, he started dating a guy who introduced him to the wonders of crystal meth. He loved the stuff. He started smoking it from the time he got up in the morning until the time he went to bed at night, even joking at one point that it was his “coffee”. Almost everybody who uses that drug eventually begins to experience paranoia while using it, but a significant percentage stay paranoid (including delusions and psychosis) after they stop. He didn’t even use it regularly for that long – maybe nine months – but he sure did himself some damage. Give a drug that induces paranoia to someone who already tends to be paranoid, and you have a recipe for disaster. I won’t bore you with all of the horror stories I experienced with him, but suffice it to say that he has lost apartments and jobs and most of the people who might have been friends, and was assaulted and arrested, blah, blah, blah. The stories are often very similar with serious addicts, crystal meth or otherwise; only the names and the details change.
There is almost no one who maintains contact with him any more, and he is painfully, painfully lonely. He talks non-stop about his delusions: the government is persecuting him, through everyone and everything he encounters, and spying on him via the television and his computer, etc; if someone clears their throat near him, that is some kind of (negative) message to or about him; the banners hanging from the light posts on the street are signals of some sort to or about him; there is no war in Iraq; it goes on and on and on, without end. Needless to say, his “conversation” is extremely tedious and boring beyond description. He is like a broken record, and the music isn’t remotely interesting or beautiful. Who wants to be around that?
Nevertheless, I have tried to remain a friend to him, to whatever extent that is possible. After all, he has no one else, and I feel some combination of pity and responsibility and affection for him, because I know what he once was and perhaps could be again one day, if he got treatment. According to him, there is nothing wrong with him; all of his problems are a result of his persecution at the hands of the U.S. government, since I “brought him here”. Miraculously enough, he has mostly been able to maintain a job, although he eventually loses whatever job he has or gets another one. I think he eventually makes enough strange remarks at his place of employment that people get creeped out by him and they find ways to get rid of him, or drive him away. Imagine if a coworker of yours told you that he didn’t believe that there was a war in Iraq? That’s just one of his crazy beliefs, and one of the interactions at work that he has related to me. Imagine if you had already lost a parent or a sibling or a partner in that war, and heard something like that from someone at your job?
At times I am afraid of him, because if I brought him to the U.S. and I continue to be involved with him on whatever level as he is persecuted by the government, then I must be part of the conspiracy. What’s worse – for him – is that I don’t tolerate his crazy, bullshit talk. I am constantly confronting him, so frequently our interactions are not very pleasant. He screams at me and voices his bizarre accusations against me, although he has never physically attacked me.
He asked me to take him out to dinner the week I left, and said that he would pay me back half of the cost later (which he did). His so-called conversation was the same as always. I kept calmly telling him that he was nuts and trying to get him to the basic illogic of his statements, but he just got more agitated. I found myself wondering what the hell I was doing spending my precious time and money sitting across the table from him in a nice restaurant, when there were so many other people’s company I could have been enjoying and so many other things I could have done with that time and money. I don’t know how much more I can tolerate his company – in any location or circumstances.
Life is too short and precious, and I no longer think that my attempts at ongoing friendship with him are doing him any good. Until the pain of how is living is greater than the pleasure of it, he will never get treatment. Worse, my continued involvement with him might in some way be helping to perpetuate the myth that he is a victim of government persecution. Maybe that’s why I had that dream.
