Author’s Note: Doing a bit of a slightly off-brand (?) pivot today. The following is a short story/creative nonfiction essay based on my stay in a short-term, inpatient, dual-diagnosis behavioral health facility (almost eight years sober!) Identifiers have been removed and some details have been changed to protect people’s anonymity. Why here? I suppose I talk about my ‘lit fic’ background but don’t show it much, so here it sort of is. Plus, I needed some creative muscle stretch and an outlet to share something.
Content/Trigger Warnings: Addiction, inpatient treatment, brief mention of incarceration, mention of self-harm, mentions of drug and alcohol abuse, psychological abuse, trauma, domestic violence, mention of experimentation involving animals. No graphic on page violence or animal death or harm.
Ring the bell. Give the food. Ring the bell. Give the food. Ring the bell.
Wait.
The dog salivates. The bell inextricably linked with food.
Of mice and men and rats and dogs. Do the drug. Get sick. Do the drug. Get sick. Do the drug.
Wait.
In rehab, a counselor demonstrates this “lesson” about classical conditioning by denying us our cigarette break at the designated time. The clock chimes. Give the cigarette. The clock chimes. Give the cigarette. The clock chimes.
Wait.
He’s done this before. Smug smile, self-important use of vocabulary he’s sure we won’t know. Oh yes. He’s done this as frequently as Pavlov rang that God damn bell.
Time for him to learn a lesson in fucking off.
I stand, nearly sending my plastic chair flying into the cheap Formica table behind us. “We’re not Pavlov’s fucking dogs. We’re people.”
His smirk drips to the floor like a Dali painting. “You know Pavlov?” He presses a finger to his lips. Like he’s never considered an addict could do something as extraordinary as know things.
I tighten my fingers. Chewed down nails scrabble for purchase against soft, white palms. My jaw clenches. Muscles protest, sore from grinding teeth, but I ignore my body’s bullshit. Same as always.
My head spins, turning my stomach. Days since I’ve slept more than minutes. Still, my alcohol withdrawal doesn’t seem nearly as bad after watching my eighteen-year-old roommate writhe from her drug of choice. Heroin.
I press the heels of my palms to watering eyes. Night blends into day. So do sounds. This counselor’s nasally lecture, then my roommate’s hiccuping, repetitive cries. I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to…
No three clicks of her heels. Not here. Her ruby slippers are rehab and a clean piss test. The yellow brick road is a broken bitch full of potholes and more than one wicked witch. Her father called the cops on her when she stole from him. Rehab or jail, the judge said. Clean or homeless, her father said.
From my plastic-covered mattress I listen and think. Of her. Of me. Of my college education and good job I’ve somehow managed not to lose. Of the apartment that’s all mine. Of my cats who I hope are being fed according to my strict instructions. Of the world waiting for me on the other side of this hell. Gratitude floods my veins like wine once did. Fear sneaks in alongside.
I shiver. Now or last night. I’m not sure. Losing time and my body again.
A blanket that’s too small to cover me, too thin to warm me. When I asked for another one, the nurse refused. In the shitty half-light of our room, my roommate—frizzy, light brown hair framing her round face and small voice—shyly explained how the One Blanket Policy prevented noose-making.
Fucked up. That’s what you call the situation in which an eighteen-year-old girl who cries for her father every night explains this to you with a sheepish smile.
Hell. That’s what you call this place run by aids who check on you every fifteen minutes, flooding your darkness with light, snatching your sleep, nurses who come every four hours to take more and more blood, and counselors and doctors who see us as experiments to test their hypotheses. Not people. Never that.
I pull my chair into its place at the edge of the semi-circle and sit back down, sucking in a breath so deep my tar-filled lungs strain at their edges. “I know Pavlov,” I say, running my finger over the pattern of scars my pink pajama pants hide. “And Skinner. Operant conditioning, the quadrants, antecedent, behavior, consequence. I know Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park.” I lift my gaze. “We’re not stupid. We’re sick.”
The counselor leans forward, eyes shrewd. I imagine him older, his shaggy brown hair graying, glasses touching the tip of his freckled white nose. Thick hands twisted from arthritis and all the writing of grand, scholarly articles.
Content in his self-righteousness, he sits in a plush leather chair. Blue scrubs traded for an argyle vest, white shirt rolled up to the elbows, one leg crossed over the other, notepad in hand, he listens to a woman cry. Murmured platitudes, coping strategies, and I understands are exchanged.
Nothing. He understands nothing.
“What’s Rat Park?” A man with light-brown skin that should be darker perks up. His brown eyes hint at smiling the way his voice hints at a Mexican accent.
The counselor leans back in his blue plastic chair, smirk retrieved. He sweeps his arm across the group like a king gesturing toward his court. “Go ahead then, if you’re smart enough to teach my lesson.”
Bait. Provoke. Wait.
I take it. Of course I do. Taking the bait is how I ended up here. Not in a Reagan’s gateway drug sort of way but because proving people wrong about me is my real drug. Failure to do so the thing leading to the downward spiral.
Behavior, antecedent, consequence.
I face the group. Lift my chin. Straighten my spine. My eyes feel sharper than they have in a long time. He thinks he’s teaching classical conditioning, but he’s teaching me an entirely different lesson. Addiction has branded me for life. A new scarlet letter. Tagged by society as other. Lesser. Weaker.
The thing inside me that hates when the world gets away with wrong flails against my ribs like a feral cat trapped in a cage. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. It becomes my heartbeat. My war cry.
In that moment between breaths, between the tautness of my latissimus dorsi muscles, and the slowly waking synapses firing in my brain like an old engine sputtering to life after years of dormancy, I realize two important things.
One. I will never prove to assholes like soon to be Dr. Whoever the Fuck they’re wrong. I will never convince them I’m more. We are more. Stronger. Smarter. Braver.
Two. I don’t have to.
This guy doesn’t matter. We do. The ones in this room. We matter, and we have more to offer. More than the needles in our arms and the vodka on our breath. More than what we’ve done and who we’ve been. We’re a whole world of untapped potential waiting to conquer the dreams left behind.
But first, we have to break free.
“Rat Park was an experiment conducted by a psychologist named Bruce Alexander back in the ‘70s,” I say. “To test a hypothesis about addiction, he put rats in different environments. Some lived in small, empty cages alone. No other rats. No little wheel. Just them and the cage.”
The man who asked the question draws back, a shudder racing from his neck to the tips of his fingers. Thick biceps ripple with the motion, goosebumps appearing on his lighter than it should be brown skin. Prison. That’s where he’s spent the last eight years. Trading one cage for another. Doomed by society to play this age-old story on repeat. Stamped forever like the rest of us. Doubly condemned for the color of his skin. Triply for the lilt in his voice.
But we aren’t Alexander’s rats any more than we’re Pavlov’s dogs. We’re people. This one loves his brother with a ferocity to rival the sun’s heat. Who loves his nieces even more. He wants what we all want. It’s the thing that binds us together, here in hell clinging to hope.
Freedom from our cages.
I tilt my head. No, we’re not rats. We’re snakes, shedding our skin. Becoming better.
One day at a time.
“The other rats he put in Rat Park.” I smile. Twist my voice like my mom did reading me a story when I was little. The way that makes everything feel more magical.
She made our cage disappear with stories. Downstairs, the enemy wasn’t a man drunk on cheap gin snoring atop vomit and piss-soaked couch cushions. It was a dragon huffing out puffs of smoke in her lair amidst a pile of jewels. My mother wasn’t a battered wife with a black eye and a broken nose. She was the first female knight in her realm, fastening her glistening armor tight.
In a story, you can change everything. Even how people see themselves.
“In Rat Park, the rats were allowed to socialize with other rats, including have sex, very important to mention that.” A few people chuckle. “The rats formed family units and social groups. They had treats and toys, soft places to make their beds. There were activities for them, wheels, puzzles, whatever rats like doing. Rat Park was a cage, too, because it’s all a cage really, but it was a fucking awesome cage. The rats had their friends, their family, things to do and eat and play with. Best of all, there were no predators. It was safe.”
An elderly Black woman with crinkled skin and a tough as nails attitude scoots her walker closer. Her dark brown eyes, sclera yellow where they should be white, wide as a child’s as she waves at me to continue.
Crack. She’s here because her daughter threatened to stop paying her rent if she didn’t check herself in. When she told me her drug of choice, I wondered how someone with a walker bought hard street drugs, then what kind of person sold them to her. Fortunately, my mother also taught me to be polite, so I kept these questions to myself.
“Alexander gave all the rats two bottles to drink from. One had plain water. One was laced with morphine.”
A white woman in her mid-forties with bleach-burnt blond hair and a frame a novelist would describe as bird-like settles her chin on her hand and lets out a sigh as weary as the bags under her blue eyes. “I know where this is going.”
Next to her, a tall, Puerto Rican woman in her early thirties smacks her lightly. “Let her finish!” Once upon a few months ago, she was a nurse in this very facility. Until meth stole her license, then tried to steal her life. She still wears scrubs and pulls her thick, curly black hair into a bun neater than any of the other nurses. Still defends every patient with a mother’s instinct. Her kids are the reason she’s here, the threat of losing them all too real now her ex has called CPS.
I nod my chin. Yes, the bird-like woman does know where this is going. But I’m intent on telling it regardless. “In the small cages, the rats chose the bottle laced with morphine as soon as they knew what it was, or, more importantly, what it would do. But over in Rat Park…”
I stumble. Swallow hard. I know this story. It even has a happily ever after with a moral at the end, my favorite kind. I know the point I wanted to make. Rat Park is a thing we have to create for ourselves.
Fear shocks me like an ice bath. It isn’t breath that stops but heart. What if we can’t? What if the too small cages aren’t only in the world but in each of us?
What if our minds have become our cages?
“Over in Rat Park what? You can’t just stop like that and leave this dude to tell the rest.” The man who asked the question to start has returned from the place I sent him with my talk of tiny cages. His thick arms twine around the chair he straddles, a refusal to sit in it “properly” like one of the douchier aids insists.
Behind him, leaning against the back wall, still in a drug-induced haze that glasses over what might be hazel eyes once the broken blood vessels heal, a ghost of a boy shifts his hands from across his chest to the pockets of his baggy sweats. It’s the longest he’s been quiet since the police brought him in less than two days ago, screaming with a fury that made spit fly from bloody lips.
Meth, he told us later. He was living under a bridge with some friends. When the snowstorm hit, the police rounded them up and brought them here, so they didn’t freeze to death. Three squares and 72 hours, the maximum they can hold someone committed against their will, and he’d be back out there, he promised. This is his fourth stint.
In stories, you can make people see themselves differently.
Maybe I can do that with stories, too.
If our cages are our minds, we’ll tear them down and build our own Rat Park in their place. A feat of a thing, for sure. But there are no stronger people.
“Over in Rat Park, the rats picked the plain water,” I say. “They tried the morphine water, a few came back once in a while for another sip, but mostly, they drank the plain water.”
For the first time since I started, I look at the counselor. He nods once. Not approval. Permission.
“You usually only hear that part of the story,” I say. “It’s simple, don’t you know? Make the world better, people stop using.” I roll my eyes, the gesture accompanied by a chorus of disgruntled snorts and “sure rights.”
“But Alexander wasn’t done.” I shove my elbows into my thick thighs and prop my head on my closed fists. “He didn’t just leave all the rats where they were. Some, he moved. One group he took from their cages and put into Rat Park. Another group from Rat Park he put into cages.”
A tennis ball from the Black woman’s walker squeaks against the white floor. I take a deep breath. The room smells of diluted bleach and coffee. My heart pounds its war cry in my chest, my ears, my wrists.
Everyone focuses on the rats moved into Rat Park. The “cured” ones. But we aren’t rats. There’s no cure for the brands we bear. Some deeper than addiction. More visible, too. Trauma. Sexuality. Skin color. Gender identity. Nationality. Body type. Economic status. There are a thousand ways to be branded. Addiction is but one. One that gives no fucks about the others. One that somehow, against all odds, has brought us together.
“The rats moved into Rat Park stopped drinking the morphine water, as predicted.”
Pause. Breathe. Wait.
Time to talk about the rats the world forgets.
“As for the rats moved into cages?” I pivot, fast as a snake strike, eyes locking on our counselor. “They started drinking the morphine. Turns out we’re all addicts when locked in a sufficiently small cage.”
Aimee Davis 