Clean Mountain Air

Photo by Patrick O’Dell

’m a recovering addict. I was a junkie. My drug of choice was cocaine, crack… Whatever I could shoot up, basically. My dad bailed me out of jail, the workhouse in Columbus. He brought me back up here and after about a week he had me thrown in jail in Floyd County to sober me up. I was there for 22 days until he finally bailed me out again. While I was there, I got the realization of, “God, I don’t want to do this again.” So he brought me home and I looked up a friend of mine who I’d gone to school with up here. She had moved away, but then she went through a divorce and moved back home too. I called her mom up to try and get ahold of her and her mom was like, “Well, she’s here. She’s living here now.” She works at the health department, as it turns out, and she told me, “Get ready. I’m taking you to an NA meeting.” I’ve been sober over six months now. I spend all my extra time at the Catholic community center here, helping the sisters and doing whatever I can to stay busy and stay sober. They just put me in drug court last week. It’s set up by the court system pretty much all over Kentucky. There are three phases to it, and they just put me in the first phase. I have to call in seven days a week and enter a code in, and then they tell me if I’m getting drug-tested that day or not. This morning, I entered my code at 7 o’clock in the morning and they told me I had to be there between 8:30 and 9:45 to get drug-tested. They give me no warning in advance. I went Monday, Tuesday, and then another time today, Thursday.

Photos by Jerry Hsu