DANE

"Are we going to die?"

Apparently when you're high on meth, little things like tailgating become life or death situations straight out of a James Bond flick. And while I didn't mean to terrify Dane like that as we drove to the rehab center, after what he's put my family through, I'm kind of glad I almost made him shit his pants.

It wasn't suppose to turn out like this. In fact, I was 100% certain that he was our savior, the one that could rise my family's smoothie shop from the ashes. He sure as hell didn't look the part: in fact, he looked like an extra from Grease, with his mouse-covered hair, skin tight black shirt and the kind of long gold chain that Mr. T would normally wear. But his personality was infectious, like the guy didn't have a narcissistic bone in his body. I told my mom that, if you wanted a deli cook, this was your guy.

"I don't know Jay," she told me. "Something doesn't seem right with him."

"The guy wants this job so he can help pay for her cancer treatment," I told her. "How screwed up can the guy be?"

At first he proved my prophecy to be correct, and during those first few months he was like the Pied Pier of sandwich cooks. The smell of Philly cheese steaks and grilled chicken sandwiches would flood the store and spill out to the street, drawing people from all around the plaza. Pretty soon we were making lunches on a regular basis for several local companies, and it seemed that our luck has finally turned around. That is, until his addiction started to control our lives.

It all started when he had to leave the store on several occasions because he thought the machines in our store were making noises, and would tell us of his numerous conversations with birds that would land next to his apartment. Then he started to tell us about how the FBI was trying to contact him through his brain, telling him that they were out to kill him, his family and his girlfriend. And what a girlfriend she was. Meth had deteriorated her body to the point where she could make most Jerry Springer guests look like Miss America models, and I could count the amount of teeth she had on two hands. It didn't help that she not only fed his addiction, as we came to find out, but she robbed him on numerous occasions, and would regularly sleep with dealers in exchange for money and drugs. Despite all of this, he was absolutely convinced that she was the best thing since sliced bread. And to put the icing on this cake, one day he walked in, asked my mom "want to see what I've been smoking?", and showed her a Zip-Loc bag with a rock of meth inside. That night she asked me what meth looks like, and I had to give her a crash course on the drug.

The straw that broke the camel's back, though, was when Dane, out of nowhere, walked out of the store, hopped in his car and drove off, leaving my mom to take care of a $300 lunch on her own. When I came back from class that day, I had to comfort her as she sobbed into my arms uncontrollably, having no clue what we were going to do with our store now. He did have the nerve to come back to the store a few days later to tell us what happened: apparently he decided to drive to Mexico to escape the government and the voices in his head, thinking they couldn't contact him if he went on the other side of the border. He even went so far as to get a job application at a McDonald's there, but once he learned of the minute pay he'd be making there, he drove back. As he told his tale, nothing but my moral values kept me from punching him in the face until he wound up unconscious.

At this point I wanted to wash my hands of him, cut our losses and move on with our lives, but my mom was the opposite. There are times when she turns into the Mother Teresa of Arizona, wants to right the injustices of society and save people from certain doom. And this was one of those times. Plus, she told me, he was holding our store hostage: too many people came solely for his food, and if he left, the business we'd lose would be catastrophic. Which is why, in June of 2006, we were driving him to a rehab center in Phoenix to get him on the straight in narrow, since no one else in his family gave a damn about his addiction.

The room he'd be staying in with two other former-junkies was surprisingly cozy: comfy leather couches, a full-sized kitchen, big screen TV and two bedrooms that were actually bigger than the one I was sleeping in. At the time, I thought this would be a place that I wouldn't mind living in. That is, it weren't for the whole "have to be addicted to drugs" thing, or the fact that I'd feel safer living in Afghanistan then in the absolute ghetto of Phoenix this place was located in.

After he dropped of his belongings, he went to the main office of the center to take a drug test. The head honcho there asked if he was serious about getting clean.

"Hell yeah," Dane told him, his Joker-like smile dripping with sarcasm. Clearly the guy wasn't buying it, but Dane managed to be serious long enough to convince him to stay. When the test came back, there were still minute traces of the drug, small enough that they would let him stay that night. They told us he would have to attend regular meetings with other junkies, and during the day he could leave to work in the early morning or afternoon. We left the center with the hope that this would be the place to resurrect him so that he could be our savior again.

For the first few weeks, everything was going to plan. We'd get regular updates from the center, and he was making great progress, fully participating in the group meetings and carefully obeying all their rules. Then two weeks in, we were told that his insurance would no longer be able to pay for the drugs he was taking to prevent him from hearing the voices, and since he couldn't afford it, they slowly started to come back to him. About 6 days later we got a call from the center telling us that he left the center the afternoon before and never came back. It was at this point that I thought we'd never see him again.

The next afternoon, I was talking to a co-worker, when all of a sudden we see a bus slowly pulling up in front of our store, letting off someone that looked really familiar. It was Dane. He was lurching like a zombie to his car, the one we had punctured holes in all of its tires so he couldn't drive away. I could tell that he was fucked up, just totally out of his mind as he staggered towards the car, his eyes staring at it like an oasis in the desert. Once he got in, he backed up and drove off, his airless tires causing him to speed off at a snails pace. And that was the last I ever saw of him.