A Life On Drugs-Mark (Part 1)

all right mark marco where'd you grow up where are you from originally originally i'm from i was born in vermont lived in the south bronx moved to jersey city and then also lived in the southern part of jersey so i'm an east coast kid originally how was your family tell me about mom and dad um we grew up extremely poor um i had five brothers and two sisters and we grew up in richfield new jersey my mom was a stay-at-home mom immigrated from ireland um didn't have much work experience and way too many children and not enough money to go around my father was an accountant in clark new jersey and just never ever had enough bills to pay i remember early on as a childhood when we moved out of the south bronx into richfield new jersey we lived in a really old house that only my father could afford and in that house there was no heat there was no hot water and uh we had just scrummage around and live on food stamps and government subsidies just to be able to eat um in the winter was freezing in the state of new jersey and we had no windows in the house and there was no heat and i remember me and my brothers and my sister at the time would just huddle around the little kerosene heater in the living room and and i could remember to this day hearing the click click click click click and hopefully the heat would come on and we just huddle around to get through the night and looking back on it i remember i was just so afraid that one of my brothers you know we'd wake up and somebody wouldn't be alive we'd maybe shower once every couple weeks boil the hot water on the stove and pour it over each other in the shower and i realized as a young age i just didn't want my brothers and my sister to go to bed hungry i was the middle child and always trying to make everybody laugh and make everything okay when everything wasn't okay and i started at a young age i would deliver newspapers i would um sell candy bars whatever i could to raise some money to feed my brother and sister and we would walk and use our food stamps and i remember how embarrassing it was and i was just hoping that there was food on the table and then my mom and my little brother neil he got sick with seizures grandma petty mall seizures and my mom had to go to a hospital and spent a long time in the hospital hoping that they would heal my brother and i lost my mom not forever but for a period of time in my life and i was a mama's boy i just shadowed my mom i idolized my mom and one day i woke up and my mom wasn't there nobody explained to me what happened and i was probably just in about fourth or fifth grade and that's when i realized i started turning to the street i started hanging around with older kids there was a lot of violence and a lot of kids that were rough and bullied and picked on and beat us up and it was terrible for me and uh all i did was just start hustling and if there wasn't enough food at home i would go to the local store or the local delicatessen and i learned how to steal at a young age but i wasn't stealing to be mischief i was just stealing because i was hungry and i wanted to feed my my brothers and my sister so richfield new jersey was really really tough on me at a young age and i didn't really know how to process all that and one day i came home and my mom and my dad said we're going to move to the southern part of new jersey because we want to get a better life and we moved to toms river new jersey to try and discover a better life and i was probably in about seventh grade when i left richfield new jersey i was already into dereliction and troublemaking and running around on the streets and staying out too late and getting caught up with all the bad people and it just seemed to spill over right into seventh grade and in seventh grade i was bullied really bad in school and i was picked on by kids and i just met a couple older kids and started drinking started drinking at a young age and when drugs were presented whether it be masculine or it'd be weed i just started smoking weed and started using whatever i could to get out of my normal state of mind i could look back on it and try and dissect it but i know that i just experienced a lot of trauma a lot of troubles my mom wasn't always around my father was always working i know that my mom and my dad had a very rough relationship they were always fighting and so i couldn't find my way at a young age and i just tried to stay away from it but always found myself in trouble and in seventh and eighth grade i just really started using drugs it was the only escape i had from the reality of i didn't want to be in my home i didn't want to feel the pain i always looked at everybody else and said why do they have a good life and why am i so troubled and i tried my hardest as a young kid just to get along and i always just never fit in and i remember smoking weed every day just to cope with going to school cope with the craziness in my home um my brother my older brother was was really hard to deal with he was beating up my brother he beat up me i remember witnessing him getting in a fight with my mom a drug down fight and i couldn't do anything about it and i look back in life today and i just see that a lot of that just spun just spun into a lot of drug usage because i just wanted to escape i didn't want to feel anymore i know my parents did the best they could but at the time it just seemed like my life was just troubled and everywhere i went and everything that happened at a young age and that's just too young of an age and it's just like my childhood was gone one day i came home and my mom and dad sprung on us that mom was pregnant with the seventh kid and we were going to be moving all the way to california and i remember telling my mom and my dad why how could you have another kid i don't understand you can't even feed us why would you bring another kid into the world and i was so angry at a young age and i was probably in about eighth grade going into ninth grade and i was already in trouble my grades were slipping and i think my parents just thought it was a good idea to move to california to be with my dad's only two sisters they were the only family we had on the east coast all the other family we had on the west coast all the other family we had was on the east coast all my cousins aunts and uncles and my mother's family and when i came to california that's when i i really started getting in trouble and i remember i was in ninth grade i met my cousin which was my my father's sisters she was married to my uncle tony and her his daughter bella knew some friends around the corner and they were really into cocaine and i tried cocaine and i really liked the way it felt it just removed all of my emotions and all of my feelings and i was in probably about ninth grade and i got into that culture that they had and the selling drugs and trying to make more money and hustle my way out of where i was at and sure enough i got caught in school and they caught me with selling drugs selling cocaine caught me with a scale i was arrested for the first time i was sent to juvenile hall i remember going through the whole process of being booked in and how horrifying it was for me embarrassing being strip searched having my mom and my aunt and my uncle and here we are we just came out to california and i was already in jail and my mom got me out and my mom didn't want to face it she just didn't want to see it and it wasn't her fault because she didn't know how to deal with it and then i had to go through the whole process of school and i was expelled from school had to go to court and i was expelled from india high school and i was off for a whole year independent studies trying to work my way back into school and i tried my hardest and i went and i did good i stayed away from the drugs i stayed away from the people and i said that's it i'm just not going to do this anymore and so i was allowed back into palm desert high school i had to go to another high school and i started real good i was doing great i was a junior in high school and i was i was doing great at a new school i stayed away from the drugs i got into sports and athletics and i've always been in sports and athletics throughout my life so i loved the game of football and i just poured my life into football but at home i was still troubled i remember at a young age i'd be like listening at night and i would hear my mom crying and i couldn't understand what it was and then i realized my father would just drink too much and get into a fight with my mom and then i would get so upset about it that one day i tried to protect my mom and i said you can't do this no more to my mom and i put her behind me and i remember trying to be the protector of my mom that's all i wanted to do is keep my mom safe and my and my dad wasn't having it and uh at a young age i think i was maybe 15 or a little after 15 my dad asked me to leave he threw me out of the house and uh i just got in my vehicle i had a little blazer i had a broken leg at the time and i i and i and i had a girlfriend at the time and i was that was the first time i was ever homeless and i didn't know what to do i just slept in the back of my blazer and hoped nobody would find out at school and because i was really good on the football team i think my athletic director kind of knew what was going on and he just didn't say anything and um the girlfriend i had at the time her father found out about it and he decided to reach out and help me and he let me stay in one of the rooms in their house as long as i had an agreement that i wouldn't mess with his daughter or do anything at the house and tom was a beautiful man and angie was my girlfriend at the time and you know i found a home it uh you know i just wanted to finish school i didn't i didn't want to drop out because i knew that the other way of life just wouldn't work and so they took me into their home and i was able to get my school under control nobody really questioned anything that was going on and i was really doing good in sports i really had a chance i thought man i'm going to go to college i'm going to get out of this i'm going to change my life i'm i'm not going to be that person i don't want to fail i just i want to win in life i don't want to fail anymore and um it looked like i was going to be able to play for san diego state and then uh they came to me and they the athletic director came to me at the school and said uh cif is not gonna let you play your senior year and i said why if i don't play my senior year i'm never gonna get to college they said well mark you got in trouble you were arrested for selling drugs and i said i know but i stopped and they said well you went on independent studies and you went too many quarters over so we're not gonna let you uh play football anymore and uh the only way to fight it is if your parents came to the cif to plead your case but i didn't want to let them know i wasn't living with my parents and i was upset at my father and i was upset at my mom and i i just didn't talk to them so long story short um nobody ever showed up uh to talk to the state and to talk to cif so they rolled against me and i couldn't play my senior year so i gave up on my hopes i went to work for um angie's father he had an electrical company and i went to work as an apprentice angie and i got married out of high school and i just gave up on my dream of playing college football and i figured it was just right to just go to work auntie and i had a child together i was young i think i was we were just out of high school maybe 19 20 years old joshua was his name and that was my first son and then everything started falling apart and unraveling at work because i wanted to leave working with tom start my own company do a little advertising agency i wanted to be an entrepreneur and get out of my own and do something myself and that fell apart i didn't have the experience and the knowledge but i had the desire i wanted to be something more in life i just i always was striving to be something better and through that dispos that when that business closed and we bankrupted it i tried to get back in several fixed relationship with my father-in-law and angie was just falling farther and farther away from me and and i realized in my life i don't do good with loss because it reminds me too much of my childhood and i started drinking heavy again for the first time and i went and got any job i could and i was working at dominoes and trying to support my wife and my son and somebody introduced me to cocaine again and it wasn't on a massive scale because i don't think my dependency grew that much at that point then i came home and angie told me look my mom and dad want to move to colorado if you want to see your son and you want to be around him we need to move to colorado and i didn't want to lose my son because i always wanted to be the father to him that i never felt i had and i wanted to do everything for him that i never had so we moved all the way out to colorado within two to three weeks when i got to colorado i had nothing but that and i was living under their roof i didn't have a job yet and angie woke me up and said you know what you have to leave i said what do you mean she said i just this isn't going to work anymore and i kissed my son goodbye i had nowhere to go i came all the way out here to california and the family i tried to create i it just went away i lost it and i lost my son and uh she didn't want anything to do with me i went out there a couple times to find her and she moved i came back to california i got uh introduced to cocaine i went back to domino's pizza and i got introduced to cocaine and i just started using for the first time like just using then i couldn't pay for it then i found out how to sell it then i started selling it and using more and i gave up my job and i got with a girlfriend and then everything just fell apart in my life it was the first time that i really became chemical dependent on cocaine because i could not deal with the fact that i lost my son and i started smoking crack for the first time in my life and i became so dependent i was 160 pounds 160 pounds but i didn't want to live and i couldn't deal with the pain of the loss and so then i got introduced to methamphetamines and i started using meth and i started dealing and i started doing all the criminal activity that comes along with it and eventually it caught up to me like everything does and i was arrested for sales and transportation and they caught me driving in a car with a trunk full of weed in in the 90s it was kind of different than it is today in the 90s you get caught with drugs and you were going to prison you were going to prison and there i sat in jail for the first real time i was in county jail and i never forget when the public defender came to me and said the best i can do for you is two years in prison and my world just stopped just stopped and i couldn't believe that i was facing that and i never knew growing up that that would be the end result and i went to prison for the first time in 1992 the first time of many more to come and i was scared all these horrible stories you hear about prison i was scared i was a young man going to prison and i went to prison right across from chino state prison california rehabilitation center hotel california for my first term and i did two years and the horrible stories were true but when i went there i was so scared i was just trying to get through and not get caught up and then back then there was so much segregation and racism and there was so much ugliness in riots on the yard and it just scared me to death and i paroled thank god my mom and dad allowed me to parole to their house and i and i paroled with the best intentions i'm never going to do this again i'm never going back that was a horrible experience but what i didn't realize how it just kind of shaved away the consequences a little for me because now i'd already been there and i tried to get going i tried to get i got a great job selling cars i thought i found my thing and then the dmv sent me a letter in the mail and said once again can't let you work there why because you were arrested you're arrested transporting drugs you can't do it and then i found myself without a job found another girlfriend then i started to say okay well let me just get another business let me try to open a company got with a partner to help you know do a little entrepreneur endeavor because i was convinced that i would never get a job i did really good on parole i never violated my parole i always tested clean but the cycle was already starting to unravel started a company started a little vending route i was doing great and in my relationship i started drinking again and it always starts with a drink i started drinking again that relationship fell apart the business fell apart and here i was faced again with losing everything one more time and as i look back in life i i see like every time i'm faced with that and i start losing everything again here comes the drugs here comes the selling of the drugs here comes the subculture of living on the street running around with gangsters and living the the outlaws life and really i'm just masking all my pain and just trying to get high because i was just hurting too much to face my life and once i started getting high and i started using drugs and nobody wanted anything to do with me started running around on the streets one more time and i got caught again for selling drugs this time i was back in county jail but what was funny about this time it was the second time that i was going upstate and i sometimes you're sitting in county jail and you just feel a little relieved that it's just it's over it's i'm going to prison one more time and they gave me another prison term and i went to prison going oh my god here i go again how did i get here and it was the drug use and i went to a little bit of a harder prison this time tachipie state prison and i served two years and i got out and i paroled and i don't get into all the horrible stories because we all know the horrible stories of prison and the gangs inside and doing everything you can just to stay alive and race riots and horrible things you see and witness it just burns that into you and then you just become institutionalized after i paroled and i got out on the street i tried to do good and then i just gave up easier and quicker this time and i just said what's the sense and i was almost becoming institutionalized without even realizing it and my second and third term came quick and the third term again was transportating drugs and selling drugs and the dereliction of it and running it around i got caught again and i was heading to prison for the third time and i did a third time in a little bit of a harder prison and i got out one more time and i paroled and i did good on parole but in between those two prison terms i never got off parole because i just gave up and the third time i tried again and then i was wanted one more time because i ran and i started using drugs and i started getting back with the old people and i started selling drugs and getting in trouble and running around and getting into crime getting into stealing dealing with you know commercial robberies and it seemed like every time i just became worse and worse and worse and then i got my fourth term which was five years and i looked back and i thought all those years 12 years went by and i saw my mom twice two christmases and that's it it was just constant in and out of prison in and out of prison in and out of prison and this last term was in solidarity state prison in a cell in a very hard prison and i and and i don't even know i look back and i think how did i get through all that with all the riots and the violence and it was five tiers high and you can just hear the pain and you could hear the screaming and you could see people being hurt in the riots and the fights and the stabbings and the killings and the just all that horrible stuff that i witnessed i remember one day i was on the yard we're out there in the main yard and we're just everybody's exercising and working out and doing their pull-ups and push-ups and everybody's segregated and we're using the outdoor restroom and i'm sitting next to my friend josh and i'm right here and there's another guy right here and he says look out mark and the guy just comes along and just cuts the guy right in the throat and just that guy ran and and he died right there in the yard and i couldn't believe i'm right in the middle of this i'm like what am i doing here what am i doing here and am i going to be able to get home safely i had no idea where i was going to parole i had no idea and my sister carol just was a unicorn at that time and said parole to my house when i got out i paroled to the house and i thought i would go to the higher desert victorville barstow area maybe a changed geographical change would do me good and i went to college i went to junior college and i tried to finish the dream i originally had as a young man and sure enough right there at college somebody offered me drugs and i started using drugs again and the whole spiral happened again and i wound up moving back down to the desert to get with all the old friends and get in trouble one more time and um that's when i really started experiencing homelessness myself because nobody wanted anything to do with me my drug addiction had taken over my alcoholism had taken over in 2009 i found myself living underneath a bridge jackson street bridge and i had a broken foot i broke my hand trying to defend myself getting in fights and all the stuff that goes on with the homeless community and there was a little alcoves little cutouts underneath the bridge so you could just go up there and just sleep at night and uh there i was homeless and i come from a good family you know my brothers and sisters are very successful they all have good careers and uh i had a troubled youth but there's more trouble out there that people experience and there was no understanding i was homeless under a bridge and i had nowhere to go walking around the city streets of indio i was arrested one more time and in jail somebody a guy wrote me a little note and he said uh you have two problems mark you need to end your homelessness then you need to find your way find god do something mark you have to change your way i remember coming out of jail it was hot my foot was broken i had no shoes no socks i looked at this little map i looked to the left and i saw the liquor store i knew where the friends were there's a little map to a rescue mission and i said man i got to change and that was the first time that i really really felt that i needed to change where i wouldn't live anymore so i walked all the way down there and i had a stop every time my foot was hurting and i and i went to that rescue mission and i experienced recovery for the first time and i lived in that over overnight shelter and i didn't want to leave no matter what but all of my past caught up to me i got a warrant i was in a high-speed chase i ran from the police they had me on a warrant for 459 commercial burglary and i had to go to court and face criminal charges one more time but instead of sending me to prison for the fifth time the judge decided to give me a court-ordered program called drug court and i really started to understand what recovery was and i really believed in like i started believing in myself again i started saying okay well that's my life but it doesn't have to be my tomorrow you know your past doesn't dictate your future and i tried my hardest and i found a home there at the rescue mission in india and i was exposed to other people and as i grew in my sobriety and i had to go through all these court cases and i had to fight my way out of it and uh go to prop 36 and dui classes and drug court and exposed to aaa meetings in church and i started realizing there's more to it and then i remember helping one person one person that was homeless and encouraging them and somehow it made me it made me feel a little bit better i couldn't explain it i didn't know what was going on at the time but i shared a little bit of my story and i was able to say you know what i've been there and it encouraged him to stay and i started making more friends and then i realized wait a minute here that kind of makes me feel a little bit good or better about myself but maybe all the things that i did in my life wasn't so horrible and that was my first exposure to just helping another person and they just found a way to keep me there you know they gave me a part-time cook job i just started cooking food for the homeless so we'd make pizzas on the weekends and it made me feel good and then i worked at a gas station and i graduated the program and then i started working in the overnight shelter and i i went there to help to get help i just needed a place to stay i didn't realize that along the way and in my journey i would find something to do and i found employment there and then we went from the small mission to a really big mission next door and we had a real real big building we raised the money for it and uh we moved from that old little mission and i always stayed around the mission they always found a reason for me to stay there and i started working with the homeless population in 2009 2010 was a lot different than it is today and so we just started working with them i graduated the program i started really doing good i i found my girlfriend francis was my wife today and um i was living i moved out successfully and uh she came home one day and said i'm pregnant and uh i couldn't believe it because after i lost joshua at a young age i promised myself i would never have a kid again because i never wanted to experience that loss and so moving forward i was clean and sober and i was doing good and i had year after year after year of sobriety i went back to school to study it to be able to help people more and i loved what i did working and i worked in the emergency shelter i worked with guys in the program frances and i we we had our son and one of the most hardest points of that whole pregnancy was finding out that my son had a birth defect that he had gastrostasis and all his intestines were on the outside of his body but we had our son he made it through little mark junior and [Music] fast forwarding it to like 2015 you know 14 13 14 and 15 was really good we had our own place everything was going well and then francis and i just we're not getting along and we had problems and we split up and looking back that was what was starting to trigger myself to unravel and everything i saw went right out the door one more time and frances and i separated and my son went with her i didn't use at the time i didn't relapse i didn't start drinking again i just kept working and working and trying to create a life that would be understandable and then have another girlfriend and just hopefully that just never worked out and we just separated and we went our own separate way and i didn't realize it then but my ego and my pride and my work was becoming my identity and i was slipping in so many ways that my life was spiraling out of control one more time with the separation of my wife i was slacking on my job i was becoming bigger than myself and i had no humility and so roughly around 2015 um my job came to an end i went to work one day they terminated my position and let me go all of a sudden all of a sudden they let me go i'm at eight years of sobriety eight years i just bought a house i bought a house because i believed that my family would come back together someday and my kids would have a home to grow up and it wouldn't have to go through what i went through as a child one more time losing the house getting evicted not having a place to call home so i thought that i'm gonna get this home and that somehow my family's gonna come back together but the loss of my job the loss of my identity i was not processing things correctly i stopped going to meetings i stopped doing everything that kept me clean and sober for that entire eight years i just bought a new truck everything was going great i drive to am pm to put gas in my car i walk in the store i look to the right and there's the beer aisle and i walk over i open the door and i grab two 40-ounce beers eight years of sobriety eight years of sobriety i sat in my car and i drank the first one and i thought to myself what did i just do i just lost eight years of sobriety and i just said the heck with it and i drank the other one and i went home and i just started drinking all over again everything just went right out the window within two to three weeks i was introduced to somebody around the corner that had methamphetamines they said hey do you want some and i knew the answer i knew what to do so i started smoking methamphetamines one more time and all of the guilt all of the shame all the hiding from everybody because i didn't want anybody to know that i slipped and i relapsed i'm drinking and using after spending all those years working with so many people having my life together now i was right back to where i was in 2009 but i wasn't able to stop once i took that drink once i was drunk once i was loaded on drugs i could not stop and in 2015 2016 i relapsed and it just became absolutely horrible i went right back to all the old guys i used to traffic drugs for and sell drugs for i couldn't get high anymore and then i started using heroin because the guilt the shame the hard times i had once i used heroin for the first time everything went away all my pain everything went away so now i'm on heroin i'm on meth i'm on alcohol the expense of it all i start selling drugs to pay for my habit i ran out of all my money i'm not making any payments on my house on my car on the water bill nothing i'm hanging around horrible people gang members troublemakers the underground the whole subculture of selling drugs using drugs white-collared crimes credit card fraud selling stolen stuff breaking into places stealing getting involved with that whole network of criminals where you're stealing stuff to get high and they're stealing your stuff to get high dealing with all kinds of drugs and the whole time the whole time all i'm doing is every now and then i have a moment of clarity where i go man what am i doing but i just can't stop i just can't quit i tried a couple times to quit on my own a good friend of mine troy who's my coach who's a dear friend was my coach in life when i was at my last couple years the mission and working at the mission knew that i relapsed but i was too embarrassed to tell him i didn't want to talk to him i was so angry at him because i blamed him i blamed the mission i blamed everybody for my relapse i remember one time he called me and i was so mad at him i was yelling at the phone and i wasn't mad at him i was mad at myself i threw the phone out the window and he just troyas got tenacity and he just would not stop he'd find my new phone number and he keep trying but i didn't want to listen to him did not want to listen to troy i wasn't ready to stop drinking and using along with my drinking and using came i got arrested in my front yard they found drugs in my car i was being watched by the police i got in terrible accidents i remember one time i was driving down the street at 45 miles an hour on jefferson and i fell asleep i hit the back of a truck totaled the truck ran from the police they found me i got arrested that's twice i bailed out i'm selling drugs i'm doing everything that is 100 wrong everything that i stood for went right out the window in order to get high i tried getting sober i couldn't get sober i knew that i was everything was coming to a close when i got loaded and i got drunk one more time i remember telling francis my wife i said francis please don't come around me please don't come around me i'm no good i'm selling drugs i'm a horrible person and i don't want you or the kids to see me loaded because she never did the whole time we were together we were sober she never saw a drunken loaded mark never and i remember one day the knock came at the door and like who's there and she said it's frances and i said you have to go away and she said no but i was so full of shame because of all the horrible stuff i was into i didn't want her to see me i couldn't open the door and she sat outside for six or eight hours and i told her please just go away francis leave me alone i'm no good just let me die let me just stay away from me and she said i'm not leaving you're the man i love and you're the man i married and that was like getting close to the end of my relapse because i was out there for like 14 months and everything i lost everything i totaled every car i've stolen i've broken into places i've sold drugs i've hung around the most horrible people and everything was coming to a close so fast and i i let her in and she said i don't get it i said i relapsed i've been doing everything wrong and i don't know how to stop and she tried with the best of her intentions to try but i wasn't listening and i would like to say hey everything stopped and i got cleaned and sober and everything came back together and everything was wonderful warm and fuzzy but it wasn't i did not stop i was chemically dependent at that time on heroin meth and alcohol and i needed to get high every day to feel well and to be able to get through my day and then all of the horrible people started coming around i got in trouble again i got arrested one more time the police were closing in on me i was in circles of drug traffickers drug dealers gang members i was trying to go all the way to san diego and move drugs just to be able to get caught up in my mind i was thinking i just need to get caught up get ahead and then i'll go get help i don't want to lose my house i don't want to lose the last thing i have in this world i just don't want to lose anything more i'm tired of losing my whole life that's all i ever felt like i was just everything i had everything that ever mattered to me i always lost no matter what i remember coming back all the way from san diego and i was driving all the way down highway 74. i fell asleep i caught a nod i woke up and i was driving right off of 74. and i drove right off of 74 airbags deployed hit me i went off of 74. two rocks kept me my vehicle from going all the way down i kicked the door open i climbed all the way back up i didn't want to call the police i didn't want to go to the hospital i'm drunk i'm loaded i have drugs on me all the time 24 hours a day i hitchhiked all the way home got home and what did i do i continued to get high i was just out there no matter what happened all the horrible stuff all the arrows pointing that i needed to stop drinking i needed to stop using and i still didn't i still did not and then i started getting into guns and then i started having guns around the house and i figured okay well let's just sell guns let's sell drugs let's do whatever we had to have money everything was just falling apart i had so many horrible people around me i just didn't even know what to do so i just kept using and consuming drugs and getting farther and farther and farther behind i had a wonderful idea uh i looked back and i think what was i thinking at the time somebody else said hey let's just go rob this store over here verizon and we can get some phones and we can get caught up and spend money and then we hatched this plan we cut through the wall and went to rob a verizon store the alarms went off we didn't get caught right then and there but obviously they have cameras they knew who did it i'm driving i'm leaving my house i'm going down the street and the cops swarm on me and they catch me with drugs and needles and hypodermic needles in my car and they arrest me one more time this is coming to the back end of my relapse it's still i get out on bail i go home what's the first thing i do i get high some more i just i cannot stop using i just keep using i keep smashing down the pain so i've spoken about troy before and i have a life coach that really believes in self-care really believes in working out and taking care of yourself and back then i didn't quite grasp the concept as i do today and one time we were hiking on the bumping grind it's a big mountain that everybody calls a bumping around and we're hiking and we're coming down this mountain and this is before i lost my job troy turned to me and he said mark i don't know anything about this drug stuff i don't know i've never done it i i have no idea i'm totally totally a myth i have no idea but what if mark i said what if what do you mean what if you were able to relapse what should i do i said ah i'm never gonna relapse there's no way my ego and pride was in the way and sure enough at the end i get a call from troy i go hello this is troy i go i don't know a troy here talk to this guy he gives a call that phone back he goes mark you don't know me and i said hi troy i know you i'm just too full of shame and i'm embarrassed and troy started just talking to me a little bit but then again i just kept on using i did not want to stop i didn't want to stop francis started coming around more with the kids i started trying to stop i started to try to have my family back together with my step-daughter ellie and junior and francis and everything got bad i just couldn't stop drinking i was getting angry at her we were fighting we were having all kinds of problems the house was extremely risky with a lot of dangerous people around and one day troy came he came all the way from oregon and he said uh i said troy why are you here look at me look at what i've become look at my my life is a ruin i ruined everything i threw everything away troy he goes i go why are you here and he said mark do you remember when we were hiking that day i said yeah he goes i made you a promise and i'm here to live up to my word i promised you i would come down here and he was there and he took me out back he said you know what mark this isn't you this is a drug induced alcohol written mark but it's not who you are you have to stop go somewhere and find help and i would like to see right then and there everything stopped and i got well but i did not and everything happened quickly within two weeks and then one night i was drinking and i was using and it felt like my life was out of control felt like i didn't want to live anymore and i had a loaded 45 on my bureau and i had a bottle of whiskey and i was up for way too long and i just wanted to end my life i just i didn't want to live anymore i didn't want to deal with the guilt the shame the worry the frustration i'm 48 years old and i'm i'm just a loser i lost everything and i remember i would i had my bible i had a alcoholics anonymous book and i was trying to read i was trying to change my life i was trying to pull out of it and i flipped through the pages of the bible and my son's picture came out and i thought i can't do this i can't leave my son alone i can't i won't leave without a father and i would like to say everything ended right there for me and i all i could say was god help me and uh i finally fell asleep and when i woke up i got all that stuff out of the house troy came back around and said man we need to help you mark you need to change i said but i lost everything i lost my why even why does it matter twice and because you're better than this and then everything started rolling fast and he said you go anywhere mark you go anywhere and you can get into any detox you tell him to call me and i'll pay the bill you gotta change mark and then troy worked with a friend of mine from the county that helped me get into a detox and troy set up mark on this day at 10 o'clock in the morning i'm gonna be in your driveway and you need to be there and you need to get in my car at 10 and we're going to go get you help and if you're not there we're done don't call me and i'm not going to call you again and unfortunately there was a holiday it was a holiday so i had to wait like three or four more days because the treatment center didn't have an available bed and i remember thinking i'm not going to make it i'm not going to make it and i kept using it kept using and kept getting high i remember the day before the night before as crazy as my mind was i didn't even know what date was then the night before i went to score some drugs and on the way home we got chased the police went to pull us over and i thought to myself don't pull the car over i have to go to treatment in the morning don't pull over and we ran and we ran from the police and we got caught in the sand dunes and i jumped out and i just started running i just started running and running and running and running and i was so scared and i knew it was getting late at night and i had to get home i walked through the desert i mean all the way through the desert hitched hiked rides walked home i got home at like maybe seven in the morning and francis was there and i said francis please don't let me fall asleep because i won't wake up for troy and sure enough 10 o'clock came and i don't know what it was like i just knew that if i did not get help i would never live i would never live i couldn't get through it anymore i had all these court cases i had the police at both sides of my block watching every move i made it was horrible i never ever experienced so much pain in my life i fell asleep but i woke up in time but i was still sick as a dog off the drugs i was sick and i remember getting high and i was so embarrassed to tell troy and i just got as high as i could just to get through the day and i remember looking at francis and the kids were there and i just said i'm so sorry i'm sorry for everything but i'm going to make this right somehow i'm going to make this right and i just threw clothes grabbed my bag and when i walked out of my house i knew right there i would never see my home again and i would lose everything but i didn't care because i didn't want to lose my life i was done and i got in that car with troy and we went over to a county building and they had to do all the assessments and i couldn't even think i was so clouded with all the detox and the horrible feelings i had and everything i was going through was just terrible they were asking me questions i didn't even understand what they were saying to me and they just heard me up and they said go to the ranch go to detox mark and i got in the car and i remember i couldn't even peel an orange that he gave me to eat i was so distorted and that's where the journey in my recovery began i decided right then i needed to live i didn't want to die and troy was that person that just kept trying and kept trying and kept trying and i listened i heard that voice inside of me that said man you got to get help mark you've got to stop what you're doing and i went to um i went to detox and again i'd like to say like oh everything was wonderful but it it wasn't it was a horrible detox it was 10 days and i was shaking and it was hurting and i just wouldn't accept anything i wouldn't accept no drugs i said i didn't come here to get andre off i came here to get off of drugs not on different drugs so i did everything cold turkey and then you wake up the next morning and you're or the second or the third morning and you start facing reality all the pain of everything you did the guilt the shame the loss everything i did came to light and i was like i could not even believe all the horrible stuff i did could not even believe it my hand i hurt my hand right here with a machete because on one of my when i was high i thought oh well this is great let's go chop down some weed plants and let's make some money i slipped and i fell and i cut my finger almost cut my fingers off so my hand was killing me and i was hurting and i was coming off all the drugs and i remember all the hallucinations i was sweating and i couldn't eat i was taking hot showers back and forth to the nurse but when the second the third and the fourth day came i started just taking a deep breath and that's where my recruit recovery started again and that was on january 15 2018 that was my first day sober again after 14 months of my relapse 14 months and the most difficult thing for me was i didn't know where my wife and kids were because troy he didn't tell me because the kids were unsafe at the house and francis was unsafe and uh so i didn't know for the first 30 days where my children were but i just knew that i had to stay there man i had to get back into recovery and what's funny is like i knew right then and there i said in the beginning i said i'm never going to go back i'm never going to help people again i'm done i eight years i served people and i counseled and i just was so mad at myself i felt like such a failure i felt like i just let everybody down and i was just done and as that journey of recovery began when i started helping people again i felt that need like i felt that desire to help people and all the other things came into play my house was being foreclosed on and we needed to sell it i had all kinds of debt the person that i hit when i fell asleep in the car was suing me and then i had all my court issues i had three court cases and it wasn't looking good because i have a lifelong of prison i have a 14 page rap sheet i have like 15 16 felonies there's no way that i'm gonna get any mercy in the courts but i knew that i had to go to court and i remember going to court for the first time and the judge looked down at me and the d.a looked over and he said is that mark mcgowan and they said yes and i remember what they said what happened to him because i used to go to court and people they'd be released to my custody because he knew we were doing good work to help people so i'm at the ranch and i'm working through it and i'm getting on my 30th day then they have a center go up there and test and then i find out i have hepatitis c from dirty needles exchanging needles i contracted hepatitis c so i had to go through hepatitis c liver treatment i got on through through my treatment phase moved to a sober living house and then i realized i had to have reconstructive surgery on my hand from the accident i had and i was in that rehab and i was in the sober living and things were starting to come back together but there's one story that i forgot to mention was right at 30 days 30 days you're allowed to have visits and i could get called up to the main office and i still don't know where my kids are i still don't know where my wife is and then walks francis and there's my son and he just dropped this little tablet and ran over and hugged me and that just made it all better and ellie was there in junior and we had a visit and for the first time i realized i was clean and sober again and what was most important in life as your family is my wife and kids and she never left she just hung with me and stayed with me through the whole time she never left and we went through a lot of processes there at the rehab and then we got into a family program so we can get our children the help they needed as i moved through and i phased up and i'm still going to court and i'm kind of fast forwarding through it and i'm moving into another sober living house called the noaa house where i'm i'm living and it's it's sponsored by my old place the coachella valley rescue mission and that's where francis went to live while i was in treatment because they had no choice and it was hard for me because it was where i used to work to know that my family had to go there for protection and safety and all of this was happening sometimes very slowly and sometimes very quickly and and this was all in my first year of recovery my first six months of recovery was nothing but court appointments and surgeries and treatment and rehabilitation and i just kept on saying no matter what i'm not going to leave no matter what i'm not going back and troy was in in my life more and he was working on more things and i was getting back into self-care and i was starting to become alive again and that happens over time because you just you lose your way you lose your soul you lose who you are and that's what drugs and alcohol do to people and it just it just gets you into this small subculture of a world that when you come out of it it takes time it takes time for you to come back around and you need to have a lot of support around you and i'm just grateful for troy because i and i wanted to say this before is that when you're working with somebody like troy i must have said no detroit 12 times but did that stop him no and he never gave up he always and i always tell people don't give up on somebody you never you never want to give up hope you never you never want to stop calling somebody because you never know when this one time you meet with that person and you may say the right thing and they might be going through the right experience and it just connects and they go you know what i want to change and they do change and sometimes we do change and sometimes we don't but this is my story is just about change at the right time but troy never ever gave up on me and that's one thing i want to let people know is don't give up on people that you're working with because nobody ever knows what it's going to take or how is it going to take it every individual is different but if you have a love for somebody or a care for another human being always just keep trying don't ever give up you

Channel: Soft White Underbelly

Views: 491,745

Keywords: soft white underbelly, swu

Id: JGNItBkI_Io

Length: 62min 28sec (3748 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 19 2022