Amor Por Sufrir
I needed help. Asking for it nearly killed me.
IT WAS ON BASTILLE DAY 2020 at 06:30AM, the same day that I declared my motivation for the day was the Eternal Science of Marxism-Leninism when I first noticed Juan Carlos was beginning to turn the color of vaseline in its jar. His eyes too, normally jittery and excited as if the crystal meth had left him with the permanent sensation he was meeting you for the first time began yellowing and stilling to a slight glance as he struggled to say that his own motivation was his husband, who he referred to in the present despite the many years since his death. He had by that point been complaining of stomach pains and an inability to defecate for a week, his belly bellowing out as he moved side to side in constant tenderness. The other lost souls recovering from their own addictions were cruel and teased him for not being man enough to withstand the pain and anxiety of withdrawals that had them on edge and experiencing every malady. The center, Amor Por Vivir, A.C. (a Mexican nonprofit), charged with his health and well-being for what should have been a 6 month process did nothing more for him than one visit from the doctor on call that gave him over the counter medication and declared him to be fine otherwise.
By the time I saw Juan Carlos take a last ragged breath in the arms of the zealot who exhorted him to renounce his homosexuality, his skin, except for that under his eyes which sagged from on his high cheekbones like wan purple flags, had turned ashen grey. His blue eyes turned towards heaven shone all the more in contrast with the dark hollows of his cheeks.
When his body was given one last violent shake after a slap failed to revive him, I remembered that Juan Carlos introduced himself to me by asking if we had met in Puerto Vallarta a few months earlier or if I had gone on the date with his friend. It was impossible, I was reading Tanizaki in Tlaquepaque playing the part of the damaged divorcé in one of the craft brew pubs for tourists that sells California IPAs. I noticed later that it was the kind of compliment Juan Carlos gave to every man he found handsome. It was the kind of compliment inside a “Comunidad Terapeutica,” a kind of purgatory for the addicted, mad and or abandoned, that lifted your spirits inside such a place.
Juan Carlos had been interned by his family in the comunidad as a last ditch effort to treat his methamphetamine addiction that had made his life a series of tragedies for over a decade. From the little I knew objectively of Juan Carlos, he had lost a husband, seroconverted and experienced other personal tragedies all while high on meth. You wouldn’t know from meeting him. His memory loss and notable cognitive decline bestowed on him the saintly grace of those who are afflicted with dementia later in life who seem to contact us from beyond death. But, Juan Carlos was barely in his early 40s and his decline was not the natural progression of age, but the abuse of drugs that he had been introduced to as part of his sexual life. His kindness emanating deep from within was eternal, however. No matter how cruelly he was treated by the other interned patients or how the staff belittled him, he always expressed an intense optimism and an enduring belief in prayer that those communities often claim as their first victim. He spoke of his mother in loving terms, trusting her decision to intern him even if he disagreed with her in order to restore their relationship.
When Juan Carlos passed, it wasn’t the official state forensics agency (SEMEFO) that took him to the morgue, it was a private funeral home hearse that put him in the back and made away with the remains. Juan Carlos—if he had an autopsy, a fact which I am uncertain of—never spoke for himself in those final days. Wracked with pain, he became trapped behind the gaze which congealed until it finally melted away. I did not have the nerve to tell his niece about his last days, or about how the patients frequently shoved or hit him. I didn’t tell her about the mocking in the restroom, how frequently he had been accused of peeking others’ members or how in the last moments of life and the first seconds of posterity others had already gathered around to take one last stab at Juan Carlos’ personal dignity. I said nothing because it was not my place and the Comunidad Terapeutica works to inform you, if nothing else, of your place and reinforces it constantly through the kind of pressure Juan Carlos experienced first hand from the first days he arrived at Amor Por Vivir until it became his final resting place.
In the moment where I became the guardian of his dignity, I knew I would be marked forever by that experience. We all killed Juan Carlos little by little robbing him of his hope until it was too late to realize it was the last bit tethering him to this world. His niece gave the center a yoga class as a thank you and as a tribute to her uncle. I was too embarrassed to speak up. Too afraid to raise my voice. In one of the licensed treatment centers among an ocean of clandestine rehabilitation facilities, Juan Carlos met the exact kind of fate the State Commission Against Addiction—Consejo Estatal Contra Adicciones Jalisco or CECAJ after its Spanish initials—was supposed to prevent and is supposed to guard against. It was not the only irregularity I witnessed. Eduardo Barbosa nearly died by hanging himself on Mother’s Day after his mother failed or refused to visit him in another of a growing list of treatments. Another, a minor, was kicked in the chest by the then-director after failing to show a “proper disposition” to internment by his father against his will. Two patients commandeered the center’s pick up truck and crashed it against the iron gate to escape, nearly running over other patients in the process. But, nothing ever came of any of this as nothing ever seems to. In Jalisco, addicts in rehabilitation facilities are left to their fate in the grey area of the law or in the absence of state authorities with the power, funding or desire to hold these centers and their directors and owners accountable.
A recent law passed to reform the state’s addiction laws and regulate its rehabilitation centers seems toothless. I watched with my heart in my stomach as another center I was interned in two years later, Beethania, another A.C. , simply packed the underage patients in the center we all shared to another site upon news the governor of the state had turned his glance towards centers like it. Nothing was made of the fact meals rarely reached 2000 calories or that others had been placed on a stool and forced to face a wall for a month until their back muscles and their bladder gave out from the strain. Nothing came of the fact they denied me my antiretrovirals for a month despite knowing I had HIV and despite the center’s own doctor counseling them towards my needs. I lost more weight from rehab than from the drug from which it was supposed to provide a refuge. It took a coordinated effort from my family and friends in the U.S., a hunger strike by me from the inside and a gargantuan struggle until I was finally released.
I have not been the same. For the first time in my life, I thought I would die. I watched as the yellow eyes of another patient with Hepatitis B looked deep into my eyes and asked for a drink of water. I watched as another, Moy, had the necrotizing tissue on his foot scrubbed out with gauze soaked in a tisane of lawn weeds by Jason. Jason breaks my heart. A Venezuelan migrant in Mexico, a nurse with a masters degree and a father of two children, he faced a debt to the center the parents who placed him there refused to pay. They used his children as leverage, extracting labor from him either in the form as a thug to physically place would-be patients into the back of an unmarked white van or as the center’s nurse when need arose. Nothing, to my knowledge, came of the complaint I made to Mexico’s Institute of Migration regarding Jason’s forced labor and the use of his children as leverage. I don’t know if he is still there, waiting to pay his debts or for the day he can escape. A strong man, he could at any time if it weren’t for his children. I hope he has left.
Jason became a friend, but I suffered. The excruciating month there was spent at first coming down from a psychotic episode without psychiatric treatment. When they told me I would be there for 9 months, eating little more than gruel and vegetables cooked halfway, I lost hope. I thought I would end up like Juan Carlos. I often spent the nights in the bedbug ridden bed staring at the ceiling, thinking of the sky in the Mojave desert and remembering the days when I could feel the crisp desert air against my cheekbones. I learned quickly to defecate in full views of others and how to hide the torrent of blood from an anal fissure. I lost the shame of being nude in front of men while taking ice cold showers with well water. I almost kissed another patient whom I had almost fallen for in a desperate gamble to feel human. It distorted my soul. I worried that when the funeral hearse would finally come and get me, that they would think I enjoyed my time. So, I rebelled though I was only 50 kilos or 110 pounds.
I wrote a petition demanding my rights. I wrote a letter explaining a hunger strike which only lasted three days due to the pressure and pleading of other patients. I demanded to know my rights, to have access to the Federal Government’s Health Secretariat’s question line. I was never told what my rights as a patient were nor was I ever able to speak to a state or federal official regarding my stay. I was there against my will. Never was I asked to sign or consent to the treatment which had been hoisted upon me. I only spoke to my mother once, supervised by a staffer who had delivered a homophobic jeremiad against me in full view of everyone in the center. They took away my notepad and my pens. I borrowed them from other patients in order to document my experiences and make more petitions.
To what extent my experiences are typical, I’m not sure. Thousands of patients sit in any one of Jalisco’s authorized addiction treatment centers on any given night and experience a gamut of conditions ranging from the bearable to the inhumane. But, if in one of the state’s authorized centers, one which other sources confirm to me is seen as exemplary—that is Amor por Vivir, A.C.—could see a patient pass away in pain, in indignity, I shudder to think what others may be like. Indeed, in my own limited experience, it seems the only guarantee as a patient in one of these centers is that you will bear the caprice of whoever runs the center and the impunity of a state and its responsible organs unable to adequately and responsibly regulate them.
I was not as kind to Juan Carlos as I could have been. But, his memory provided me the motivation to stay alive and to continue fighting when I had almost given up. He was a remarkable person; he should still be with us today. CECAJ and other organs in the state could do more. If they had, he might still be here to laugh and smile with us. He might have been able to attend his niece’s yoga classes.