Editor's Column

by Benjamin Tertin

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Floundering, I Fell Captive
to a Harsh Reality

The soft sparkle of morning dew should have calmed me, but physical torment ripped at my body. Sitting at the edge of a meadow in New Hope, Penn., I longed to be back home.

My joints and teeth ached. The previous night's drugs still coursed through my veins, leaving me in a cold sweat, shaking.

With a blurred brain, I struggled to focus on the good times -- happy moments from a road-tripping party that had begun five years earlier at a Phish concert. Since that show, I'd spent each summer and fall with a massive caravan of neo-hippies, following the band to show after show on nationwide concert tours.

We were a tight-knit subculture, a family that ate drugs with its breakfast eggs.

But the tour scene was losing its allure. Is this all I live for? I wondered in a faint moment of clarity. That moment of clarity signaled a major threat -- sobriety.

Sitting there watching the sun rise, I filled my gut with Jim Beam. Whiskey offered freedom from infectious guilt, and more important, it killed the internal conscience urging me to change. What would my family think if they saw me here? I thought. My little sisters?

My parents had taught me that true freedom is not found in the boundless pursuit of self. Freedom, they said, comes from the true God. But I was arrogant and lazy and did not care to invest any time or effort into discovering what that actually meant. Challenging thought was for suckers, and I rejected the "opiate of the masses" for real opiates.

I labeled the advice from my parents as typical Christian brainwashing propaganda.

By the time I might have admitted that my life was anything but free, I was content again, carefree, drunk. I found my only friend, Joe, and we hopped in his Explorer, en route to Philadelphia.

Our god, Phish, had taken an extended hiatus, which left us floundering. But because many other bands fuel the American tour scene, we had plenty of options for new gods: Widespread Panic, the remaining members of The Grateful Dead, The String Cheese Incident, and so on.

Joe and I chose String Cheese and hopped on "Cheese tour." Our tour ended when the Philadelphia police arrested us for selling pot and confiscated everything we owned.

Cinching thick plastic zip-ties onto my wrists, they hauled me downtown to a new subculture, one that lived behind cement walls and steel bars.

I sat with five other men in a cell designed for two. Hundreds of prisoners filled rows of similar cells, and the endless drone of angry shouting echoed throughout the steel chambers of the jail -- the "Roundhouse."

A small Hispanic guy, maybe 18 years old, curled up in the cell's corner next to a stainless toilet and nibbled the bloody ends of his fingers, tearing tiny pieces of skin off and spitting them on the floor. His fingernails were gone -- chewed off.

An average-sized white man in his 30s stared at me from across the cell with his yellowed, bloodshot eyes. Gagging at times, he stroked his arms, each textured with bruising track marks from heroin injections.

I sat squished between two monstrous black gangsters, presumably from the same gang. Forced to listen to their endless banter, I could decipher only portions of a gnarly gunfight story. The man on the left was wrapped in blood-soaked gauze, and both awaited trial for the shooting.

Tears welled up behind my eyeballs but didn't dare drip out. I remembered the sunrise over the meadow earlier that morning and realized I had lost more than freedom. Mind. Body. Every part of my life was broken.

Following my release from jail, I called my folks in Minnesota. I hadn't talked to them for so long. Shame overwhelmed me when Mom answered the phone, and I described who her son had become.

With a calm voice, she said, "Come home, Ben; please come home...you know I love you."

With nothing more than court orders and overwhelming evidence of a wasted life, I returned to Minnesota. Nothing I had done brought joy to my parents, but still, they wrapped their arms around me and welcomed me home.

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