FRIENDS

Nathan didn’t have time for friends growing up. He was too busy worrying about his mother. She was suffering from lupus and pulmonary hypertension, and Nathan spent his days consumed with an aching fear for her health. “I would constantly call home during school to see if she was taken to the hospital,” he said.

It was a heavy weight for a young boy. And then, the unthinkable happened: he was molested by a family friend. “It happened a couple of times. One time, it was violent. I never talked about it. Never faced up to it.” It set the stage for a future fraught with suppressed pain, intense confusion and profound loneliness. A troubled teen, he experimented with marijuana once.“I liked it but didn’t know where to get more so I didn’t do it again.”

A few years later, his parents sent him to a yeshiva in New York. Though he agreed to go, he quickly dropped out and went to live with his older sister. At the same time, his mother’s health suddenly deteriorated. He immediately returned home to be at her side. “I didn’t leave the hospital and stayed there until she passed away,” he said. He was 16 years old. Devastated, lost, depressed and “confused about life,” he suddenly remembered the comforting feeling of being high a few years earlier.

This time, he was able to find the drug and pay for it by working odd jobs and living at home. Through a construction job, he was introduced to pain pills and added them to his daily cocktail.“I was self-medicating. It felt like it was working even though it really wasn’t.” And when he experienced withdrawal symptoms one day, a friend told to him to take even more drugs to avoid such problems. That friend was an addict himself. But Nathan didn’t know any better. He had little experience with friends. So he “started using many street drugs and progressed to higher doses and more drugs.”

With his two older siblings out of the home, he continued living with his father—who was struggling himself with depression after losing his wife. The two barely interacted.“Things started falling apart around me. I got introduced to cocaine. I was reaching out. I was trying to make friends.”

He eventually became unable to function at work and started losing jobs—and his source of drug money. “So I conned my dad out of money. I tricked him for another couple of years.” But because that still wasn’t enough, he turned to a cheaper drug: heroin. With a combination of cocaine and heroin, he was now able to “numb everything. It felt really good.” Not willing to rob people but no longer able to trick his father, he instead started threatening him. “Eventually, my father got fed up, and he got scared, and one day I woke up to find the police standing over me.”

But his father never pressed charges, instead sending him to rehab several times over the next few years. The sobriety never lasted. With his drug dealer “right around the corner” from home, Nathan, now 30 years old and a drug addict for more than a decade, resumed his addiction each time he returned. The rough neighborhood, known for drug dealers and criminals, was now under heavy police surveillance.

One day, they pulled him over and arrested him for possession. “I started crying and said, ‘I need help.’” The arrest led to 90 days in jail, another rehab stint, and yet another relapse. This time, the judge and public defender agreed to send him to Beit T’Shuva (BT) Rehab in California because of his religion. With a ticket in hand, Nathan arrived in LA and was immediately taken to detox.

Upon completion, he headed straight to BT. But the paperwork from the probation officer back home never made it. Without the necessary forms,he could not be admitted.“I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. I was back at square one,” he explained. A relapse ensued, along with a frantic call home. His father reached out to someone in the community who happened to know Rabbi Boyarsky at the Aleph Institute. The Director of the Chabad Residential Treatment Center, Nathan’s father and Aleph staff coordinated and “brought me over and admitted me.” Aleph also funded his health insurance and “paid for everything for me to be at Chabad for a little over a year and then moved me to sober living—and that’s where I am now.”

Aleph continues to be a financial and emotional support in Nathan’s recovery. “Aleph has been so wonderful to me that I feel forever indebted to them,”he said. As he works to maintain sobriety, he needs to return home in the near future to settle the legal and logistical quagmire that ensued when he initially went to BT. But he hopes to return to California afterwards.

“I would like to spend the rest of my life here. I like California. I have a good support system here.” And, perhaps for the first time ever, “I have friends. Real friends…”