Lost And Found

There are certain movies I revisit from time to time because of what they remind me of. Silver Linings Playbook was a favorite of mine, because Bradley Cooper played such a convincing bi-polar man and Jennifer Lawrence such a convincing bi-polar woman. There's one part where he is totally manic, reading Hemmingway at four o'clock in the morning in his bedroom at his parent's house and in an agitated fit throws it out the closed window, shattering the glass, and storms into his parent's bedroom to vent about the ending. It hilarious and painful at the same time...at least if you are bi-polar it is. The relationship between Cooper and Lawrence is a mad dance, but touching also--two mentally fragile and damaged people finding solace in each other when the world thinks they are nothing but a couple of loons. Because you've been there before. You get it. It could have been me. 

There was Into The Wild, another favorite, where an idealistic and headstrong Chris McCandless makes his way to Alaska on the coattails of free-spirited adventure to live off the land. He ultimately dies in a schoolbus, poisoned from eating some deadly berries during a foraging excursion and from starvation. "Happiness is only real when shared," he pens in his final hour, remembering the parents he left as he drifts out of consciousness. It could have been me.

There are others. Crazy Heart. The Wrestler. All excellent and human films, all moved me to tears. 

And then there is Half Nelson, another one of my favorite movies, which I watched this evening. Ryan Gosling plays a history teacher at an inner-city middle school. He wants to make a difference. He coaches basketball. He cares about the kids, especially Drey (Shareeka Epps) one of his favorite students. He also has a drug problem and while he keeps it together most days, he life trends towards self-destruction and desperation. The acting is excellent. I don't know what it is, but the whole film basically reminds me of my twenties. Aside from the crack smoking. But it could have been me.

I moved to Philadelphia in August of 2003. Having met a woman on a cross-country bike tour that summer, and not having done any internships in college and having no real career prospects, it was as good a place as any to relocate to since we were in the beginning stages of a relationship. I got a job as a bike messenger and stayed at her place in South Philly for a couple weeks while I looked for my own apartment.

We were a somewhat unlikely pair. A former exotic dancer, she trained as an amateur boxer at the 12th Street gym, was covered head to toe in tattoos, and was a talented photographer working on her BFA at Drexel. Her big break came when her work was picked up by the New York Times magazine--a portrait series of regular clientele that frequented McGlinchey's, the iconic dive bar at 15th and Locust where she worked as a bartender on the weekends. After a few months together, we got engaged and planned to be married the following Fall. It was a tumultuous relationship from the start, but I kept assuring myself that "relationships are supposed to be hard." Her best friend across the river in New Jersey was dying of cancer as I was experiencing my first acute bout of mania chased by a depression so dark that I didn't know if I would ever come out of it. I entered an in-patient facility, and she went home with someone from the bar one night and contracted an STD. The relationship fell apart as fast as it had started. 

The spring after everything fell apart I started teaching at a Catholic primary school, St. Martin of Tours on Oxford Circle in Northeast Philadelphia as a long-term sub. I would catch the 1 bus from my apartment in Roxborough across the Boulevard early in the morning to the school. I made $16,000 a year and taught 7th grade English, Science, and Religion. 

I got on well with the kids and took some creative license with my lesson plans. I would do free-thinking writing exercises where they had to write in 10 minutes bouts without stopping. The object was to open the censor gates between their minds and their hands. If their pencils stopped moving during that ten minutes I would slam on the desk with my hands and yell "GO MAN GO!" If they got stuck, I would encourage them, "If you have to write the word 'butt' fifty thousand times, write it fifty thousand times. But DON'T STOP WRITING." They loved it. No one had ever given them license to create like that before. The nuns would occasionally walk by the classroom and peer in the window to see what all the commotion was about. 

I never did hard drugs, but really only because I knew that if I did I would never come back from it if I did. I would pass out under tables at bars and my friends would take me home. I smoked constantly. I drove my motorcycle over 150mph on one occasion on Rt. 29 in New Jersey. I never got in fights but I would engage in a lot of risky behavior and would spiral out of control like a top being unwound, ricocheting off everything it touches and busting up the plaster.

And so watching Half Nelson tonight, it just all came back--the memory of my twenties, the teaching, the spectre of addiction, the precipice of keeping things together when your mind is flying off in a thousand directions. When you know low, you know there's sometimes no where to go. The most memorable scene (without the prodigal return) in the movie was when "Teach" has just gone completely in to the dark, smoking crack with prostitutes. His promising student Drey, who had looked up to him all the while, had fallen into running drugs for a family friend, and delivers the drugs to the hotel room not knowing Teach was who she was delivering it to. He is completely lost, steps out of the bathroom and kneels down to her eye level as if to say, 'Here it is. You're seeing it. This is me.' She's dealing the drugs. He's addicted to the drugs. He's a twenty-something white history teacher. She's a black seventh grader from the inner-city. For a moment that seems to stand still, they are just two sinners on the same level. 

I have no desire to go back to my twenties. It was a time of pain and loneliness slathered in the salves of the world we all use in our ways, whether its drugs or sex or shopping sprees or eating or affection or achievement. I'm in a much better place, despite occasional bouts of darkness, but at least it is not compounded by the kind of sin and excess that accompanied that time of my life that just makes everything all the more complicated and destructive. 

I heard an incredible story once of a father who had gone in search of his son, who had gone to Thailand and fell in to a drug den and a life of addiction. He father flew to Bangkok and just started going to every drug house he could find, until he eventually found his son and took him home.

Occasionally I like to remember, when watching these kinds of films, not because of any kind of glamorization of it, but to be reminded what I am capable of, what hides around the corner, in the dark alleys of my heart. I think we have a tendency to whitewash our sins from time to time when we gain a modicum of Christian respectability in our own eyes. But when Christ enters in--when we are on the floor of the motel bathroom with the crack vile in our hands, at our lowest points, the light pierces the darkness, and he looks on us with compassion in our brokenness, carrying us out on his back. And we remember, in the end, that we are not lost after all. Broken, but not lost. Broken...and found.