Chapters 12-15 Overview - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Chapters 12-15 Overview

Chris

Herren’s

Basketball JunkieSlide2

Chapter 11

“

Herren

remained unconscious for the next several minutes, forcing police and rescue officials to break the rear driver’s side window to remove the former Boston Celtic’s shooting guard,” one newspaper reported. “Herren, police said, was revived by medical rescue and was transported to Newport hospital where he was treated and released.” But I hadn’t been released. After I was removed from the car, police found drug paraphernalia and eighteen empty packets of heroin in the car, and they arrested me at Newport Hospital. They took me back to the police station, where I was in a cell most of the day before being officially charged that night by a justice of the peace and released on bail.

“

This is my career

,” I was quoted as saying. “This is my life. I am very worried about the whole thing. This is just crazy.”

Crazy

, indeed.Slide3

Chapter 12“Few people had known about my addiction. No one knew about the problems overseas.” (210)

“I was still the six-foot-two white kid from Fall River who had made it all the way to the NBA, who still was, on the surface anyway, a great story. …Now all of that had been shattered. I wasn’t just a junkie. I was a public junkie. Complete with the overpowering shame that came with that. I couldn’t look people in the eye. It was like my head weighed fifty pounds, like I couldn’t raise it. I basically stayed in the house, became a recluse.”

Owes his survival *MEMOIR ALERT* to Heather and the Portsmouth school system. “Chris had one amazing teacher that year. She knew what was going on, took a special interest in him”

Grandfather died, and mother was diagnosed with cancer.Next basketball gig = Tehran (Iran)Slide4

“I lived in the mountains. It was beautiful, with a lot of stucco buildings. There were ski slopes open. You didn’t see the poverty there. The mountains were where the money was in Tehran. It got poorer as you went farther down into the city, and the architecture changed, more cement.” (217)

“Alcohol was illegal, though it was easy to get. Tehran was foreign, but I had lived in different places by then, so I was used to it. People were people, wherever they were. Some good, some bad. But mostly good.” (217)

“My driver was Iranian, but he spoke English. He would show up every morning outside my hotel with cocaine tied into a sock and throw it up to my second-floor balcony.” (216)

$12,000 per month… “After about a month, it was time for me to go.”Slide5

Mary Parker

Communications teacher from Fresno State who threw Chris a life preserver… Lived in rural Oakhurst… “In many ways it was one of the worst times in my life, for everything was spinning out of control, regardless of the change in zip code.”

“There was no heroin, at least not in the beginning. Instead, I became a drunk.” (220)

“Let’s go out,” he said.“No. I can’t. Heather’s here.”“Come on.”“Can’t do it.”The next day I heard that he and his girlfriend had been shot and killed, in what was being called an execution. (221)Slide6

Soon after, she took me back.

Why?

It’s the unanswerable question.

Maybe it was because she always had faith in our future, regardless of the hell we were in. Maybe it was because she had known me in the age of innocence. Maybe it was because she had two little kids and she was always putting out fires – her life in a free-fall around her – and in some twisted way it was easier for her when I was around, as fucked up as I was… Maybe it was as simple as love… Maybe it was all of the above. Heather had seen my life crumble, its slow demise. Because addiction doesn’t destroy you overnight; it’s a slow walk down a tortuous hill. (223)Slide7

Chapter 13

Chapter of “DESPAIR”Slide8

“Every day I’m putting junk in my arm. Talk about

despair

. That’s the definition of despair. It’s like picking up a revolver to play Russian roulette five times a day. One bad shot from that needle and your life is over.” (226)

“And when you’re living like that you’re way beyond the big picture.” (226)“Heather became as engulfed in it as I did. It became her world, too. She became ill herself. She lived every bit of my addiction, except she didn’t buy it, and she didn’t use it. But it dragged her down too, because that’s what addiction does, it drags everyone down.” (227)

“A friend helped me get a job at the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island… The institute was run by Dan Doyle, and

he was throwing me a lifeline

… The institute did many incredible things, including putting on the World Scholar-Athlete Games, and in the beginning, I was so desperate for a job I would have swept the floors… The institute also runes the

New England Basketball Hall of Fame

, and they wanted to put me in it, but I couldn’t even handle that.

Talk about not being able to see the

big picture

.” (227)Slide9

Darkest Moments of Despair

“I was in the kitchen one morning and a woman was prostituting herself in the next room with the door open and her little kid could see it. I was with people who were sharing needles full of

blood

. I was in houses with no furniture, no TV, no anything, just mattresses on the floor, and little kids sitting on them. I saw things no one should ever see. Hell couldn’t be any worse.” (230)“On the night before I drove off the road in Fall River in front of the cemetery and was dead for thirty seconds, I went to a friend’s house in South Kingstown. I was there for about an hour and then, as we walked down his driveway to where my car was parked, I threw up. I had been to his house before, but he explained to me how to get on Route 1 north, the road that would take me to the Newport Bridge and then back to Portsmouth. It was very easy, just one turn. I didn’t take it. About twenty minutes later I started seeing signs for Connecticut, which meant I had spent the last twenty minutes in a virtual blackout, going south when I should have been going north.

Is it any wonder that after another day of getting fucked up I don’t remember driving through Fall River for a mile or so in the afternoon and passing out in the car with a needle in my arm, then being pronounced dead for nearly thirty seconds?

Hadn’t I had this date for a long time?Slide10

Chapter Fourteen

Cyclical writing – time seems to move in circles, train-of-thought-style of writing

Stream of Consciousness Writing StyleSlide11

Daytop Rehab Facility – Upstate NY

Military-style “initiation”

“I was completely broken.” (234)

Time passed & overcame the “dope sickness”Was finally allowed to go home to see Heather give birth.“Sean didn’t see it. He stayed in the car. I bought a pint of Popov, guzzled it, and stuck a couple more down my pants.” (236)

“Better without you in their lives”

“That night was my rock bottom” (238)Slide12

Counselling and sober thinking without distractions can be described, by Chris, as “exactly where I needed to be.”

“If my marriage was really going to end, then I had to get better so I could be a father.

So I prayed for Chris and Samantha.

I prayed for baby Drew.I prayed for my marriage.I prayed for my sobriety.“But eventually that had become my goal: to be the kind of person that my children could look up to.”“On the way back to Daytop, I thought of how blessed I was. To be able to eat dinner with my family when I was sober, not hiding vodka bottles. To be able to engage in conversation like a normal person. That’s what Daytop had done for me.” (242)Slide13

Kevin Mikolazyk

I started feeling sorry for myself.

Kevin quickly knocked that out of me.Slide14

Support System

“

Joleena

and I would talk for hours, and all that helped me. With both her and Kevin I was seeing people who had been where I had been. No hope. No future. And no confidence that was ever going to change. Yet they had resurrected themselves, built new lives. In many ways they were my role models. They were a daily reminder that it could be done. It was all about small victories.” (248)“The meetings were small victories, too; another day sober, another day of being vigilant. And the more I went to meetings in Falmouth, th emore people I knew. …That made it easier, along with Kevin and Joleena.” (249)“And things were getting better at home.

Heather and I could have a dialogue now… That was a huge step on my road to recovery” (249).

“my circle was growing, little by little” (250).

“I no longer felt I was shipwrecked on some private island, all alone with nowhere to turn. I had people who cared about me. I had people who had forgiven me. I had people who were starting to believe in me.”Slide15

chapter fifteen

“But that article changed everything.

Until then, my reentry into the world had been gradual. It had been day-by-day, week-by-week. I had been lost for so long” (252).Slide16

Ken Gray, Heather’s father

“Enter my father.” (253)

Lawyer named Joe Silvia

“he basically took care of Heather and the bills”Slide17

http://www.ahoopdream.com/