The Corrective: A Six Day Journey

By Peter Ferentzy

Peter Ferentzy is a recovering drunk and a recovering crackhead. He knows this topic from the gutter right up to the halls of academe. After losing two friends to overdose, and seeing clearly that in each case the governing approach to addiction was the cause, Peter wrote Dealing with Addiction -- Why the 20th Century was Wrong. The Corrective is an extension of that agenda, showing as it does that persons with substance use issues can – without completely quitting drug and alcohol use – accomplish much more than mainstream authorities would have you believe. In this case they manage to “stave off World War Three, derail the prison system, ‘liberate’ half a million captive animals, settle ethnic strife in Eastern Europe, unite warring Muslim nations in the Middle East, and generate prosperity in Sudan” (from front cover with special thanks to Stanton Peele).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Nov 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483439044

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THE

CORRECTIVE

A Six-Day Journey

PETER FERENTZY

Copyright © 2015 Peter Ferentzy.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Author photo (back cover) by: Noel Chris Miller

Front cover photo and all art inside the text by: David Coombs

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3905-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3904-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015916421

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 1/7/2016

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Day One: Thursday

1. Prologue

2. Despotic Nerds

3. The Stalkers

4. The Corrective

5. Staring Into the Abyss

6. In a Stalker’s Lair

7. The Collective Making Plans

8. Intruders

9. Norbert’s Spiritual Awakening

10. How to Improve Your Grades

11. The Adventure Begins

12. Death to Druggies!

13. The Plan: Making Omelets

14. The Stalkers Strike

15. The Collective Strikes Back

16. Engaging With a Doomsday Cult

17. Crazy Fuckers

18. A Different Kind of Meeting

19. Failsafe Security Inc.

20. The President’s Dilemma

Day Two: Friday

21. The President’s Address

22. Mind the Gap!

23. Foreign Affairs

24. Does The Corrective Have a Philosophy?

25. More Foreign Affairs

26. Good Citizens

27. Foreigners Can’t Be Trusted

28. Tough Guys, Ideologues, and Contradictions

29. Down and Up

30. Big Men and Big Ideas

31. Ugly Trouble Around the Corner

32. East European Powwow

33. If One Man Dies

34. If One Hundred Thousand Die

35. More Statistics

36. The Will of God

37. Something Completely Different

38. The Virtue of Patience

Day Three: Saturday

39. Who Is Your Worst Critic?

40. Bad Citizens

41. If Grandmother Could See This

42. Protecting Your Genitals

43. The Adams Street Platform: Fuck!

44. If You Can’t Beat ’Em

45. Keep the Candle Burning

46. Fucking Fuckery

47. The Piss Police

48. Healing, and Letting Old Ghosts Die

49. The Great Satan

50. Guns Don’t Kill People!

Day Four: Sunday

51. The Glory of War

52. The Middle Kingdom

53. Babysitting a Psychopath

54. Shmuckmeister Toothpaste

55. At the End of the Day

56. Up the River

57. The Transcendental Instinct

58. Ashes to Ashes, and Dildos in the Hereafter

59. Sweet Love on Her Mind

60. Get Drunk, Fight, and Blow Leprechauns

61. What Is Enlightenment?

62. Taking the Bait

63. The Last Few Yards

64. Dominos and Superstars

65. The Magnificent Five

66. If History Has Taught Us Anything

67. Coyote Gets Two Road Runners

68. A One-Headed Dragon

69. If Chickens Could Vote

70. If Elephants Could Run Down the Street

71. When Old Friends Meet

72. Tong Wong’s Vision

Day Five: Monday

73. M’Kumba’s Vision

74. Jancsi’s Vision

75. John’s Vision

76. Kareem’s Vision

77. Sheila’s Vision

78. Marvin and Wendy

79. When the Walls Come Down: Contagious Craziness

80. Time to Wake Up

81. Time to Get Busy

82. Time to Step Up

83. Make ’Em Go Tizzy

84. A Special Show

85. Making Omelets Revisited

86. The President’s Resignation

Day Six: Tuesday

87. Independence Day

88. Shittiness

89. Phallocentric Studies and Fucked-Uppery

90. Gender Roles and More Fucked-Uppery

91. What a Day!

92. Keep Calm!

93. So What Now?

94. Young Love

95. Consider Your Options

96. Too Much Work

97. The Lands We Once Had

98. Let the Children Play

99. The Will of God in History

100. The Great Navajo Desert

101. The Last Great Interruption

102. Emerging From the Abyss

103. Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First off, I would like to thank my dear friend, Mary Talbot, who babysat my sorry ass when I was heartbroken and suicidal, and who later followed (with edits) the writing of this manuscript chapter by chapter. At times, I would bug her in the middle of the night with one of my harebrained ideas. So, thank you, Mary.

I would like to thank my Mom, who stood by me no matter what—even when I was wasted almost all of the time. A mother’s love really can be unconditional.

I want to thank Chris, Patrick, Tom R., Dylan, and Jascha for their helpful comments, and also my dear friend Deb W., for her annoying comments.

I want to thank Flora Matheson, Robin Room, Stanton Peele, Paul Antze, Nigel Turner, Gabor Maté, Tom Horvath, Wayne Skinner, and David Duncan, each of whom has played a pivotal role in my ongoing quest to understand addiction.

I want to thank David Coombs for the outstanding artwork, on the outside and the inside of this book, and Noel Chris Miller, whose top-notch photography skills have come through for me once again in this, my first novel.

I want to thank Barb Every for the excellent editing job on this and some of my other books.

I want to thank my dear cousin, Steven (AKA Tives), whose wise counsel prevented me from saying something dumb (and embarrassing) in this acknowledgement section.

Peace out,

Peter (your friendly neighborhood crackhead)

Chapter1.jpg

DAY ONE: THURSDAY

1. Prologue

Well, here it is, said Rees, certain that they were too inexperienced to pull it off. He indicated as much with a sarcastic tone. Why did we come here at all? he thought.

You better put a lid on your attitude, said Mathias, staring at the great city, almost stunned by the lights, and allowing his mind to get sidetracked with a metaphysical query: are the lights just lights, or a single entity? Fuck it. Lights are lights.

They were all scared.

Now, after so much planning, practice and deliberation, they were looking right into the abyss—or at least that was how it felt. How could such small, insignificant creatures take down a vast and seemingly infinite reality?

Reality, it will always surprise you, Rees was thinking. After all, had he not been full of confidence only a week prior to this day? Then something snapped, and he lost his nerve.

But now, looking at it, even Mathias had to wonder. Reality is like that, he thought. It becomes more and more real the closer you get to it.

Rah-Nee, the so-called witch, also had to wonder. Were they on a fool’s errand?

Sheila, the addiction specialist, professor and stunningly beautiful egghead, couldn’t get her thoughts to stay still—an uncharacteristically humbling experience.

Sure, reality could mystify. Just how real is the scenario right here? Sheila thought to herself.

Maybe, thought Rees, reality is bewitching when it messes with your conception of reality. Hmmm … Good thing we have a ‘witch’ on our side. Despite misgivings and an ardently secular skepticism, Rees knew that Rah-Nee’s Wiccan skills could sometimes function like … magic. Maybe the Wicca-witch could fuck with reality. Maybe … Whose reality, anyway?

On what might be a fool’s errand and at the same time hunted by the Stalkers who, on an errand of their own, were sworn to destroy them, the four unlikely allies would have to move—and think—both quickly and with deliberation. That’s not a contradiction, thought Rah-Nee, just tough reality.

Real challenges involve such tensions, don’t they?

What was real, anyway? They were here, united, precisely because each of them—despite their different values, personalities, stories and aspirations—had one thing in common: they had been drug-addicted misfits, all of whom, supposedly, had relied on drugs because of an inability to handle reality.

Let’s do a toke, said Rees to Rah-Nee. She nodded in agreement and took out a long, cylindrical glass tube with metal mesh inside one end.

He took one out as well, along with a small plastic bag filled with little white chunks.

So they were both smoking crack.

Mathias, who was addicted to cocaine and opiates but preferred to inject rather than smoke, shook his head. You crackheads light up every half hour. It’s inefficient, and you slow us down.

Screw you, said Rah-Nee. I’d rather smoke than poke.

Rees was onside. At least we don’t nod—talk about slowing things down!

Sheila, like Mathias, was also a poker, a needle-freak. But unlike many addicts, she had little use for the upmanship—or downmanship—in which these social misfits often engaged: it was normal to disparage another’s vice in order to make one’s own seem less troublesome. So quite a few alcoholics took pride in not using drugs, just as many druggies looked down at stupid, violent drunks. Crack smokers took pride in not using needles, and injection drug users often bragged about how, unlike crack smokers, they didn’t have to indulge every twenty minutes. Gamblers looked down at all substance abusers, and substance addicts felt good about wasting less money than gamblers. And on it went, ad nauseum. Sheila understood that perfectly, and refused to engage.

Funny thing, but neither Rees nor Rah-Nee lit up every half hour—they once had, but now their use was sporadic. And neither Sheila nor Mathias was in danger of nodding as they had been when their habits were completely out of control. All four of them had managed to taper their addictions, but that didn’t prevent three of them from engaging in another old habit, possibly harder to break: putting down another’s vice in order to vindicate one’s own.

I am Spam. Spam I am! I do not like my pussy with jam! A Dr. Seuss fan with a taste for Spam, Rees was babbling, as he often did after a blast.

No one seemed to pay attention.

I’m a boobie girl in a boobie world! Rah-Nee was pleased, singing a variation on an old jingle to herself as though she had just found an elusive spiritual center.

Rees was hyper, and he added a verse: Doobie be doo wop, di doo di doo.

Will you two shut the fuck up? Mathias was not amused.

Rees replied: I know you are, but what am I? He knew he wasn’t making sense and that this would annoy Mathias.

Rather than take the bait, Mathias took his own advice and shut the fuck up.

A few feet to his right, Mathias spotted a crevice—possibly the designated point of entry. It wasn’t too dark out, but he still used a flashlight to home in on it. Yes, it was the right spot. Graffiti, including a swastika, a communist hammer and cycle, fellatio jokes, and homophobic and racist anecdotes, as well as other tidbits—it was hard to mistake if you had ever looked at it before. All the words and symbols—representing love, hate, sex, hope, violence, fear, resentment, and even gratitude—spoke to the mishmash of elements that made up the human condition.

Since he had found the point of entry, Mathias was more concerned with that than with anything the graffiti might invoke—save for one line: Death to Druggies!

Yeah, a needle-freak knows about hatred and prejudice, he thought. It’s like being gay, Jewish, black and in a wheelchair all rolled into one. Off-colored himself, perhaps halfway between European and African descent, and being kinky enough to make most gays look vanilla, Mathias contemplated those words: Death to Druggies! Maybe I’d support such a movement, he mused, but only if they had enough sense to kill me first.

Life could be such a chore.

Mathias sat down, and took out his rigs. If he really was to enter that crazy place behind the crevice, he would shoot up first. Shit, this fix might be his last. So I better do a good one! he thought.

After, Mathias felt much better. He thought about how Rees and Sheila, partnered up, made such a quaint couple. He walked over to Sheila, who was sitting beside her man, sat down beside her, and put one hand on her shoulder: So your old man’s a criminal, a drug addict. He’s got no job and he’s got no home. But at least he’s white!

Rees laughed. Sheila didn’t: Fuckoff Mathias. And at least he can spell his own name.

Mathias had never finished secondary school and, though quite bright, was self-conscious about his lack of education. But he was feeling too good to care. Sure, but his name only has one syllable.

Fuckoff Mathias, she said again, though this time with a grin.

2. Despotic Nerds

Rah-Nee recalled a late twentieth century movie called Demolition Man. In a futuristic world—ruled by a figure who was like an evil version of a few goody-goody kid-show hosts—there was no swearing or dirty talk allowed, no smoking, no drinking, no eating meat, no sexually explicit pictures or paintings, no violent sports (Wesley Snipes even referred to the leader as an evil Mr. Rogers). Oh, and forget about crack, heroin, or S & M—that stuff wasn’t even on the film’s radar. But it was on her radar. After all, she and her team were out to humiliate, and then maybe take down, a group of rulers similar to the uptight wiener-ruler in that long forgotten film. Imagine some of the most extreme goody-two-shoes characters you can recall from television, and now imagine them with political ambition, and then imagine a conglomerate of them running a nation. In a now united North America, ascetics of all stripes had put their differences aside and had decided to work in tandem. They included, but were not limited to, the following: Christians, Marxists (mostly Maoists), political Platonists, animal rights advocates bent on converting humanity to veganism, staunch environmentalists (often dubbed eco-fascists), hardcore pro-censorship feminists, drug and alcohol prohibitionists, and even a disparate collection of New Agers and other visionaries who wanted humanity to rise above the body and its functions. Nietzsche would have understood—to him, they were all the same kind of people. Moraline was a term he had used: no coffee, for example … ascetic purity.

Funny, Rah-Nee considered herself a feminist, but had little use for the strict dress code and anti-makeup variety of feminism that had been popular in the second half of the twentieth century and which had made a seemingly miraculous comeback.

And she had no use for any of the moraline—moralistic—asceticism of the ruling order in all its facets.

It had started off as remedial, a reaction of sorts. The Uber-Rulers had been cruel and grandiose. They put their power on display: public torture and (mass) executions on live TV. They advocated genetic purity and physical superiority. Like the Romans and Greeks of old, they valued physical beauty and despised sickness, ugliness, deformity and weakness. Their overthrow was reminiscent of the Christian overthrowing of older Roman and Egyptian aristocracies: it wasn’t enough to displace the rulers; there was also an imperative to stamp out the many blatant and lewd symbols of aristocratic power. The time had come for the average to shine and, failing that, to smother any bright light that reminded the average that he never could.

In this post-revolutionary climate, Marxists, Christians, and other moralistic ascetics had found plenty of followers.

Now, the entire North American continent was as sanitary as the leaders could make it. Public health—physical and mental hygiene—was the order of the day. There was (officially) no more capital punishment and (officially) no state-sanctioned torture—quite a change from the prior regime. Poverty was rampant, but those in need received a lot more aid than the Uber-Rulers would have even thought of providing. This, on its own, was not a great achievement in social justice, as the Uber-Rulers had a Darwinian view of the many unfortunates and social outcasts: rather than help them proliferate, they would allow them to die off—and even encourage them to do so by means of deprivation, sporadic genocidal initiatives, and sterilization (preferably voluntary, though the Uber-Rulers weren’t too fussy about such things).

Compared to what had been, the current regime would strike many observers as heavenly. Why fight it? And of all people, why would the drug-addicted turn against a system that accepted them and tried to help them, rather than simply shut them out or exterminate them as the prior regime had done?

The first answer an outsider might venture is partly right: the new regime was preachy, moralistic, ridiculously sanitized, strict, repressive—downright uptight.

But there was more. The Uber-Rulers had cared about their own power, their own interests. Despite paying lip service to a neo-Darwinian genetic agenda, and despite considering the unwashed and unfed to be subhuman, they paid little attention to anything that did not affect them or their immediate interests. So pockets of illegal, semi-legal, or extralegal subcultures abounded. The Uber-Rulers were pragmatic, and made that clear in deed if not always in word: don’t mess with us, don’t piss us off, and we’ll leave you alone.

It was different now. The ruling body, known as The Collective, seemed to care about everyone. No one would be shut out. No one would be excluded. No thought was too minor to warrant analysis, no impulse too trivial to warrant scrutiny, no stone too small to remain unturned and, as these four characters would learn, no ragtag group too insignificant to warrant attention, intervention, mothering and smothering. Rah-Nee, Mathias, Rees and Sheila had more in common than drug addiction: they longed for the freedom they enjoyed during the old regime. The unthinkable had become an ironic reality: many actually missed the freedom they had had under the Uber-Rulers.

The current regime certainly had its good points. Operating in a Platonic tradition, and with a sincere desire to shelter people from the many horrors of this world, The Collective did its best to ensure a safe and happy life for all. What The Collective could never accept was transgression—and in the case of these four companions the transgression was extreme: unrepentant substance users with little or no desire to reform. It really was an impasse: moral, spiritual, ideological. A joke often heard on the streets—Big Wiener is watching you!—said a great deal. Pretty well everyone had a job, and officially there was no unemployment. And everyone had to exercise at work together, oh so sweet, but never too intensely.

Moderation, health, balance, serenity, humility, safety, community, cleanliness, honesty, rationality, brotherhood, sisterhood, longevity, morality …

Some were fine with it