Anatomy of A Drug Addict: He refused to let drugs define him and his mother's refused to give up.

By Charles Brown and C.S. Marlatt

One out of ten families deal with addiction to drugs or alcohol. The number of young men and women dying from addiction has grown over the years and is still growing today. Addiction impacts not only the addict but also the addict's family. For every addict there is a father and mother who are bearing the hurt of watching a child descend into the darkness of drug or alcohol dependency. Though others often give up hope, these mothers and fathers are desperate to believe there is a door to freedom. In addition to parents, there also are wives and children abandoned because the father is incarcerated for a drug-related crime.

Charles' story tells us there is hope that comes from God and that this hope will not disappoint us. His story tells us that when we come to a spiritual awakening and receive the counsel and help that creates new thinking and emotional healing, a new story can be written for us, and a new life can spring from the wreckage of failure and become a part of the solution for others walking that same path.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098332938

Charles Brown

Charles Brown host the radio talk show “Ambassadors of God” on WGIV satellite radio (103.3). He is a freelance/blog writer on Christian doctrines that is applicable to the social issues we face today. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Bethune-Cookman University located in Daytona Bch., Florida in the area of sociology and worked on his Masters’ degree at the University of Miami in Public Administration with emphasis on International Politics. After understanding the politics of society he eventually formed a passion for the Lords’ work and entered Maple Spring Baptist College in Maryland to study divinity.

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Published by Bridges International

2145 MetroCenter Dr., Suite 350

Orlando, FL 32835

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Italics in Scripture references are the author’s emphasis.

Copyright © 2020 by Charles Brown. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Lori Costantino Brown and Diana Larsen

Visit the author’s website at http://www.bridgesofamerica.com/.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-09833-292-1

E-book ISBN: 978-1-09833-293-8

I have tried to recreate events and conversations from my memories of them. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

20 21 22 23 24 — 987654321

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One: The Family

Chapter Two: Life at Home

Chapter Three: Church Life

Chapter Four: Off to Juvie

Chapter Five: A Prodigal Is Born

Chapter Six: The Great Escape

Chapter Seven: You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide

Chapter Eight: The Tobacco Fields of Madison

Chapter Nine: Ain’t No Sunshine When You’re Gone

Chapter Ten: The Job Corps

Chapter Eleven: Demetrius and the Boy

Chapter Twelve: Black Power and the Militant Years

Chapter Thirteen: The End of Innocence

Chapter Fourteen: The Irish Cop and the Dog Who Didn’t Snitch

Chapter Fifteen: Just Another Day in Paradise

Chapter Sixteen: New Thought, New Job, New Girl

Chapter Seventeen: The Dream, the Mail, and the Diaper Pail

Chapter Eighteen: Out of the Darkness, Into the Light

Chapter Nineteen: A Ray of Hope and a Judge Who Pointed the Way

Chapter Twenty: The Bus, the Book, and the Bridge Over Troubled Water

Chapter Twenty-One: Coming to the Bridge

Chapter Twenty-Two: Growing Pains

Chapter Twenty-Three: Being Prepared

Chapter Twenty-Four: Growing, Growing, and More Growing

Chapter Twenty-Five: Birth of a Family and Death of a Legend

Chapter Twenty-Six: Looking Back—The Here and Now

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Nothing Is Lost

Foreword

As a Christian, I believe that a man or a woman can change. I believe we are not defined by our strengths or weaknesses; rather, because we are made in the image of God, we are inherently worthy in His sight. Every person is worthy of God’s love and is meant to love and be loved. I believe that every person has a good purpose and plan given to them by their Creator, and in Christ Jesus that purpose and plan come to life.

I have known Charles Brown since the mid-1980s. That was about the time I became aware of the Bridge program under the leadership of Frank Costantino. What Charles and I have in common is the spiritual parenting and mentoring of Frank Costantino. So in a way we are children of the same spiritual father.

Knowing Charles in that way made reading his autobiography a fascinating experience. I had heard bits and pieces of his early life and was aware somewhat of his criminal background and involvement in drugs. But my relationship with Charles was with the new creation that had not only overcome addiction, but had fully dedicated his life to helping others find victory in their lives. Charles, by the grace of God, conquered the tyranny of addiction. His message was not from the halls of academia, though he is a brilliant counselor and clinician, but from the battlefields for the souls of men and women.

One out of ten families deal with addiction to drugs or alcohol. The number of young men and women dying from addiction has grown over the years. Addiction impacts not only the addict but also the addict’s family. For every addict there is a father and mother who are bearing the hurt of watching a child descend into the darkness of drug or alcohol dependency. Though others often give up hope, these mothers and fathers are desperate to believe there is a door to freedom. In addition to parents, there also are wives and children abandoned because the father is incarcerated for a drug-related crime.

Charles’ story tells us there is hope that comes from God and that this hope will not disappoint us. Charles’ story tells us that when we come to a spiritual awakening and receive the counsel that creates new thinking and emotional healing, a new story is written for us. I have listened to Charles teach on the use of the twelve steps in recovery. I have heard him give life to proven clinical techniques that deal with the problem of addiction in a holistic way. I know the skills and methods he has developed over the years that have led to a program that has decreased recidivism dramatically. I have seen him, with all his expertise, reach out to a young man or woman struggling for freedom, not as a distant professional but as a friend, brother, and father who brings a supernatural love to bear.

At the core, Charles is a man with a heart for God. He is a priest in the Society of St. Dismas and serves under my episcopate. He is a good priest. He will freely admit that it is because of his relationship with Jesus that he is free. It is also because of this that Charles preaches the gospel of Christ Jesus every Sunday in the church located in the middle of the Bridge of Orlando.

Reading this book will renew your hope if you have lost it. Reading this book will bring you the hope you need to live today. If you are addicted, it will show you a way out. If you have a loved one who is addicted, it will help you understand that your hope is not in vain. I encourage to read this book. It is a story bigger than Charles Brown.

His mercy,

—Bishop Craig W. Bates

Preface

This is the true story of the powerful grace of God working in my life, bringing me from the rebellious days of my youth and over twenty years of drug addiction and mental health problems to where I am today.

In many ways mine was a normal family of the postwar era and inner-city culture of the South. Like most of the fathers in the neighborhood where I grew up, my dad was a weekend alcoholic. For so many young men during and after World War II, drinking seemed to be a rite of passage. Unlike today, the drug of choice back then was mainly alcohol, and underground liquor was still popular at that time, though Prohibition had ended in 1933.

Not so different from the drug dealers of today, peddlers sold moonshine and other homemade alcoholic beverages, and many of them had corrupt beat cops or the local police hierarchy on their payroll. Moonshine was a cheap, affordable alternative for the working man and appeared to be the alcohol of choice in our part of Jacksonville and other, surrounding communities.

My father was born in 1927, just six years before Prohibition ended. I wasn’t around when he first started drinking, but even as a young boy, I could tell that alcohol seemed to change his entire persona. Dad was always at work and invisible during the week from early morning until he came home for dinner, but he was a lot of fun to be around on the weekends. Drinking seemed to loosen him up and make his hard life a little more tolerable.

It wasn’t until I matured somewhat that I began to see the negative side of the drinking, which eventually took his life. His death certificate listed alcoholism and brain encephalitis as the cause of the severe strokes that ended his life at the early age of fifty.

My mother, on the other hand, was an avid Christian. I remember her going to church every Sunday night, and she made sure all of my siblings and I attended services three times or more each week. She sang gospel songs during the day as she prepared dinner and did other chores for our household of ten, and like most of the women in our church and neighborhood, she was a housewife by profession.

Mom was a strict disciplinarian who did not spare the rod when it came to punishing the wrongdoing of her children. Her methods were based on the Scriptures, which she often quoted while whacking us with her chosen rod of correction, which was either a switch from the peach tree in our backyard or an electrical cord from an old iron.

I feared my mother greatly, but I also really loved and respected her. To this day I believe God gave me the right parents to build the foundation that finally brought me to both my knees and my senses.

Mom seemed to have my number and always managed to be in my head to the point that she would often catch me before I ended up doing something really stupid. I would sometimes plan my bad behavior around what would happen if she caught me and what price I would have to pay for my disobedience.

Our mother always spent time talking to us before she bore down on our butts or backs with her weapons of choice. She would remind us during the whipping that it hurt her more than it did us, but we were never convinced of the truth of that statement.

Mom told me once that she was born with a double veil over her face. According to folklore, this meant that she had a mystery about herself that gave her special abilities that could not be explained in the natural world. I later learned that only a small percentage of people are born with a veil over their faces, which is known as a caul or hood. It just means that the membranes of the amniotic sac are still covering the baby’s face at birth. According to folk tradition it’s supposed to mark the child as having special psychic abilities, sometimes known as second sight or clairvoyance.

My mother was very superstitious, and there were certain things we could never do, such as open an umbrella in the house, place a hat on a bed, or allow a child under a year old to see themselves in a mirror. These and many other beliefs infused much of her life with fear. She was very fearful, and even to this day I have to deal with the spirit of fear in my own life.

One thing she did for sure, though, was to pray for us children. I sincerely loved my mother, but I also had an unhealthy fear of her. However, if it was not for my mother’s prayers, I would probably not be alive today. She prayed for me almost constantly, and as you will see as you read this book, I gave her plenty of reasons to do so.

I dedicate this book to my mother and to all the mothers who have or have had a wayward child who has not yet found the right path for their life. The Bible says in Proverbs 22:6, Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

Every child comes from God through a human family. God chooses the mother and father who will birth us, and He places a special anointing on the parents to steer the child in the right direction. My mother would probably not be surprised by how my life went, especially how things are going now. God instructs and anoints every parent to train up their child in the right way. Some try their best to do that, even though they may not immediately see the fruit of their efforts.

If you have wayward children, don’t give up. Pray for your children. Plead with God to help them find a good path for their life. Lay your hands on them and speak words of blessing over them. God will use your prayers to direct your child through the struggles and battles they will face in their life. My mother always reminded me that God had given me a double portion of the Holy Spirit and a special assignment for my life. Her powerful words often came to my mind when I was off living a life of rebellion, reminding me that there was another way. God has a plan for your child’s life, and where they are right now (as hard or impossible as it may seem) may very likely be a part of that plan.

I also believe that if you are addicted to drugs or have a substance abuse problem, this book can change the trajectory of your life and cause you to find a better direction. God has a plan for your life and where you are right now, including the fact that you are reading this book, is part of that plan. I believe that God allowed me to experience the things you will read about here and that he has anointed me to share this book with you so that through it you can find a new life in Him.

My prayer for you is that God will reveal his Son Jesus Christ to you and, through the Power of the Holy Spirit, He will restore you to His perfect plan for your life and give you the ministry of reconciliation, allowing you to be used to reach others for Christ.

2 Corinthians 1:4 says that God, . . . comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

—Charles Brown

Introduction

As a drug addict, you live with your feet in two worlds. In one world you want to be everything the drug tells you that you can be; in the other, you live a life of running: running from the guilt and shame, running from God, running from the pain when the high is gone, and running as fast as you can to wherever you can get the next fix to take away the pain. It’s a vicious cycle that can end suddenly in total isolation from family and friends, time in prison, or a lonely death. If you somehow manage to survive, the addicted life can go on for a seemingly endless eternity, killing you slowly one dose at a time.

—C. S. Marlatt

It was to be an early morning ceremony, and I had driven up from Orlando the day before to make sure I arrived on time. After having dinner with my sisters Hazel and Doris and Doris’ daughter and grandson, I spent the night in a hotel not far from the Jacksonville Bridge, where I was scheduled to be the commencement speaker for their graduation ceremony the next day. There was a flu epidemic going around, and nearly everyone I knew had it. Somehow, I was spared, and I was feeling great about going to the first Bridge graduation ceremony of 2018.

The next morning, as I sat in the front row of the packed chapel, the excitement of the graduating clients and their families created an atmosphere that was already giving me a shot of adrenaline for the speech I was about to give. As the senior vice president and chief program officer of all the Bridges, I was excited to be participating and to get a chance to meet some of the graduates and their families as they left to go out into the world with a new vision for how to live a drug-free life and stay out of prison.

After the opening welcome from one of the Bridge’s senior staff members, the in-house band performed their opening song, Fast by country singer Luke Bryan. I was struck by the chorus and how much the words seemed to reflect my own story and the reality of my life looking backward through time:

Sixty seconds now feels more like thirty

Tick-tock, won’t stop, around it goes

Sand through the glass sure falls in a hurry

And all you keep trying to do is slow it down, soak it in

Keep trying to make the good times last as long as you can

But you can’t, man

It just goes too fast

Sitting there holding the paper where I had scribbled out the words to my speech, I kept flashing back to my own graduation ceremony thirty-five years before. I had just finished my time at the Orlando Bridge, and I stood on the brink of the second biggest decision of my life. I was free again after serving my brief stint in prison and having finished the Bridge program as a part of the first alumni group. I stood there in the parking lot with new hopes and a new relationship with God, contemplating my future as I decided where to go from there.

Returning to Jacksonville and rejoining what was left of my family seemed like the logical thing to do at the time. But just like some of the men sitting before me at the graduation ceremony in 2018, I had fears about my future. Mostly I feared how my new life would be if I went back to the place where I grew up and spent so much of my early adult life drowning in a sea of drugs and crime, and running from the law.

Suddenly I felt a pair of strong, familiar hands on my shoulders. Standing behind me in the dark was the Bridge founder Frank Costantino. He had seen me standing there alone and sensed that I was struggling with a decision that could probably alter my life forever. Though he was never a drug user himself, he had spent years in South Florida as a major criminal and ended up serving five and a half years in the Florida prison system for crimes he had committed. Starting the Bridge was his way of thanking God for turning his own life around in Belle Glade prison in 1969. It was his vision to create a safe space for those coming out of prison who needed a hand up to rebuild their life free from drugs and life behind bars.

At first, I just stood there silently as this man who had become a second father to me seemed to be trying to find the right words for what he wanted to say. Finally, he spoke nine words that would change my life forever: Son, if you leave the Bridge you will die!

Chapter One:

The Family

Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.

—Anthony Brandt

I was born on January 2, 1949, to Willie James and Hattie Mae Brown. My brother Herbert was two years older than me, but it wasn’t until many years later that I learned we had different fathers. Apparently, my mother had a relationship with someone else before she married my dad, and Herbert was born out of wedlock. By the time I came into the picture she was living full steam for Jesus. As time passed, she tried her best to make sure all of us kids spent enough time in church to avoid making that same kind of mistake later in life.

I grew up with my parents and my ten brothers and sisters all living on Jacksonville’s Eastside in a tiny, 600-square-foot house with only one bathroom. Ours was an open house, where you could see all the way to the back where the bathroom was when you first walked in the front door. The only separate room was my parent’s bedroom to the left of the main room, but even their door was usually left open, so that the house was basically one big open room. It was a common style back then for wood-frame houses built in our part of town. Many of them have since been torn down or condemned.

Like all of my brothers and sisters, I was born at home with the help of a midwife who was a part of our community. She delivered most of the children in our neighborhood right there in our own homes. That’s the way it was back then. Midwives were an important part of most Black communities in the South. In those days, hospitals below the Mason-Dixon Line were usually segregated.

First, there was Herbert Lewis Brown, the eldest of the siblings. He was born in 1947, and as I mentioned, he was really a half-brother. I didn’t know the full story until later on, but looking back now I can see that Herbert never really felt like he was a full-fledged member of the family. He was my mother’s son but not my father’s, though as far as I could tell my father treated him the same as the rest of us. Herbert died from esophageal cancer at sixty-eight after struggling for many years with what was clearly a family-wide addiction to drugs and alcohol.

I came in second in 1949, followed by my brother Willie James Brown, otherwise known as Pumpkin. He was born on March 25, 1950, and died in April of 1990 at the age of forty. Pumpkin became a heavy drug user and eventually was a dealer of some reputation in the Jacksonville area. He was killed by two crackheads who shot him because he wouldn’t give them some drugs on credit.

After Pumpkin was our sister Brenda, who came into the world in 1952. She died just a year later from pneumonia. I was only three at the time, and my memory of her is