Clean start, every day

Serenity Shack holds doors to recovery open depite addiction's efforts to close them

It's tucked away, up a hill and far away from Naamans Road just east of the Tri-State Mall.

The Serenity Shack, attached to the Cabinet Factory like an afterthought, is bigger than it seems, stretching several yards back from the entrance.

The wares beneath its glass counters and along its shelves lead browsers to a comfortable sofa and chairs where one may sit, think and read.

For the uninitiated, it's a doorway into another world, a place where those seeking solace may find their first comfort, where they may find out when and where a meeting will be.

For the initiated, it's a place to celebrate a day, a year, a decade and more of recovery.

Customers may not know each other personally, but in a glance they know each other's stories.

Shared stories, common bonds

Everyone who visits The Serenity Shack has a story. Some are addicts. Some know an addict.

Dion Taylor's story has a happy ending -- which he fights for every day -- despite childhood abuse, learning to drink before he entered the first grade, dealing drugs in junior high school. He smoked, inhaled and injected all manner of substances before spending three years in jail, where he got clean.

Marie Allen, who lives near Hockessin, also has a story.

She came into the shack four weeks ago to ask if she could sell a pamphlet she cobbled together from her daughter Erin's journals, letters and her own memory. It chronicles Erin's struggle with alcohol, marijuana and then heroin, which took her life at 21 in 1997.

Erin, who wanted to be a writer, sent her mother letters to be included in a book she wanted to write about her addiction. It took Marie eight years to weave together her own memories with her daughter's words to produce the 70-page pamphlet called "Dope Help."

"I kept trying to write it, but I couldn't do it," Marie says.

She finally chose to write the narrative exclusively in Erin's voice, even her death.

To be in recovery from addiction is to know that there are millions like you, Taylor and Allen say. More than 1.1 million people are members of Alcoholics Anonymous alone, according to AA.

"I see people all the time out there who I know from the rooms," Taylor says, referring to recovery meetings. He sees those people on the street, in banks, in supermarkets.

"It's like some secret society," he says. "Like the Freemasons with their handshake, except we have slogans, wear jewelry.

"We're in recovery.

"We know who we are."

Twelve-step talismans mark successes

The Serenity Shack is chock-full of 12-step recovery paraphernalia. The 12-step recovery programs, first offered by an alcoholic for other alcoholics, offer a framework for the addict to help control addiction.

The store's wares include coins commemorating the 24 hours, or the year, or two, or more of staying "clean." They range in price and quality from a $1 aluminum coin to a $2.25 bronze coin to a $19.95 coin tri-plated in silver and gold.

Cards, bookmarks and bumper stickers are filled with the slogans of the recovery movement: "One day at a time," "Just for today," "To thine own self be true" and "I'm a friend of Bill W" -- who happens to be the guy who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Books detail the Twelve Steps for many different addictions, from alcohol to narcotics to overeating to sex.

Martha Lis, who has managed the shack for nearly three years, says she has seen people in every stage of recovery -- including those in desperate need of a place to begin.

"It's no coincidence that you end up in my store," says Lis, who has her own story, one she prefers not to detail in public. "You come because you're hurting and you want to help yourself."

The shack is owned by John and Michael Lewis, brothers who also own the adjoining Cabinet Factory. They're continuing the work of their father, George, who began the shop 25 years ago on Philadelphia Pike. It moved to its present location three years ago.

George died last November, at 63, from cancer. He had been sober for 21 years when he died.

George met Taylor "in the rooms" and hired Taylor to drive for the Cabinet Factory. He's worked there for more than a year.

Helped by the grace of a forgetful buddy

The first thing Taylor's buddy did when he picked Taylor up from prison in 1998 was apologize.

"I forgot my six-pack of Heineken," Taylor's friend said. "Sorry."

Taylor and his friend had drunk many a Heineken six-pack over the years, but Taylor had been clean throughout his three years in Gander Hill prison (now the Howard Young Correctional Institute) and Plummer Community Correction facility, both in Wilmington.

Not that he couldn't get drugs in jail. Or alcohol.

But while serving time, Taylor attended 12-step recovery meetings and found a sponsor who helped keep him on track.

So, when his friend forgot the six-pack, Taylor could only say, with disguised relief, "Don't worry about it, man."

That was eight years ago.

Today, sitting in the lounge area of the Serenity Shack, Taylor, 47, looks weathered but assured. He's been clean 11 years.

His short gray hair caps a round face, and when he smiles, the lines around his eyes smile, too.

"I don't know what would have happened if he remembered," he says of his friend.

The gold earring Taylor bought here and wears in his left ear is of a circle within a triangle, one of the traditional symbols of recovery. The three sides of the triangle represent unity, service and recovery.

He has coins -- one a tri-plated medallion that commemorates his 10th year of being clean -- and a half-dozen stickers on his 1999 Chevy Tracker. On one sticker he proclaims, "Let Go Let God."

"I'm proud to be an alcoholic and an addict," he says. "I got a second lease on life. It doesn't matter how I got there."

Giddy with marijuana, hooked on heroin

Like Taylor, Marie Allen knows that it takes just one moment in an addict's world for everything to change for the worse.

Marie's daughter Erin was unlucky enough to have a friend who introduced her to heroin.

She took her first hit of the drug at 19, after attending a 12-step recovery meeting in Newark.

"Someone offered her something and she did it," Marie says, flatly. "There's too many young people who do it that way."

It wasn't the first time Erin did drugs at the urging of a friend.

Even at the time Erin first took the heroin, she already had been drinking and smoking marijuana for four years.

Her first giddy experience with marijuana impressed the 15-year-old.

"Everything seemed funny," she wrote of her reaction. "After that first time I started smoking pot a lot. I liked the way it made me feel. It was better than alcohol, and it didn't give me a headache."

Like most teens, Erin had plenty of ups and downs. Only hers were clinical.

At 16, Erin was diagnosed as bi-polar. But by that time, she was drinking and smoking marijuana steadily. She refused to take her medication because she thought it made her too fat.

When she became hooked on heroin, Erin made frantic trips from the family's home in Elkton, Md., to the "Badlands" section of Kensington, an area in northeast Philadelphia known for the availability of drugs.

"One day I went to my usual place in Kensington," Erin wrote to her mother. "I sat down next to this old dude. I tied off just as naturally as I get dressed, and I shot my bag. Instantly the fuzzy warm feeling surged through my body and mind. I felt numb but alive. Kind of energized; my sickness had left me."

Erin would go days being clean. But it never lasted.

"The demons came back into my head," Erin wrote after being clean a few days. "I left detox, and I'm headed back to Philly, back to HELL. Hey, I stayed two days; I think that's a record for me. I have been spending most of my time on the street. I'm too ashamed to go home. I can't face my family."

She supported a $250-a-day habit by stealing, lying and cheating her way to Philadelphia and back.

A false escape from internal pain

In a letter, Erin describes the lure of drugs, the peace she felt after shooting heroin into her veins.

"I had just shot up and after a few minutes the intense pleasure of no pain washed over my entire body from spine outward to my fingertips," she wrote. "My feet felt like they were filled with helium. I could hear the voice of a heavenly woman telling me everything is all right. I could feel the heroin surging through my body."

When you use, you want to feel better, Taylor says.

"But there's a reason you feel bad to begin with," he says. "All that negative stuff we grew up with, it hangs with you: inadequacy, fear, low self-esteem."

Taylor first drank when he was "5 or 6 years old," he says. "I got into my dad's liquor cabinet."

His parents thought it was funny, their little boy lying on the couch with the ceiling spinning above him.

Before he was a teenager, Taylor began smoking marijuana.

"I saw my dad coming home and passing out on the couch," he says. "I didn't want to be that way."

He thought he'd found an easier way to get high, without alcohol's side effects.

At 13, he began using marijuana so much he began selling it to his friends in junior high school.

There were times his parents protested. Once, his father threw out 15 pounds of marijuana Taylor had stashed; another time Taylor came home to find his mother with an open trash bag, smashing into it one by one each empty bottle she saw in his room.

But those moments were rare.

"They didn't want to confront me," he says.

In high school, he "experimented" with acid, PCP and speed.

His soccer coach once caught him smoking marijuana, but the coach ignored it.

Taylor didn't graduate from high school, but began working odd construction jobs and driving jobs.

He came to work every day -- "I had a work ethic," he says -- but he came high or drunk or stoned. Coming home from work, he'd drink that six-pack of Heineken.

He moved from living with his mother to living with guys who sold drugs to living on his own on Fourth Street in Wilmington.

It was there, in the mid-1980s, that someone showed him how to freebase cocaine, a process in which one transforms powdered cocaine into a crystal and smokes it.

"In a couple of years, I lost everything," he says.

Like Erin's experience with heroin, the only thing Taylor wanted to do via cocaine was to feel no pain.

For a week one time, he taped up the windows of his apartment and freebased. He didn't want anyone looking in.

"You get paranoid when you do it," he says.

"I was lucky I didn't die."

He continued to drink and use drugs, despite the fact that he met a girl and had a daughter.

They moved in with Taylor's mother, but the situation grew impossible.

"I smoked her paycheck, and she didn't want to live with Mom," he says.

She left and took the child, and he proceeded to get and lose a series of driving jobs.

He was arrested in 1992 for a DUI -- he was driving while under the influence of PCP -- and his lawyer got him probation.

But he continued to get high, and during the years that Erin was making the trip up to Philadelphia, Taylor made many trips there to get his drugs, mostly PCP.

Someone "ratted" him out, and he was arrested again, this time for trafficking, distribution and possession, breaking his probation. He was sent to jail Jan. 29, 1995.

Three years later to the day, he got out. Clean.

Twelve Steps and a higher power

The point of a 12-step program, no matter the addiction, is to wrest control of the drug's addiction over you and replace it with another "higher" power, says Ken Williams, a recovering addict and a certified addiction counselor who practices in Media, Pa.

"Any of the Twelve Steps offer a framework to allow someone to come back from addiction," he says. "These concepts, and the realization that it's an illness, allows you to begin thinking about what's going on in a different way, as something you can deal with."

For many, like Taylor, the higher power is religion, most often Christianity and Jesus.

"I'm not ashamed to have a 'Real men love Jesus' sticker on my truck," Taylor says.

The program also has helped him stay in touch with his daughter. They talk, and see each other occasionally.

At the program's "religious" base is a "kind of pragmatic spiritualism," Williams says. "Things you can do to improve your quality of life in a spiritual sense, and honestly take a serious look at yourself with the help of a sponsor."

The various "anonymous" groups -- including alcoholics, narcotics and overeaters -- "offer an incredible amount of support," he says. "There aren't a lot of places you can walk into and talk about your addiction and be supported in return. The combination of these things makes it a powerful instrument of recovery."

The "disease" of addiction itself is ambiguous, he says, variable with the person and the drug.

"If you did an experiment, and had 20 people drink a fifth of whiskey daily for 30 days, at the end of 30 days, you'd have five alcoholics and 15 with headaches," he says.

With addiction, he says, as well as with most problem behaviors, "We're talking a combination of nature and nurture. Some have a propensity to become chemically dependent."

Taylor knows he has that propensity. It's why he runs a recovery meeting every Wednesday evening at the Plummer Community Correction facility.

It's also why he visits the Serenity Shack daily.

"The value of any recovery-oriented shop or gathering place is that it helps the addict integrate into a culture of recovery," Williams says. "Hanging out at a place like the Serenity Shack allows one to experience it -- to live it. It makes it okay to be an addict -- a recovering addict."

Sometimes, nothing is enough

Erin got help from police, former addicts and her parents, but she continued to shoot heroin for nearly three years, beginning in 1994.

During one rehab, she visited Marie, took her keys and stole her red Chevy Cavalier, and drove to Philadelphia. She sold the car for $200 to get high, but after she got the money, she was jumped and raped.

And soon was arrested.

Marie pressed charges against Erin for stealing her car.

"It was the best thing I ever did," Marie says.

Erin was sentenced to The Crest, a drug program at the Plummer Community Correction Center in Wilmington that offers a rehabilitation program for heroin-users to kick the habit. She spent five months in prison waiting for her chance.

But she got the chance, and it worked, for a while. From the time she went to the prison to the time she left The Crest, she had been clean for nine months.

She got a job at Brew HaHa in Wilmington, but one day she had to get blood work done to check the level of her bi-polar medications.

The needle the nurse used to draw blood "triggered something," Erin wrote. "It made me think about using heroin. It brought back all these feelings and cravings."

She told her mother, but went to work. There, Erin felt so anxious, she called her counselors, who came to her job and talked to her. Erin seemed fine to them. They left her at work.

On the evening of June 21, 1997, Erin did not return to The Crest, where she was staying.

Two days later, Erin's body was found in a Kensington row home. She had overdosed on heroin. She was 21.

Long before Erin died, before she stole her mom's car, Erin had written a letter to the drug that eventually killed her.

To "my only true love," she wrote.

"Our love became too insane as you were running through my veins. It was all a big sketch of fantasy. Now reality is setting in, and I realize what I must do. I'm moving on with my life and you are no longer a part of it. Please know that I will never forget you. NEVER! Love, Erin."

She didn't win her battle. But her story is on the shelves at The Serenity Shack.

Her mom hopes it will help others win their battle.

"I learned not to take life for granted," Marie says. "We did everything we could to help Erin. It just wasn't enough."

The News Journal