When Javier was a little boy growing up in Los Angeles, his grandfather – whom he loved more than anyone in the world – would wake him up and say, “Kiddo, let’s go to the store.” His grandfather would make flour tortillas directly on the stove, buttering one, rolling it up and giving Javier a taco to eat. But his grandfather disappeared when Javier was 6, and no matter how much he asked to see him, his grandfather never returned.
When Javier was 9, his father took him to Mexico for the first time, down to the village where his father grew up, past cows and horses that amazed the city dweller. His father led Javier to a small cemetery and fell to his knees, crying and apologizing at the grave of his father, Javier’s beloved grandfather. “I didn’t tell you sooner because you were too young,” his father said between sobs. “But you are always asking for him, and we can’t continue this way.” Javier was silent. He alternated between anger and anguish – how could his father deceive him? How could the grandfather he loved so much no longer be in the world?
After his sister was shot three times, Javier was sent to Mexico with his mother and siblings to escape the gangs of South Central LA. He turned his immense pain inward, quitting school at the age of 14, smoking pot that same year and taking his first drink at 15. The fourth eldest of nine, he started work to help his family build a better life, embracing construction jobs with a strong back – and a stronger work ethic.
Javier liked having money to spend, a truck to drive and a cell phone in hand. He started hanging out with an older, tougher crowd who went to rooster fights, taking bets and selling drugs. He admired their cowboy boots, sombreros and gold chains, feeling like he was “living a fantasy” but afraid of their drugs, convinced he would never ever use them.
He landed in the ER for the first time at 15, vomiting blood but faking the flu to his mother. Doctors told Javier at 15 his body was not made to drink, and that he would do damage to his kidneys and liver – but Javier paid no attention. He followed a girl back to the States, returning to live and work with his father in LA. He started drinking more – and tricking himself into believing he didn’t have a problem. “I started forgetting everything,” Javier recalls. “I started to live a different life. I was going to Mexico to drink and party in Tijuana, but I didn’t consider myself an alcoholic. I had rules. I didn’t drink Monday through Friday, but after the work week ended, I could drink.”
Javier began spending time with his extended family, who introduced him at 21 to cocaine, which Javier loved because he could stay up late and still get to work on time. He bought a brand new car with no miles on it, reveling in a successful job that allowed him and his father to invest in and rehab rental property. “I thought I was being responsible because I was going to work,” Javier recalls. “ But I had to have a cooler in my truck. I’d show up to work with two beers in my system and have another two at lunch and then another two – and then a case to take me home. I was drinking an average of 18 beers in a 24-hour period, and the coke wasn’t doing it for me anymore.”
Javier was also introduced to crystal meth at the age of 23. He kept telling himself everything was alright, but his mother knew better – and begged him to get help. Javier was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 28 after a booze and crystal meth-induced binge landed him unconscious and intubated in the hospital for nine days. “My life became unbelievable to me,” Javier recalls. “It was no longer six beers during the day and 12 at night. I was drinking more than 30 beers in a 24-hour period and doing crystal meth. “Every day, I had to take a shower with a beer in my hand like it was shampoo. At the sink, I already had lines of crystal meth set up. I was high already at 7 a.m. My head told me I was a responsible guy, though. I was showing to up to work and taking care of things.”
Things continued to spiral. Javier and his father lost their rental property. Javier sold the truck he was once so proud of and bought a cheaper, used model. He started selling off his power tools. And the man who lived to work quit his job – before he could be fired. But the bottom of that particular barrel came when Javier, drunk and high on crystal meth, insulted the pregnant wife of a brother and then took a swing at him – and connected. Javier remembered nothing of it until the following morning when his brother called. Horrified and ashamed, he reached out to a sister in Grand Rapids and asked to visit. “You can come,” she said, “but you have to stop drinking.”
Javier arrived in Grand Rapids in June 2018, landed a job, bought a truck and promptly started drinking again when he realized “party stores” sold liquor. “I didn’t want to accept I was in suicide mode,” Javier recalls. “I knew about my liver condition. I knew I would die because of it. I was shaking at night and started to have convulsions. I had to have a beer, but my body was rejecting that beer.” His sister, Brenda, took him to Saint Mary’s, where the doctors pulled out his California medical records and said his liver condition was very bad and he might have only a year left to live if he continued drinking.
Javier went to Network 180, the community mental health authority for Kent County that connects individuals and families to services for substance use disorders and other issues. A counselor made an appointment for Javier to talk with Guiding Light – but he didn’t want to go and told his sister as much. “I saw her searching Guiding Light online in the middle of the night, when her husband and daughter we sleeping,” Javier remembers. “Brenda thought I was sleeping, but I was looking at her.”
Javier walked through the doors at Guiding Light on Oct. 17 and immediately wanted to leave. “My pride and ego were saying, ‘A Mexican like me, a person like me can’t be in this place. I didn’t know anything abut humility. I thought, ‘Who wants to be on that wall to say I’m an alcoholic?’ “I always considered myself a religious person. When my sponsor asked me to talk with God, I didn’t want to. I thought he would be upset with me. “But I had to let go. I had to surrender. They told me they could help me, but I had to change.”
Javier spoke very little English when he arrived at Guiding Light. Recovery program leaders Brian Elve and Steve Pratt began helping him build his vocabulary with a language app. “Willingness, vulnerable, relapse – I didn’t have those words in my life,” Javier explains. “The way I grew up around my father’s family was very bad. I was introduced to drugs by my own family.”
Javier began embracing the Foundations program, his successes were reinforced and celebrated by Guiding Light Executive Director Stuart Ray, those leading Recovery, and his peers in the program. With the help of Guiding Light, he secured a good-paying job in manufacturing and began paying down the debts he brought with him. “The Foundations program is like building a house,” Javier says. “I looked at myself from a construction standpoint. I had to demo everything inside, start with the foundation and begin rebuilding.
“Thanks to Guiding Light, I have a strong foundation with a lot of the focus points we discussed – willingness, honesty, self-compassion. Now, I don’t want to die. Mine is a life worth living again.” Javier has lived in Iron House for two years now, remaining clean and sober and grateful for the opportunity to work again, to rebuild the relationships with his family. “Iron House is my house,” he says of Guiding Light’s sober-living community, which offers a safe and secure environment in a residential area outside the inner city. He’s apologized to God, asking for help in a better way – not like when he used to pray for more money as a teenager. He’s going to the gym four times each week, and the doctors treating his cirrhosis say he’s nothing short of a miracle. If Javier keeps this up, the docs tell him, he can die of old age.
The tattoos on his chest – Tecate and Corona – remind him of the life he’s left behind. When he looks at himself in the mirror, he thinks, “You’re already in my skin, but you won’t get in my body anymore.” Watching one of his brothers at Iron House relapse, Javier better understands the pain he knows his mother felt watching in vain at the window each night for him to return home. “Not seeing his car in the parking lot, calling and he doesn’t answer,” Javier says. “My friend relapsed, and it was powerful to see. I don’t judge him. This is a powerful addiction. “I have to look at it a different way. I have to learn from it. I don’t want to be selfish, but this is reality. Those experiences are motivation to keep us moving and getting stronger.”
And Javier is getting stronger every day. He said coming to Guiding Light was an act of providence – one he knows his grandfather would appreciate. “I pray to my grandfather every day,” Javier says, wiping tears from his eyes. “I know he’s very happy. This is the life he wanted for me – to regain everything in a different way. I regained my family, but only the ones I chose. “I’m pretty sure my grandfather would tell me he’s OK and I’m OK – and now he can rest in peace. He doesn’t have to worry how I am doing.”
