9They Dared Cocaine and Lost
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2020年07月31日 16:39
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A Dream Destroyed
Stand Belin was born in the 1930s to an urban family locked in the grip of the Great Depression. His was a fractured family, one in which his parents fought constantly. “I lived with a feeling of impending doom,” he says. This fear drove him to be a model child.
Stan has a vivid memory of once leaning against a bridge railing as a boy and gazing at a handsome party boat passing below. He could see people on deck enjoying their outing. It was a scene of comfort and luxury he could hardly have imagined. That mental picture influenced the boy’s idea of success. His goals became money, power, and prestige.
Stan did well in school. He found his greatest academic success in his science courses. But he lacked the confidence to pursue a medical career and turned to dentistry as a quicker route to his life’s goals.
He married a young woman he had known since high school, and for over 20 years Stand and Jane lived a life that many people would envy. His reputation spread, the money started rolling in and he was appointed to a prestigious position by his state government. Two healthy children were born. The family had a magnificent house, expensive automobiles and took exotic vacations.
The crowning touch for Stan came when he bought a luxury yacht and sailed to the bridge where, as a child, he had first glimpsed what he hoped would be his future. “I told Jane the story,” he says. “As I spoke, I realized that something was all wrong. I possessed everything I had ever dreamed of, but I felt very sad and hopeless. What was worse, I knew it would never change.”
Then in the early 1980s, a doctor friend invited Stan to dinner. The friend said he had been using cocaine as an antidepressant. He described it as marvelous non-addictive drug. Stan decided the drug might be just right for his own depression?
“From the instant I snorted the first line of cocaine, I was addicted,” says Stan. “It gave me poise, confidence, happiness --- things I had believed money should buy. It made me seem a better person, a better talker, a better dentist.”
At first Stan did not believe that he was doing anything wrong: “I thought I had finally found an antidepressant drug that raised me from my misery. It angered me that such a wonderful drug would continue to be outlawed.”
Two years after Stan’s introduction to cocaine, his insulation from the world of street addiction was knocked asunder when his physician friend was murdered. A week later, Stan walked out of his dental office and never returned. “At the time, I believed I could not deal with the pressures of my practice, but that wasn’t it. I just needed more time for my addiction.”
He spent his days aimlessly --- going shopping with his wife, and wandering from doctor to doctor to find help for his depression --- al the while snorting cocaine. He took menial jobs. He frequently considered suicide.
By the third year
of Stan’s addiction, the effects of cocaine were increasingly fleeting. The high would last for only seconds before he would crash back to the depths of his depression.
“Finally, it reached the point where I just stood around crying,” Stan says. Jane knew her husband’s condition was desperate, and she persuaded him to enter an addiction center. Stan checked into a prominent institution, but he had one-half ounce of cocaine concealed his clothes. “I was cooperative for a few days, until I had snorted up my cocaine,” Stan says. Then he split --- as he did other times when Jane convinced him to seek help.
Once when Stan believed he had finally beaten his addiction, he was washing his car and saw a small vial of cocaine, a leftover from his past, roll from beneath the carpet. “Just the sight of it made me high,” he recalls. “I put it in my pocket. I thought it would make me stronger to keep it and resist the temptation. But my mind never left that vial.”
Like a serpent coiled in Stan’s pocket, the little vial of cocaine lay quietly. A war raged in Stan’s mind. Then the serpent struck with a ferocity known only to those who are powerless against their addiction.
Today Stan has completed an extensive rehabilitation program for his addiction and works as a counselor in a drug program. His salary is one-seventh what he earned as a dentist; his house and boat are gone.
Only time will reveal if he finally has beaten his addiction. Now, as he tries to build his new life, Stan is determined not to let the serpent get so close.
Dance of Death
At the age of 21, Patrick Bissell burst upon New York as principal dancer of the American Ballet Theatre. Rarely had a man so young dazzled so many in the supercharged, intensely competitive world of ballet. He was praised, in the words of Mikhail Baryshnikov, as “one of the brightest lights in the entire ballet world.”
Patrick Bissell also helped bury the American myth that ballet is for sissies. At six feet two inches tall, Patrick was a tough, hard-drinking kid from Texas with a passion for motocycles, cowboy boots and women. He was a muscle man who could twirl ballerinas into the air and make them look as graceful as butterflies.
Seven months after his birth in 1957, baby Bissell was not walking, according to his mother; he was actually running. When Patrick was ten, his sister bribed him with her allowance to come to her dance class, because she needed a partner. His natural gifts of coordination and stamina were stunning, and from that point on, his destiny was dance.
The ballet world is notoriously brutal in its physical and emotional demands. The primary become, a ballet star never has the satisfaction of knowing a final score, or of beating the competition. He competes only against himself --- and for a perfectionist this may be the harshest competition of all.
When young Bissell set off for life, his mother believes he carried with his seeds that would lead to hi
s destruction. Patrick was one of five children born in six years to Patricia and Donald Bissell, an ambitious young couple who moved six times by the time Patrick was 12.
Patricia Bissell, herself terribly frustrated during those years, is convinced that her son’s self-esteem was so battered by her emotional and physical beatings when he was a child that he carried with him a deep-seated hatred of himself. True or not, Patrick Bissell’s life seems tormented from the time he was a very young man.
Every indication is that, even early in his career, Bissell was addicted to cocaine, alcohol and other drugs. But his strength and skill were so tremendous that he was able to perform the most demanding work without his managers’ knowing the truth.
In her autobiography, Dancing on My Grave, ballerina Gelsey Kirkland claims that Bissell introduced her to cocaine soon after his success in New York City, thus setting their private stage for a long affair of sex and drugs. She watched Bisse3ll’s paranoia grow to the point that, when he slept, he kept a hatchet under the bed and a knife under his pillow. He would stand by the apartment door for hours with a can of Mace to fend off imagined intruders.
In June 1981, only three years into his career, Bissell slashed his wrist. When the paramedics reached him, Bissell smashed a bottle to use for a weapon and fought them off. Next day, he was bandaged and back onstage.
By this time, he and Kirkland were clearly out of control --- spending weeks on cocaine bingss. Increasingly they were absent from rehearsals and late for performances. Both were fired from their jobs, rehired and fired again. In the end, Gelsey Kirkland sought ck Bissell did not.
In the fall of 1987, the ballet company sent Bissell away for treatment to the Betty Ford Center in California. He told friends that he was ready to lean up his life. He wanted a fresh start.
He was released a week early and returned to New York. During December, Amy Rose, a ballerina he had become engaged to, was on tour in California and would return to New York after the holidays. Alone, Bisssell got Christmas tree and decorated it for their apartment.