Farrell had tried to please his father. He'd willed himself into a serviceable football player at Lowell High, but a severe leg injury and seven operations led to a dependence on pain killers. Following his father's death, his drug dependence eventually led to heroin.
By the time he was 30, in 1987, Farrell had a wife and two kids. He'd made a decent bit of money thanks to some savvy real estate deals. But he lost it all. As the guilt from his father's death corroded him, he sank deeper and deeper into addiction, drifting like a scabby phantom through Lowell's abandoned mills.
And so, one day, consumed with self-loathing, he loaded a syringe with as much heroin as it could hold and decided to kill himself. It didn't work. After being revived at the hospital, then arrested, he was sent to rehab.
He'd been there before. Each prior visit had been a short one, and ineffective. But this time would be different. Over seven days in detox, Farrell fought back and won. Writing with workmanlike terseness, he's unsparing in his descriptions of the place's ugly utilitarianism: the harsh fluorescent lighting, the torn window shades, the enema soap subbed in for shampoo, the cold and runny eggs, the coffee spiked with saltpeter to sap libido, the "dark brown overcooked chicken tenders swimming in ketchup."
He's equally good at limning sympathetic portraits of his cohort in treatment — such as "Crazy Mary," a coke whore who describes her avocation as "sucking white stuff for white stuff" with whom Farrell strikes up a genuinely meaningful mutual relationship, and "Doc" a grandfatherly alcoholic in horn-rimmed glasses who figures into one of the book's most harrowing scenes.
But the book's most affecting passages come from Farrell's visceral, often-disturbing descriptions of his own agonizing emergence from the darkness — of the horrifying physical (and, especially, psychological) toll his addiction and recovery took. We see him shooting up before visiting his kids. We cringe as he borrows a dealer's needle, caked with dry blood. We're shown, not told, the sweat-soaked, soul-shaking, diarrhea-dripping truth about going through withdrawal.
"It's un-friggin-believable," says Farrell in his Merrimack Valley accent. "Think about your worst flu, and amplify that 15 to 20 times. You just shit yourself — every muscle, every joint aches. Your entire body cries for heroin. Just one bag of heroin, you know that's all you need, and you'll feel better."
Worse, he says, "once you've made it through that, now you gotta deal with the psychological part." Much of the book centers on Farrell's therapy sessions — he's surly and stand-offish at first, and only much later do the walls come down — with the treatment center's resident psychiatrist as he works through his tortured feelings for his bully father and church mouse of a mother, the wife who left him, the aunt and the priest who both sexually abused him.
Compelled to leave rehab after the maximum seven days, Farrell reentered the world fragile and frightened. "That was the most difficult time," he says. "You have a minefield in your backyard. You have a year or two years of mines to walk over, make sure they don't blow you up. You've created this wreckage of your past. Holy shit. The whole time there's a voice in the back of your head: 'Just go back to Adams Street. Get a bag of heroin. And you'll be all set, man.' "
