“I was in an 8 foot by 8 foot cinder block cell with nothing
except the jail-issued clothes I was wearing and a 2 inch foam mattress on a
steel bunk,” Rick Laham wrote, feeling like an animal locked in a cage. Although being alone, he knew God was with him. These feelings, along with Gideon’s Bible, a pen and paper, and his
core values emerging through forced sobriety, enabled him to scribe a journal
of his daily thoughts articulating his ever deepening faith.
Rick Laham recounts many of the events prior to his arrests,
being at times out on probation and toying with his own u.a. (urine analysis) schemes
to pass his drug use as being undetected by his P.O. (parole officer). His fellow addicts; some being beautiful
women, some junkie sleaze balls, but all having one thing in common – not being
able to stop using drugs until they run out, pass out, die or go to jail. Out of those four conditions, only one was a
permanent method of quitting – death. The others were just temporary situations.
Although despair and depression flirted within his mind
luring him to suicidal thoughts, Laham wrote, “Thank God, that was one thing I
would never do. I always believed it was the only unforgivable sin. Scripture says
that all things are possible through God. So if you know the Scripture, as I did, to
kill myself would have been blasphemy, saying God did not exist and that there
was no hope.” In reading his story it’s
hard not to see the irony in his thinking for him not to believe the drug use
was another form of suicide. From within
the disease, he points out, one’s emotional maturity is stifled, and
responsibility is distorted to the point where nothing else matters but
continuing the self-medication.
Immaculate Recovery
begins with many first-name-only short stories about some of his exploits of
scoring drugs, using drugs, and talking about the characters that go around the
drug world: taxi drivers, strippers, plus those nobody would ever suspect such
as a grandmother, or successful and wealthy professionals. The book is soberly honest – there’s an oxymoron: a recovering drug
addict writing a sober book. However,
this style of writing is prevalent in many works, as often writing is a method
of recovery in and of itself. Later in
the book, Rick Laham evolves to a diary format, written during his days in
jail. Many of those details are simply insignificant,
as mundane as jailhouse life itself. He
has a dozen or so examples of drawings done while behind bars. One point he wrote how he would listen to his
AM radio late into the night, often helping him to fall asleep. “One thing I
did learn while I was in jail, was that if the batteries were dead they could
be revived by putting them in hot water for a while, maybe 20 to 30 minutes,
and interestingly enough, that would bring a dead battery back for an hour or
two.” I felt the subliminal irony in
this remark as jail was the “hot water” which enabled Laham’s soul to be
brought back to life.
Immaculate Recovery
has the subtitle as being: The Amazing
True Story, Part 1 which indicates more is still to come. There is certainly more to Rick Laham than
166 pages can possibly bring to our attention, and I look forward to his
continuing story in the future.
