Day 5 of my Son’s Self Detox

I’m sitting in my car in the shade in my pkg lot keeping an eye on my son, who’s asleep in the passenger seat. Today is day 5 of his self detox. He’s had one beer to taper so he doesn’t have another seizure like the one in 2024 when he’d been drinking a handle of whiskey a day. This time he’d only been drinking for five weeks since his seven month and eighteen day stay in rehab. He’d also tried to detox five times in facilities after he’d gotten thrown out.

Around St. Patrick’s Day, while still in residential rehab, my son drank a bottle of Fireball before going out to his car to drink a fifth of Jim Beam at 5AM. He then drove to my house around 9AM and asked his sister if she wanted to do anything. I asked her what he was doing there and then called him. I could tell he was drunk.

Not half an hour later, my son called me and said he’d had an accident and that the air bag had deployed. He was terrified. I asked him if he was okay and where he was. He responded with the name of a city that was an hour away and only started with the same letter as the name of our city. I knew he wasn’t really there.

He said he’d thought he’d hit a parked car at a rich person’s house and that people were taking pictures of his license plate, so he had to go. He then called me from a nearby supermarket and asked where I was. He’d thought I was going to pick him up, but I’d never said that and had no idea where he was. Somehow he ended up parked back in my parking lot, where he’d been living in his car when he went to rehab.