Way bUt Up

story by r achel s tone

After hitting rock bottom, they came back in a big way video

photographs by c an t ürkyilmaz & b enjamin h ager

Thanks To Tabloid and reali Ty TV, we know that people are sometimes prone to self-destruction. Watching it can be morbidly entertaining, but more intriguing than the train wreck is the rare story of one who manages to pull himself out of his pitiful existence — the drug abusing, jailbird celebrity who finds lasting sobriety and subsequent success or “Biggest Losers” who shed hundreds of life-threatening pounds. These are the stories that move us, and you don’t need to turn on the TV to see them. These true tales of redemption are being lived, and touching lives, right here in our neighborhood.

Bobby Wheeler

Bobby Wheeler spends each workday counselingadultprobationerswhoare court mandated to drug treatment.

The neighborhood resident counsels a roster of 120 female clients, almost all of whom don’t want to be there.

It’s mostly a thankless job.

But Wheeler, 42, does it with enthusiasm because he knows that drug addiction is a prison.

Wheeler says he grew up with a sweet mom and a friendly dad who was a functioning alcoholic. As a kid, he would fetch his dad beers from the fridge, always taking a sip or two on the way.

In 1988, he started experimenting with drugs.

“I always felt like an outcast,” he says. Sometime in the early ’90s, he tried crack.

“It was off to the races then,” he says.

Soon, he had a $1,000 a day habit. Even though he held down a job, he had to support his habit by stealing and, eventually, prostitution.

Always a “mama’sboy”,heremembers stealing the grocery money out of his mom’s purse at night, then going to the grocery store with her the next day, “knowingshedidn’thaveanymoney because I stole it.”

He was in and out of Lew Sterrett for prostitution, drug possession and other complaints. And he was in denial about his problem, never admitting he used crack.

“I would always say I did weed or I drank,” he says. “I would never say I was a crack head.”

Allthosechargesfinallycaughtup with him. And the day he went to court continued on page 42 after that, her parents did not allow her to drive, go to school, ride horses or do any other activities. She was either with them or she was in a treatment center.

She gained weight and was able to attendSMU(insteadofTexasa&M as planned). She struggled with eating throughout college.

“What I didn’t know through my initial treatment, but soon discovered, was that what I wanted was to disappear,” she says. “For me, to be seen meant getting hurt. I never wanted to be hurt again.”

She realized she was afraid of men and of being attractive to them.

She lost much of her identity in the disease. It cut her off from friends and family and most of the joy in life.

But slowly, she started to realize that some men are OK, and one of them fell in love with her.

“I stumbled into a relationship with someonewho I wantedtobewith more than I wanted to be with the eating disorder,” she says. “You can’t have both. It’s impossible to be in an intimate relationship with an eating disorder and a boyfriend.”

So she spent much of this romantic relationship just observing — how to eat normally, how to interact with friends, how to enjoy sitting on the couch watching television on a Saturday afternoon.

“I had gotten tired enough and seen through most of its lies by then,” she says of anorexia. “all the hurt it claimed to keep me from really just kept me from life.” her whole self needed restoration. Like a jigsaw puzzle, she took pieces she liked for the picture of herself, and she left behind the ones she didn’t. She got back in the saddle, literally, and returned to things she liked before the eating disorder. That’s when she decided to get a master’s degree in counseling.

Eating disorders are tricky, she says. You can’t take your eyes off for too long, or “it’s gonna get ya”.

“So, I decidedtomakeitmylife’s work,” she says.

She knows what it’s like to lose herself in an eating disorder. But now she is restored, and that gives her clients hope. They can believe in her before they can believe in themselves.

“They can see I’m not any different from who they are. I’ve just worked at it longer.” t for a crack possession charge on Aug. 6, 1994, he knew he was going away. Before that, though, he had started praying for God to help him.

And he kept praying during a one-year stay in county jail.

“I was a praying dope fiend,” he says. “I prayed ‘God, take this away from me.’ ”

After that, he went to “Safe-P”, a prison that focuses on intensive drug rehab, in San Diego, Texas. A friend of his, Randall Pearson, was transferred from Lew Sterrett to Safe-P at the same time as Wheeler.

Pearson was an illiterate heroin addict whose health was so bad that he had a massive heart attack. Wheeler was there to watch him die.

A few days later, Wheeler says, Pearson “came to me in a dream”.

In the dream, he asked, “Would you live for me?”

That changed everything for Wheeler.

When he got out of prison, “I came home running because I knew how much a white substance could hold you for years.”

He found comfort in the Winner’s Circle Peer Support Network, a meeting space and clubhouse of sorts for recovering substance abusers. It was a place he could go and talk about his feelings, fears and experiences and not be judged.

Now he’s executive director of Winner’s Circle Dallas chapter. He’s in his 17th year of sobriety. He even quit smoking 10 years ago.

He’s a licensed counselor with Texas Department of Criminal Justice clearance, and he visits prisons throughout the state, speaking to drug addicts. He’s working toward clearance for federal prisons. He takes night classes at El Centro College; next, he intends to earn a bachelor’s degree.

He attends AA meetings regularly, and he makes no predictions about his future sobriety, but he still has no desire to go down that road again. He still feels like an outcast, he says, “but come to find out, that’s not such a bad thing.”

Through his job, he has counseled more than 3,000 women. Sometimes, they curse and yell at him. But eventually, most graduate from court-mandated rehab.

“It’s rewarding to call their names at graduation, and their faces light up,” he says. “And they say, ‘Thank you for working on me’. Helping other people is what helps me.”

MicheleDerrington

There is an old brick two-story building in a residential White Rock neighborhood where women go to heal. It’s called the Magdalene House, and those who end up there are alcoholics who have, in most cases, lost their families, jobs, homes and dignity.

By the time they meet Michele Derrington, who runs the place, they are often dirty, sick and broken, yet she welcomes each new arrival with marked compassion. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that she was in the same dismal spot.

At 43 years old, Derrington has a commanding yet gentle presence — residents and workers at the

Featured Listings

MagdaleneHouselistentoherintently when she speaks. It comes as some surprise, then, when the well-spoken, smartly dressed director shares that she has spent more than a few days in jails, treatment centers and psyche wards.

She says she grew up in the White Rock area in a sporadically violent home where she remembers having her first alcoholic drink at age 5.

Throughoutheryouth,drinkingand dabblingindrugswasnormal.When she was in her late 20s, Derrington tried cocaine. From that point on, she says, she just couldn’t get her head straight.

“Once I [tried cocaine], it was all I ever thought about.”

Untilthen,shehadbeenworking toward a promotion at her job, but since she was hooked on drugs, she could no longer function.

“I left the job, spent all my savings, and things got really bad,” she says.

The addiction landed her in perilous places, including the scene of a murder.

“I witnessed someone getting shot over $20 worth of drugs,” she says. She was subpoenaed to testify against the gunman and showed up in court wrecked after a night of cocaine use.

“Fortunately, I was never called to testify,” she says.

Seems like that would be rock bottom, she says, “but I had many bottoms … I would tell myself, ‘I am never doing this again,’ but by the next night, I was doing it again. I couldn’t hold any type of job — call centers, restaurants, the simplest of tasks — I just couldn’t work.”

In 1999, she entered rehab for the first time, but there was “still a lot of denial going on,” she says.

Therehabilitationcenterpopulation included burglars and homeless people, she says.

“I was not like them. I wasn’t willing to do what [the counselors] told me to do. I just didn’t get it.”

She soon relapsed, and things became worse, she says.

“I resorted to desperateacts. I did whatever I had to do to feed the disease looking back, I should be dead today.”

Derringtonexperiencedperiodsof sobriety; she even landed a job with the DallasSymphonyOrchestraforsome time, but she couldn’t hang on. She says she just wanted to be normal — have a drink now and then. She didn’t understand why she had to be different.

Finally, family members intervened.

“My mom told me we were going to the Arboretum. I knew something was up.”

They were actually staging an intervention, after which they drove Derrington to the 24-HourClub on Ross.

“I cussed at them the whole way, and when they dropped me off, I looked at the director and said, ‘I hate this place.’”

The24-HourClub,whichprovides transitionallivingforalcoholics and drug addicts, is located inside a dusty, well-worn hotel.

“It is the last house on the block,” Derrington says. “I was pretty disturbed to be there.”

Again, she looked around at her bedraggled new dorm mates. Only this time, rather than saying to herself, “I’m not like them,” she said, “I am like them; this is me.”

Once you make it to this point, you basically have to choose to change or die, Derrington says.

So she changed.

For awhile, she worked in the kitchen at the 24-HourClub.

“I sat there thinking about how my mom used to say, ‘Get an education so you don’t wind up flippin’ burgers,’ and there I was, in my late 30s, flipping burgers at the 24-HourClub.”

But it was better than the alternative; she was sober.

Today she loves the dusty old 24-Hour Club, where she says she realized that the key to staying sober was helping others.

In 2007, she took a job at Magdalene House, where she is now executive director. When women come in with feeling like trash, she says she helps them understand that they are worth saving. That they aren’t bad, but sick. And she is living proof, for them, that recovery is possible.

She says her job gives her the opportunity to stay connected to the recovery community and the 12-step recovery program on which the Magdalene program is based.

“I’m not actually doing service work here, because I get paid, but it gives me the unique opportunity to be among women who have been where I have been.”

Work with alcoholics isn’t always happy a day earlier, Derrington received a call about a former Magdalene House resident