RECOVERY FEATURE
Finally, done running by ROBERT MITCHELL
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wo years ago when Steven Kaus walked through the doors of the Salvation Army’s Providence, R.I., Adult Rehabilitation Center on New Year’s Eve, he wanted to find a new life rather than celebrate a new year. Kaus , who was born in Nebraska, married in 1998 and he and his wife welcomed a daughter, Kayleigh, the next year. However, the couple’s good times were short lived, and they divorced in 2001. Steven headed to Texas, where his mother, Mary, lived. “I started drinking as soon as I got to Texas. I think I was an alcoholic from the first night I decided to drink,” says Steven, who was 24 at the time. “I refused to drink my whole life up to that point, because my biological father was a real bad alcoholic.” In fact, his father died of cirrhosis of the liver when Steven was just 12, and he had determined to stay away from alcohol. “When I started drinking, I liked the way it made me feel, because suddenly I didn’t have to be concerned about the pain that I was going through,” he says. “The partying was fun at first, and I had good jobs and that sort of thing. But then I started hurting a lot of people, especially my family. I hurt the people closest to me.” For 12 years, Kaus was estranged from most of his family, including his daughter. As his life spiraled out of control from drinking, he decided it was best to stay away.
The runaway prodigal The years that followed saw Kaus in and out of jail for various drug and alcohol offenses in Nebraska and Texas, which
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included more serious charges such as armed robbery and assaulting a police officer. He estimates he did a total of eight years behind bars, often in short sentences of just two or three months each. “I would get out of jail, get drunk, and then do something stupid—sometimes on purpose—to escape the way I was living,” he said. “I figured that, if I was locked up, it would make a safe place for the rest of the world. I knew I was no good to myself or anyone else.” After being released from a three–year prison stint in Nebraska in 2018, Steven headed back home to Texas, but he could tell his drinking hurt his mother. He hit the road again and ended up in Seattle, where he injected methamphetamine for the first and only time of his life. “When I had some money in my pocket, I would get really drunk and then go out looking for anything I could find on a particular night,” he recalls. "I would work someplace for a few weeks at a time to get money to drink. Then I would enjoy a city I had never been to. “But I would get tired of where I was. Then, most of the time, I would end up doing something stupid. So, before I ended up going back to jail some more, I would just get out of there.” In August of 2019, Kaus made his way to Maine, where he briefly found some stability working as a mason. “I was making a lot of money, so I was drinking and smoking marijuana like crazy,” he said.
