Meth, Shattered Lives, Part 4D

LIFE AFTER METH STILL SURPRISES FORMER DRUG ADDICT

IDABEL-Terry Wallace loved his wife, but not as much as he loved dope.

That was never more apparent than the day they began arguing again over his
"druggin'." At some point, Wallace said he passed out because all he
remembers is that when he woke up, Lesia was lying at his feet in a pool of
blood.

Instead of helping her, Wallace stepped over Lesia, opened the refrigerator
door and pulled out a beer. Then he sat back down and turned on the TV set.

For 20 years, about all Terry Wallace did was lie and cheat, do drugs,
drink alcohol and hurt the ones he loved.

Today, he owns his home, pays taxes and counsels other addicts. And he and
Lesia have been married for 24 years.

It's a miracle that even Wallace can't believe.

"Every day I'm afraid they're going to figure me out," he said.

For a long time, no matter what he tried to do, Wallace always felt a
little out of place. "Like a red dot on a white wall" is the way he puts it.

So he tried drugs.

The more he used, the more he felt people, not the drugs, were the problem.

The TV kept talking back to him, and people made him jumpy, so Wallace did
what seemed normal to a paranoid crank addict.

He built a 16-by-12 foot shack out of tar paper and plywood in the deep
woods 10 miles outside of town and moved in with his wife and three children.

"I felt drugs were a solution to my problem and that people were coming
between me and what I felt would make me normal," he said.

There was no electricity, no water and no telephone in his primitive
hideaway. And no peace of mind.

"I came home one evening and the bed was covered with blood," he said.
"Everybody was gone, and I thought to myself, 'What did I do?'

"Then I experienced a sense of relief. I thought I must have killed them -
all four of them - and I had a sense that maybe my hell was over."

What happened, however, was that Lesia had started to miscarriage and had
walked nine miles to a neighbor's house. It was the next day before Wallace
knew she was alive.

A Life Of Abuse

A sign on the outskirts of Idabel boasts: The Dogwood Capital of Oklahoma,"
a claim few would argue with because as the county seat of McCurtain County
it's a town that knows its timber.

Sandwiched between the Kiamichi Mountains to the north and the Red River to
the south, McCurtain County is home to lush forests and pristine lakes,
whose beauty is rarely wasted on outsiders.

For almost a century, conditions have been ideal for making moonshine,
growing marijuana and manufacturing methamphetamine.

Terry Wallace doesn't remember exactly when he first set foot on McCurtain
County's famous trail of vices.

"I saw a picture of me when I was about two, and I was holding a quart
bottle of Olympia beer with a nipple on the end," he said.

Wallace was 13 years old the first time he had too much to drink. "The next
morning, I overheard my grandmother tell my mother, 'Well, at least he's
not doing drugs,'" Wallace said. "I took that to mean that it was okay to
drink."

Ironically, it wasn't until he moved to Tulsa that Wallace got his first
whiff of "McCurtain Gold," the marijuana that made southeastern Oklahoma
infamous.

Wallace was married and making good money as a plant foreman.

"Someone dropped in and he was smoking marijuana," Wallace said. "He was
laughing and having too much fun. I said, 'Well, I'm going to try that. I'm
in my own home.'

"And, wow, it did everything alcohol did for me without the hangover. Food
tasted better. Colors looked brighter. Everything was better."

Rock Bottom

For a long time, Wallace blamed God for where he was headed, and he had his
own vision to prove it.

"I was 6 years old in this vision or memory," he said. "We had gone in the
church and I remember the preacher talking about a big book of life.

He said that everybody's name would go in the book and that when you sin,
he'd put a check mark by your name. When you got your page full of check
marks, he said God would harden your heart."

To Wallace, it only meant that God had turned his back on him.

"For 20 years all I'd done was go in and out of jail," he said. I was
really scared, then really angry that God wouldn't help me. So I decided to
show Him how bad, how crazy I could really be."

After a two-month meth binge, Wallace woke up in a Pinewood, Texas,
psychiatric ward. He weighed 130 pounds. His long black hair was a tangled
mass. His eyebrows were gone and there was a hole in the brim of his cowboy
hat.

"They told me I had put a gun between my eyes and pulled the trigger,"
Wallace said. "My first thought was that I couldn't even do that right. I
don't know if the hand of God came down and grabbed the gun or if I passed
out at the last second."

Either way, Wallace was alive. When he got strong enough to get up, it
didn't take him long to figure out he wasn't well.

"There was a lady there, a rather large lady, who was sitting across from
me," Wallace said.

"Suddenly, she announced: 'I killed John Wayne.'

"I said: 'You killed John Wayne?'

She said: 'No, I killed John Wayne.'

I said: 'I killed John Wayne?'

She said: 'You did?'

"That's when I realized that there were crazy people in here and I was one
of them."

Another week passed before a counselor asked Wallace, "Why are you here?"

"I guess I'm just an evil ...," Wallace answered.

The man looked Wallace dead in the eyes and said: "I don't think you're a
bad person at all, but I think you have bad disease."

Wallace thought hard about that for a minute before speaking.

"You mean to say all this stuff that's happened to me the last 25 years is
because I'm sick and you can treat me for it?" he asked.

The man nodded, "Yes."

Wallace then stretched out his arm and said "Well, stick it here."

The man just laughed and said, "It's not a shot at all."

Getting Help

Treatment and The 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous saved Wallace's life and
reunited him with his family.

It may have been Step 2 - "Came to believe that a Power greater than
ourselves could restore us to sanity" - that made the biggest difference in
Wallace's recovery.

"My counselor said that I had to believe that I would get better," he said.
I didn't believe that at first because as much as I had always wanted to, I
kept letting everyone down."

To prove his point, the man sat Wallace down in front of a large desk.

"If I wanted to move this desk by myself, I'd struggle with it all day and
not get anywhere," he said, "but if you help me, we can take it anywhere we
want."

Today, Wallace helps others with the heavy lifting.

(SIDEBAR)

The 12 Suggested Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become
unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to
sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God
as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact
nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make
amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do
so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly
admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact
with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for
us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried
to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in
all our affairs. "I wanted to be like the other white dots," he said.