Austin in Full

“Austin” (not his real name) was the first person I interviewed for this series. I couldn’t have found a better person to write about.

I began working on this series two months ago, searching for people whose stories would inspire regardless of how I made them sound. I searched for people who’d experienced hell on earth. I never even thought that some of these people would have at some point created that hell on earth for others.

Austin was a hell-bringer. He was one of those people that my mom worried I’d run into when I started hanging out in downtown Greenville, North Carolina. Sometimes he’d get robbed, yeah, but other times he was the one with the gun. In this world revolving around drugs, guns were like ATM cards and their victims the ATM.

Austin put it this way: “If I had no money, you had money in your pocket and I had a gun in my pocket, and we met, when we went our separate ways, I’d have your money and my gun in my pocket.”

Today, Austin’s been clean and sober for over a year. He loves Jesus Christ. And he’s helping other addicts and alcoholics recover along with him. Twice our interviews were postponed. The first time, he had to meet with someone he was sponsoring. The second, he was driving a guy to Greenville to check him into rehab.

This is his story, and the first epic published here at The Evidence Project

~

Chapter I

~

Austin’s life changed the morning after the last time he was robbed.

Like he’d done a million times before, Austin drove downtown – hammered drunk – in search of some dope. Like a million times before, he rolled down a window next to a guy standing on a corner. Like a million times before, he asked, “Watchu got? I want some dope.”

It often went three ways. One, the guy would pull out some drugs – Austin was looking for crack tonight – then Austin would make an offer. Two, the guy wouldn’t have anything but could tell him somebody who did. Or three, the guy would have some dope but instead pull out of his pocket a gun or knife, ordering Austin hand over the money he’d planned to spend.

“No,” the guy on the corner replied. Pulled out a gun. Pressed it to Austin’s head. “Give me your money.”

Tonight, it was number three.

~

The first sip of that beer. The first buzz from that bong.

These aren’t moments in which you’d imagine yourself in rehab, or facing a dozen felonies, over the next two decades of your life. Not when you’re twelve. When you’re twelve, all you’re thinking about is the people in the room. Or, if you’re lucky, what your parents might say about this sipping of beer and taking of hits off bongs.

Austin wasn’t lucky. He began drinking and smoking, yes, at twelve years old.

“I don’t think there’s ever been anything that’s been introduced to me that I said, ‘No’,” he says.

Austin grew up in Greensboro, NC. The smoking and drinking came naturally as anything else to fit in. Like wearing jeans with holes all over them. “It was the cool thing to do, I thought,” Austin says. “I really don’t know why, because I grew up in an awesome family. Very well-off.

His father owned a vending machine company, a coffee service and a bottled water company. That family didn’t hurt for money. Austin’s every need or want went met.

“I was spoiled,” he says.

He was popular, too. An athlete, even, starring for his high school football team for two years at nose tackle and right guard. “I did it all,” he says.

He quit sports his sophomore year when his coach found out about the pot and alcohol. The coach advised Austin to quit; Austin’s response was, “Screw you” followed by turning in his jersey. He never played a down of football again, and went from using to selling. Yet somehow, Austin remained immensely popular.

“I had a lot of friends who were good kids,” Austin says. “Athletes, people who went to church. And then I had the other friends that were the totally opposite, that I’d get in trouble with. Somehow I lived like a chameleon. I could fit in anywhere.”

He might not have been the life of every party, or anything like that, but Austin was at every party held. Even as a sophomore, he could drink anyone under the table, and was up for any drug passed around.

On the flip side, when he’d spend Saturday nights at one of his friends’ houses, he’d go to church with his family the next morning.

“I could be whoever you wanted me to be,” Austin says. “But I was never me. I was trying to always be whoever I thought you wanted me to be, depending on who I was hanging out with at that point.” He pauses, looks at his sandwich – we’re eating at a popular restaurant in Wilmington – as if asking it if he should say what he’s about to say. Then he speaks. “I didn’t know who I was.”

The church was Presbyterian, and the only contact Austin ever really had with any sort of religion outside of Young Life. “My family didn’t go to church,” Austin says. “That’s as simple as it gets. There weren’t any Bibles in the house that I knew of.”

Whatever that preacher preached, Austin heard none of it. The sermons came off as completely irrelevant. He snored more often than he listened. “They were talking about stuff I had no clue about,” Austin recalls.

When Austin was fifteen, he was arrested for the first time. It happened in the school parking lot, when a security guard caught him with a half-pound of pot as he was making a deal. He went to court, got slapped on the wrist, and didn’t miss a day of school. His parents, naturally, were furious. Some of his friends were shocked. But if Austin noticed, he certainly didn’t change.

“I was so selfish I guess I didn’t really care,” he says. “It didn’t seem to affect me at all. There were no consequences.”

The next day he smoked with a few friends and all was forgotten, lost in the haze of the smoke and the high. That sensation – that ability to instantly forget, that numbness to the thoughts and opinions of anyone else – would become as addicting as the drug. That sensation was such a blissful escape. Even when brought on by wild nights of drinking the numbness always came, and with it, comfort.

“I partied all the time,” Austin says. “I mean, all the time. To where I was drinking almost every day after school, and all weekends.”

Ironically, Austin stayed involved with Young Life. Not for the Christian message – he didn’t care a bit about God – “Just because some of my friends went,” Austin says. “And I really liked the scene. And I knew they were doing the right thing. And I liked it.” He chuckles. “You’d think that might have been a hint to me, but nothing to stick.”

By age sixteen, Austin started doing cocaine. “I was just with some people that were doing it, so I said, well, let me do it,” Austin says. He had an older brother – who we’ll call Travis – who went to East Carolina University in Greenville, NC (about two-and-a-half hours from Greensboro). Austin visited whenever he could. He loved partying, and loved doing it with the college crowd.

“I could always drink everybody under the table,” Austin recalls. “I wasn’t the guy that passed out. Everyone else would quit, and I wanted to do more. Of anything. There was no stopping point for me.”

Somehow, Austin made it through to graduation, then enrolled at ECU, where he joined a frat. Until then, Austin’s security rested in how he managed to maintain friendships with people despite his wild habits. Once he joined that frat, wild as he was, he became just one of a crowd. And he loved it.

“It was cool,” he says. “Because when I got there, I could hang out with people who could drink like I did. I didn’t look as different any more.”

~

Chapter II

~

I can’t find anything to back this up, but I know I heard this while I was in middle or high school: Every year, Playboy rates the top ten party schools in America. One year, right around the time Austin was at East Carolina, ECU was taken out of the top ten – and given its own category. “In a league of its own,” or something like that.

In this environment, Austin the drug dealer and alcoholic entered college. In this environment, Austin thrived.

He immersed himself in the drug culture. He used plenty, but he began selling more. Cocaine. Pot. Ecstasy. In no time, he’d developed an extensive network, which he says is common in drug circles. Everyone eventually knows everyone. Austin dealt with guys he says that “a middle class white kid like me would not normally be hanging out with…People that live in the projects, mostly black.” Says Austin, “Fact of the matter is, I knew the people with the money. The middle class white kids whose parents were well off.”

Austin raked in the cash, making thousands of dollars a week.

At the end of his first semester, a dorm room inspection turned up five pounds of pot. Austin was kicked out of the dorm and suspended for the spring semester, but he spent a few grand on a good lawyer, who got him off with probation and recommended rehab. So on September 4, 2000, Austin was first introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous. The meetings were meaningless to him. He was no alcoholic, for one thing, so he didn’t need these meetings in the first place. And the programs required you to believe in some kind of god, any form of higher power you could believe in, but Austin believed in nothing. “I couldn’t believe in something I couldn’t see,” he says. “I just couldn’t.”

The stint in a rehab center lasted twenty-eight days, and Austin took all twenty-eight, hoping to appease his parents, alleviate the law and just fade back into the crowd.

Everyone knows that the first step to recovery is admitting there’s a problem. Austin had no problem, not in his mind. He said the right things and smiled at the right times and expressed remorse about the right things, got deemed fit for life, and returned from his vacation to enroll in Pitt Community College, Greenville’s two-year community college.

“Nothing changed,” Austin says. He kept using and kept dealing, stayed off the radar and in the meantime amassed wealth in exponential proportions. He brought in five figures every two weeks. He had hundreds of thousands of dollars just stacked around his apartment. He bought a new car – a Mitsubishi Galant. He fixed his apartment up nice with a new television and video game console and DVD player.

That went on for roughly two years before Austin was busted again, this time for an ounce of cocaine. He was charged with four different felonies; he faced ten years in prison.

But he gave a lawyer a lot of money, and the lawyer had the felonies reduced to misdemeanors, and Austin again received probation. The legal system came through again.

“It’s all money,” Austin says. “That’s how the system works.”

He was around twenty-one years old with hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend as he pleased. “I could do whatever,” he says. He was untouchable. He was God, bestowing blessings upon those closest to him, carrying a dozen friends to Vegas one weekend and another dozen to Miami another, just whenever the urge so struck.

Police? Forget the police. Austin had, literally, the best lawyers money could buy. He’d even begun dealing coke to a corporate lawyer who set up a fake business for Austin, letting him collect interest on his income. Austin was invincible.

“I felt my power and control,” Austin says. “That’s the way I always lived.”

And the way he always wanted to live. The way he believed he always could.

But as these things go, the mountain beneath the peak from which Austin ruled all began to crumble. The foundation was shaken by erosive alcoholism and addiction that pervaded Austin’s existence. It began in Greenville with a drug deal gone bad.

Austin paid $110,000 for pot that never got delivered. Austin knew the seller and trusted him, so he paid him before he saw the drugs. When the seller went to get them, he was busted, and Austin never got his shipment.

“That started the downfall,” Austin says.  “This whole time, my alcoholism and addiction was catching up to me. I stayed up days and a week at a time, doing drugs, just trying to stay wasted, stay high.”

Not long later, Austin was called into the Greenville police department’s narcotics division, where a detective informed him that Austin was on their top ten list of drug dealers in the region. At number three.

Austin decided it was a good time to leave. He dropped out of Pitt and returned to Greensboro.

~

Chapter III

~

When Austin got home, he worked for his dad, who’d sold his old companies and was now the owner of a courier service. His parents knew Austin had been in trouble, they knew he’d been into drugs, and they just wanted to give him somewhere to stay, some way of making an honest living.

But instead of waning, the addiction got worse.

“I just continued to use drugs,” Austin says. “I could go into work late, and partied like I wanted.” He started smoking crack, shooting cocaine and heroin. And his money began running out. “I spent money like it was my job,” Austin says. “It just went…I was just trying to sell more than I’d do so I could break even.”

His parents had been furious about what happened in Greenville, but Austin didn’t care. They screamed at him, but he didn’t care. They cried, but he didn’t care. He cared about nothing. He felt nothing, except for the belief that he could get away with anything. So he did, and his parents furor faded into helplessness.

“They loved me too much to let be on the street,” Austin says. “But they loved me so much they were going to let me die. Out of love. Families don’t know how to deal with that. You love your kid…It’s hard to let them go.”

If they kept him in the house, if they kept loving him, if they kept giving him everything he needed, he’d change. He’d realize he didn’t need the drugs, the alcohol. Or so they believed.

“But that’s not the way alcoholism and drug addiction works,” Austin says. “If you give me love, then I’m going to take advantage of it.”

For awhile, he did enough wheeling and dealing to get from fix to fix. He’d meet sources for dinner, have a meal, make the deal, go on his way.

Until one night, one dinner, when everything went horribly wrong.

The dinner went fine and as far as Austin knew, the deal was on. He had a half-pound of weed and a few ounces of coke in his car, plus $10,000 cash. They met at a restaurant like usual, ate and conversed like usual, paid the bill and left as usual. Austin smelled no rat.

He didn’t know that less than twenty-four hours earlier, the guy sitting across the table from him had been busted and given a choice: cooperate, or spend a decade in prison. He chose to cooperate. He chose to turn Austin in.

The instant Austin got to his Galant, four of five cars and Tahoes surrounded his car, sirens blaring, lights flashing. Austin was arrested, charged with four felonies and faced up to ten years in federal prison.

He spent what money he had left on a lawyer, and once again, money was the oil that helped him wriggle free of the legal system. Two of the felonies stuck, but the other two were dismissed and all Austin faced as a consequence was another probation and another twenty-eight day vacation in a rehab clinic.

Austin was released the Friday two weeks before Thanksgiving. He still didn’t believe he had any drug or alcohol problems, but he didn’t like the life he was living. It was time to start over. “I figured that I needed to move because it just wasn’t the right place for me,” Austin says. Then, as if mocking himself, he adds, “The problem wasn’t me, it was everyone I was hanging out with.”

By Monday, he decided to move to Aspen, Colorado. When I asked him, “Why Aspen?” he gave me this look that said, “Heck if I know.” He had no reason, except that he kind of liked snowboarding, and from something he’d once seen about Aspen on TV, it looked nice. By Friday that week, he’d packed his clothes into the Galant, put all the cash he had in his pocket – a few thousand dollars, if that much – and hit the road.

His first night in Aspen, the first place he went was the first bar he could find. That’s where he began his fresh start – restarting his cycle before finding somewhere to sleep.

“That’s all I knew,” he says.

That night, in deep fall in Aspen, Colorado, Austin slept in his car. “Cold,” he says. “Nothing but white snow.”

The next day he went job hunting and found nothing. And that night, he was back in that bar, blowing through shot after beer after shot. In his drunken state, he ended up telling a couple of girls his story, about how he was in Aspen with no money and nowhere to live.

“Well, you can move in with us,” one said.

“Well, I’m moving in tonight!” Austin replied. And he literally moved into their house that night. Not that it took him long to carry his clothes from his car to a room.

Eventually, Austin lied his way into a job, working at the Ritz Carleton as a bellman. He denied ever being convicted of any felonies or other criminal charges, and just hoped they didn’t do a background check. Apparently they never did.

Austin also learned that one of the girls he’d move in with was the daughter of the man who owned a nationwide drugstore franchise. (Hint: her young brother’s name was Eckerd.)

For two years, Austin lived in Aspen. His drinking, he kept relatively in check. “I did pretty well,” Austin says.

But he eventually found cocaine again. He started drinking more heavily after that. And he doesn’t even remember how that started. “I just went searching for everything I thought filled me,” Austin says. Despite holding down a job and supporting himself, Austin was left without any sense of self-worth. “[The drugs are] what gave me power my whole life,” he says. “Or maybe, it was a sense of I didn’t have to feel. If I was wasted all the time, then I didn’t have to feel bad about myself, or lost.”

Then after two years, when up for a promotion at the Ritz, Austin was fired after his employers performed that dreaded background check.

Aspen was a bad place now. Austin left. This time, after less than two weeks home in Greensboro, he moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, hoping he could finally find a good place.

~

Chapter IV

~

Austin had always liked Wilmington. His parents had a place there that they visited often, and since Aspen was a bad place and Greensboro was a worse place, Wilmington had to be better. It was another chance at a fresh start. Plus, after doing some research, Austin realized Wilmington was a ripe market for a new courier service like his father’s. So he started one.

“For a couple months I was okay,” Austin says. “But then the money starts rolling in. I start buying drugs. Same thing.”

He did everything he could to run from these things, but he couldn’t run from himself. “Everywhere I went, there I was,” he says. “I was always trying to get away from….me. The problem was, I always thought the problem was where I was…So if I move somewhere, I can start fresh. Nobody knows what I’ve done. Nobody knows who I am. Start fresh. But I was still the same guy. So I’d start fresh and make new dope friends and there it is, the old life.”

He started shooting cocaine and smoking crack. “All you need for cocaine is a needle,” Austin says. “You can shoot it. That’s all it takes. Then you see somebody cook cocaine into crack one time and you can do it.”

Getting it was as simple as driving down to the hood, the projects, and asking around.

“Drive down there, see some black guy standing on the corner and ask him, ‘What you got?’” Austin says. “And he’ll sell you some drugs.”

Often Austin didn’t even need to get that risky. When you’ve been involved with drugs long enough, you become part of the subculture. “You’re gonna know somebody,” Austin says. “People from Greensboro who moved down here, then you get to know their dealer, you get their dealer. If you’re looking for it, you call everybody you know who does drugs and say, ‘Hey, can you give me some?’”

So everywhere he went, everywhere he tried to get his fresh start, the same Austin always came out. “That’s all I knew how to do,” Austin says. “I didn’t know how to live any other way. That’s all I knew how to do, so I’m going to do what’s comfortable for me.”

Within three months of starting it, Austin had run his courier service into the ground. “I was f—– up,” Austin says. “Losing customers. Too tweaked out to answer the phone. Not going into the office when I needed to. Had the calls forwarded to my cell phone. Drinking all the time.”

Before it went completely kaput, Austin old the company for a few thousand dollars’ worth of profit, enough to live off for awhile if he needed to. Then, in keeping with his pattern, he left. Fled. “Now Wilmington was the bad place,” Austin says. He went back to Greensboro. Back to his parents.

~

Chapter V

~

In Greensboro, nothing changed except where he slept sometimes. His parents were wholly aware of the extent to which Austin was using and drinking. They knew he was an addict and a helpless alcoholic. So they did what most parents would do. They let him come home. They tried to protect him. But in doing so, they just enabled him to keep using.

“People just don’t know how to deal with it,” Austin says. “They want you to be home. They want you to come home, so when you come home, they don’t want to say, ‘Get out.’ Because they know you’re safe at home. When you’re at home with them, you’re safe. They want to be as nice as possible, so maybe, maybe you’ll stay. Until that itch comes, and I need some dope, and I’d leave.”

He knew exactly what to say and how to act to get what he needed from them, too. “I manipulated the s— out of them,” Austin says.

Living on a whim as usual, Austin decided to enroll in barber school in Winston-Salem one day after talking to his barber. “I always thought I’d be good at it,” he says. “My barber was making good money. And it was just something to do.”

It took Austin eleven months when it was just supposed to take nine. “I used every day,” Austin says. The same stuff – crack, cocaine, heroin. And of course, always alcohol. “Every day,” Austin says. “I’d disappear for weeks at a time. I wouldn’t go tbed for a week. It was chaos.”

Physically, the symptoms were horrible as ever. Austin, who weighs 242 pounds today, weighed just 170 then. “Sick part of it?” Austin says, “I thought I looked good.”

The veins in his arms were “hard as rocks.” His body never stopped hurting. His nose bled often. It became normal for him to blow his nose and have to pull strands of bloody tissue out behind the snot. But it was never enough to make him stop using. He’d hardly shrug, just thinking, Did too much last night. Oh well.

“I just wanted some more,” Austin says. “It’s a feeling. I want more…It’s that high, it’s that feeling. That’s what you live for. This side of the nose bleeds? Use the other one. This arm hurts? Use the other one.”

He’d snort water up his nose to clear it out, so he could put more up.

When he told me that, I asked him, “And you’d just do it again?”

“It’s insanity, man,” Austin says. “It’s really insane.”

And where he spent his time was equally as insane. While hanging out at a guy’s house, everyone high and whacked out of their minds, one of them started playing with a gun. Put it to the back of another guy’s head. Pulled the trigger. Boom.

“Didn’t bother me,” Austin says.

Some days, it was Austin drawing the gun. Money had begun running out regularly, and when the money ran out the drugs ran out. The former was a problem; the latter, unacceptable.

“Me and my buddy would pull over on the side of the street and rob a guy walking down the road,” Austin says. He robbed people whenever he felt like it. Sometimes he broke into houses. “I just did what I had to do. When that urge to get high or the withdrawal would kick in, I just did whatever I had to do to get high,” he says.

Yeah, he got a rush the first few robberies. “But it gets to a point,” Austin says, “Where, like, it really didn’t bother me. There was no right or wrong. I didn’t even feel it. I didn’t care about that person that I robbed. The guilt wasn’t there. I just did what I had to do.”

One of his worst moments didn’t come while pressing a gun to a stranger’s head or standing in a stranger’s bed room, though. It was in front of his own mother, who’d just discovered that Austin had stolen every piece of her jewelry and pawned it off for cash to pay for his latest fix. She was just staring at him, weeping. Then she said, “I just wish you weren’t even my son.”

And even in the face of that, Austin felt nothing. “She looked me in the eyes and said that,” he recalls. “And I couldn’t cry. I knew she was bawling, but I could not feel in that moment.”

~

Chapter VI

~

After Austin got his barber’s certificate and went to work in Greensboro, he still wasn’t making the money he needed. So one day, while they were visiting Wilmington, his parents called him. They’d found an ad in the paper for a barbershop in need of a barber. Austin called the owner, “Mark,” the next day.

Mark hired Austin over the phone. The next week, Austin left Greensboro for Wilmington. Moved into his new place on a Monday. Started work that Tuesday. Had a great day Tuesday, making $300. Pumped, Austin home, drank himself into oblivion. Then decided he needed some crack, so he drove to downtown Wilmington. “Just doing what I do,” he says.

Austin saw a black man in a baggy jacket on a curb, pulled up, rolled down the window. “Hey man, I want some dope.”

“No,” the guy replied. Pulled a gun, pressed it to Austin’s head. “Give me your money.” Behind him, two more men emerged from the shadows.

What happened next is a total blur to Austin, but here’s what he remembers:

“The guys wanted to rob me, but I didn’t want to be robbed,” Austin sums it up.

He jumped from the car, grabbed the gun and hit the guy before getting tackled by two others. He fought them off, blindly pulled the trigger, hit nobody. “It was all chaotic,” Austin says. “But I went after them. I was crazy as hell…Punching them, grabbing their guns, whatever you can do…It was just madness.”

Eventually he lost the fight, and with it went his money and cell phone. Back into the darkness the thugs disappeared. In a rage, Austin drove around the neighborhood countless times, yelling for them, searching for them. “I didn’t care,” Austin says. But he never found them, so he just went home, got up for work the next day, moved on with life as though normal. And it was his normal.

“S— happened like that all the time,” Austin says. “When you’re hanging in places like that, that’s just what happens. You gotta look out for getting robbed….Sometimes I was the one doing the robbing, you know?”

When Austin arrived at work, Mark began asking questions. “Why don’t you have any money? You made a bunch yesterday. And where’s your cell phone?”

“So,” Austin says, “I replied with an alcoholic lie…That’s what alcoholics do. They lie. They’re good at manipulating. Trying to come up with a believable story. And that’s what I did my whole life. Truth was lost. I’d lie just for lying. I thought that just sounds better than the truth, to me.”

Austin was maybe a minute into his story when Mark cut him off.

“Stop.” He sounded angry. His face was tense. “Man, that’s – that’s f—–’ b——-.”

“I hadn’t even finished my story,” Austin says. “And I was kinda taken back that he was calling me a liar.”

“Look,” Mark said. “I don’t know where you’ve been. Where you come from. I don’t know your history. But I’ve been in recovery for twenty-two years, and you’re talkin’ my language.”

Austin was shellshocked. Mark continued with an ultimatum: “You can either tell me the truth – Start telling me the truth, or you can pack your s— and go. I’ll give you a minute to think about it.”

Austin retreated to the back of the shop, dizzy with disbelief. “After all the rehabs I’d been to,” Austin says, “I never thought I had a problem. I was just doing what everybody else is doing.” But when he sat in that back room, he felt something. “I just broke down into tears,” he says. “I finally realized that I was an alcoholic. I was an addict. And that I needed to do something about it.”

The date: September 4, 2008.

Austin went on to say of his breakdown in that back room, “That’s the first time I ever thought there was a God.” When I asked him how, and why, he said, “Because I couldn’t deny the fact that I came from a different city into this barber shop where this guy’s been in recovery – it wasn’t a coincidence. It was God. God, doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself.”

For years Austin had run, only to be relentlessly chased by himself. He’d simply existed from high to high. But now….he could feel again. What he felt that morning in the back of that barbershop Austin says could be nothing other than the Holy Spirit.

“I’d never felt that before,” Austin says. “I could feel again. I could cry again. I was so numb to everything. I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t cry.”

Later that week Austin went to a church I’ll simply call Church, and when he walked into Church, and its pastor, Mike, began talking, Austin began crying again.

“Those were the first times I’d cried in years,” Austin says. “That feeling of, there’s hope. There’s a feeling you can’t explain, really.”

~

Chapter VII

~

For the longest time, whenever Austin looked at Christians and saw them act like how he was acting now, he’d dismissed it. “Christians would do their thing over there, I’d do my thing over here,” Austin says. The stuff about the Holy Spirit – “That was the stuff that discouraged me in the beginning,” Austin says. “I was like, Ooohhh, I don’t know if I felt it or not, what’s it feel like? People can’t really tell you. But it’s kind of a belief, that you felt it. If you have the belief, then you did…There’s no defined thing. I believe if you think you’ve had that feeling and you think it was the Holy Spirit, then it was. Who’s to tell you it wasn’t?”

Austin’s been sober for over a year now, since that morning Mark called him out. He’s gained fifty pounds and with it a new sense about life. It wasn’t magical. There was no divinely inspired overnight turning from old ways. Humans are human.

To stay sober, Austin went to up to fourteen Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings a week.

But today Austin still feels, for the first time he can remember, hope, and not just for himself anymore – for others. For his brother. For his fellow alcoholics and addicts.

“That keeps me sober,” Austin says. “I’m not thinking about myself all the time. Not worrying about what’s wrong with me, what my problems are. I can help somebody else with their problems, and mine don’t seem too bad.”

Not too bad. He was mugged regularly. He’d overdosed multiple times, and multiple times should have died as a result. He’d been shot. Stabbed. He’d been arrested, faced decades in prison. But his inexplicable escaping of all those are, to Austin, evidence of God’s interacting in his life.

“I see how He was in my life my whole life,” Austin says. “So many times when I should have died, overdosed. Getting shot at. I could see where He’d been there the whole time. That’s how I chose Jesus as my savior. Every time I went to court and was supposed to go to jail for ten years at a time…I clearly remember overdosing, and not going to the hospital, then coming too.” He makes a face when he says that like, “What do you make of that?” “And I’m still here…So many times I should have not been here, or been places I shouldn’t have been, and something would happen. It was God looking out for me.”

And through Austin God’s been able to meet Austin’s brother. Yes, that older brother, the one who’d introduced Austin to many of the drugs and the lifestyle in the first place. “I told him that it was God that changed my life,” Austin says. “So he believes in God now.”

That brother was baptized before Austin.

Austin’s parents are still working through some things spiritually, but their relationship with Austin is – miraculously – completely restored. Sometimes his mother has some darker days, but she tells Austin, “Sometimes you’re the only thing that keeps me going.” That, the woman says to the boy she once told, “I wish you weren’t my son.” And they’ve begun trying church, too.

Of course, contrary to what many believe, church doesn’t equal salvation and isn’t even a requirement for it. All God cares about is that we care about him. But church is a nice step sometimes. It’s a place to learn (or at least, it should be).

“I don’t have to be perfect,” Austin says. “I don’t have to worship him perfectly. But if I’m striving at all to make him a part of my life…I have not missed a day of prayer in the morning and prayer at night.”

C.S. Lewis once wrote that prayer was less about getting something from God and more about completing our relationship with God. It’s like talking to your lover. You don’t call them on the phone when you’re away just to tell them to send you a package. You call them because you love them and they love you and it means something to both of you just to talk, even if it’s about nothing. That’s prayer.

“In the mornings I pray, thanks for waking me up this morning,” Austin says. “I ask him to help me in making the right decisions that day to stay sober, and not take a drink or a drug. I ask him to put somebody in my life that day I can help. I ask him to make me a little bit better of a man than I was yesterday. Then I pray for others. People in my life. People that I’m worried about, people that I need to pray for. That’s my morning prayer, every morning…At night, I thank him for keeping me sober that day…I just reflect on the day.”

I asked Austin what kept him in it; how did this become real?

“I’m not trying to do this for anybody else anymore,” Austin says. “I pray and I talk to God and I help other people because it makes me feel good inside. I know I’ve found God, which fills that God-sized hole. And that’s it.”

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Final Notes

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Austin was the first person I had the chance to interview for this project. He was a great sport through all of this, and authentic and free in telling his story.

One of my greatest concerns heading into this project was that the people I interviewed would feel like I looked down on them for how they’d once been. Growing up as a relatively boring Christian whose biggest problem was exactly that – judging others – I’m getting more conscious of this in my life.

At the start of our first interview, I told Austin, “I want you to be comfortable with me, and you need to know that in absolutely no way will I judge you or anything for what you tell me.”

“To be really honest,” Austin replied, “if you did, I wouldn’t care. Because that’s you…I know I’m not a horrible person. I’ve just gone through some stuff, you know? Made some bad decisions. Gone through addictions. If I hadn’t been who I was, I wouldn’t be who I am.”

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Later, Austin and I got to talking about his family and how they’d started getting to know God and Jesus and everything. Then we compared what he was doing to what a lot of other Christians do.

“I don’t push anything,” Austin said. “I just – it’s like the AA program. You lead by example. AA is an attraction program, and I think that Christianity should be the same way. You know? If somebody likes the way somebody is as a person, then they’re attracted to it. And people will want to know, well, how’s he living? What makes him so happy? What makes him so attractive? It’s when opinions get involved is when, I believe, that God and Jesus aren’t the point anymore. Keep your opinion out of it. It’s not ours. It’s God’s opinion – he loves all of us.

“I have no right to judge anyone. Just because I have done some really bad things in my life – I turned all that over to God. He saw me when I was doing it, and we’ve had talks, and I’ve let that go to where I can grow now. And just because you haven’t been there or you’ve been fortunate enough not to go there, you have no right to judge. Because you’ll never know what somebody’s life’s been like. It’s all relative. It’s what somebody’s trying to do today. And giving up on people sucks.”

Austin’s 29 years young now, and he’s met God. It started with a breakdown in the back of a barbershop. It grew as he wept in church. But it eventually transcended emotion. A choice had to be made. Austin said that based on what he learned, he picked Jesus. When I asked him what he’d learned, exactly, he said, “It’s that He loves me. And that’s all I really need to know right now: is that God loves me, and I don’t have to be perfect…I’m just trying. I do the same thing I do every day. It’s worked so far, and who knows what’s to come. But I know I’ve gotta keep God in my life.”

When Austin woke up back in the day, he’d hit a needle or bottle first. Now his hits his knees, praying, asking God to make him just a bit better of a man, so he can make others a bit better, too.

One of my final questions was, “What’s it like, looking back on your routine now, compared to what it used to be?”

All Austin could say was, “It’s a miracle.”