Detox on $72 a Day : Treatment: Alcoholics from three counties go to an Oxnard center to get acupuncture, counseling and a first step to recovery when they can’t afford other care.

Marilyn had binged before, but not like this. By the time this run of drinking was over, a month was gone. Her green Toyota was bathed in dust, the interior a jumble of pillows, cans, curlers and the uncomfortable odors that accumulate when you start living out of your back seat.

The car sat in the dirt outside the government-supported Primary Purpose detoxification house in Oxnard. Marilyn sat inside the detox, 52 years old, alcoholic as they come, feeling the way her car looked.

“Vodka,” wrote the worker on her intake form at 12:30 p.m. A quart daily. Assigned to Bed 1.

Wayne, a big man with only a duffel bag and recollections of schnapps, King Cobra and the Wagon Wheel Motor Inn, arrived three hours after Marilyn on the same Sunday afternoon. He was 44, subdued when sober, five days out of the County Jail. Bed 8, in the men’s bunk room.

The detox house is on West 5th Street, a few blocks from Oxnard High School. It has six bunks for men and four for women and costs $216 for three days, $360 for five. It is not fancy. But when you’re someone like Marilyn or Wayne and you want help sobering up from drink or drugs, you don’t have insurance or savings to pay the $500 a day that many private medical clinics charge.

You could try the Ventura County Medical Center, but unless you need emergency medical care, they’ll send you here. The Primary Purpose detox is the only place of its kind in the area. From Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, they come to this detox.

“I could have sobered up at home,” said Marilyn, when she was cleaned up and the shaking had subsided some. “But that wouldn’t have done any good. I need counseling and A.A. That’s the problem--I don’t keep up with A.A,” she said of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Wayne, once his head was clearer, put it another way.

“I’ve tried counseling. I’ve tried medication. I’ve tried religion. . . . I’ve tried changing drinks. I’ve tried controlled drinking. And none of it works,” he said. “I need to do what I’m told this time.”

Detox is simple but not easy. You stay three to five days. Wake-up is at 5:30. Bed-making. Morning acupuncture. Counseling and Alcoholics Anonymous. Herbal tea. Evening acupuncture. At 11 every night, lights out.

And so Marilyn and Wayne, strangers in a house on West 5th Street, set out to dry out.

Monday morning, early. Marilyn is up but shaky and not at all ready for breakfast. The plums in the kitchen, the Nilla Wafers and grapefruit juice, the unopened box of oat bran. . . . She steers clear and finds a seat on the couch in the living room.

There’s a newspaper, but she can’t read properly because she’s lost her glasses. She’ll have to call her brother. Until then, she sits.

Next door, in the office of detox coordinator Cathy Mullins, the woman from Bed 3 is checking out to go home, against advice.

“I know I’m not going to drink,” the woman said.

“They con themselves,” Mullins said after the woman had gone. “It’s so sad because I get calls from the coroner. . . . They say, ‘Cathy, tell me the next of kin.’ ”

Six of the 10 beds are full, with two more clients, heroin addicts whose parole officers have referred them, on the way. There’s sometimes a waiting list, but it never seems to get longer than about five people. Instead, Mullins said, the callers just go back to drinking or shooting or snorting or, as is usually the case, some combination of those.

Wayne is next in the office, explaining for the files how he landed in detox. The story comes out in a flat, steady voice.

He is a career drinker, raised by an abusive mother and a Washington state orphanage, further trained in the military. He was living in Ojai with his girlfriend when he got drunk, stayed drunk a while and got thrown in jail. He got out on the Fourth of July and got drunk again for four days.

“I hit her about two weeks ago,” Wayne said, explaining the jail time. “I either slapped her or punched her in the forehead and one of the neighbors called the police.

“It’s always been the same with me,” he said later. “If I wasn’t drinking, I was a pretty good human being.”

Wayne rises quietly and shuffles into the living room to wait for the 8:30 acupuncture session. Five tiny needles in each ear for 45 minutes. They say it eases anxiety. Wayne is ready for that.

They meet their housemates on the porch, where everyone smokes.

Marilyn sits there with a red coffee can for the ashes. Wayne watches the traffic whiz by. Near him, in a cloud of Bulgarian cigarette smoke, sits the man from Bed 10 with a book.

The man is a vodka drinker, 33, less than a year out of Bulgaria. His book is from there, and looks like a tractor manual or a government document. It is not. It is a translation of Dashiell Hammett’s “Maltese Falcon.” Hammett is very popular with the readers at home.

“But the top in Bulgaria,” said the man from Bed 10, “is Raymond Chandler.”

It’s Monday afternoon now, and the way Wayne sees it, circumstances are nudging him toward sobriety.

First a volunteer leads him and a few others to an A.A. meeting. Marilyn goes, too, but pulls up with a bad foot on the way. Wayne gives her his arm, and soon they’re on familiar ground.

Wayne has been going to meetings like this, on and off, since 1969; Marilyn, since 1975. Introductions are made, a man with 31 years of sobriety speaks, stories are shared. And near the end of the meeting, tokens are offered to newcomers who pledge sobriety.

Wayne stands to call for one and beams at the applause from his fellow recovering alcoholics and addicts.

“Thank God I’m back,” he said.

Marilyn takes one, too, quietly. Then they walk back to the house, pull up a pair of chairs on the porch, and Wayne gets his second nudge. They find themselves facing a drunk.

This is a practicing drunk, with eyes fogged, nose scabbed, speech slurred and a blue T-shirt that says “Lambada.” Someone has led him to the detox, and he reeks.

“They’re not gonna take him,” Marilyn said.

“You don’t get nothin’ here.” said one of the detox specialists from Primary Purpose, turning him down. “You quit cold turkey. That’s why I’m afraid you’ll have a seizure.”

But instead of leaving, the drunk turns to Wayne.

“You’re right. I’m drunk,” the drunk said. “And I got steel plates and 15 screws in these legs. . . . But I didn’t get in no fight. I was in a hotel and I think I fell off the bed.”

Wayne stares the man down and holds out an upturned fist. At Wayne’s wrist, where a watchband would go, is scar tissue.

“I didn’t get in a fight either,” Wayne said. “I just got a butcher knife and cut my wrist open.”

“I’m a stone alcoholic,” the drunk answered. “I’m one of the worst.”

“Saturday night I looked just like him,” Wayne said. “How old are you?”

“I look about 55, but I’m 46,” the drunk said.

“I’ll be 45 in another month,” Wayne said.

The two alcoholics look each other up and down, one clear-eyed and penitent, the other glassy-eyed and hopeless.

“Don’t you drink,” Marilyn said.

She is a small woman, about 5-foot-3, with blondish gray hair and brown eyes, and she is presiding on the porch.

The red polish on her toenails is chipped, her elbows are scraped up and her feet are blistered from walking for miles, drunk, on sunbaked pavement.

“I was a cocktail waitress and my husband was a bartender. We’d drink at work, then drink at home. I lasted about a year, and then one morning I woke up with the shakes. I couldn’t go to work. It was all I could do to hold myself together. And I wanted a drink.”

In the 20 years since, three husbands have come and, one way or another, gone. She has her mother and a brother nearby, but she stays sober only for spells of a few months at a time. Before her last lapse, she said, she was waiting tables at a waterfront hotel.

“I was working real hard, and I decided I deserved a beer,” she said. “I had a beer and went to bed. Just fine. Went to work the next day. I pulled that off for about a month, and then it started catching up on me.”

She walked off the job. Weeks later, she turned up at the detox, still in her car, still holding a pair of Kamchatka vodka bottles. They brought her inside and poured out her bottles.

Now, she said, she feels better, but the shakes keep coming back. She doesn’t know where she’ll go next--maybe a halfway house, maybe a 30-day treatment program, maybe the street--and sleeping is hard.

“You just toss and turn,” she said.

The acupuncture, they say, works better after you’ve had it a few times. First there’s the shallow, sharp pain, and then it dulls, and then, the theory goes, your nervous system sends soothing messages to your liver, lungs and kidneys, and your body releases endorphins that mask the pain.

For Marilyn, the strangest thing about this seems to be the cassette that the acupuncturist plays to drown out the hum of traffic outside--gentle, meandering New Age instrumental music that makes her think of deep space.

“That’s weird music,” she keeps saying.

“Reminds me of those educational films you’d have in school,” said Ernie, a quiet young man with dark hair who checked in late the night before. “I’d go in there and sleep. It’s a nice feeling.”

Ernie is a 31-year-old parolee who has been shooting heroin daily. He takes the acupuncture needles without flinching. Within a few minutes, he’s asleep with the others.

Brock Haines, a tall young man in glasses and suspenders, handles the needles. He and two other Oriental medicine practitioners have been offering the treatments since February, when the detox landed a $12,000 grant from the Swift Foundation in Oxnard. The program will run out in a few weeks and detox workers are still compiling the hard numbers, but they say they have seen far fewer seizures since they added the acupuncture treatments and that heroin addicts are now less likely to bolt from the house when their addiction calls.

“It reduces the craving without introducing new chemicals,” Haines said. “That’s the beauty of it.”

Ernie doesn’t bolt. Instead, his parole officer shows up around 10 a.m. with two uniformed cops. They handcuff him in the men’s bunk room and lead him out of the house.

Mullins calls the clients together. Ernie, she said, has been violating his parole. He bailed out on detox twice before, then showed up this time, without an appointment, to delay his return to custody. No such luck.

Wayne steps out to call his own parole officer and explains why he won’t be starting at the job he landed a few weeks ago.

Marilyn gets the shakes again, this time so badly that she can barely climb the six front steps.

The mother and father of the Bulgarian from Bed 10 arrive, check him out and drive him off in a shiny red Japanese car. He’s moving to a halfway house so he can find a job while he’s drying out.

He sits on the passenger side, squinting out at the bright day, and raises his hand either to wave or shade his eyes.

Wednesday. Three days dry now, and time is running short.

Wayne said he’ll probably go to a halfway house in Ventura, but he has doubts. He went through this same detox last year, and then to a halfway house instead of the treatment program that was recommended. He lasted seven months.

This time he wants it to stick, he said, and he wants to patch things up with his girlfriend and his daughter, who talked him into detox this time. He also remembers what the Primary Purpose counselors are always saying, that detox alone doesn’t mean much.

It takes a month or more in a structured recovery program, they say, before your odds of staying sober begin to look reasonable. Primary Purpose has 38 beds in a handful of other houses, all for 30-day treatment programs. But Wayne knows that they screen applications--only about one in four detox clients gets in--and that return customers get low priority. It’s a long shot.

Wayne, whose full name is Wayne Staddon, tells a visitor that he has no problem with seeing his identity and picture in the newspaper. The next time he’s tempted to drink, he said, he’ll pull it out and remind himself what will happen.

Marilyn wants no picture and no full identification--but that’s not her biggest worry now. Her time, she has been told, is up.

“I’ve been detoxed,” she said, dazed, stepping out of Mullins’ office. “I got healthy too fast.”

Marilyn has already been accepted by the 30-day program but seems to be looking for a way out. She said she can’t afford the $40 to $120 a day it costs, and that she can’t do anything without some money for cigarettes. She may just go home.

“She’s making up reasons for not going into the program,” Mullins said. If Marilyn were showing some determination, she said, Primary Purpose would waive the cost and cover the expense.

“If something doesn’t change,” Mullins said, “she’s going to walk out and go back to . . . sleeping in her car. The symptoms are all cashing in. You can see it coming.”

There are unanswered questions everywhere: whether Wayne will find an available halfway house bed, whether the expected detox clients will actually show to take Marilyn’s bed, whether Marilyn’s brother might appear with a wad of money or, failing that, her glasses. She’s been squinting at print for three days now.

Wayne and Marilyn putter through the living room, the bunk rooms, the kitchen. While they do, another clutch of newcomers gathers in the living room.

“I’m surprised I’m not shaking,” said Stan, a 53-year-old alcoholic from Los Angeles County. But when he holds up his hand, it vibrates as if he’s riding a train.

“I can smell the poison comin’ out of me,” said Terry, a bearded young man who sits and sweats in the corner.

“I’m still shakin’ inside real bad,” said Barbara, a grandmother with crude tattoos on her arms and legs. “And now I got a toothache.”

It’s late afternoon now on the porch, and just Wayne and Marilyn are out there. Marilyn has an announcement.

“My brother brought me three packs of cigarettes and put $9 worth of gas in my car. Wouldn’t give me a cent,” she said. “That’s brotherly love.”

The cigarettes are generic. But her brother also brought a bag full of old glasses from their mother’s house. Marilyn tries them on, lamenting her prospects, talking about how she’ll go out and get a waitressing job.

She settles on a pair, which Wayne compliments, and then considers her shoe situation. She’s got a bunch in her car, but none seem to match. Who’s going hire a waitress with shoes that don’t match?

It’s an imponderable question, and for no good reason it makes them both a little giddy. They sit quietly for a moment, two dry drunks on a porch on West 5th Street, circumstances modest, prospects uncertain.

“It’s kind of funny,” said Wayne. “Then again, it ain’t.”

On July 13, Wayne and Marilyn entered the Primary Purpose 30-day treatment program. A week later, program coordinator Marina Ross reported that they were doing well.