Two Families in Recovery : AN ADDICT’S ODYSSEY : ‘I Had Dreams. Loaded, I Lost Those Dreams’

With her blond pageboy, jeans and Doc Martens boots, Lisa Parker looks like a fashion-page version of a punk rocker. But as she talks of her cocaine addiction, episodes somersaulting over one another, the truth becomes as obvious as the tattoo that crawls out onto her shoulder.

Emaciated, with eyes dead and blackened by drugs and fatigue, Parker roved for years among punks and skinheads, pumping herself with lethal cocktails of illicit substances, robbing friends’ parents, conning counselors, escaping treatment centers.

Of her three former closest friends, one is dead, one is a paraplegic--the victim of an accident during a police chase--and one is in jail, charged with attempted murder. But Parker has survived and, clean for two years, she now meets weekly with young addicts at Orange County’s Juvenile Hall, one of the many places she was locked up.

Her tale begins with an incident so seemingly trivial that none of the other family members remember it:

One day, as she was passing her mother’s bedroom, she saw her mother and her older brother, Michael, playing and hugging. When she glanced at them, Michael returned a look of rejection that his sister felt was saying, ‘This is my mom.’ Parker was 5, already pretty, popular, “the easy child”--and dangerously jealous of her brilliant, demanding brother.

Her divorced parents had remained friends but engaged more in intellectual discussion with their children than in emotional expression. By the time she was 11, Parker had become irreversibly alienated from her family.

The first incident of her addiction occurred in elementary school, when she sneaked a bottle of vodka from her mother’s liquor cabinet. “I plugged my nose. I tilted my head back, and I drank,” she says. “I knew it would make me not feel.”

Parker woke up in the hospital, telling her parents she wanted to die.

Soon she began dealing speed out of her junior high school locker and inhaling butane. At 14, she committed her first burglary, stealing more than $7,000 from a neighbor’s house. (She eventually paid most of it back). The next year her parents sent her on vacation to Germany, thinking the change might do her good. But she fell in with the local skinheads, and for the first time she sensed how deadly excitement could be.

Back home, punks and skinheads continued to be her ersatz big brothers. They partied in empty lots, waking up coughing dirt, and robbed a house on Christmas Eve. Parker collected knives, handguns and swastikas and had an iron cross tattooed on her back.

While her brother was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she entered Juvenile Hall.

At the height of her addiction, Parker remembers shooting up the night’s last fix of cocaine. “I was playing doctor and getting my friends high. I was so high that when I went to do mine, I couldn’t. My hands were shaking too bad.

“I sat there for two hours sticking the needle in my arm over and over, up and down, and on my hands and legs. By the time I got the cocaine into my arm, the needle was all full of blood. The next day I had huge bruises. I was so desperate. I was totally thrashed.”

Parker’s parents sent her to KIDS of El Paso in Texas, a franchised treatment program that has been investigated by police and public officials following clients’ complaints of abuse. KIDS officials deny such allegations.

Under confrontational treatment methods, which included physical restraint and belittling by other clients, Parker says she lost her menstrual period for nine months. But she was not subdued.

Humiliated by two patients during a rap session, she recalls, “all this anger burst, and I just socked this chick straight up the nose. I went ‘Bom!’ and pushed it up in her head. I bit through the other chick’s finger.”

Later, she says, she suffered for her rebelliousness. In one disciplinary action, she recalls being picked up and dropped on a tile floor. “I landed on my face. Then they turned me on my back. They had one person on each leg, and one on each arm and at my head.

“A staff member said, ‘You’re never going to hit anybody again. Make it hurt.’ The kids started pulling my legs apart until my back was coming off the ground.” Parker says she was held down for 13 hours, twice urinating on herself.

Shortly afterward, she escaped.

In all, she escaped three times, then embarked on a three-month last flight with stolen cars, drugs and guns.

Finally, in June, 1989, while her parents were in Boston attending her brother’s graduation, she faced reality.

“I realized, ‘Wait, they’re not even looking for me.’ The police were (because of outstanding warrants), but my parents weren’t. I mean, my parents had hunted me down in the weirdest places. I felt like I didn’t have anyone. It was like getting thrown against a brick wall.”

Parker turned herself in to the Tustin Hospital Medical Center. “It was the first time I’d ever walked into a (treatment center) by myself,” she says. “When I was a little girl, I had all these dreams of life, where you grow up and get married and have children and a career. Loaded, I lost all those dreams. That wasn’t going to happen for me. I was going to end up living in a hotel room with children on welfare and a husband in prison. Now I have back all those dreams.”

Counseling has helped the family re-establish strong ties. “Some kids get clean and they blame their family,” Parker says. “I just say my family did the best job they could. Now we’re making amends.”

Since her treatment, she has remained clean--though she still attends a full schedule of recovery sessions for herself and others. Putting together a daily life, she takes community college courses in writing and graphic design and even frequents punk rock gigs--drug- and drink-free.

And, when the youths at Juvenile Hall wonder if the road to recovery isn’t too tough, she tells them, “You don’t have to give up everything. A lot of cool people get clean.”