1/23/2024 0 Comments Day one portsmouth ohio![]() Their hope was to take back one street, then the next. And so he and a cadre of off-brand saints - the accountant at the town’s Chevy dealership, a second Gulf War vet who bought and flipped buildings, the executives of Portsmouth’s biggest treatment center, among others - pitched in what money, time, and know-how they had. With no help from the state or federal government to count on, it was up to people like King - and the patrons of his gym, the Portsmouth Spartan Kettlebell Club - to piece together something that looked like progress. It was down for so long that the world deemed it past saving: another ghost city on the greasy river that separates Ohio from Kentucky. “I felt safer,” says King, “in Mosul than I did at home.”īut that is the magic and the mission of this town. Syringes in the grass with blood still in the barrel block upon block of empty stores, the plumbing ripped out for scrap. When he returned from the Gulf in 2007, he railed at the lost souls tramping the streets and what they’d wreaked on his hometown. Dale King, an Army captain who did two tours in Iraq, retaking bombed-out cities with a Special Forces unit at the peak of the Sunni rebellion, is as odd a redeemer as you’ll meet in the recovery game. Their leader sits, cross-armed, at the head of this table, his shirt still slick with sweat from his predawn workout. The tribal vibes are fierce in this building - former junkies with Popeye forearms power clean 200 pounds and run trails shoeless. Those sweatbox sessions turn addicts into athletes, and athletes into CrossFit assassins. And, lastly, the secret sauce, the Portsmouth touch: four or five days a week of endurance training in kettlebell gyms like this one. An inpatient bed, following a week of detox an outpatient bed for months of subsidized housing a suite of apprenticeships in the building trades that convert to full-time jobs. And, client by client, Portsmouth reclaims them with months - or sometimes years - of wraparound treatment. They pour in by the hundreds now, these children of the plague: pilgrims from close-by counties who’ve lost everything but the last, faint will to live. With its tax base in tatters, its downtown a graveyard, and its sons and daughters dying in moldy campers, Portsmouth is saving itself by beating the devil - it spawned the most rigorously comprehensive program for opiate addicts. Portsmouth - the birthplace of the opioid pandemic, a city so sunk by the tide of Oxycontin that people used their pain pills as currency, paying for food and Pampers with Oxy 40s - that town is coming back, house by house, powered by its rescue of men like Rooster. Because in Rooster’s resurrection is the tale of this star-crossed city and its impossible return from the grave. ![]() But it’s a story so gripping that we all lean in to hear it, five of us hunched around a conference table at a gym in Portsmouth, Ohio. He speaks in a rasp deracinated of tone, as if those years cooking meth made pulp of his larynx and left him only a husk to tell his story. He has the midnight pallor of an addict who started young, and who - depending on the light - looks 16 or 60, the oldest-living millennial in southern Ohio. It’s his longest such stretch since he was 14. “I fucked my brain up bad that time - hadda learn to walk and talk again from scratch.” “They told me I was dead for seven minutes,” he says, worrying the milk-white scar on his wrist. He lanced the carotid artery and was gone before his forehead hit the floor. Rooster’s last attempt was a two-gram spike of fentanyl into his neck. ![]() He’d been blue for minutes when they summoned EMS they had to pump his stomach to revive him. (An old man hunting arrowheads cut his cold corpse down and pounded on his chest to bring him back.) There was the time he downed a bottle of Percocet in the bathroom of a trap house. There was the time he hanged himself from a tree by the river and swung there, counting heartbeats, till he died. How many ways can a man kill himself before the devil finally says, “Well done?” For Rooster, the answer is unknowable: His seven serious bids didn’t take. ![]()
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