Every Brilliant Thing Montana Tour 2019
Days 22–28: Great Falls, Lewistown, Malmstrom Air Force Base, Conrad, Shelby, Havre.
It’s the first Sunday night of the summer and I’m in Room 147 of the Quality Inn in Havre, MT (Population: just shy of 10,000, Nickname: “The Crown Jewel of the Hi-Line”).
The Hi-Line refers to the stretch of Montana which runs east-west along Rte. 2, just south of the Canadian border, from North Dakota to the front range of the Rockies.
The Hi-Line is marked by open prairies, cattle farms and wheat fields, and in the day since we arrived here in Havre, I’ve also noticed a plain adorable abundance of wild rabbits hopping about town. But to most Montanans, Havre has a more notorious distinction: that of being one of eastern Montana’s major distribution centers for meth and opioids.
On the day before I left Georgia last month, I was having a farewell drink with friends when I mentioned to our server that I was planning to spend the summer in Montana. Rather than a response of “Oh it’s beautiful there,” or “I’ve always wanted to go there,” I was surprised when she returned with, “Jeez, that sucks. That place is just all meth, isn’t it?”
And though I would never go so far as to describe this incredible state as “just all meth,” like many rural areas of the country, it turns out, sadly, that crystal meth addiction is a fact of life here.
In a press conference last year, Montana Attorney General Tim Fox stated:
”Montana is in the midst of a substance abuse crisis. We see it all around us every day, rising crime rates, the deaths of our friends and loved ones.” In 2016, Fox started AID (Addressing the Impact of Drugs) to try and coordinate law enforcement efforts to crack down on the problem. In 2005, the Montana Meth Project was started by businessman Thomas Siebel to help combat first-time/teen use. And as you might’ve guessed, Montana’s rampant substance abuse problem is also one of the contributing factors to its high rate of suicide.
In other words, it’s one of the reasons I have a job this summer, as well as something that feels important to think about as we traverse the state.
According to the Montana Meth Project,
“We need to find new ways and new people coming forward and sharing their personal accounts,” says director Amy Rue. “The more we can stir these authentic conversations about where meth will take you and where people have ended up and what they’ve lost and what they’ve traded.”
It’s difficult to picture the seriousness of this issue as I write this tonight from a makeshift sheet-and-pillow fort on the floor of my hotel room at the Quality Inn.
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This week, now that Rosie and I have sort of settled into the rhythm of this tour (with the show well up on its feet and the novelty of in-room-coffee-makers wearing off) we also found that the time had come to make things a little more personal.
Personal Show Thing #1:
After our third show of the week, (a spirited and very informative matinee at Malmstrom Air Force Base) Rosie and I agreed that rather than swapping roles daily, we would instead try swapping weekly. This would allow us to build more momentum within each role (we’d been having trouble with this) but also required a level of trust that we just hadn’t established before now.
Personal Show Thing #2:
On Thursday morning, as we drove from Belt (which is near enough to Malmstrom AFB that we couldn’t resist paying another visit to Amy and Mayor Jim again) and Conrad, where our Thursday night show was booked, Rosie and I began a conversation about how we needed to make the post-show discussions more powerful than they had been.
The conundrum was that since our panels already include mental health professionals and Rosie and I are both chiefly theater artists with similar mental health training, it seemed redundant for us to appear at the talkbacks armed with the same statistics and talking points that professionals could deliver much more effectively.
What we realized Thursday morning, though, was that though we may not be equipped with extensive experience in mental health, what we do have is our willingness to share, and boldly at that.
In other words, we both have big mouths. That’s not always a plus, but we realized that in this context, it might be.
So by the time we arrived at the venue in Conrad, the vision we had for the show was that from the moment the audience enters until the moment they leave, we needed to create a space where people would be comfortable sharing their stories and expressing their emotions courageously.
But how could we quickly cultivate that sort of atmosphere?
Every night as the talkback begins, either Rosie or myself have the opportunity to kick off the discussion anyway we choose. And up until now, the default has been to begin somewhat somberly, with a general introduction to the tour’s mission, before moving on to introducing our local mental health professionals, and then opening the conversation to questions from the audience.
There are certain talking points that we’ll hit (the reasons for Montana’s high suicide numbers, the resources that we’ve brought [literature, gun locks, medication disposal bags]) as well as some talk about the signs and symptoms to look for.
After that, we’ll interview our panel and hope that the audience has questions for them to answer. Up until now, it’s been a slow-moving mill of information, and the ritual of it, it seems, has been to provide a room full of people with the opportunity to give this issue the attention and seriousness it deserves.
But we realized the other day how different that is from starting the work ourselves, right there in the room.
For example:
The first time I smoked crystal meth was with my friend Matthew Novick during the year I attended New York University when I was 18 years old.
During this period, my roommates and I fancied ourselves chemical cowboys, willing to try any new drug we could get our hands on.
Fortunately for me, meth wasn’t even close to one of my favorites. It didn’t give me the same creative burst that cannabis did, nor the symphonic, Jungian sense of purpose of psilocybin; it was just another upper, less expensive than cocaine, sure, but also less readily available than my roommate’s Ritalin.
So after a few excursions marked by long nights with friends chain-smoking menthols while trying to name every movie that had been released between 1981 and 1983, I sort of forgot about meth until I moved to Colorado Springs two years later.
In the Springs, meth was just a part of living. There are a few reasons for this, but the main ones are poverty, easy access, and a plain old lack of things to do in town. Working at a brewpub with a bunch of twenty and thirty-somethings from town, I soon discovered that at any given moment, there were several ounces of meth on the premises, and if I wanted, I could have access to it any time of day.
During my year in the Springs, I ended up smoking a fair amount of crystal myself but mostly spent time around folks who were on it regularly. It wasn’t uncommon at the time to be working with someone who had been up for 2–3 days or to come home to find one of my roommates maniacally consolidating all of the mayonnaise in the fridge and rambling about the wastefulness of glass jars.
Rosie (with her permission to tell this story), on the other hand, found herself pretty enthralled with meth and alcohol most of the time between 7th and 11th grade, by which point, she had been arrested a handful of times, been enrolled in several treatment programs and eventually, wasn’t even allowed to leave the state for college, as she was still involved in a federal investigation into drug trafficking. By the time she was 17, though, she was in recovery and sober, which she has now been for the 23 years since.
Friends and family of Rosie’s won’t be surprised when I say that she has a lot of colorful stories from her “troubled years.” I got to hear a lot of these as we drove around Helena together and she pointed out spots where she used to score, where she used to spend the night, where she’d been arrested. During this period, she also attempted suicide twice; once not very seriously, and the other more so.
Over the past few weeks, I’d noticed Rosie’s high school suicide attempts starting to creep into our post-show discussions, and so as we brainstormed how to make the talkbacks more effective, I realized that the answer had to be sharing our own stories. If we were going to try and convince these communities that frank discussion was their most powerful and readily available resource, then it was our job to model that candor and vulnerability ourselves.
So last Thursday night in Conrad, Rosie started the talkback thus:
“Hi, I’m Rosie- you just saw me onstage. Thanks for being here. My first attempt at suicide was when I was 14 and honestly, it wasn’t very serious. I mostly wanted attention, and oddly enough, only one of my friends talked to me about it at all, and she barely knew what to say. My next suicide attempt was a year later and was a little more serious, but obviously…unsuccessful. I’m 23 years sober now, and during that time, I’ve developed a lot of coping skills, I’ve got people around that care about me, and I’ve worked hard to know how to take care of myself. Nonetheless, a few years ago, I was in a pretty rough spot, one of my kids had a serious medical issue, my marriage had hit a bump, and to be honest, I started having suicide ideations, and could’ve very easily reverted back to that old behavior if it wasn’t for the coping mechanisms I’d developed over the years. So instead of dwelling in that darkness, I made myself a list. Now, this was before I’d ever even heard of this play. But included on that list was that I wanted to do a one-woman show before I turned 40 (Author’s note: Rosie’s 40th birthday was on June 4th) and also that I wanted to do some sort of theatre activism that was going to feel meaningful. So here I am.”
Unsurprisingly, that talkback proved to be the most open, most honest and brought out the frankest discussion that we’d seen since the tour began.
I’m back onstage this week, starting with a show in Malta on Tuesday night, and though I haven’t ever attempted suicide personally, I was recently hit with some news that brought it frighteningly close to home.
The night after our first show of the tour, in White Sulphur Springs, I received a text from Sam Polcer, one of my other dorm-mates from that year at NYU, which read simply, “Google Matthew Novick.”
When I did, the first hit to come up was an article from the Bennington, VT newspaper about how my old college drug buddy been charged with attempted murder following an incident in January where he’d fired on state troopers with an assault rifle. Doing the math, I realized that this was just as I was receiving the call from Grandstreet Theatre offering me the job as one half of their suicide prevention tour of Montana.
After college, Matt had moved out of the city and up to Vermont, where he’d begun isolating himself, and apparently, amassing a collection of firearms (one article said the police found over 60 in his home). I knew that he’d gone through a series of mental health issues, but until Sam texted me, I had no idea that these had culminated in a complete breakdown where he’d attempted “suicide by police.” Although Matthew took a bullet, thankfully, nobody else was hurt, but currently, my old chemical cowpoke friend is awaiting sentencing, where he faces up to 35 years in prison.
And so here we are.
Items to add to the list this week:
1,000,010: Telling the truth, fearlessly.
Thanks for reading.
See you next week.
Ry
