Ok, I want to make this clear before I get started- I’m sober today through the grace of god and the fellowships of AA and Na. My name is Pauly j.
I wasn’t always a spiritual person, as a matter of fact, I was anti [god] at one point in my life. I was born Italian catholic in Philadelphia in 1974, and being Italian and catholic has its own world of chaos and rules, quite a paradox indeed! In order to satisfy my family I was expected to be an alter boy at a young age and attend parochial schools, get confirmed by the church and go to confession weekly. I never put much thought into any of that, except my parents both came to America in the early twenties, old schoolers from the old country they were.
So I’m sure you understand when I say, it was kind of on the strict side and god was taken very seriously. But I was young and a bit care free when it came to religion, I was taught theology with a ruler up and down my backside and a lot of Pain and fear, it’s tough to love and understand a god that lets nuns kick the crap out of you! I’m not putting blame for my wild behavior and attitude on the schooling, I just learned to rebel at an early age.
Moving ahead to my first contact with alcohol, I’ll make this brief, as an altar boy I drank the wine used for communion as did the older boys who turned me on to it! I was found sleeping in the back of the church, as 7:15 am mass was going on, I was drunk! And my mother was told never bring him back here again.
Ok, moving along, I graduated catholic elementary school and was off to high school Good choice of word, [high] school, because I had already by the age of nine, smoked my first joint, and been drunk many times, mostly on weekends and family functions!
At one point in catholic high school, I had three people selling joints for me and it was my only reason for even showing up, [to collect my money and pass out more weed to my sales force]! I got through school by a thread.
My next recollection was keg parties and some hard core drugs like crank, not crack, crank, it was like ice is today, but it had to be either snorted or injected, and glorious mind freeing lsd! Orange sunshine! Acid!!!! I loved it; I was a latent hippie at heart anyway! I was heading straight towards an on coming train and I never knew or cared! What I remember through the fog now as I write this, is how at some point my close good friends started scaling back their drug and alcohol use, and I was full steam ahead.
As my circle of friends went off to college and or started families, I progressed in the addictions I had formed early on. I found new people like me that were willing to just about do anything to get and use drugs and drink! Simply put, I was doing whatever it took to continue to escape life!
Years passed, jobs came and went by the dozens, my living arrangements were who ever or wherever I could squat basically, I used people to no end, I prayed on them as if I was Dracula, I sucked the life out of many who loved me and those who barely knew me as well. I had no conscience at all, no feeling and no heart for the ones I was crushing emotionally. If my hands weren’t in my pockets, they were in yours! I stole if you didn’t give to me freely, enough said?
Now off to prison in p.a. 1990, graterford prison in Pennsylvania was at that time the second largest prison in the country, and one of the oldest. 5500 inmates and counting! I got sentenced to five years for burglarizing a warehouse I had worked at on one Sunday; I went right into the office and wrote myself 4 four thousand dollar checks out of the ledger book, and I put them in my own name,, you see, I was in the middle of that crack epidemic from about 85 to now I guess, I cashed two of them before I was caught, I came clean to the cops but was pretty much forced into confessing quite a few of my wrong doings, and got a harsh sentence! I deserved worse!
I got out of prison after two and a half yrs on state parole and within two hours of my release I had a crack pipe in my mouth, it was off to the races! I came back to Philly and my father said you can live here as long as you get a job and no drinking or drugs, that lasted about ten minutes! I went back into the inner-city of Philly and hung out in the badlands and the shooting galleries, I was just days away from trying heroin for the first time.
I was waiting for a runner to get my crack from down the street and a heroin dealer came into the burned out row home we were smoking in, and he handed out about ten dime bags of heroin for nothing, it was new brand on the street called [no joke] That’s the stamp on the bag, they all had catchy names on them stamped in little envelopes back then, I snorted my free sample and proceeded to nod out within minutes, mainly because I hadn’t slept in days!, But there was a revelation, it was a new god in my life, heroin, I felt like a slumbering drooling superman! It felt like I was drifting on cotton candy clouds!
I shot up heroin for the first time later that day, I was in love with this drug and how it made me feel at ease with the world, a peace you don’t get when your smoking crack and running around like a sprayed roach trying to fund that habit! I was a hard core heroin addict from the word go! I even quit drinking because it interfered with my dope money, I lived through horrible winters homeless on the streets for a few years in a row, and I didn’t feel too much
pain, my crimes I committed were pretty much under the radar as far as the police were concerned, you had to pretty much kill somebody to get locked up in Philly back then!
I got sick from not being able to support my habit more often then not, I was miserable and starving to death, I was finally crashing to earth in a big way! God had let me run and dodge him long enough; I was not quite ready though for him! To my rude awakening now, I was in a bar in one of the worst sections of Philly on a Saturday morning, at 7:30 am; yes, they are open that early in the big cities, I was dope sick and pan-handling in the bar, when they had enough of my crap they threw me out on my ***, I looked up at the pay phone and it hit me, call mom!
Mom was always good for a few bucks! Mom was easily scared into giving me money so I wouldn’t do something more drastic to get a fix! I prayed on her worst of all now that I look back on it. So I called collect of course, and for some strange reason I hear the operator asking my sister if she will accept the call, why was my sister there? She was married and lived 100 miles away from there and it was 7:30 in the morning; she accepts the charges and proceeds to get this out in no uncertain terms in a loud voice,
“MOM IS DEAD YOU *******! SHE DIED SIX DAYS AGO! WE BURIED HER TWO DAYS AGO! NO ONE WANT S TO SEE YOU OR HAVE YOU COME AROUND HERE ANYMORE FOR ANY REASON OR THE COPS WILL BE CALLED”!
Then she hung up! I was rocked, only momentarily, I remember it like yesterday and to convey how this disease owned me, it was only minutes before I said to myself, now how will I get my fix today? I didn’t get sober for six months after that!
It’s now mid April 1995, I’m sitting on the front steps of an abandoned house it’s a little cold, I feel nothing, I want to die, I have no point in going on with life, I smell like garbage and I feel I am garbage, I want to die! I was a chicken **** when the thoughts of suicide entered my thoughts; I had fantasized about finding a hundred dollar bill so I could shoot all ten bags at once! I knew it wasn’t going to happen, I thought maybe if I could only get into a situation where the police would blow my head off and it would finally be over! Again, chicken ****, something had to happen and happen soon; good, bad or ugly!
As I sit there, I say to myself out loud, god why did you let this happen to me? How can you be an all loving, caring god? Why was I your target? In other words, why have you forsaken me? And bam!! The light goes on! Those were the words Jesus used on the cross when he asked his father why you have forsaken me? And wow therein lies the answer! I was living in sin; I had been for the most part of my life! God waited for me at this very moment for it to hit me! He had to turn away from even his only begotten son as Jesus took all Our sins and made the new covenant for us, god had to forsake him And me as well!
Man I tell you it was like a bomb going off in my heart and mind! If god seemed so far away from me, who moved? I did, all the time, away from god, as far and as fast as I could! And there he was, ready to save my ***, if only I asked him to! WOW, what a concept, me asking him for help and to take my burden off of me!
I tell you this if your still reading, I remember where I was the weather, the surroundings The time of day, the color of the sky, the smell in the air, what I was wearing, and the Explosion in my heart of god’s hand! I tell you it was the epiphany and the spiritual awakening you only read about in books!
He had waited for me, never left me, and had to let me find him in just this very manner! I had to see how I was wrong about him, I was wrong, I’ve never been more wrong about anything else in my life!
I need to say to you here, that I stayed sober for nine years, till 2004, When I took my will back from god, he proved to me again, that he would never leave me unless I turned from him, which I did, he let me taste my own poison, I had Moved to Florida and had my own home, which I quickly lost, along with my wife and car, and etc, etc, etc, But I’m happy to say im sober almost 5 years now, ive added more god into my program then before, I help more struggling addicts then I did during those nine years, And I feel much more spiritually grounded and healthy!
I include god in all my life now, and I spread the word as much as I can without being annoying! I want this to be my final time finding god, and don’t want to ever try and leave him again. If there is a message im trying to get across to the reader here, it’s this, if you’re struggling, or wondering where god is, hit your knees and with all your heart ask him into your heart! Tell him you’re a sinner! Tell him Jesus is your one and only savior!
Don’t live in misery one more day! God is love! That is a fact!
Written by Pauly J 08/26/11 God bless!

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