On a bed drenched in sweat, Allan Wilson emerged from a stupor that began decades before. He saw his life through newly sober eyes. It was a horror show.
“I had nothing,” Mr. Wilson, 61, recalled recently at his home in Yonkers. “All I got to show is thirtysomething years of marriage down the tubes, children that are ashamed of me and a majority of my life spent in prison.”
That moment occurred at an inpatient drug detox program in 2002, when Mr. Wilson was 46. He remembers first getting high at age 9, and addiction that started with marijuana and grew to include alcohol and other drugs.
Mr. Wilson is the youngest of 16 siblings and the last surviving member of his family. His parents were dead by the time he was 19. Nearly all of his siblings died from cancer.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Mr. Wilson idolized his brothers’ wayward lifestyles.
“To me, they were like gods,” he said. “They were drug dealers, thieves, armed robbers, womanizers, everything I aspired to be.”
Continue reading the main storyHe began following in their footsteps early on, selling drugs at age 10, committing burglaries by his early teens. At 16, he married.
His choices, he believes, stemmed from an insatiable desire to win approval and assert his manhood, but the results were misguided.
“The only thing it led me to was a life of addiction, a prison record as long as this floor,” he said.
Mr. Wilson served time in several state prisons, incarcerations that total nearly 15 years. In 2002, he was ordered to attend an inpatient drug program at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, on Long Island, where the drug haze finally lifted and a fire started churning within.
“I went to war with addiction,” Mr. Wilson said.
There, he encountered a woman who told him about an Alcoholics Anonymous program held in the basement of a church in Bay Shore, also on Long Island, nicknamed the Pit. She said that she was a regular attendee and lent him a copy of the “Big Book,” the obligatory text for Alcoholics Anonymous. Mr. Wilson went to several meetings, hoping to find her and return her book.
“Nobody there had ever heard of the woman,” he said. “I kid you not. But it got me going to the Pit.”
At that first meeting, Mr. Wilson struggled to get comfortable. He recalled that he was unkempt and probably looked half-crazed. But he forced himself to speak.
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“I don’t know how to live my life,” he told the group. “I need help. I need somebody to show me how to live.”
With help from new friends and forgiving family members, Mr. Wilson adjusted to his new world. He became a regular at Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and found work as a security officer at the office of a tax preparer.
“You start getting stuff back that normal people take for granted,” Mr. Wilson said. “All that stuff’s going to help motivate you, keep you on the straight and narrow.”
In addition to addiction, Mr. Wilson found he had to confront another ghost that had long dogged him. Mr. Wilson has major clinical depression with suicidal tendencies. He said voices nettle him constantly, and make death sound alluring.
These urges have resulted in two suicide attempts. The first was in the late 1970s when Mr. Wilson, lamenting the possible loss of his marriage, leapt in front of a cab. The vehicle sent him hurling through the air and crashing onto the street, leaving him deaf in his left ear.
The second attempt occurred fewer than 10 years ago, after Mr. Wilson became sober and while he was living with his daughter. He described a trancelike state induced by an inner voice coaxing him to put a loaded shotgun into his mouth. He complied, only to yank the barrel loose the same instant he squeezed the trigger. The gun blew a large hole in the wall, which sent family members running to him.
“My grandkids would have ran down to that room and seen me laying there with my head splattered all over,” he said. “I would have traumatized about 10 grandchildren.”
Mr. Wilson’s physical health is also strained. In 2004, he suffered the first of two heart attacks. In 2011, he had a stroke. He was diagnosed with diabetes and in 2016 underwent bariatric surgery. Amid it all, depression remains at the forefront.
“I stay vigilant,” he said. “I got to watch what I allow to take space in my mind.”
Mr. Wilson, who was laid off from his job in 2009 and is divorced, receives each month $735 in Supplemental Security Income, $87 from New York State Supplement Program benefits and $190 in food stamps.
In 2012, he reached out to Westchester Jewish Community Services, a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of the eight charitable organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. A caseworker helped him secure housing in Yonkers.
This year, Westchester Jewish Community Services used $800 in Neediest Cases funds to pay off two months of Mr. Wilson’s phone bills and his Life Alert service, which is dependent on his phone line.
Mr. Wilon’s current goal is to found a nonprofit agency: the Organization for Mental Wellness and Upward Mobility. He has gathered letters of support, attended a grant-writing seminar and sought pro bono legal advice.
“I’m not giving up,” he said of the project.
The pilot program, Taking Back My Dignity, would help adults battling mental illness and substance abuse by teaching them life skills and providing job opportunities. Mr. Wilson believes that this specialized approach of offering redemption to society’s rebuked will end recidivism, something he knows about all too well.
Mr. Wilson attends weekly therapy sessions, takes medication regularly and has a home health aide for 10 hours a day. Additionally, he finds support at his church, Kingdom Christian Cultural Center, specifically from its pastor, James N. Hassell.
Although he has been offered an round-the-clock aide who could intervene if he is ever tempted to hurt himself, Mr. Wilson has refused.
Silence and solitude may court disaster, he said, but he believes these battles are his to fight and to overcome. To that end, he keeps his television on at all times, even at night. Its blaring volume is audible from several doors down his apartment hallway.
“I have to have stuff loud to drown out the voices in my head,” Mr. Wilson said. “If I sit down and listen to them all day, I’ll be in here fighting a losing battle.”
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