Making changes for a better life

One family's journey through substance abuse

He believes it was the empty stomach that put him over the top, not the two 40-ounce malt liquors. After all, he had handled that much alcohol before. His mother estimates it was more than 80 ounces that brought his blood alcohol to .258 that night — more than three times the legal limit for an adult.

Nick Rivelli’s parents were acting on the best of intentions when they made the educated decision to move their bright, outgoing son ahead one year in school. They consulted specialists, who administered tests. His mother, Stephanie Horoszko, mined her own background in speech pathology for cues. He was smart, he was confident, he was ready.

“We were afraid he would be bored in school,” Horoszko says. “Our whole goal as parents has been to raise happy, productive children. We had no idea we could be doing it wrong.”

An average-sized kid, Rivelli felt smaller than the rest. He knew he was younger, and so did they. He also knew that, in many cases, he was smarter. So did they.

“The teasing was the worst in eighth grade,” Rivelli says. “One kid, knowing I was allergic, rubbed poison oak on me, and I blew up like a balloon. I was younger and smaller than everyone else. I was the little guy, the target.”

“You were right in the middle,” says his mother.

“It always bothered me,” he says. “I had no friends. But one kid seemed nice to me, a little stoner guy. I smoked pot for the first time at the end of eighth grade.”

It wasn’t just school that contributed to Rivelli’s vulnerability. The dynamics at home were unstable and unsettling, eroding the support system that might have offset his experiences among his peers.

“My family situation wasn’t good,” he says. “My parents were always fighting, always yelling and screaming at each other or screaming at us. It wasn’t a model environment for me to bring up my stuff.”  Rivelli arrived at Monterey High School for his freshman year, a 13-year-old boy lost in a sea of high school kids and terrified that, once again, he’d have no friends. 

But he was smart and outgoing, so he actually made friends quickly. Just not the best kind.

“I remember the first time I smoked pot in high school,” he says, “but it wasn’t til the fourth time that I actually got high. It was before school, and I’d never felt it before, had never been under the influence. I thought, ‘This is crazy good.’ I went to class feeling it, acting like it; people knew — everyone did. They had to.”

His parents were catching on as well.

“We had found empty packets of cough medicine,” Horoszko says, “and I discovered that some of my prescription drugs were missing. So we took Nick to the Clint Eastwood Youth Program (at Community Hospital’s Recovery Center), where they evaluated his behavior and decided to make a deal with him. If he didn’t drink or use drugs, he was good to go. But if he did, then he had to come back for their 28-day recovery program.”

Rivelli actually went sober on his own that entire summer after ninth grade. But the dry spell ended when summer did.

“I knew if my parents caught on, I’d get in trouble,” he says, “and I really didn’t want to, so I stayed clean. But once I got back to Monterey High in the fall and started seeing all my friends again, I got back into it. After that, my drinking and drug use escalated to the point where I was smoking pot plus a pack of cigarettes on a daily basis.”

Rivelli never actually got into trouble at school for smoking pot. In fact, he almost never got into trouble outside his home.

“Only two times was I in deep enough at school to get into trouble with the law,” he says. “One time, the campus cops caught me smoking cigarettes. The other time, I got suspended for ditching school. I used to have really long hair, so I was easy to spot. They watched me walk off campus, could tell it was me in the distance, so they suspended me. I ditched school all the time. I just didn’t want to be there.

“That’s how it got to be in 10th and 11th grade. This is where I found friends, which is the main reason I did it. People wanted to be with me. I’d go to school just to meet friends, ditch, hop a bus to Marina, and get high till 7 or 8 at night.”

But then there was that night when the bus turned into an ambulance ride to Community Hospital, where Nick was treated for alcohol poisoning and released to the custody of his parents, pending that promised return visit to the Recovery Center.

“The last thing I remember is finishing the beer I was having,” says Rivelli. “I came to six hours later after leaving the emergency room while walking to my parents’ car. It was Labor Day weekend 2004, at the start of my junior year of high school. My parents had to wait through the holiday to sign me up at Clint Eastwood.”

Rivelli completed the 28-day recovery program and returned to school in October. By the end of November, he was once again smoking pot, drinking, and ditching school. Within two months, he also started ditching home.

“I wasn’t even 16 yet,” he says. “I had no high school diploma and was not really going to school. Still, I thought, ‘I’m going to run away and fend for myself, escape the pressure, the confrontations, the lies. Eventually the cops will stop bringing me home.’ So I did. And they did.”

Rivelli paid for his habit with his $5-a-week allowance, supplemented by weekend weeding and lawn mowing. He also skipped lunch to reallocate his lunch money to drugs.

“My brother Dominic, who was 13 at the time, had this big change jar in his room,” Rivelli says. “He had like a million quarters in there, so I could take about $3-worth, and he wouldn’t even notice.”

“He also stole $20 from me,” says sister Angela, now 12.

In addition to using his younger brother’s coins to support his habit, Rivelli introduced his sibling to drinking and drugs.

And then one day they came. Right to his house, walking right up the driveway. And he knew, the moment he saw them, that he shouldn’t have come home that day, that he would have run if he could have, and that he was going away for a long time.

They were the “Gentle Giants,” custodians who would escort Rivelli to a wilderness program in Utah, where he would spend two-and-a-half months before getting into a high school recovery program in Texas that would both consume and save his life during the next year.

“Had I known they were coming,” Rivelli says, “I wouldn’t have come home. My parents had signed my custody over to these people, who told me I was leaving right then. ‘You can do this the easy way or the hard way,’ they said. ‘You can get in the car, or we can handcuff you and put you in the car. We don’t like to do that in public if we don’t have to.’ I asked if I could say goodbye to my parents. They said ‘No.’ I started crying, but I accepted the fact that I was going and got in the car.”

He left with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a whole lot of fear. He was not permitted to speak to his family for the next 10 weeks.

“I got sent away one week before my 16th birthday and before spring break,” he says. “My parents knew what they were doing. At first, I was unwilling to take a look at what I was doing. I spent the first week trying to tell people I didn’t need to be in their wilderness program.

“I used drugs the first four weeks I was there by taking another kid’s sleep aid. But then I started to catch on. The wilderness program is not a permanent thing. It takes you out of your situation and teaches you how to behave. Had I not gone there, I would have tried to bolt from [the school in Texas].”

Rivelli also believes he would not have accepted his recovery process had his counselor at the Recovery Center not recommended to his parents that he be enrolled in an immersion program.

“Had we not hooked up with the team at the Recovery Center, a place that really knows kids, we wouldn’t have sent Nick to Texas,” Horoszkosays Horoszko. His counselor, Noah Shumpert, knew he needed it. I think it all depends on the individual. There are kids who get it in 28 days, maybe those who are not in as deep as Nick was. And there are others, like Nick, who need to be pulled out of their situation.”

The therapeutic boarding school in Texas, based on Positive Peer Culture, was developed by Harry H. Vorrath and Larry K. Brendtro, as explained in their book by the same name. The central position of their philosophy is that young people can develop self-worth, significance, dignity, and responsibility only as they become committed to the positive values of helping and caring for others.

“It took me a few months of being there to get that I needed to be there,” Rivelli says. “I was really manipulative and sneaky and able to think quickly. But in Texas, every other kid was like that, too. ‘You can’t hustle a hustler,’ we’d always say. Everyone in my group had been through it and was able to see what I was doing and confront me on it. I told them I could still do drugs on the outside, and they said, ‘You’re an idiot; you wouldn’t be here if you could.’”

One of the first things Rivelli decided to do was to write a letter to his younger brother, apologizing for getting him into drugs and alcohol and to tell him to “knock it off.” “I told Dominic,” Rivelli says, “that if he wanted to end up in Texas like me, to keep doing what he was doing. I never would have gotten my little sister into it; I was 13, so she was 9 then. I didn’t feel it was right. Besides, my dad told me that if I ever gave her anything he’d kill me.”

Meanwhile, Rivelli’s parents were taking a look at their own lives, at their roles in their son’s descent into drinking and drug use. “It’s amazing how much you bail your kids out,” says Horoszko, “actually believing you’re helping them. In reality, we’re hurting the child by not allowing him to suffer the consequences of his actions and learn from that."

“People say that sending my child away must have been the hardest thing. It wasn’t. I’d gotten to the point where I understood that my child has an addiction. Fifteen months ago, we didn’t know if he would graduate from high school. We didn’t even know if he would survive. I had to help my child by getting myself together first. My ultimate goal is to raise healthy, self-sufficient adults who contribute to life in a fulfilling way. It takes a village to raise a child, and we used the Recovery Center as that village.”

Rivelli graduated from high school this past May and subsequently earned a scholarship, which he has applied to his courses at Monterey Peninsula College. He is hoping to become a sociological portrait photographer.

“Something I learned in rehab,” he says, “is that I took everyone’s energy away just to deal with me. My life — everyone’s life — is a lot better without the drugs. The best thing is that I don’t have anything to hide. I’ve left the lifestyle of secrecy and lying behind. The mental shift is even better than the physical health."

“But every day I have to stay the course. It means making new friends and staying busy in a town that has nothing to do. If I walked downtown right now, I could get anything, any kind of drug I wanted. That presents a challenge.”

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