One more tip: Buying a bed is like buying a car. You don't have to pay retail. The price is negotiable. Get a good price, then comparison shop. I saved up $500, and then went from place to place asking what I could get in a full size mattress and box spring for that price, including tax and delivery. Anyone who couldn't play ball got a walkout from me. I finally found a mattress marked down from $1,000 to $750, and they gave me that one for $500.
More Than One Set of Sheets
Once you have the new bed, get some sheets. By no means should you sleep on that bare mattress. You shouldn't be sleeping on a bare mattress unless you're living in a squat or in the back of a van, and you shouldn't be doing either one of those things.
Really, you need some bed sheets. Stop sleeping on the bare mattress. You're going to spend some money on the bed. Now spend a little more and protect your investment.
Most discount stores sell sheets. You should know what size your bed is before you go shopping. You can buy a pack that has a full set of sheets including pillowcases. If you get two sets, it's easy to keep a clean set around.
Sheets are something that no one will notice if you have them, but they will definitely notice if you don't. Aside from helping you assimilate into society, it will also prolong the life of your mattress.
Dare I mention mattress pads here? Maybe that's too much for you right now. But there's this other thing that goes between the mattress and the sheets. The human body is kinda gross and dirty. The mattress pad is your mattress' machine-washable defense against the shedding of your humanity.
Bank Account
Get a real bank account. You're a legitimate member of society. Stay away from the check cashing and payroll advance places. You have no need for them. More on those places later.
It doesn't cost anything to set up a checking account. Shop around and find a bank that doesn't charge you monthly fees. If you can't get a fee-free account, shop for the lowest fees. These fees will be much less than what the check cashing people were taking out.
Credit Card
It's hard to live a regular life in this country without a credit card. Many jobs require hotel stays, and you will be asked to leave a card for incidentals, even if you don't plan on using any incidentals. You can't rent a car or a DVD without a credit card. It's likely, however, that you won't be able to get a regular card.
Once you have a bank account, talk to a bank officer about getting a secured credit card. You must leave a deposit, which they will put in an interest-drawing savings account, and the bank will give you a line of credit. I did this with $300. I put my phone bill on an automatic payment through my credit card and then put the credit card payments on automatic payment from my checking account. This is easy enough to do. I never missed a payment.
Within six months, I was getting offers in the mail for other credit cards. Most of them weren't good deals; they came with high interest rates and big annual fees. I ignored those. But my regular payments on my secured card were reporting good news to the credit services.
After a year, the bank gave me back the deposit with interest and my secured card became a regular credit card. Every so often, they raise my limit. It's big enough now to handle all my bills.
The only warning here is that it is our tendency as addicts to max out our credit. We want to get something today and not have to pay for it. There is a consequence to this behavior. I don't rack up more debt than I can pay off at the end of the month. I don't want to pay any interest for the quick satisfaction of having a big screen TV or a nice vacation.
A DVD Player and a TV
The point of this one is that you need to occupy your time in those weird hours. There's that weird time between a meeting and sleep that you have to fill. It's these idle hours that drove me crazy. Those are the hours that the liquor store seems really close. There are also much less dangerous, but still bad, ideas. Calling up old girlfriends who really don't want to talk to you again is one that comes to mind.
While cable TV may be out of your price range, it's not that hard to get hold of a TV and a DVD player. You probably don't realize how easy these are to come by. A lot of people have spare ones sitting around that they're not using anymore. People don't want to throw away a working TV just because they don't have a room in the house without one. When the new flat screen comes home, the old, fat, bulky TV gets retired to a room they don't use, like a boxer getting a greeting job at a casino. They'd rather give Old Clunky away. But who doesn't have one? You.
New DVD players are only about $40. That even looks weird to type. I remember when they were $800. Used TVs are really cheap at all the thrift stores. So even if you can't find one for free, buying one won't be much.
When I first got sober, I'd go to a meeting and hit the video store afterwards. They had old movies for a dollar or two and two-day rentals.
At night, my mind was not calm in the least. I spun through past circumstances, worried about the future, and generally, freaked out about the state of my existence. I was too scattered to read, I already had a day's worth of program stuff, I didn't really want to talk to anyone, but I needed to focus attention outside of myself. Enter the high school teen movie.
Kitchen Stuff
At one point I owned some pans and some silverware, but I can't remember where they disappeared to. I used to have a coffee grinder and a French press. I had bowls and glasses. Then they all went away.
I've left a lot of things behind. I'm not sure where it all went, but when I did get sober, I had nothing that belonged in a kitchen.
I lived in a series of houses and used whatever was there. During holiday season, I'd pick up the package with the bottle and the two glasses. I was drinking alone, so the second glass was for when I broke the first one or for the second day of drinking, whichever came first.
The point is to live like a normal person. After years of scoring drugs and using, it's really easy to score food in the same way. The natural inclination will be to subsist off food that you can buy somewhere else. You'll get little bags of fast food as a substitute for little bags of drugs.
Maybe you'll never be much of a cook. But you definitely can't cook without pots and pans, and you need things to eat out of. So get them. Even if you're making ramen noodles or mac and cheese, making your own dinner is a further step into normal.
Phone
I don't know how 12 Step worked before the cell phone. Really. What went on? This all started before answering machines were even common. Back then, when you called somebody, they answered, you got a busy signal, or it just rang until you hung up the phone.
Get a phone. As soon as you can. Get a plan that allows for lots of texting and anytime minutes. People will call you anytime. They will call at noon, they will call at two a.m. They will call you in crisis, they will call you drunk, and they will call with inane questions.
The phone is great for those Fuck-It moments. When I'm ready to quit my job over some dumb thing that happened in the office, when I feel like getting into a fight over the slightest infringement on my pride, when I feel the shroud of self-pity coming over me, I call someone. It's that easy.
DANNYBOY
I sometimes joke that I didn't recognize Dannyboy when he came into the group because he wasn't on fire. Dannyboy was one of those guys I always used to see with a cast on one leg one week and on the other leg the next week. But I never ever saw him slow down.
Dannyboy is one of the Dog Patch Winos. I'm not really sure how to describe them; the best I can do is to say they're like a biker gang without the bikes. They have all the hell-raising