Before his addiction took over, Robert Stackhouse had a home “literally with a white picket fence,” he says. He had a wife and son, a steady job as a mechanic, and extra cash to explore his passion for racing and to give generously to his father.
“I really had a life,” reflects Robert, now 45. “I just threw it all away.”
Robert is currently rebuilding his life with the help of Prevention Point Philadelphia (PPP) and its support services, including its reentry services.
“I thought nobody cared. I thought I was on my own. Thank God I ran into you guys,” Robert says.
Growing up in South Jersey, Robert had experimented with narcotics, including cocaine and marijuana, but he saw them as “party favors,” he says.
Life was good—until suddenly, it wasn’t. He and his wife separated, and she moved away with their son. A few years later, Robert’s father died. Robert had spent years building a relationship with his dad, and the pair were closer than ever when the older man was diagnosed with cancer.
“He was big and strong like me, never had a problem in his life and then all of a sudden he had cancer and he was dying,” Robert remembers. “He went from being a big, strong, healthy-looking man to looking like Yoda, a shriveled up old man. It blew my mind. In three months, he was dead.”
The loss “broke me,” Robert says. He used methamphetamine and fentanyl to dull his pain. He lost his house and his job and was soon living on the streets of Kensington, washing with water from a fire hydrant.
“I was doing drugs every day, stealing, getting in fights,” says Robert, who was in and out of jail for misdemeanor offenses during that time. “Everything was the drugs. From the moment you wake up, the drugs. To the time you go to sleep, the drugs. It takes over your life.”
Two years ago, during the forced detox of incarceration, Robert decided he’d had enough. In a prison phone call, he told his fiancée he wanted more from his life. She told him about PPP, which had helped her get a mailing address.
“I had no idea you do all of the things you do,” he says. “I thought it was only a place people came to get their needles.”
With the help of the PPP case manager he calls “my guardian angel,” Robert re-connected with his parole officer and began addressing the unpaid fines that had put him behind bars. He got an established mailing address and applied for an ID for the first time in decades. He took advantage of health services, including repairing his teeth that had been damaged by fighting and living outside. He and his fiancée got off the streets and—with PPP’s continuing support—broke away from the drugs.
“People think couples can’t get sober together. They say you shouldn’t do it because the chances are if one starts using, the other is going to follow,” Robert says. “Not so. Not in my case.”
Now Robert is looking forward. He’d like to resume working as a mechanic, ideally opening his own shop. He wants to help people who, like him, have been derailed by substance use, perhaps teaching his trade to others in recovery.
“I feel bad for people who still have the problem. It’s horrible and nobody understands it unless they’ve actually been there and had to climb their way out of the pit they were in,” Robert says. “I only wish my father could see this.”