The Road to Recovery:
Samples remained an addict for 12 years (from the age of 17 to 28). Based on a photograph his aunt took, Samples admits he began to physically change. Samples said his face was blotchy with yellow pigments. His eyes were blood-shot and watery, and he was chewing his lips off.
He began to see and hear things that didn’t exist.
“I was imagining people coming in the windows wearing straight jackets,” Samples said. “I could hear the electricity from the fridge in the other room. I even unplugged the wires to my garage door. But there was no sound.”
In the beginning, Samples believed he could handle the drugs and alcohol. He watched others he knew take narcotics and still be able to function the next day. Now Samples just watched everything disappear from his life: his job, wife, dreams and sanity.
“No one wanted to stand by me or even be associated with me,” Samples said.
However, there were two individuals who stood by Samples throughout his addiction and recovery: Julie and Donny Geldert, the uncle who got him the job at Prestige.
Samples remembers the night Geldert waited for him at his apartment. Samples said it was days since he had gone to the grocery store because he was high on drugs. As he returned with food and Gatorade in his arms, Samples saw his uncle’s Ford Expedition in the parking lot.
“I just shook my head,” Geldert said of the apartment, furnished only with a futon, pornography, boxes and carpets soiled in dog feces. “I consider Hal a brother, and I would always stand by him. But he needed tough love.”
That’s when Samples realized he hit rock bottom.
“I cried so hard after I figured out what I was sad about,” he said. “I had lost my drinking friend and that person was me. Hal was my pal.”
Samples spent four months at the House of Isaiah, a Christian-based rehabilitation center for men located in Mabank, an hour outside Dallas. Prior to attending the House of Isaiah, Samples was turned away from the Dallas and Fort Worth centers. He had made too much money as a salesman to be considered an indigent to receive state aid.
“I would go to the centers and come right back,” Samples said. “I’d stay at my uncle’s house and detox with his children using me as a jungle gym. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
During his first night of rehab at the House of Isaiah, the director kept Samples awake till 5 a.m. smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.
“I thought I was in a cult,” Samples said. “Later on, I learned to receive the method to the madness.”
Despite his initial reaction, he admits the rehabilitation was a humbling experience. Samples said he slept in a room with 12 other men. His bed was glued together with a hot glue gun and above it was a photograph of himself that his aunt took. Samples used the picture as inspiration, hoping to never become that person again.
“I’d have people asking me who the person in the picture was,” Samples said. “I’d say, ‘That’s me.’ I made it though…I’m at the point where if someone shows me a tape of my family getting beheaded by a terrorist group, that doesn’t mean I need a drink.”
Samples had one relapse since leaving the rehabilitation center, when he received the divorce papers on his birthday, Nov. 4, 2001. He said divorce justified his reason to begin using. However, the drugs didn’t have the same effect.
And he’s been sober since.
“There’s no valedictorian when it comes to this,” Samples said. “It’s still a daily reprieve.”
