He’s Saving Addicts By the Hundreds. Why Is His Hometown Fighting Him?
How many ways can a man kill himself before the devil finally says, “Well done?” For Rooster, the answer is unknowable: His seven serious bids didn’t take. There was the time he hanged himself from a tree by the river and swung there, counting heartbeats, till he died. (An old man hunting arrowheads cut his cold corpse down and pounded on his chest to bring him back.) There was the time he downed a bottle of Percocet in the bathroom of a trap house. He’d been blue for minutes when they summoned EMS; they had to pump his stomach to revive him. Rooster’s last attempt was a two-gram spike of fentanyl into his neck. He lanced the carotid artery and was gone before his forehead hit the floor. “They told me I was dead for seven minutes,” he says, worrying the milk-white scar on his wrist. “I fucked my brain up bad that time — hadda learn to walk and talk again from scratch.”
Rooster, 31, is almost two years sober. It’s his longest such stretch since he was 14. He has the midnight pallor of an addict who started young, and who — depending on the light — looks 16 or 60, the oldest-living millennial in southern Ohio. He speaks in a rasp deracinated of tone, as if those years cooking meth made pulp of his larynx and left him only a husk to tell his story. But it’s a story so gripping that we all lean in to hear it, five of us hunched around a conference table at a gym in Portsmouth, Ohio. Because in Rooster’s resurrection is the tale of this star-crossed city and its impossible return from the grave. Portsmouth — the birthplace of the opioid pandemic, a city so sunk by the tide of Oxycontin that people used their pain pills as currency, paying for food and Pampers with Oxy 40s — that town is coming back, house by house, powered by its rescue of men like Rooster. With its tax base in tatters, its downtown a graveyard, and its sons and daughters dying in moldy campers, Portsmouth is saving itself by beating the devil — it spawned the most rigorously comprehensive program for opiate addicts.
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They pour in by the hundreds now, these children of the plague: pilgrims from close-by counties who’ve lost everything but the last, faint will to live. And, client by client, Portsmouth reclaims them with months — or sometimes years — of wraparound treatment. An inpatient bed, following a week of detox; an outpatient bed for months of subsidized housing; a suite of apprenticeships in the building trades that convert to full-time jobs. And, lastly, the secret sauce, the Portsmouth touch: four or five days a week of endurance training in kettlebell gyms like this one. Those sweatbox sessions turn addicts into athletes, and athletes into CrossFit assassins. The tribal vibes are fierce in this building — former junkies with Popeye forearms power clean 200 pounds and run trails shoeless.
Their leader sits, cross-armed, at the head of this table, his shirt still slick with sweat from his predawn workout. Dale King, an Army captain who did two tours in Iraq, retaking bombed-out cities with a Special Forces unit at the peak of the Sunni rebellion, is as odd a redeemer as you’ll meet in the recovery game. When he returned from the Gulf in 2007, he railed at the lost souls tramping the streets and what they’d wreaked on his hometown. Syringes in the grass with blood still in the barrel; block upon block of empty stores, the plumbing ripped out for scrap. “I felt safer,” says King, “in Mosul than I did at home.”
But that is the magic and the mission of this town. It was down for so long that the world deemed it past saving: another ghost city on the greasy river that separates Ohio from Kentucky. With no help from the state or federal government to count on, it was up to people like King — and the patrons of his gym, the Portsmouth Spartan Kettlebell Club — to piece together something that looked like progress. And so he and a cadre of off-brand saints — the accountant at the town’s Chevy dealership, a second Gulf War vet who bought and flipped buildings, the executives of Portsmouth’s biggest treatment center, among others — pitched in what money, time, and know-how they had. Their hope was to take back one street, then the next. Instead, they stumbled onto something profound: a DIY haven for the hopelessly lost, and a potentially scalable fix for other Rust Belt cities overwhelmed by drugs. Somewhere along the way, they trademarked their plan, calling it The Portsmouth Method. They don’t have a slogan yet, though one’s staring them in the face. Over the door of King’s office hangs his Special Forces banner. It reads, “No one is coming. It’s up to us.”
Rooster was a wraith when he shambled into town, 98 pounds of rag and bone who ate from the trash behind Tim Hortons. Three years later, he weighs 200, a heavily tatted, self-described “box of rocks.” He trains three hours a day after his factory shift ends, then goes home, cooks a couple of skinless chicken breasts, and settles in for a night of kids’ TV. “I ain’t gon’ lie, I’m a freak for Scooby-Doo,” he says. Like so many others here, his development stopped the day he got into hard drugs. But there’s a sweetness about him that’s hard to square with the horrors heaped upon him as a child. He was abused, he says, by an older relation who beat him like “a grown man.” When Rooster was 10, he says, the relative fractured his jaw and busted six of his ribs. Laid up after a hospital stay, Rooster finally got out of bed — and found his family had moved and left no note. He hitched to Cincinnati, where he wound up pitching crack, a white child hugging a corner in an all-Black neighborhood. It went about as well as you’d expect, he says. “They regulated my pale ass on the daily.”
He became a father in his twenties and got himself a straight job, vowing to clean up for his son. “I was workin’ two shifts and puttin’ Jacob first. That little boy was my whole world.” Till the day he left for work and a relative came to visit, fresh off a stint in rehab. What happened next is a jumble to Rooster, lost to the fog of addiction. The gist, he says, is that his small child died and his death broke Rooster in half. “From that day on, I just wanted to die,” he says. “‘Every time I tried, though, I kept comin’ back. Only, more stupider than the time before.”
He means that literally, alas. After surviving the two-gram shot of fenty, he spent nine months relearning baseline functions, among them the ability to read. “I’m gettin’ better at it,” he says. “The big thing givin’ me trouble now is vowels.” His left leg still drags, causing occasional stumbles, and his process memory has holes you could sail a barge through. “I’ve been taking apart car engines all my life, and now I can’t remember where the fuel lines go or how to set the pressures,” Rooster laments. When asked how long ago his son died, he squints, counting backward on both hands. Thirty seconds later: “I — I’m not for sure,” he croaks. “I have young-timer’s bad.”
What’s young-timer’s?
He looks to King for help. “In Portsmouth, they call Alzheimer’s ‘old-timer’s,’” says King. “So, you know, like that, only younger.”
Unsteady as Rooster is, though, here’s a man with a full-time job, driving a car he just bought with his earnings. By summer, when he’s two-years sober, he plans to sign his first lease and bear down on his reading lessons. When King opened his gym here in the Boneyfiddle section of Portsmouth, this former nightlife crawl was dust-bowl barren, its clubs and bars shuttered for 20 years. Now, these cast-iron buildings house loft conversions, and crowded pubs serve grass-fed burgers to the artists and techies moving in. There are stores and museums and a spot around the corner pairing artisanal bourbons with doughnuts. (Yes, doughnuts.) And the laborers who brought those properties back? Most of them were addicts mentored by King and hired by his CrossFit cabal.
They’d be even further along if not for stiff resistance from Portsmouth’s City Council and Facebook haters. “Those people you just named [King and his partners] are knee-deep in making money off rehab, and their success rate is horrible,” says Andy Cole, the city councilman for Portsmouth’s affluent Third Ward. Worse, “they’re vanning in [addicts] from other counties,” dumping “their problem people on us.” Cole concedes he has no stats to back his claims, but says he hears it from his voters every day. “They call to tell me that the place next door just sold and they’re scared it’s gonna be a sober house”; that the homeless population has “absolutely spiked” since the rehab centers opened; and that the people on the street “with face tattoos” are terrifying neighbors.
“There’s a lot of moral judgment from the just-say-no bunch who view addiction as a personal choice,” says Sean Dunne, the personable and enterprising mayor of Portsmouth, who’s tried to steer a middle course. He pushed for — and won — a freeze on clinics till the town could establish standards of care. For his trouble, Dunne was “killed by people in both camps,” especially those “who want the treatment centers gone.” At a fiery town-hall meeting last year, Dunne was dragged by angry residents from Portsmouth’s posher wards. “The leadership has shown they’re not strong enough to control the demise of our city!” cried one. “This is becoming the rehab capital of Ohio!” moaned another.
Tensions are running hot between the two sides, and King and his friends are denounced as “vultures” at town-hall meetings. There’s a war on for the future of his town, King says. “But I already lost a fight in Iraq,” he says. “I’m damned if I’m gonna lose another one at home.”
THE SHORT VERSION of the story goes like this: In 1952, a psychiatrist-cum-adman named Arthur Sackler bought shares in a sleepy drug firm called Purdue Frederick. A polymath persuaded of his own omniscience, Sackler was a world-class promoter of prescription meds. As a kid in high school, he handled ad sales for the student paper — and for that paper’s leading client. At 15, “he was bringing in enough money from these various hustles to help support his family,” reports Patrick Radden Keefe in his lacerating portrait of the Sacklers, Empire of Pain. Sackler’s masterstroke was to market drugs directly to doctors, first through carpet-bomb ads in medical journals, then relentless sales calls upon physicians. He made Valium a blockbuster drug for himself, turned pharma clients into global behemoths, and sold America a disastrous lie — that everyday pain could be safely managed by powerful, lab-made morphine.
Twenty years after he hooked bored housewives on benzodiazepines, Sackler and his younger brothers launched MS Contin, the first time-released opiate, in 1984. It would popularize the notion that an end-of-life drug could be casually prescribed for aches and pains. Sackler died soon after, leaving a galactic fortune, but his life’s work wasn’t wasted on his heirs. In 1996, his brothers rolled out Oxycontin, the pill that swallowed the suburbs whole, addicting the sons and daughters of cops and lawyers. Two things set Oxycontin apart from the opiates that came before. First, it contained a single drug, oxycodone, and so was stronger, gram for gram, than existing meds that mixed opioids with aspirin or Tylenol. Second, it was child’s play to corrupt. If you put one under your tongue, its jacket melted in five minutes, leaving 80 grams of powder to snort or shoot.
“I did my first line at a [college] kegger,” says Max Liles, the captain of the football team at Minford High School when he graduated in 2007. “It was like the warmest blanket on the coldest day — but you could also go and get shit done.” Soon, his sole task was scoring tomorrow’s pills today, and finding someone else to inject him. “I was terrified of needles, but I made a business decision. It was a whole lot cheaper to shoot pills than snort ’em. Till it was cheaper to shoot heroin instead.”
Liles, who’s 34 now, dropped out of college, sold everything he owned or could swipe from vacant houses, and left the care of his infant son to his parents. Like Rooster, he’s an archetype, but a different demographic: the addict who didn’t come from trauma. His parents loved their children (and each other) fiercely, earned professional salaries, and had no history of substance disorder on either side of the family. Clinicians call those virtues “protective factors,” but they counted for next to nothing in Portsmouth. A Rust Belt town that lost its mojo in the Seventies, when the shoe factories and steel foundries bled jobs to Taiwan and Mexico and families left, en masse, for other cities, Portsmouth could barely pay its small police force or collect the trash. Once a post-war model of middle-income kitsch, a place that sold footwear to the free world was effectively shoeless now. One strong push and it would fall into the river. Enter Purdue, and a demon named David Procter.
If the Sacklers could’ve built themselves a doctor from scratch, he’d have walked and talked a lot like Procter. According to Dreamland, by Sam Quinones, the definitive and indelible account of the opioid epidemic in the heartland, Proctor was a small-town physician with big-town tastes; he drove a fleet of sports cars, owned a huge house, and stacked his patients end to end, pushing Xanax and short-haul narcotics. Then along came Oxy, touted by the Sacklers to be tamper proof, time-released — and safe. Less than one percent of users become addicted, read the handouts doctors got from Purdue’s salesmen. Procter’s practice told him different. The line outside his door formed hours before he opened, and new clients arrived by the vanload. They were happy to pay him cash — $250 for a three-minute visit — and to come back faithfully once a month. Those scripts for Oxy 80s would pay their own freight, reselling on the street, where a bottle of 90 pills was worth thousands.
Procter hired ringers to handle the heavy traffic. The doctors he brought in were bottom-feeding hacks, but their licenses to prescribe narcotics were valid in Ohio. Thus was the world’s first “pain clinic” hatched. Soon, there were more than a dozen in Portsmouth, serving a town of 19,000. There was nothing cops could do but arrest the addicts when they brazenly stole from Walmart to feed their habit. “Doctors were protected by the law,” says Jason Hedrick, the deputy chief of Portsmouth’s police department. “Under the rules, it was legal to prescribe for pain, so we couldn’t touch those guys for years.”
Inevitably, Procter — or “the Godfather,” as patients called him — went full-on Scarface crazy. He had sex with female clients, trading pills for favors, and committed such rampant medical malpractice that he finally brought the feds to town. He pleaded to three counts of intent to distribute and was sentenced to federal prison in 2003. Several of his colleagues went to prison with him, and Procter would die in exile in 2019 — but Portsmouth’s mills kept churning out addicts. Finally, state legislators passed a new law in the spring of 2011. House Bill 93 essentially criminalized the mills, putting Portsmouth’s quacks on notice. Coordinated raids by a federal task force rolled up the last of the clinics in 2012. “When we went to those places, we’d always see the same things,” says Hedrick. “There’d be lots of medical equipment — MRIs and lab carts. But the machines weren’t always plugged in.”
Liles, the former captain of the football team, describes what happened next: “If Oxy and Percocet’s the god you pray to, then Jesus will make a way.” Salvation lay 90 miles north, in Columbus, where balloons of black-tar heroin filled the void. “Heroin and Oxy are chemical cousins, the difference being that black-tar heroin will keep you high all day for a fifth of the price of Oxy,” says Quinones. Liles would drive the round-trip once a week, come home with half an ounce to feed his head, and sell the other half to stay solvent. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Portsmouth’s users did likewise; the stretch of U.S. 23 that connected the two cities became known as Heroin Highway. Liles eventually cleaned up, spurred by the passing of his father. He went back to college, earned a social-work degree, and took a job at the treatment firm that had helped him: the Counseling Center (TCC) in Portsmouth.
TCC began life in 1980 as a tiny outpost treating alcoholics. “We had two or three employees, and our only aim was to get folks to AA meetings,” says Andy Albrecht, CEO of the center. An ex-client who became a counselor, then climbed the company ladder, he’s had a front-row seat as the agency grew into the premier rehab chain in Ohio. “No one here imagined we’d have 500 staffers or twentysomething sites just in Portsmouth. But it wasn’t like we had much choice. The pill mills kept sending folks in waves.”
It was TCC that lit the first flare about Oxycontin, allowing local reporters in to talk to clients about the new drug ruling the streets in 1997. TCC was rewarded for its courage with a call from Purdue’s lawyer, who warned that the center would be sued for even implying that Oxy was addictive. So TCC piped down and went about the business of paying close attention to its clients. What those clients asked for wasn’t treatment — but hope after treatment. A safe place to live once their 90 days were up. A job skill that paid them a living wage. A caseworker to help clear the wreckage they’d left behind — a suspended driver’s license; a pile of debts; visitation rights with their kids.
TCC responded by doing what other firms wouldn’t, spending its meager Medicaid dollars to meet those urgent needs. It built a safe haven for pregnant addicts and women with small children. It bought and converted houses, opening a string of sober homes. It moved to an old grade school and made vocational-ed labs out of former classrooms. Whatever came in by way of state and federal dollars went out to fund new add-ons. A department to handle clients straight from prison. Nutritionists to treat obesity in patients. “Then we caught a break [in 2013],” says Albrecht. “Our governor at the time [John Kasich, a Republican] was brave enough to take [Obamacare].”
That Affordable Care Act expansion lowered the bar to entry, bringing tens of thousands of addicts to treatment across the state. Still, TCC couldn’t meet the demand, as all of those strung-out seniors — and their thirtysomething children — trooped through the intake door. “We’d get grandmas with four different drugs in their system, lookin’ like tomato-soup sandwiches,” says Liles, who’d signed on as a counselor in 2014. “We thought we’d hit our bottom when the speedballs started — meth and smack shot in the same needle. Then the fenty came and we saw what the bottom really looked like.”
It looked, he says, like a graveyard full of dead kids.
DALE KING WAS IN Iraq when his hometown went up in flames. He’d hear from friends about the zombies trudging the streets, but he had other matters on his mind. Shortly after he landed at the air base in Mosul, an Al Qaeda bomber there blew himself to bits. Twenty-one soldiers were vaporized a block or so from where King was sitting. He was an intel officer with the 10th Special Forces Group, so it was his job to know about these sorts of plots before they took the lives of his fellow fighters. “That was our little ‘Welcome to Iraq,’” King grunts. “We did get the pricks who’d planned it, though. Not that it made us feel any better.”
He’d see a lot more death in the Sunni Triangle over the course of two deployments. Mothers and children mangled by errant mortars. A headless corpse piked outside of polling stations on the eve of the national election. What compounded the horror was his mounting sense of failure as the war ground on. “We’d been fed a crock of bullshit about why we went in, and then we had no plan when they fought back.” Rudderless and disgusted, King came home around 2007. He got a job as a security analyst at an atomic-enrichment plant, but was bored and drank too much, drowning his anomie in beer. His wife, Tia, meanwhile, manned the battle station as an ER nurse treating addicts. “She’d come home with that same look I had in Mosul: just seeing so much bad shit, especially kids.” Her commitment to the mission pricked his pride, however. He needed to find his next fight, fast.
He found it in, of all places, the gym. “I’d started doing CrossFit on the base in Baghdad, and something clicked. I loved that you had to kill yourself to get through the hour — all you could think about for 60 minutes was breathing and how to count.”
He began teaching it for free at a fitness club in Portsmouth — till the owners asked him to leave. “They said, ‘You can’t be in here. Your moves are scaring the other members.’” Eventually, he leased a space in a storage shed and held small classes there. The spark that lit his fire, though, was a call about a soldier who’d been very badly wounded in Iraq. “A buddy of mine named Derick had been hit with an IED. Lost his leg above the knee, had burns all over his body.” A giant of a man, Derick recovered but left the Army, and was at loose ends in his twenties. “I told him, ‘If I can open a gym, dude, you can, too. I’ll drive up to Michigan to help you launch it.’”
There, he had a brainstorm: They’d go to the Arnold Classic and compete in the CrossFit events. At the Arnold — a Roman circus of strength and fitness staged in Columbus each winter — Derick doffed his tear-offs to reveal a full prosthetic, and blazed through the event at a gallop. Though he threw up his guts at the end of the heat, the crowd went berserk. Afterward, the promoter approached King. “He said, ‘Could you bring a whole team of these guys next year?’” King rounded up a squad of adaptive athletes — soldiers missing arms, firefighters missing legs — and called it Some Assembly Required. “These are folks who, by rights, should’ve just given up,” says King. “But Derick became the World’s Strongest Disabled Man [for bench press], Josh set the [Paralympic] record in the shot put, and Tanya runs marathons as [an athlete born without legs].”
Their bravery inspired King to quit his job and buy an abandoned warehouse downtown. His new gym — a long, squat slab that he painted black and badged with warrior icons and hellhound banners — was the first new business in the Boneyfiddle section in roughly 20 years. King worried that membership fees wouldn’t be enough to pay his mortgage. But, disabled or able-bodied, clients showed up. They were a tight amalgam of Portsmouth’s best and brightest — bankers and business owners with disposable cash and a vexed but obdurate love for their town. There are things that happen in a CrossFit box that you’ll never see at Equinox. The hour is so grueling, and the pace so relentless, that the only apt descriptor is “group suffering.” You don’t get a dopamine rush during class; you get it at the end, when you’re spent and drenched, gasping on your back with 15 people.
“But the bonds you formed coming through that hell together, and yelling at the top of your lungs for each other — that stuff’s magic for the brain,” says Dr. Tom McCoy, a board-certified physician in emergency medicine who owns a CrossFit gym in northern Ohio. “What we’ve learned, in rat and human trials, is that intense exertion lays down dopamine paths that weren’t there before. You can get that from rock climbing or marathon running — but what you don’t get is the flush of oxytocin that comes from shared experience.” Oxytocin, says McCoy, is the bonding hormone, or “love drug,” released during childbirth. It explains why you’ll always see the same 12 people at a 6 a.m. CrossFit class. They’re a tribe welded tight by their trials of endurance, an attachment that becomes a lifeline over time.
King knew nothing about addiction, but he knew about CrossFit and its capacity to heal the afflicted. In 2018, he contracted with Albrecht to create a program at TCC. Its Health and Wellness Center, or “the HAWC,” as they call it, began as a bare-bones gym-and-pool room in a former Cadillac lot in 2018. “We blew our wad redoing the building and had nothing left to buy equipment,” says Liles, whom Albrecht named to run the HAWC. “Those first few months, it was lonely as fuck. I’m talking classes with just me and Dale.” But soon attendance spiked and entire sober houses trained together. “If there’s one thing clients want, it’s to become their counselors,” says Liles. “The one in front of the room with their shit together.”
King’s doubts were more emphatic. “I’d been training vets doing balls-out stuff, while here’s these fuckers with no excuse looking like hell warmed over.” His breakthrough was a guy at the back of a class, working hard but hiding behind other clients. Bit by bit, that young man, Andrew Wright, opened up. He’d been a varsity wrestler who got his girlfriend pregnant and joined the Marines to support her. But he washed out after failing a drug test, and wound up cycling between the streets and jail for petty possession busts. “His pride was crushed and he was just beaten — but no one in that room trained harder,” says King. At the end of 90 days, he came over to thank King for his help and kindness. “I said, ‘Where do you go from here?’ and he said, ‘The shelter. They don’t have a bed yet in transitional.’”
Aghast, King pulled some strings to find him a room and hired him as a part-time porter. In the course of mentoring Wright, he learned that treatment’s an all-hands lift — but when done right, it fetches big returns. Wright was the first of King’s recovery hires. Within a year, Wright had earned credentials to teach CrossFit sessions; within two, he was attending Shawnee State. Today, he’s a case manager at TCC with a girlfriend and a house. “I work 40-plus hours a week and go to school full time — I’m making up for lost years,” says Wright, 37, who has been sober since 2018. “I want to show the normies that we’re human, too. We’re just lost and need some care.”
King now only hires recovered addicts; at the moment, he has 10 on staff. One day, I approach a tall and ductile woman at the HAWC, mistaking her for a coach. I ask her how her clients are coming along. King breaks in as she warily looks me over: “This is Kayla. One of my lurkers in the back.”
Kayla shakes my hand, while refuting King’s characterization. “I don’t really do that anymore.”
As she explains to me over coffee later that week, her hiding days are done. For the first time in her 31 years on Earth, she insists on being seen. “This is my seventh stay [at TCC], but I’m finally getting honest. I can’t keep all those secrets anymore.”
Like Rooster, she’d been betrayed by family. As teens, Kayla and her twin sister, Katrina, were pimped by a relative’s employer. Their two older brothers were gone by then — they had stolen a car one night and smashed into a tractor-trailer. They were dead at 14 and 12. The girls were full-blown addicts in high school. Katrina overdosed in Kayla’s arms in 2014. “That was nine years ago,” she says, kneading her palm. “I had so much guilt, I stopped caring. I’ve OD’d at least 10 times since she passed.”
It’s then that I notice that she lacks half an index finger, and that the thumb on her other hand doesn’t bend. “I used to shoot up in the webbing,” she says. “When they said I caught MRSA, I told ’em to cut it off. I needed to go back out and get high.”
Kayla hit her bottom in the fall of 2022. After five months clean at TCC, she opted for sober living in Columbus last summer. “That’s my hometown, but it’s also my poison. Everyone I know there is just so …”
She returned to TCC with a sword overhead: six years in a cell if she failed again. Many of the firm’s clients are deferred in lieu of jail time. It isn’t that Ohio suddenly saw the light and decided to treat addicts humanely. Rather, fiscal pressures forced the state to cut its spending — and treatment’s much less costly than incarceration. (TCC spends about $30,000 per client, a cost split between the feds and the state; prison, on the other hand, costs more than $42,000, a cost borne entirely by the state.) Treatment’s also cheaper than doing nothing. Between EMS calls and hospital stays, one addict on the street can run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid medical bills. Rooster, for instance, needed 45 doses of Narcan in a single year. At $200 a dose — not counting ambulance rides, ER stays, or the months of physical therapy after his stroke — he was a hugely expensive ward of the state.
“I’ve been in jail myself,” says Kayla. “I’ve made terrible choices, and I own that.” The difference this time is that she’s taking on the grief work she’d been ducking. “When your twin sister dies and you were there and shot her up …” She holds a breath, then lets it go. “But I’ve gotta keep sharing, and I’ve gotta tell her story. I want to be that person for somebody.”
That person?
“Who gives back what this town has given me. I’ve been [treated] in Dayton and Zanesville, Columbus. None of ’em help you like Portsmouth. In Dayton, you’re on your own. Here, you never are. If I ever missed a meeting, 10 people would come and find me. This town will just not let you go.”
HERE’S A DIFFERENT way to greet the dawn: Run 200 meters out the door of a gym, run back at top speed and flop to the floor, doing 10 burpees without pausing. Now, sucking wind, grab the barbell at your feet and hoist deadlifts with 185 pounds. In CrossFit speak, that cluster is called a “round”; for the next 20 minutes, you’ll trade off with a partner, stacking as many rounds as you can. That’s how Ricky Shaw starts the day: shirt off, abs bunched, and his tattoos shined by a light patina of sweat. Asked why he does this, he thinks it over and shrugs: “Because it’s Tuesday.”
His teammate, Sarah Wilson, lets out a laugh while gasping. “It’s ’cause he ain’t right in the head,” she says. “I think his mama dropped him on his head.”
If Shaw’s mama did that, it was among her kinder acts. Mostly, she just let her children starve. “We’d eat when it was food-stamp day,” he says. “Though 80 percent of the time, she sold ’em for booze. That’s when we’d go looking through the dumpster.”
There’s a reason Ricky and Sarah are psychic twins: Their childhoods all but tracked each other’s. He grew up in a hellhole nicknamed the Bottoms, a doomsday enclave of dirt-poor families 10 miles north of Portsmouth. There’s one road in and one road out of that encampment on the flats; the dumpster he refers to, over by the Speedway, was the de facto fridge for far too many Bottoms kids. His mother brought home randoms from the jab-and-stab bars, when she wasn’t cooking meth with her kids.
“One time, she left us for two weeks with no food so she could run off with one of those guys,” says his sister Trista, who’s had her own drug travails. But she’s “four years clean and aiming to become a counselor. I know my story will matter to someone else.”
Sarah was raised on the wrong side of Columbus. At 14, she entered foster care. She was homeless in her teens, and in lockup in her thirties. Still, the deeper through line is their decency, the instinct to forgive and go forward. Ricky looks out for his disabled father, a man who beat his kids, then left and never returned. Sarah is the mother hen of King’s employees, taking special care of men like Rooster. She runs one of King’s spinoffs, Spartan Solutions, which sands and ships out kettlebells forged in town. Ricky helps manage King’s third firm, Doc Spartan, a line of skin-care products and apparel. Portsmouth saved these two when nothing else could, and their labor and spirit is how they give thanks for the grace they’ve both received. In a city that stopped making goods back in the Seventies, they are the products of its renaissance, the drivers of its new economy.
“This is a company town — and that company does recovery,” says King. “We should be proud. We’re fuckin’ beacons of hope. But all we get is backstabbed for doing good.”
“There’s so much ignorance from these so-called Christians,” says Tim Wolfe, King’s friend and partner. “They sit in the front row at City Council meetings, saying, ‘Let the bums die, problem solved. There’s 60 of ’em dying every month!’”
Wolfe, a fellow Iraq veteran, has become a developer since the war. He’s gutted and renovated 20 properties; brought Boneyfiddle back with pubs and lofts; and is a frontline employer of recovered addicts, with around 54 on his payroll. “These guys started out hauling bags of sand, and now they’re my millwrights and carpenters,” he says. “You can’t find better workers in Scioto County — and I know, ’cause now we’re sending them to other counties.”
Wolfe didn’t set out to be Maximillian Kolbe, the patron saint of addicts. Like King, he was appalled by the strung-out souls relieving themselves in doorways. But he couldn’t find anyone to work his crews when he began buying tear-downs in 2014. “The guys back then, I called ’em 50-50s. I’d pay ’em 50 bucks at the end of the shift, and there was a 50 percent chance they’d come the next day.” Then he met King and took the tour of TCC; he decided to teach construction to people in treatment and has turned out hundreds of tradesmen. Such is the demand for their labor that TCC runs vans now, shuttling clients to jobs an hour away.
By way of thanks, the town imposed a block on any rehab firm that wants to grow. The moratorium runs through the end of this year, when Dunne, Portsmouth’s mayor, hopes to get some guidance from the state. “We have no data on the size of the need, so we don’t know how to go forward,” he says. “How many folks are seeking treatment? How many beds are enough to manage that, and will we ever get state protocols on standards of care?” These sound like reasonable asks, but no one seems to know who has those facts or when Ohio will hand down best-practice codes. Meanwhile, there have been efforts to zone the clinics out of city limits, and to severely shrink the size of sober houses. There were furious open forums at the City Council, and shrill public meetings around town. The flashpoint for those set-tos was TCC’s purchase of two large, derelict properties on the edge of town. One, the Rodeway Inn, was a hot-sheet motel that had menaced its neighbors for years. “That place was a house of fucking horrors,” says Liles. “Sex traffic, drug dealers, tons of OD’s. The cops were in and out of there all day.”
TCC’s plan was to gut the place and move its inpatient lodging there. The community was somehow incensed. Hundreds turned out to castigate the firm as “scammers” cashing in off addicts. “Good lord, no one wanted to buy the Rodeway,” says Albrecht. “It was a drug pipeline between Detroit and Columbus.” Responding to the self-enrichment charge, Albrecht’s deputy laughs. “C’mon, people, we’re a nonprofit firm! No one’s getting rich here,” says Aaron Wagner, TCC’s chief operating officer. The Rodeway reopened as client housing last fall; the panic about public safety was misplaced. According to Wagner’s sources, there were around 38 overdose deaths at the Rodeway Inn over the six months before its sale. In the six months since it reopened? Exactly zero.
The second scrum was over the Mitchellace factory, as grim a totem of Rust Belt failure as you’ll find in Portsmouth. A corpse-gray slab on the eastern end of town, it once employed 5,000 workers making shoelaces, shipping millions of pairs a month. But, too big to salvage when it closed in 2021, it moldered for years behind its cyclone fence. When TCC announced its purchase of the site, neighbors thronged the public hearings last spring. “It was berserk,” says Albrecht. “They accused us of trying to take over the city and turn it into one huge clinic.” Instead, he says, he plans the reverse: to centralize treatment in one location, moving most of his operations from their downtown sites to this decrepit stretch of Portsmouth. That rebuild, which he prices north of $40 million, will take five or more years.
On my last day in town, King takes me for a drive through the east end’s dismal sprawl. In the Mitchellace’s shadow sit abandoned diners and blocks of craftsman houses boarded shut. A fog seems to hang over these sloping porches and cars propped up on cinder blocks. Kids live behind some of the makeshift doors: Their overturned trikes are the lawn signs of neglect. “Picture a thousand people coming to work here each day, and a thousand more living in dorms. You’d have lunch spots opening and apartments going up. This would be the hot nabe.”
Two girls go by us in XL hoodies over baseball caps, the brims pulled down to hide their gaze. Shapeless sweats and Nikes that have dulled to the shade of don’t-care. King’s eyes track them as they round the corner, his head shaking. There’s a hole carved into men who’ve been to war: the bond of obligation to those they’ve lost. They can save a hundred people and it’s never enough; the chest wound that predates them doesn’t close. King knows by heart the stats: 21 million addicts in America, nine-tenths of whom receive no treatment. A death toll that’s quintupled in the past two decades, and more than doubled in the past 10 years. One trained doctor for every 7,000 addicts — and few physicians in rural regions. The Roosters, the Rickys, the Kaylas, the Sarahs: King’s seen so much beauty and so much pain. But in this war, at least, you hail the living, not the dead, and fight for every soul who stumbles in.
“I know the juju works, and I know hope is real,” he says. “Portsmouth’s all the proof I’ll ever need.”
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