People keep asking Owen H. why he’s always smiling. His roommate said it plainly: “I wish I had just even an ounce of your positivity.” Staff keeps circling the same question: why is the alcoholic in all black walking the halls at six in the morning with a grin on his face? Owen has an answer, and it isn’t a simple one. “You’ve got to realize and know that comes from a deep darkness. I know the opposite of it. My dark is dark, and my light is bright. It goes both ways.” A smile is not the absence of hard times. It is what he pulled out of them.
Let’s start with Owen’s name, because somehow, that is a complex topic of its own. You see, Owen is not his “real” name. On his birth certificate is says Phillip Owen [HIPAA]. His parents named him Phillip Owen because they thought it sounded more professional than Owen Phillip—despite having every intention of calling him Owen. At a certain point, even his sister forgot his first name existed. To the world, he was Owen; to the government, he was Phillip. So when he first walked into the rooms a few years back, he didn’t reach for the paperwork name. “I’m Owen, alcoholic,” he said, “not Philip, alcoholic.” Because “when I hear Owen, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re my family member—my friend.'”
Raised in Santa Clarita—Canyon Country, Owen spent his days outside with his friends. As a kid, he was almost never indoors. He and his friends built forts out of dragged-up plywood and old nails, rode their big wheels dangerously fast down a steep hill, and shot each other with bows and arrows. Even when they got Game Boys, they took them outside too. The neighborhood was safe, full of kids to play with. So, his mother never worried. “We were so easy to find in our little community there.” A little slice of the America of old.
In stark contrast to his blissful life playing outside, inside his house was anything but peaceful. His father was an alcoholic, and by the time Owen was eleven or twelve, the drinking had settled into the walls—the quiet, the cutting off, the hiding in the room, the depression and anxiety no kid should have to carry. “The house could be a pretty dark place.” The sun doesn’t shine in a house like that. So, no wonder why he sought solace outdoors.
This is where the smile first got its shape, though not yet its meaning. “I learned how to put on the mask of I’m fine pretty young.” It was survival before it was anything else. He slept over at friends’ whenever he could. He smiled with his friends. He smiled outdoors—and he did his best to bring that light inside.
Owen was a self-proclaimed “chubby kid with long hair” who got picked on in junior high and high school, and he carried some body issues out of it. But he wasn’t a rebel—not really. His mother twisted his ear one time when he was five, and he never needed it again. “I listened and did everything I was told.” What he had instead of rebellion was music. When he first got a Walkman, he begged his mom for a Guns ‘n’ Roses tape. She said she would buy it for him, but first had to tell him why she hated that band so much. She said that when she and his father first got together, there was a homeless junkie living on his couch who always played guitar. Eventually, to save the relationship, she made him kick him out. That man was Axel Rose. Unphazed by the story, Owen had his mom get him the tape, and something clicked. He instantly became a diehard metalhead—hence the long hair. He dove into that world with everything he had. With that came a dabble here and a sip there of some weed and drink, but nothing too serious. He also already knew something about himself that scared him. “I knew I had an addictive personality since I was a little kid.” Sugar, video games, it didn’t matter—his mind would lock and orbit. World of Warcraft ran sixteen, eighteen hours a day, some summers. So when the harder stuff came around, he did the math early and steered clear.
After high school, his family moved to North Hills. Owen’s mom always worked in a grooming shop, so he’d grown up around animals. No babysitter, he’d gone in with his mother and swept the floors for two dollars a day. So his first real adult job was bathing dogs at that same shop, where the owner still remembered him. “It was awesome. It was like a family.” He loves animals with a tenderness he’ll never apologize for—the sad ASPCA dog commercials wrecked him, and he didn’t care who knew it. After taking a year off to learn more about himself, he tested into higher classes at Pierce, pulled a 3.9, and planned on microbiology. Then, when he tried to leave his job at Chipotle to focus on school, a manager kept asking for “one more week,” and Owen—who could never quite say no to someone who needed help—dropped out of school. He stayed six years and climbed to general manager.
The drinking arrived quietly and then all at once. It wasn’t much until he was around twenty-five and moved in with one of his friends from his old neighborhood in Canyon Country. By this point, his friend was already deep into his alcoholism—a fifth a day. Owen matched him. He’d stay sober through his Chipotle shift, then crack a tallboy on the way to a second job at Panera, where a manager would send him to the basement for a shot of Jack before his shift. “That’s when I realized I could drink and work perfectly fine.” He was a high-functioning alcoholic with a general manager title, a car, an apartment, a six-year relationship—working ninety hours a week and drinking through all of it, still smiling on the floor. It caught up to him one inventory night when he left a bottle in the walk-in, and another manager found it. He was allowed to quietly resign, with nothing on his record. But underneath the functioning, something was coming apart—and it wasn’t only him. The gears of the perfectly constructed machine he had built were starting to rust.
Back when Owen moved out of his parents’ house, his mother started drinking too—she thought if she drank his father’s share, there’d be less left to make him violent. Instead, the house turned physical. He’d get calls at work from his sister—mom’s bloody in the parking lot. Owen would have to leave his shift to go stand between his parents, again and again. Tragically, when Owen was twenty-six, his mother had a heart attack, broke her ankle, and died soon after in the hospital. He put the bottle down that day. “Fuck this. I’m done. I’ll never want to drink again.” With that determination, he white-knuckled the next seven months. But he was still living with the friend who drank, and every day there was another “come on dude, take a shot,” and eventually he took it. Soon, it was exactly what it had been. “I worked to drink, and I drank to work.”
Eventually, his sister took him in on one condition: no drinking in the house. But that was a promise he just couldn’t keep. He’d go out to his car to drink and time his return for when the house was asleep. He says, admitting he wasn’t as slick as he thought he was. “She smelled it. My sister has a bloodhound nose for booze.”
Then, one day, he picked up his girlfriend while driving drunk. She knew something was off. She yelled his name. He hit the brakes. It was too late. He slammed his car into the back of another—folding it like an accordion. When the cops showed up, he knew he was going to jail. His one priority: making sure his girlfriend was okay. Three days in jail—the only three he’d ever do, the only time he’s ever been cuffed. The felony charges came down to a misdemeanor DUI. Out of the wreck came the one good thing. “It was kind of a blessing in disguise because it was the thing that got me in the rooms.” He started hitting AA and loved it. But loving it wasn’t enough. Thirty days, then a drink; sixty days, then a drink; a constant losing battle. When he relapsed one time too many at his sister’s, she let him go—not out of cruelty; she’s done Al-Anon, and she understood he was up against something bigger than willpower. “She kicked me out very nicely. My sister is my best friend. We are on amazing terms now.” But she gave him a reason to leave that would define the next three years of his life. Their father was dying alone, and someone had to be there to help him.
So, Owen moved in with the man who had darkened his house. His father was still an angry, drinking alcoholic, and Owen spent three years trying to keep him alive. He quit his job to care for a father whose mobility was failing, who wouldn’t take his meds, who fell constantly. After part of his father’s colon was removed, there was a stoma bag his father refused to wear, and there was feces—on the floor, the counters, the walls—and Owen cleaning it up, throwing up while he cleaned it, calling 911 again and again, only for the hospital to patch the old man up and send him home to do it all over. He needed a drink in him just to walk out of the bedroom and face it all. He never knew if he’d find his father dead or get a bottle thrown at his head. He yelled back maybe three times in three years before he understood there was no point. “There’s no reasoning with him.” Owen, who had every reason to walk away, stayed—because that is who he is.
It nearly killed him, too. He was suicidal, deteriorating, unable to work, unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The light outside. He and his sister decided: enough, out of that house, get him into in-home care so Owen could finally take care of Owen. He was three and a half weeks sober when he woke and found his father dead in his wheelchair, naked, covered in feces, a half-handle of a bottle of rum in front of him. “A sea of empty bottles filled every space a bottle could go.” He called his sister. He called 911. The responders looked at the room and said what it was—not foul play, “a severe case of self-neglect.” The next day, Owen called his cousin Jake, a Beit T’Shuvah alumnus, and said the words he’d been circling for years. “Hey, I’m ready. I want to go to Beit T’Shuvah.” Jake told him he’d have to be sober first. “Oh, I’m three and a half weeks sober. Dad’s dead. I’m ready. Let’s go.”
He’d known about this place for years. But, there was always a “reason” to not go. Now there were no reasons left, only the last things a death leaves behind: certificates, finances, the landlord, a house to scour for anything worth keeping, a cat to surrender to a no-kill shelter. He got it all sorted as quickly as he could and made the call to admissions. “I showed up orphaned and homeless. It very much felt like a fresh start.”
Owen walked through the doors ready. Downright beaming. “I came here excited. I came here already knowing that I wanted to come here for years. It was like I finally got to come here.” What he found here was the thing the outside had always given him as a kid, made permanent—a community close enough to disappear into. Tomorrow, July 4th, will mark his six months, and this time, for the first time, the cravings simply haven’t come. His roommate Josh feels like a brother now. “This place gave me another family.” He knows everybody’s name here, walks up to everybody, because he remembers exactly what it feels like not to be known. “I want everyone to feel welcomed and comfortable. It sucks when you’re alone.”
He’s a Clinical Department Intern now, fresh off his first shift, and it’s exactly where a man like him belongs. “I honestly care about people here,” he says with a warm glow. “I truly wish everybody who comes here gets as great of an experience as I have. You get to be in a community of people that are close-knit, and they’re all working towards a similar goal of bettering themselves. We’re not in the business of burning bridges anymore.”
The kid who learned to smile so no one would worry about him grew into a man who smiles so no one else has to feel alone—the same face, turned all the way around. The grin he shows now isn’t the same one he practiced as a kid; it’s the real thing, earned the hard way, dark on one side and bright on the other. Because his smile isn’t his armor. It isn’t his shield. It’s his sword. Used to fight through the darkness. Because after everything, he’s finally found that, the whole time, there was light inside.