Looking back on bad decisions

Curtis Salgado speaks to teenage boys Thursday at Daybreak Youth Services about drug addiction, his music and recovery.

Javier, 18, listens to Salgado talk Thursday about life, music and the heartache caused by drugs and alcohol. Daybreak Youth Services officials asked that last names of boys in the program not be published. (Photos by TROY WAYRYNEN/The Columbian)

Famed Portland blues musician Curtis Salgado breaks into a tune Thursday at Daybreak Youth Services in Vancouver.

When Curtis Salgado woke up, he was soaked, cold, and throbbing in his head and chest. He couldn't remember where he was or what was happening.

His companions told him he'd overdosed. His heart had stopped. They pounded hard on his chest to get it going again. They tried to lift him into a bathtub of icy water to snap him out of it but missed the tub and slammed his head against the rim.

"We were gonna dump you in a field, man," one friend told him.

Dump him in a field? Not take him to the hospital?

No. His friend couldn't risk it. There were drugs in the house — lots of drugs.

At that moment, Curtis Salgado realized his friend wasn't really his friend. And his rock 'n' roll lifestyle — drugs and drink, parties and more parties — was really no life at all.

"It made me wake up quick," he told a bunch of teenagers who are on a similar — hopefully less painful — path to a better life.

Salgado, a famous Portland bluesman, visited Daybreak Youth Services on Falk Road in Vancouver on Wednesday. Daybreak is a secure, 16-bed residential drug-treatment facility for teenage boys.

Salgado will headline a concert to benefit Daybreak on Sunday at the Heathman Lodge; he said he wanted to visit with Daybreak's charges ahead of time to get to know them and tell them his story.

"You're men," he told the assembled group. "You've got to make men decisions. Not punk decisions — men decisions."

Salgado said he grew up in Klamath Falls and Eugene, Ore., and got into drugs and drink early — by age 12 or so. He tried to learn guitar, too, he said, but sniffing glue seemed to take the focus out of him.

Why did he do it? Peer pressure. "It wasn't because of a broken home," Salgado said. "My parents were great and I still ended up a numbskull." It was simply that the cooler, older kids were doing it, he said.

He did manage to master singing the blues and blowing the blues harmonica, skills that took him far in life.

"I don't know how I made it somehow," he said. "Most of my friends did not." Anybody who kept at that sort of mischief, Salgado said, is dead or in prison today.

Salgado kept on truckin' — making money and playing music, but going nowhere just the same. He wasn't playing his own music or being creative, he said. He was a sideman, going through motions. He looks back now, he said, and knows it was drugs and drink that were holding him down.

"It was taking away my dreams," he said. "Music was just a secondary thing. I wasted so much time."

But he did develop one skill to an exceptional level: "If projectile vomiting were an Olympic event, I would have been a gold medalist," he said.

Salgado, 55, said drug treatment was the best move he ever made. He's been clean and sober for more than 20 years now, he said.

"These kinds of schools, this kind of help wasn't happening when I was a kid," he told the Daybreak group.

And even now that it is, he emphasized, early bad decisions still can haunt you all your life. He'd been sober for 19 years, he said, when the early damage he did to his liver came back to bite him. The hepatitis C he'd carried for years developed into liver cirrhosis and cancer that for a time looked inoperable.

"This was all through drug abuse," he said. "I had seven months to live. I figured, I'm dead."

But people came forward to help him — including an ex-girlfriend who was ready to donate a portion of her liver, and a host of famous friends who put on a benefit concert to help pay his medical bills. Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Steve Miller, Robert Cray, Everclear and others all pitched in.

Which goes back to Salgado's epiphany regarding the company you keep: Are they people who'd dump you in a field, or people who'd make an extra effort to save your life?

"I am into class," Salgado said. "I am into being positive."

The youths who listened to Salgado's story were a mostly silent group. He advised them to figure out their passions in life and get busy following them.

To demonstrate the passion that keeps him going, Salgado whipped out an A-harmonica and improvised an impromptu song of unrequited love for Sarah — a Daybreak staff member who stood laughing in the back of the room.

"Sarah, you look so fine to me," he sang. "But Sarah's in love with James, and that's a mystery."

Guitar, cooking and BMX biking were among the passions the teenagers in the room fessed up to. Salgado traded anecdotes with them about extreme sports, favorite recipes and current musicians — he's a big fan of Buckethead and was thrilled to meet the musician backstage recently, he said.

He let the kids in on a secret: With luck they'll grow up and look back from age 55. What will life look like?

"Don't waste your time," he said. "Create something that makes your heart feel good and makes other people's hearts feel good. Lord have mercy, I wish I never would have done that stuff."

Scott Hewitt: 360-735-4525 or scott.hewitt@columbian.com.