by Eric Blehm
Later that day she found a card tucked under the windshield wiper of her car. On the back Adam had written, “Meme, you know I love you.”
She tucked the note into her wallet and treasured it for years. The small piece of paper reminded her that the Adam she knew and loved was still in there somewhere.
For most of the first half of 1995 Adam lived and slept wherever he could flop himself down: the airport terminal, a crack addict’s trailer in the woods, or the house of a friend he hadn’t yet stolen from.
At a loss as to how to help him, Adam’s friends did what they could, taking him in, getting him odd jobs that lasted only until the schedule and responsibility overwhelmed him. The longest stint was working the pit at Stubby’s BBQ, a job that high school buddy Chris Dunkel procured for him at his family’s restaurant in hopes that good southern food would encourage Adam to eat more. Adam moved in with Chris, who tried to keep him on a healthy schedule, but once more, he disappeared.
In May 1995 Adam showed up at Jeff’s apartment in Fayetteville, where he was attending the University of Arkansas. Cindy had recently broken up with Adam because he couldn’t give her what she needed, according to Adam. Jeff interpreted this to mean that Adam couldn’t give her enough drugs or drug money.
“Hearing they were apart,” says Jeff, “was the best news I’d had all year.”
But Adam continued his hard-core drug usage, splitting his time either being depressed or trying to forget how depressed he was by shooting himself up with speedballs—a mixture of cocaine and an opiate, usually heroin. He confided in a friend that at times he’d wake up from a drug-induced stupor and have to ask another addict where he was.
Only Adam’s family and closest friends knew the full extent of his problem. Janice and Larry didn’t talk about it openly, instead shouldering most of the stress themselves—all the anxiety, sleeplessness, and obsessive worry.
If a fatal car accident was reported on the radio, Janice immediately thought of Adam. If a body was found floating in a lake, she’d half expect a sheriff to pull up and break the news. When she heard crime reports, she thought of Adam. With any news related to illegal drugs, her mind shifted to Adam.
Most of all, she wondered.
She wondered if she and Larry were doing everything they could for their baby, the precious little boy they’d brought into this world almost twenty-two years earlier. They had talked extensively about intervention, but most of what they’d read said that Adam had to be ready, that the only person who could help Adam was Adam himself. He was an adult; they could not commit him to a lockdown treatment program unless he was a danger to himself or others.
And the knowledge that he was using a dangerous drug—crack cocaine, Adam’s best friends confided to the Browns—only added to her stress. Crack is nasty stuff, as Janice discovered in her research. A user can become addicted after just one try, it alters the brain’s chemistry, and it renders the user powerless against an intense need for more. The side effects, both short term and long term, are horrifying: increased blood pressure and heart rate, anxiety and paranoia, insomnia, severe depression, delirium, psychosis, auditory and tactile hallucinations, respiratory failure, brain seizures, heart attack, stroke, and sudden death. One of the most unnerving effects Janice read about was “coke bugs,” a tactile hallucination in which users sense, and sometimes see, bugs moving about beneath their skin and will do anything to get rid of them: scratch, cut, poke, stab, even kill themselves in the process.
When Janice went to bed on New Year’s Eve 1995, the last thing she wondered before drifting off was where her wayward son would sleep that night, or if he would sleep at all.
That night Adam was at a friend’s house on Morphew Road, not far from his mom and dad’s. He had become so addicted that he couldn’t go half a day without experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Several hits of crack were stashed in his pocket to ring in the New Year, and he began smoking them at midnight.
Around two o’clock in the morning, Adam went into the bathroom with a knife. Sometime later, his friend checked on him, and when Adam didn’t answer, he kicked in the door and found Adam crouched on the floor covered in blood, continually stabbing at his neck with the knife.
Instinctively, the friend balled up his fist and punched Adam squarely in the face, disarmed him, and yelled down the hall, “Call an ambulance!”
The first police officer to respond found Adam bleeding profusely from his neck and arm. “Applied direct pressure to wounds until Lifemobile Personnel arrived,” he wrote in his report. “Ran subject for wants/warrants. Subject had an active felony warrant for his arrest and was placed in custody after his wounds were taken care of by St. Joseph’s ER staff.”
Adam being “processed” at the Garland County jail during his dark time.
Upon receiving the call that their son was in the hospital with self-inflicted stab wounds, as well as wanted by the law for forging checks and stealing property, Janice and Larry paid the ten thousand dollars in bail and restitution and requested that an officer drive Adam from the Garland County jail to a lockdown drug treatment center. Months before, they had looked into the center but could not persuade Adam to check himself in—and there wasn’t evidence that he should be committed against his will. Now that he was clearly a danger to himself and bound for jail if his parents hadn’t paid the restitution, he had no choice.
When the drugs left his system and the fog cleared, Adam found himself in a hospital with a staff whose recovery strategy included the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Adam began his first step toward sobriety by admitting he was powerless over the drug and that his life had become unmanageable.
“He couldn’t argue that one,” says Larry, who along with Janice kept their visits to a minimum, stopping in only a handful of times.
Adam began by answering questions in a mini-autobiography highlighting the significant events in his life. “This tends to put your life in perspective,” stated the instructions.
Sitting at the small desk in his room, Adam started with his childhood and preteen years. He noted that he had “always wanted to impress everyone and be the very best. Enjoyed showing off to my parents and brother in sports and cared for my sister very much.” He recounted his earliest attitude about alcoholism or chemical dependency by stating, “Only losers let it happen to them.”
While Adam was working through these questions, Manda visited him. “He was so sad,” she says, “and just lost.” She put her arms around her brother and hugged him. He started to cry. She hugged him harder when he told her that he hated himself. “Adam, you can get through this,” she said, offering him the same advice their mom had once given her, the shy and quiet sister in Adam’s shadow who wondered if people liked her or if she even liked herself. “First of all, you need to get over this,” she said, repeating Janice’s words. “You are a likable person, and you need to like yourself. Remember who you are.”
For months Manda had been praying for Adam. However, she never told him she had been praying for him, because she knew it would have had little or no impact, but “it was what got me through and gave me hope,” she says. “I prayed for my mom and dad too, because they were carrying such a weight on their shoulders with Adam. It was eating them up inside.”
When her parents would tell her “Only Adam can help Adam,” she inwardly believed that what Adam was up against was too big for even him. Leaving the hospital that day, she thanked the Lord for getting Adam off the street and prayed that he would continue to watch over her brother.
Grandma Brown and Larry’s sister, Becky, had begun taking Adam and Manda to church on Sundays when they’d moved back to Hot Springs after those years living on the road, and as young teenagers both of them had accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior and been baptized. Manda had stayed on the path, but somewhere Adam had veered off.
The questions in the autobiography forced Adam to examine each stage of his life. Regarding his relationship with his parents and
siblings before his drug additction, he answered “good” every time. Asked what major values his parents had passed on to him, he wrote, “Be the best you can be. You can be anything you want to be. Hard work will overcome anything.”
He perceived himself to be “very shy” with girls, but felt he had had lots of close guy and girl friends in high school. He felt he was a “good person” during the high school phase of his life, which was when he began to experiment with alcohol, “so I could feel at ease with myself,” he wrote. On the subject of his current life, he wrote that for the first time ever, he had let his parents down and taken advantage of them. As for Shawn, “I lost my relationship with my brother.”
“I can’t be depended on anymore,” he continued. “I was once a crazy, unique, hard-working person, but now I’m a miserable drug addict that hurts other people. I feel very alone, but I have many, many people that really care about me.”
Most of the twenty-two-year-old’s answers were a barrage of self-deprecation without an ounce of hope. Only the very last line in the workbook allowed a sliver of light to penetrate the dark storm of self-hatred: “But I will climb out of this hole and be somebody.”
Fighting shivers, sweats, and the severe shaking of physical drug withdrawal, Adam worked his way through the First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous. He sat in group sessions, met daily with a counselor, and made it his goal to return to college. Fourteen days later, Janice and Larry paid the six-thousand-dollar bill and were told by doctors that Adam was ready to go as long as he continued the twelve-step program.
“Really?” said Janice incredulously. “You think he’s okay to go out into the world this soon? Can he go back to college?”
“We’ve provided him with the tools,” said one of the program’s counselors, and Adam agreed, saying, “I’m ready to get back on track.”
Skepticism overshadowed Janice and Larry’s hope: expensive as the hospital had been, two weeks didn’t seem long enough.
6
In God’s Hands
ON THE FIRST DAY OF MARCH 1996, Janice and Larry returned home from searching for Adam after hearing from the University of Central Arkansas that he had not attended classes for weeks.
Nobody they knew had seen or heard from Adam. Larry was distraught and Janice was at her wit’s end. She kept telling herself that she’d felt this way before, that even though she would worry herself sick Adam was dead somewhere in a ditch, he always showed up. But they couldn’t—and Adam couldn’t—keep going on like this, so Janice and Larry sat down at their kitchen table to figure out a course of action.
As Janice brainstormed aloud how they would save their son, Larry had an epiphany. Reaching across the table, he took his wife’s hand. “We’ve tried everything we can do,” he said. “We can’t fix Adam. God is going to have to fix Adam. We’ve got to go to church.”
Janice hadn’t been raised to know God. She didn’t even think about God. With Larry’s words, however, a light bulb switched on. “You’re right,” she replied.
Larry slapped both his knees and said, “We’ll go this weekend.”
The next Sunday morning Larry found the Bible his mother had given them as a wedding gift, wiped some thirty years’ worth of dust off the spine, and brought it with them to Second Baptist Church in Hot Springs—the church Manda attended when she was home from college.
A woman about Janice’s age greeted the Browns by the front door. “Good morning! Welcome,” she said. “My name is Helen Webb. Come on in and let me show you around.”
Larry, who hadn’t gone to church since Vietnam, was a bit rusty on his knowledge of Scripture, and Janice had never read the Bible, but after that first sermon, both of them felt lifted up. The peace Larry experienced returned him to occasional times in his youth when he had leaned on God.
They went home with an invitation to come back soon.
The associate pastor, Mike Smith, knocked on the Browns’ front door three days later to thank them for being guests of the church. Over a cup of coffee, Janice and Larry shared Adam’s story. “We are failing our baby,” Janice said as she shook her head and wiped at tears.
For more than an hour, Pastor Smith listened while they explained their family past and their spiritual past. As a child Larry had gone to church three times a week but stopped once he entered the military. Janice had attended church only for weddings, funerals, and a Christmas Mass or two and said she knew nothing about religion. “I don’t know how to pray,” she said, “so I’ve just been talking to God nonstop in my head since church on Sunday, asking him to look after Adam.”
“You’re doing fine,” said Pastor Smith. “Just open up your heart to Jesus. He knows exactly what you’re up against; your struggles are not uncommon. And he has a plan.”
Pastor Smith understood intimately what Adam was up against with addiction and cocaine, but he left the Browns’ home without sharing his personal history. Back at the church he called Helen Webb, who was in charge of the prayer chain. “Helen, we need to pray for a couple,” he told her. “Their son was arrested, he’s battling drugs, and they desperately need our prayers.”
The following Sunday Janice and Larry attended separate Bible studies before the worship service. In the women’s class, “most of them were mature Christians,” says Janice, “and they started talking about ‘I read this scripture, and it revealed to me that I need to do this today.’ It was totally foreign to me, but what I saw was that they were living their lives through the Bible and laughing and having fun—and I didn’t think Christians could have fun.”
She became intrigued with the Bible, who Jesus was, and why all these people were so enamored of him. When she shared a little about Adam, one of the women told her to “give some of that weight you’re carrying to Jesus. You can’t do it all by yourself. Just like your son can’t do it all by himself.”
So she did. Right then and there, Janice prayed silently, and she could not deny the peace she felt. Larry experienced the same liberating freedom from his own debilitating guilt and failure as a father. “God is in charge,” Larry said to Janice afterward. “That’s what going to church reminded me of today.”
Although Janice had gone for one reason only, to help Adam, “it ended up helping me,” she says. “Once I realized I needed Jesus, it wasn’t for Adam; it was for me.”
Scripture by scripture Janice devoured her new Bible, until one morning, as she stood in her kitchen, she asked Jesus into her heart. She shared the news with Larry, who said he had recommitted himself to God and reconfirmed that Jesus Christ was his Lord and Savior. Together they prayed, asking Jesus to save Adam.
Only then were they able to stop chasing him. “We quit,” says Janice. “We were like, ‘Lord, you’re in charge, and we’re going to back away and let you be in charge.”
For the first time in her life, Janice understood what it meant to have “blind faith.”
Two weeks later Adam’s boyhood friend Ryan Whited was driving south on Highway 7 in Hot Springs when he heard a horn honking from behind. The driver in the blue Toyota truck tailing him waved him over.
Ryan pulled off to the side of the road and the Toyota rolled up alongside. “Adam Brown!” Ryan said through the open window. “What’s been going on?”
In high school, though not a football player, Ryan had been rowdy right along with Adam. He had mellowed some as a senior and become more active in his church, and in fact had invited Adam along a few times. When Adam had been working on his workbook in drug rehab three months earlier, he had answered the question “Name the spiritual mentors in your life” with three names: Grandma Brown, Aunt Becky, and Ryan Whited.
But it had been years since Adam had seen Ryan, who had attended the local community college after graduation, then traveled around the world, living in a commune in Switzerland before returning to Hot Springs.
“Sorry for pulling you over like that,” Adam said, “but I saw you driving and I kind of need to talk to you.” He hopped into Ryan’s
car and proceeded to unload what had been going on in his life, that he’d stolen from virtually everyone he knew in order to support his drug habit. When Adam confessed he’d stolen from his parents, he started crying. “I’m really addicted to crack,” he told Ryan. “I can’t stop doing it. I need your help.”
Adam asked if he could move in with Ryan and his brother, David. “I know y’all will be a good influence, and I’ll get myself well,” he said. “I won’t be a problem.”
Yes, Ryan said immediately, then he called David, who was four years older and a youth pastor at a local church, to confirm. David had known Adam as a kid and agreed to let him stay, with some basic ground rules: no drugs or drug friends allowed in the house.
Adam, not trusting himself, asked if Ryan could drive with him to where he’d been staying to pick up his belongings. Along the way he pointed out five crackhouses. “If I disappear,” Adam said, “can you come get me out of there?”
In a wooded area outside town, they turned down a narrow road of broken blacktop that led to a trash-strewn clearing. “This is it,” said Adam, pointing to the centerpiece of the dump—a dilapidated trailer.
The inside looked as bad as the outside and smelled even worse. Dirty dishes covered with rotting food were piled in the sink. There was a crib in the living room. The floor was littered with garbage. Adam waded through the tiny rooms, grabbing clothes and stuffing them into a black Hefty bag.
“It was in a state that animals shouldn’t be living in,” says Ryan. “It was just nasty. The clothes that we gathered were on the floor. It wasn’t like we got out specific things from the closet that had been put away. It was a disaster. I was just sitting there in this place thinking, What in the world is going on in Adam’s life that he could live here?”