On Pills and Needles

by Rick Van Warner

  Coming up empty, we returned to the group and in our own vehicles staked out both sides of Tommy’s friend’s home as well as the abandoned building we had searched. Trying to keep a distance, we hoped that eventually the friend would emerge and lead us to Tommy.

  Paul had pegged it. Sketchy was the perfect term for this guy. He’d emerge from the front door on foot, nervously look around, and then walk a block or two down an alley before turning around and coming back. Fifteen minutes later the garage door would open and he’d take off on a black bicycle, only to return within minutes. Keeping the heat on this confused and obviously drugged-up kid, we hoped that he’d either crack and tell us where Tommy was or lead us right to him.

  This cat-and-mouse game went on for the entire afternoon, and at one point my friend Rich, sporting a thick mustache and driving a very undercover-cop-like dark Chevy Caprice, rolled down his window to talk to him as he walked by.

  “Look, we don’t care about you or getting you in trouble,” Rich told him. “We just want Tommy, and then we’ll leave you alone. But until then, you won’t be able to wipe your butt without one of us being there.”

  Then, from my familiar post watching the abandoned building, I couldn’t believe my eyes. A group of four young men ducked through the fallen section of chain link fence and ambled across the overgrown lot toward the opening through which Rich and I had first entered the building. One of them walked, dressed, and from a distance looked like Tommy. I wasn’t able to get the binoculars on them before they stepped into the darkness of the building, but my hope rose that the nightmare would soon be over.

  I called the officer that had been helpful earlier, and he promised to investigate. A call from Cherie reported a couple kids running from the back of the building, dashing my hopes. Shortly after that I saw the officer enter the building, and then emerge a few minutes later with the four in tow. Unfortunately, Tommy was not among them.

  The anguish we felt as parents trying to locate a missing child in danger was unlike anything either my wife or I had ever experienced. Despite both of us having been through a disproportionate share of trauma in our lives, the intense heartache and dread were unbearable. The root of this pain also likely made me leap to the conclusion that it was Tommy I saw among the four kids entering the sinister building that afternoon when it wasn’t.

  With the emotional roller-coaster ride continuing and the day’s light fading quickly, Paul called me with a new plan.

  “I talked to John again,” he said. “He’s getting really wigged out by being followed and is very nervous. He said some old dude with a mustache is particularly creeping him out,” referring to Rich, sparking a brief, tension-relieving chuckle between us.

  “Let me go alone and convince him to show me where he and Tommy hang out when they go to the building,” Paul suggested.

  “I don’t know, son. It sounds dangerous, and I’m afraid he’ll just lead you on a wild-goose chase.”

  “Let me try, we’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Before long, from my regular observation post, pride mixed with hope as I watched Tommy’s friend emerge from Paul’s car. The pair then walked across the lot and entered the building.

  During what seemed like an eternity, I reflected on the man our eldest son was becoming. Paul had the unfortunate luck to be the firstborn of a damaged father and flawed mother, both products of difficult childhoods marred by divorce and dysfunction.

  Paul was challenging from the day he was born after twenty-three hours of labor. As a baby he wouldn’t sleep and cried constantly. His ear infections were frequent, and he had a double-hernia operation at age two. Once he could crawl, there was no stopping his climbing, running, and chattering. He had three trips to the emergency room for multiple stitches before his fifth birthday, two a testament to his climbing coupled with the unforgiving nature of the old cast-iron radiators in our century-old house. It almost seemed like he enjoyed smashing his head against those things! By the time I’d make it home from Manhattan to the emergency room, the crisis would already be over, Mary’s blood-soaked blouse the reminder of what I’d missed.

  Clearly, Paul was very intelligent and full of energy, but his motor was always racing full speed. We enjoyed great times together at places such as the Bronx Zoo and Yankee Stadium. Tommy came along nineteen months later, then Barry twenty months after that. With Paul on the smaller side, Tommy average size, and Barry a bit taller, the three boys were virtually the same height, and frequently we were asked if they were triplets. Particularly after Barry was born, and we became outnumbered, life became more challenging. Mary took a hiatus from her career to focus on the kids after Tommy was born when we realized that given the costs of child care, commuting, and dry cleaning, she’d be going to a job in the city to bring in less than $10,000 per year.

  We enjoyed our Stone Harbor vacations on the southern Jersey Shore and often spent weekends with friends and their children, celebrating many birthday parties, communion celebrations, and other events with large groups of family and friends. Life was good with one small but not insignificant problem. I was rarely home.

  Still chasing the recognition and affirmation that my father had never provided, I was absolutely driven in my career as a journalist, determined to make a name for myself. My first job in Manhattan, paying just $11,500 a year, earned me the spoils of a cockroach-infested basement apartment in Queens with no phone, no television, a college-sized refrigerator, and a stoop-over handheld shower hose over a makeshift metal drain. I had to walk four blocks to the nearest phone booth to put in a collect call to my fiancée, Mary, who was living with her grandparents in the Bronx.

  Before long I had a better job, for $500 more a year, and over the next few years continued to work hard and ascend in my career. By the time we had our three boys, I was leading a national magazine and traveling across the nation, and occasionally to Europe, to spread the magazine’s goodwill. I loved every moment with my sons; however, I wasn’t home enough to have enough of them.

  The real wake-up call that changed the course of our lives came out of the mouth of Paul, then five, who while frolicking on a playground pointed up at an airplane flying overhead and asked, “Daddy, is that where you live?”

  As much a knife to the heart as his words felt like that day, it didn’t really hit me until the next week while on a flight to the West Coast. Trying to hide my face from the passenger next to me, I broke down sobbing. For the first time I realized that I’d created a different version of how my own father lived his life—for himself, not his sons. As much as I paid lip service to being a great dad, and as much love as I had for each son, how I spent my time proved they were not truly my first priority. Even when in town, there were many long days when I left to catch the train before they awoke and returned home after they were tucked in at night. While my own confidence and self-actualization had materialized, it came at a cost to my kids. Deciding to change course before it was too late, I began listening to headhunter calls and considering new opportunities.

  It was particularly difficult to tell my mentor and boss Jim Doherty about my decision when the right opportunity came along. Jim, a successful businessman who I sensed had certain regrets about his own years as a father, may have seen me as somewhat of a second chance given the age difference between us. “Van Warner is a work in progress,” he’d frequently tell people, just as my first mentor, my high school football coach John Pilato, had. Jim taught me about business, which I was essentially clueless about having grown up in the household of a teacher and a jack-of-all-trades high school dropout. With his career as a successful restaurant executive drawing to a close, Jim had been convinced by my then employer to move to the opposite coast and turn our business around. He plucked me out of a team of older, more experienced colleagues as his right-hand guy to make this happen. A hard-nosed Irishman, Jim wasn’t one to mince words and certainly was not a particularly sensitive man, instead cut from the cloth of World War II warriors raised by th
e notion that real men don’t cry.

  On a train home from Washington one day I got a call from my boss that both he and his boss had been fired that day and that Jim wanted to see me early the next morning. I walked into his office not knowing whether I would be fired or promoted. As I entered, Jim was pacing furiously, smoking a cigarette. He was obviously agitated and spoke in short, direct bursts at whoever was on the other end of his phone. He motioned for me to be seated, cut his call short, and began to speak.

  “OK, Van Warner, you might’ve heard that both guys above you aren’t here anymore,” he growled, taking a pull off his smoke. “I didn’t come here from LA to be third place or in the red. We should be the top business in the market, and I plan to get us there. I don’t give a damn what it takes.”

  Still uncertain about my fate, I nodded.

  “I see something in you that you don’t see in yourself, so I’m going to give you a shot,” he said. “This is big for you if you grab the brass ring. I’m going to give you six months to see what you can do. I’ll give you a lot of rope, got no time to babysit. What you do with that rope is up to you. You can either climb it, and I’ll promote you to editor and give you the money that goes with it. Or,” he said with a piercing smirk that I later came to secretly enjoy, especially if he was using it on others, “you can tie a noose and hang yourself! It’s up to you. Whaddaya say?”

  From that day forward I was all in, gladly accepting Jim’s coaching and guidance, the second major mentor in my life to compensate for an absentee father. I made the most of this opportunity and learned much about both business and life, and the years we spent together were the most rewarding and fun times of my career. Together our team did return our magazine to the top and the perks included getting to know self-made restaurant industry legends such as Dave Thomas, Norm Brinker, Joe Lee, and Carl Karcher. It meant spending time with rising chefs before chefs became celebrities, talented and eccentric people including Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse, Charlie Palmer, Rick Bayless, and many others. We were treated like royalty at the finest restaurants and resorts throughout the nation. It was a far cry from how I’d grown up, where the rare visit to a restaurant usually consisted of a Carroll’s fast-food drive-through or Ponderosa buffet line.

  Despite how much I enjoyed my role and the tremendous love I had for my editorial team, mentors, and job, Paul’s innocent words suggesting he didn’t even realize we lived under the same roof continued to haunt me. They reminded me of the dejected feeling I’d get every morning during my childhood summers, running to the lake’s edge after waking only to see that my dad’s boat hoist was empty. He left at dawn every day to go fishing, never offering to let me tag along. I was determined to break that cycle, and within a few months, Mary and I packed our three young boys and two springer spaniels into the minivan and began the long drive to start a new life in Florida.

  As he had on the playground fifteen years earlier, Paul once again had galvanized our actions with a new approach as the draining search for Tommy continued. Just fifteen minutes after Paul and Tommy’s nervous friend whom we’d been stalking entered the abandoned building, my cell phone rang.

  “I’ve got him,” Paul said.

  “Will he come out?” I asked.

  “He’s tripping balls,” Paul said. “Give me time.”

  An agonizing thirty minutes later, and several days after Tommy had disappeared, Paul emerged from the building walking slowly, his arm draped across Tommy’s shoulders. John walked a couple steps behind. What Paul had mistaken for a hallucinogenic trip on LSD or mushrooms was actually Tommy on Oxy pills, enough to have put him into the zombie-like haze we found him in.

  By now, Mary had returned with our youngest son, Barry. Also on hand were the Orlando police officer who had to remove Tommy from the missing persons database for us to legally leave with him and the helpful detective from our local police department.

  The tears flowed as we hugged Tommy and told him how much we missed and loved him. Looking dazed and somewhat blinded by the setting sun’s light, he showed little emotion, yet I sensed he was relieved.

  “I love you,” he said in a weak, faint voice.

  Within hours Tommy was safely ensconced in a hospital psychiatric facility for detoxification. Our search was finally over, but the journey was just beginning.

  4

  Coping with Chaos

  The hustle and bustle of the new school year had a special significance that fall, if you could even consider it autumn given the relentless heat and humidity in Florida during September. Tommy was reentering high school for his senior year, a fresh chance to leave his chemical demons behind and move on with his life.

  Jessie and I arrived at her middle school for orientation. The past nine months had been particularly difficult, not just because of Tommy’s continuing struggles but also due to a sudden illness in our family.

  On the day of the previous Christmas Eve, Mary and I were summoned to her doctor’s office for a consultation. The doctor delivered the bad news. The lump in her breast was indeed cancer, and she would require surgery as soon as possible. Merry Christmas!

  We decided to wait until the afternoon of Christmas Day to sit down with our three sons to share what was happening. We told our young daughter later and in a different way.

  Whether or not Mary’s diagnosis impacted or triggered our most sensitive son’s rapid descent into full-fledged opiate addiction is something we’ll never know. It certainly cannot have helped. During this period he was already smoking a lot of marijuana, and we suspected he was using other drugs. We continued to uncover hidden pipes made of pens and empty sockets, as well as bongs made from plastic water bottles. We had shifted from being parents into being detectives. We became obsessed with stopping his behavior and ensuring he was keeping his word when he denied using. Urine drug tests from Walgreen’s, seemingly a profitable product given the high price of the kits and pervasiveness of the problem, became a staple in our home. In ill-fated attempts at deterrence, we would require a surprise test on any of our sons at a moment’s notice, particularly Tommy.

  “Where have you been, son?” I asked him one night when his huge black pupils seemed to be blotting out way too much of his corneas.

  “At Austin’s house playing video games,” he lied.

  “Time for a drug test; you know the drill.”

  “Really, Dad? This is stupid, but it’s your money.”

  He complied, but not really. Much later we learned that Tommy was beating the tests by keeping a medicine dropper full of bleach, easily obtainable from our laundry room, in his bathroom at all times. Even when I walked into the room behind him to observe him peeing into the sample cup, he deftly would slide the dropper up into the long sleeve of the shirts he always wore and then squeeze its contents into the cup along with his urine stream. Opting to stand behind him rather than stare at his genitals while he filled the pee cup, I never noticed this clever trick and would have never known about it had Tommy not confessed it during one of his recovery attempts.

  Meanwhile, we continued to ratchet down the screws on his social life each time we caught him doing something wrong, which was frequently. A particularly low point occurred when I received a call from a close friend on the morning after our family had attended a small social gathering at his home. Their son, a few years younger than Tommy, woke up to find most of the money in his piggy bank missing, and he suspected Tommy. I told my friend that I’d check and call him back, then marched down to Tommy’s room with dread. I woke him up and confronted him.

  “Did you steal money out of Bruce’s room last night?”

  “No, why?”

  “Don’t lie to me, did you take money or not?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Here,” he said, sliding open a drawer to reveal the exact amount missing.

  “What is wrong with you? What were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know. I needed money and didn’t
think he’d miss it.”

  “You mean you thought you could get away with it, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “How many times have we talked about the importance of always being honest, never stealing, and respecting other people’s stuff?” I asked. “If there is anything I can’t stand, it’s lying, cheating, and stealing. Lately you’ve been doing all three. What is going on with you? What is it you need so badly that you would steal for?”

  “Sorry, I made a mistake.”

  “Get your butt out of bed and get dressed. We’re heading over to Bruce’s house so you can return the money and apologize.”

  Bruce and his parents accepted the apology and money with great grace, going out of their way to diffuse the awkwardness of the situation.

  “He’s a good kid who just made a mistake,” Bruce’s father said. “Hopefully, he’ll learn from this.” Sadly, he didn’t.

  The embarrassing visit was the first of many times Tommy’s problem would strain friendships, regardless of the kindness and understanding usually shown at first. I didn’t blame anyone for not trusting him and not wanting a teenager who would rob a younger kid’s piggy bank in their home. Over time this added to Tommy’s isolation, as we became hesitant to even put him in such situations. Much later we’d adopt more of a bunker mentality, becoming defensive or resentful toward friends who seemed to look at Tommy the wrong way or make a careless comment. Unless you’ve walked in our shoes, we’d think, who are you to judge? Today we recognize that everyone has personal challenges in their lives, whether they choose to share them or not, and have developed thicker skin, especially when it comes to our children.

  Although the telltale signs of drug abuse were there, particularly stealing and lying, we figured we were dealing with the usual teenage rebellion and not a descent into hard drug addiction. We took away his teenage lifelines, the cell phone and the car, and essentially had him at a point just short of house arrest.