Cruising up the interstate on the eight-hour drive, my son sound asleep in the seat beside me, it seemed like weeks had passed since the exhausting search and rescue of Tommy from the old building in Baldwin Park. It had actually been less than a week earlier. Since then we had scrambled to search any and all options available, both parents working the internet and phones. We knew that his hospital stay would be brief and were determined to send him straight into a rehabilitation program. Guilt again washed over me as I glanced at my son, still feeling then that I had failed him.
Along the way we stopped for food and he wanted to buy a book, Into the Wild, about a college graduate who had sold all his belongings, cut off contact with his family, and drifted throughout the United States before making his way to Alaska, where he perished.
“I want to travel, to see the world,” he said. “I’ve never even made it to the West Coast yet.”
“I get it, but first you have to get clean and get on track. You have a great life ahead of you, but the drugs will rob it from you if you let them.”
The sense of relief I felt after checking him into the rehab facility was tremendous, though coupled with sadness. Looking back, I felt this same relief each time I’d drop Tommy at another detox or recovery center. Having somewhere to send him if even for only a few weeks allowed us time to regroup, recharge, and at least try to focus on our other children. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very long before the vicious cycle would start all over again. It took years before we recognized what a waste of time and money most of this had been. It didn’t solve Tommy’s problem; it only briefly kept it out of sight and mind.
Driving home after dropping Tommy in the Panhandle, I meandered through back roads to give myself time to process all that had happened. We figured we’d have at least twenty-five to thirty days to plan the next move in regard to Tommy’s recovery. We ended up having less than a week.
Within days of arriving, Tommy managed to get himself kicked out of the program by sneaking out of the center to buy cigarettes from a nearby Walmart for himself and fellow patients. Despite the lax supervision that allowed this and the fact that the center still had yet to assign him a counselor, his decision ensured that his stay was brief. Just a few days after dropping him off, I found myself back in the car for another sixteen-hour round trip to retrieve him.
Despondent again, Mary and I spoke on the phone repeatedly on my solo drive north. Back into crisis mode, we were running out of options and time. She furiously searched online and made phone calls, but finances, insurance rules, and the fact Tommy had now been asked to leave a rehab center left us with dwindling choices.
I’d begun that day at work, still relieved that Tommy was safely embedded in a program. The call came late morning that the center wanted us to pick him up by the following morning at the latest. While having dinner at a bar after my long drive back to the Panhandle that night, my phone rang. It was my brother.
“Send him to me, we’ll take him,” Ron said.
“No, we could never do that to you. Thank you, but that’s not fair,” I replied.
“I talked it over with Delores, and we can do it,” he insisted. “He’ll have to live by our rules, but he needs a fresh start somewhere where he doesn’t know anyone.”
Despite my protests, my brother remained firm in his commitment to help. Deep down I knew it was also the best option we had by far, both from a financial and practical standpoint. A family member, particularly one who had walked in Tommy’s shoes and beaten the odds, would be far more vested in my son’s recovery than a stranger possibly could, I reasoned. So began the first of my son’s two multiweek tours in the mountains of northwest New Jersey.
7
The Transporter
Like a scene from a spy movie, I quietly picked the “transporter” up at the airport late one night.
A burly, muscular man wearing jeans, a black leather jacket, and carrying nothing except a duffel bag, extended his hand after throwing his bag in the backseat.
“How are you? I’m Sal,” he said in a thick Boston accent.
“I’m Rick.”
“Look, I know this is hard, but I do this all the time, and it’s gonna work out fine.”
He had read my mind in the first fifteen seconds and put me at ease. He was a divorced former cop with a heart for helping troubled kids get on the right track. For a mere $3,000 fee plus expenses, he would fly anywhere, nearly anytime, to ensure the package—in this case Tommy—would arrive at the destination on time without drama.
After I’d briefly learned about his background, Sal asked me a series of questions and then began to go over the next morning’s game plan. We would arrive to pick up Tommy from the hospital at 6:30 a.m. Sal would make it clear to Tommy that anywhere they walked, from the hospital to the car, the car to the airport terminal, even onto the plane itself, Sal would have his hand firmly on the back of Tommy’s belt. Tommy was to walk slowly and deliberately in front of him, follow his instructions, and never try to deviate from this procedure.
Despite having gone through two recovery programs following two detoxifications, as well as a relatively successful twelve-week period of sobriety living with his uncle and cousins in New Jersey, Tommy had reverted to his destructive tendencies. The stealing to support his habit and his chaotic behavior had again become untenable in our home. Since a year remained before the legal pardon his eighteenth birthday would grant, we decided to force him into a residential treatment center in southern Utah.
Recognizing that my aging legs would have little chance of catching him should he decide to run, we hired Sal to help with the transition. Sal had successfully transported Tommy’s best friend to a different state in the middle of the night without incident just a week earlier.
The next morning I picked up Sal from his motel and we drove to the hospital. While Sal met with him privately to explain the rules of engagement, I signed reams of paperwork to have Tommy released. We were soon in my truck, me as the chauffeur, Sal and Tommy in the backseat. Not much was said on the drive to the airport, and occasionally I’d glance in my rearview mirror and catch Tommy either staring vacantly out of the window or dispassionately at me.
At curbside, I said good-bye, tears welling up in my eyes, and hugged my son. “I love you, son. We want you to have a great life. Get clean! We know you can do it.”
“Thanks, Dad, I love you too.”
With that I watched them walk away, a muscular New England cop behind an emaciated average-height teen. As I drove away I questioned the decision to spend more money that we didn’t have versus taking him out there myself. Many months later my son confirmed that we’d made the right call because, while waiting in the hospital, he had already thought through which stoplights on the route to the airport might be closest to one of his drug dealers’ places and where the best spot to escape from my truck would be.
Except for one of the fathers in the circle who said nothing, my wife, Mary, was the last person to open up and share. I actually enjoyed it when the counselors rejected her pat comments and pushed her to dig beneath the surface of her emotions, which is still the level where she seems most comfortable. We were disappointed that we were barely allowed to see our son during this visit to a remote corner of the Southwest. By the end of the first day, we were reminded about a concept we had struggled to grasp in our Nar-Anon group back home. Family support groups are not about fixing the addict; they’re about fixing yourself by learning to let go. We were also reminded that there isn’t a thing any of us can do to rescue or help an addict; they must choose to help themselves.
Despite the intellectual fortification that Nar-Anon and family sessions at Tommy’s various recovery facilities provided during the first couple years of our miserable voyage, they weren’t enough to prevent futile and desperate rescue attempts or irrational behavior during emotional moments. Regardless of the advice and written principles urging us to “let go and let God,” we simply were incapable of doing so. In a
now familiar combination of despair and anger, I’d regularly jump in the truck on a night he had quietly disappeared in a futile attempt to find him. I would drive up and down row after row of cars through apartment complexes or shopping centers searching for the blue Prius with a particular bumper sticker driven by Tommy’s best friend. I’d stroll through dangerous streets and dark city parks at night with the illogical thought that I might come across him. Doing something felt better than doing nothing.
There were times when my irrational approach led to confrontations, accusations, and potential harm. I could feel the desperate rage boil up inside me and know it was wrong to put myself in danger, but I was unable to back down. Like the superhuman strength from adrenaline that supposedly allows a person to lift a car off someone under it, when my emotions rose on the battlefield in the fight to save Tommy, adrenaline took over and I sometimes lost control.
The most poignant moment of our first visit with Tommy in Utah came when he told me, his tears flowing, “I’ll never have the chance to walk across that stage and get my diploma. I’ll never enjoy that moment of graduating from high school like a normal kid.”
His words, especially the word “normal,” pierced my soul as the truth of his words sank in. He saw himself as an outcast, barely worth our efforts.
Like previous attempts at recovery, and attempts yet to come, the months in Utah ended in failure, not to mention more debt. Again we found ourselves struggling to cope with a seemingly impossible dilemma. My brother stepped forward a second time with great courage and selflessness. With nowhere else to turn, we looked north once again.
The energy-sapping gray skies of a New York winter were a familiar sight as my son and I sped in the rental car around the mountains toward my brother’s house in northwest New Jersey.
“It really looks different up here in the winter,” Tommy said. “With the leaves off the trees you can see everything.”
“Wait until you experience a couple arctic cold blasts, then you’ll really know what winter is about.”
Upon arrival we all sat around Ron’s living room for an intervention of sorts, an establishment of ground rules that, not surprisingly, Tommy was ultimately unable to abide by. My mother, Isabel, then eighty-five, Delores, and my two young nephews and niece were present as my brother laid down the ground rules. My youngest nephew, Jake, curled up on Tommy’s chest, the recently formed bond between them one of the only positive outcomes of the ongoing saga. My mother tossed out a typically annoying comment in her best schoolteacher tone. Delores made sure he knew that he’d be doing his own laundry and reminded him of rules for keeping the house tidy. The kids weighed in enthusiastically that they wanted Tommy to stay. Tommy promised to abide by all rules, which he did until around the time of his eighteenth birthday, when all the parental strings on him were officially untethered. Thus began his second stint in New Jersey.
By the time I returned a few short months later, the wheels had fallen off. A few days prior to Tommy’s birthday, Ron and Delores left for a much-deserved vacation in the islands and to get married in a private ceremony. It was just the opening Tommy was looking for, and on the first weekend with my elderly mother in charge, he decided to go “camping” with some friends and didn’t show up back home until 4:00 a.m. Once Ron found out, it ended quickly. He called Tommy to kick him out and called me to tell me what happened. The next day I boarded a plane to New York.
The following weeks would bring Tommy to death’s doorstep and put him into yet another codependent relationship. But first he manipulated and conned us into thinking everything was still on the right track. From about age sixteen, he had regularly expressed his intense desire to be on his own, not to have to answer to his parents or, for that matter, anyone else. On his birthday, Ron and Delores still away, I picked him up at a diner and with my mother in tow headed to Manhattan for a birthday dinner. A good friend, whom my children call Uncle Bob, joined us for a pleasant and uneventful evening at a family-style Italian restaurant.
Bob has a special place in all of our children’s hearts, as he does in both Mary’s and mine. My best friend since college, he accompanied all three of my sons and me on our wilderness trips and is like another father to them. Bob, who tragically lost his only son, Bobby, at a young age to a rare flu virus, enjoys spending time with all three of the boys and Jessie, and they all love him. It was Bob who cheered Tommy up during a five-day rafting trip down the Colorado when he felt bad about not being a strong enough rower or was picked on. During the difficult years of Tommy’s struggles, Bob was a constant source of strength and encouragement to me on the darkest days.
The next morning would foreshadow the days to come. Tommy wanted me to drive him to a friend’s house before I went into the city, which I gladly complied with. On the way we stopped to look at his friend’s beat-up car, which of course Tommy had no money to buy but thought I might cave in and spring for. His halfhearted efforts to find a job had yielded no opportunities, not surprising given the region’s high unemployment and depressed economy.
He was squirrely as I tried to drive him to a destination that he didn’t quite know how to get to. Finally he directed me into a neighborhood, where he wanted me to drop him at a park in the middle of several houses.
“Why don’t I take you to your friend’s house?” I asked.
“This is fine, you can leave me here,” he replied.
“This is BS,” I responded, feeling the tension and fear well up inside of me.
“He doesn’t want his parents knowing someone is coming over,” he lied.
“So they won’t see you walking up?” I demanded.
“They’re at work,” he lied again, deploying the circular logic that we’d sadly come to recognize.
As he got out of the car, I could feel hot tears of rage building up. I drove from the neighborhood, turned around, and circled back on another street to see him from a distance. He was standing at the edge of the park on the phone. He spotted me and started walking toward the car. Finally forced into telling at least a partial truth, he admitted that it was a couple high school girls that were coming to pick him up and that there actually was no friend in that particular subdivision, just a convenient meeting place.
“I love you, Tommy, get clean!” I implored, driving away and gasping for air under the all-too-familiar waves of pain and despair. My wife’s “I told you so” response when I shared the episode on my drive to the airport turned my hurt into anger and, once again, Tommy’s problem drove a wedge between us.
That morning was the last time I saw Tommy for several weeks, and very nearly the last time I saw him alive.
8
Boomerang of Agony
With excitement and surprise since he hadn’t mentioned anything, I saw my son Barry jog out with the offense for the spring varsity football game. The defensive captain, he had not played a down of regular offense since his sophomore year. But now he was lining up at both fullback and tight end.
Just then my cell phone rang. It was Tommy, whom I hadn’t heard from in weeks. After leaving another treatment program in Delray Beach before completion, he had worked his way back up to Orlando and was sleeping on the couches of friends. I got up from the bleachers and walked down to the sidelines where I could still keep an eye on the game while talking. As soon as I got to field level, Barry caught a short pass in the backfield, turned the corner, and ran for a fifty-three-yard touchdown, the only one of his varsity career.
How ironic and typical, I thought. A potential highlight memory virtually erased by the timing of a phone call. My joy quickly turned to dread. Instead of enjoying this moment with my wife and friends in the stands, I was sucked right back into the life-draining cesspool of addiction. When I reflected on this a few hours later, I felt that God was reminding me not to get too high or too low about anything in life. The message seemed to be to keep things in balance and remember that he, not me, was in control.
As for the urgent phone call, Tommy
wanted me to buy him a pizza to be delivered to the friend’s place where he was staying. No hello, no update on him returning to Orlando, just another self-centered request. “No,” I responded and hung up.
But just as he’d done countless times before, he managed to divide his parents again. Before I could get back to my seat in the stands to tell Mary that he had resurfaced, Tommy had already called her, and she had paid for the pizza to be delivered.
The statistics regarding opiate addiction are frightening and getting worse. According to the CDC, more than ninety people per day are still dying from opioid overdose (including prescription opioids and heroin) in the United States alone. This “epidemic,” as the agency labeled it, has surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in our nation and has claimed over five hundred thousand American lives since 2000.1
Tommy was on the brink of joining these statistics at least twice.
During our first year of misery, we never fathomed that we’d still be living in the destructive wake of a synthetic heroin user years later. Or that the numbing cycle of drug abuse, lying, stealing, detox, rehab, and relapse would repeat itself thirteen times. After digesting many books and occasionally attending family support groups, we began to recognize how powerful chemical dependency truly is. As our understanding about addiction grew, so did the tension between Mary and me about what to do.
Each journey to another recovery attempt was somewhat surreal and was always a trip I took alone with Tommy. It was almost the same each time, making me feel like the Bill Murray character in the movie Groundhog Day. Each trip would begin with relief that he was still alive and a small glimmer of hope. As I would watch my broken son snooze next to me, whether in the passenger seat of the truck or on an airplane, I could never understand how this peaceful, artistically gifted, and love-filled young man had fallen so low. Each time I found my mind and heart overwhelmed with memories from happier times.
On Pills and Needles Page 8