On Pills and Needles

by Rick Van Warner

  Even to this day there is nothing that infuriates me more than a bully picking on or taking advantage of others perceived as weak or defenseless, an internal anger that likely began with the nasty, ignorant teen schoolboys who once tormented me. My willingness to take on bullies—from a man using a crowded subway car as an excuse to inappropriately rub himself against a young woman to an abusive colleague taking advantage of a shy new worker—is a risky approach. It is probably wiser to ignore such issues, but my inability to do so, especially when someone is being bullied, has created a few problems over the years, including a couple brushes with serious injury or death. While I’ve certainly become more selective with age and in recognition of our increasingly dangerous world, there are still times when walking away from an injustice just doesn’t cut it.

  For Tommy, who is slightly built, it wasn’t physical characteristics that crushed his self-esteem during his formative years. It was more his inability to achieve a sense of belonging. The tribe of outcasts, consumed with the culture of drugs, was the only place he found the acceptance he craved. He tried becoming part of many groups and succeeded for a while in some, such as the Boy Scouts and crew team, but he ultimately took up full-time residence on the Island of Misfit Toys.

  At the hospital where Tommy and his girlfriend Sarah were recovering from their accident, we felt genuine pity for the young woman we’d grown to loathe but had never really had a full conversation with. Wrapped in a body cast and clearly in pain, she looked so sad, lost, and tiny, more like a twelve-year-old than the eighteen years she actually was. Suffering from a broken pelvis bone, shattered shoulder, cuts, bruises, and other unknown ailments, Sarah had suffered the worst from the scooter accident. Our son had some bruised ribs, lots of cuts, bruises, and road rash, but by comparison was unscathed. When we later saw pictures of what was left of the twisted wreckage of the scooter, we couldn’t believe either had survived.

  By now Tommy had not been living with us for several months. The previous summer had been a disaster, culminating with his arrest for selling narcotics just a couple months before the scooter mishap. We found out about the arrest through the internet mug shots that Mary obsessively and covertly viewed on a daily basis, making sure I was unaware of her activity.

  At first we were relieved, feeling that perhaps a few months living in the harsh reality that is jail might wake him up, but mostly knowing it would be harder for him to die from an overdose on the inside. But within two days Tommy had been bailed out by his primary drug dealer, further increasing his debt to the 350-plus-pound giant whom we later recognized on the nightly news following his arrest during a major sting. The scooter accident didn’t seem to even faze our son, and he was right back to resuming his synthetic heroin habit and living in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city.

  Within a couple of weeks, his drug debts must have become due, because Tommy, now nineteen, was forced by gunpoint into a room at his drug dealer’s house, where he was kept locked in for a week and pistol-whipped at least twice. As previously mentioned, by now we had already accepted and mourned our beloved son’s imminent death and had begun to move on.

  Somewhat to our amazement, we got a call from Tommy asking for help just a few weeks after we saw him at the hospital.

  “I really want to get clean this time,” he pleaded after we greeted his request with skepticism.

  Once again false hope rose up in our hearts. Will we ever learn? I thought as we drove to pick him up.

  He was in really bad shape this time, with sores, bruises, filthy hair, and discolored teeth. Now weighing only about 125 pounds and wearing tattered clothes, he looked more like a person who’d just been released from a prisoner of war camp than someone we used to know. His mother was thrilled to have him home and alive, even if only for a day, and cleaned him up, tried to get him to eat, and was actually in a good mood for the first time in weeks.

  As much as we love our children and try to be good fathers, there’s simply no way a father can have the same bond with a child that a mother can. We didn’t carry them inside our bodies for nine months before going through the difficult and miraculous process of bringing them into the world. As Mary hugged, cried, laughed, and doted over our broken son, I felt very little this time beyond the intense desire to get him back out of our house. Emotionally, I’d completed the mourning process. Having this person back in my home, someone who had hurt both my wife and my health, tanked our finances, and nearly destroyed our family, was nearly too much to take. Yet here we were again.

  With very little hope that he’d really changed, we entered him into a detox facility the next day. From there he went into another rehab program, this one only ninety minutes away.

  For the first time ever, he actually completed the fifty-three-day program and received a graduation certificate at a ceremony we attended. It was during family meetings at this center that we were exposed to the scientific aspects of addiction, including how hard drugs can rewire the brain, but that a sober brain, much like a liver, can regenerate itself over time. We also learned how much drug abuse retards development, particularly during the teen years when the brain is going through its most active development phase. Our nineteen-year-old was developmentally about thirteen, the head counselor told us.

  On the ride home, Mary and I were elated with the idea that through sobriety Tommy still had a chance to repair the damage he had done to himself. We’d previously believed his drug use must have caused irreparable brain damage and fretted that he’d never be able to live a normal life, even if he did manage to get clean. The new information was a glimmer of hope that we prayed our son would grasp. He didn’t.

  Upon graduation from the program, Tommy insisted on returning to the “love of his life,” Sarah. We knew from texts, phone records, and social media that she was desperately clinging to their relationship. Sarah, whose young mother had died from an overdose the year before and whose father was not in the picture, was as codependent on Tommy as he was on her.

  Determined to forge his own path, Tommy decided to move into a halfway house in Daytona Beach that was linked with the center he had graduated from. Like other halfway houses he has since resided in, it was an old, no-frills house in a relatively rough neighborhood. Run by a hard-nosed military veteran, it seemed just the place for Tommy to have a chance to thrive. He lasted about a month.

  Never since his struggles with opioids began had Tommy managed to stay clean beyond ninety days. It was almost as if an internal timer went off that it was time to use again. He would do so well, even going to meetings every day and sometimes trying to work the twelve steps toward sobriety. But just as quickly he would crash, picking right up where he left off. Within days he’d find himself back at either the grim reaper’s or jail warden’s door.

  Tommy and his girlfriend manipulated Mary’s mom into taking both of them in to live with her once he’d had enough of the halfway house rules. It went downhill quickly, with the pair stealing and pawning his grandmother’s silver and Tommy being arrested for shoplifting about a week later.

  His grandmother bailed him out without our knowledge, and Tommy decided he wanted to try getting clean again. The only good news from the mess in our minds was that he still wasn’t in our home or town and that the time periods between relapse and attempts at rehab seemed to be getting progressively shorter. With this rationalization, we again sanctioned a return stay at the rehab center he’d successfully attended before, putting as much of the exorbitant cost through our insurance plan as possible, but again increasing our astronomical debt load. Our love was too great to give up now.

  At home, family dynamics continued to shift. The stress on our family was especially hard on my daughter, who finally had come to accept that her favorite brother was gone.

  “That Tommy is gone forever,” she told me one day, a sad look in her eyes. “I don’t know this Tommy, he’s different.”

  By now our other sons were fed up and advising us to just
let him go and stop trying to help him. We’d already been through several attempts at rehab and recovery, none of them successful for more than a few weeks.

  But as I told Tommy repeatedly during my delusional phase of trying to reason with an active opioid user, “We’ll never give up on you, son; don’t give up on yourself.”

  While we refused to quit on him, we made it clear that this was his final chance to receive any assistance from us. Little did we know then how foolish this promise was or how often we would go back on the vow.

  On one such occasion, after Tommy had resurfaced and called his mother, it was my daughter’s softball game that was interrupted.

  “I’m going to get him,” she said.

  “No you’re not, I’ll get him,” I insisted.

  Both of us put ourselves in harm’s way several times when it came to this struggle. When I was out of town, Mary didn’t hesitate to venture into dangerous neighborhoods in the middle of the night, a fearless, five-foot-tall, petite, and weaponless warrior that should never be underestimated. When it comes to one of her children, she’s as fierce as a lioness trying to protect her cubs from a roaming male hoping to take over the pride.

  As I drove toward the rendezvous spot, fighting my cynical frustration at our latest Groundhog Day morning, Mary was scrambling to find a detox facility with an open bed and a recovery center that could take him after that. As usual, it was the weekend, and the business staff was off duty. By now experts in the recovery business, we knew full well that no matter how bad a condition Tommy was in, there would be no room at the inn without the requisite financial payments up front. There was no time to spare.

  “Can you wait until tomorrow to leave?” I asked Tommy after picking him up on a street corner. He was carrying his remaining clothes and belongings in a tattered garbage bag, the drawstring plastic ties over his shoulders like the straps on a backpack. He reeked of cigarette smoke and body odor as he slung the bag into my backseat and climbed up front.

  “No, I really need to get out of here today,” he said.

  “Why, what’s going on?”

  The fear in Tommy’s eyes seemed different this time. It was not the fear of dodging a drug dealer to whom he owed money, even though those threats still existed. It seemed to be a deeper, more genuine fear than I’d seen before.

  “I’ve got to get out of Orlando,” he said. He began to sob.

  As much as we’d already been through, a small doubt had remained in the back of my mind that perhaps he wasn’t truly an addict, as I then understood an addict to be. I’d grown to detest the label addict, much as I’d later learn to hate the word disease. Both seemed overly simplistic, convenient ways to put addiction into a neat little box. There is nothing remotely neat about addiction.

  As I tried to comfort my crying son, putting my hands on his shoulder and reminding him how much I loved him, I realized why his fear was different this time. He was so firmly in the grip of the drugs he’d been using that he knew unless he was immediately extracted from his familiar stomping grounds, he’d likely die.

  Mary called to say she’d found a highly regarded program in Delray Beach, which was known in the dysfunctional family circles we now traveled in as the recovery capital of the southeast. There were numerous rehab facilities located there, and we put the wheels in motion. First he would detox at a facility near the center to work through the physical withdrawal process, which was always painful and messy. On the car ride to the detox center, Tommy began experiencing cramping and nausea, the first stages of withdrawal. I explained to him that if he chose not to complete the program, he should not bother calling us again. At the time we meant it, but we really never could turn our backs on him. Each time a brief period of sobriety would grant us enough time to rejuvenate mentally and physically, and because the time between relapses and sobriety kept getting shorter, we kept clinging to the hope that this would be the time he’d really get it.

  Tommy and I arrived at the bleak, white-brick detox building, located in a deteriorating neighborhood. The woman at the desk was gruff and no-nonsense, but her eyes harbored the kindness and understanding of a person who had seen scores of kids like our son. After a brief physical and interview process, she suggested I go and buy him some packs of cigarettes.

  “Honey, the one pack he’s got isn’t going to cut it!” she said.

  It was very odd to buy cigarettes for the first time in more than twenty years, especially for my child, but I complied. I gave Tommy a huge hug, told him I loved him, and urged him to work hard at his recovery.

  “You can do this, son,” I said.

  “I love you, Dad,” he said.

  “I love you too, son.”

  After dropping the cigarettes back at the center, I began the three-hour drive home. Easing back onto the interstate I was swept by the familiar relief that he was no longer in our care, at least for a while, and for the first time in months I allowed myself a small measure of hope that he might get better. This turned out to be the last time for a few years that I had real optimism and hope that my son would have a happy future. Hope neutral is the gear I chose to remain in, and still mostly remain in today.

  15

  Groundhog Day (The Movie)

  Four hellish years, nine rescues, nine detoxes, nine rehabs, and nine relapses from the time we found Tommy in the abandoned naval barracks, we found ourselves driving Tommy back to the halfway house in Daytona for a second tour of duty. While the mix of men living in the house seemed more compatible with our son this time, we honestly didn’t expect the outcome to be much different. And it wasn’t.

  For several weeks Tommy worked at a seafood restaurant cutting fish, shucking oysters, and frying seafood. While the hours were decent, his unrealistic expectations about buying a car, getting his own apartment, and attending college right away clearly signaled that little had changed in his drug-addled brain. Perhaps even more disconcerting at the time, approaching double digits in relapses, was the fact that he clung to the notion of being able to smoke pot and not do other drugs.

  Like clockwork, at about the ninety-days-sober mark Tommy gave up on what he called “Dirtona,” and began snorting and shooting up Oxys again. He reunited with his girlfriend Sarah, who by then had found work as a stripper. The two of them flopped wherever they could, at friends’ houses, drug dealer couches, the fleabag trailer where her raggedy, twelve-tooth “uncle” lived, or whatever park bench they found themselves near during their drug-fueled haze.

  We didn’t hear from him during this period, but we changed the code on our garage door keypad and the locks on our doors for fear of being robbed by him.

  The accident, as much a fault of his poor judgment in taking a low-speed scooter onto a major highway as it was the driver that mowed Tommy and his girlfriend down, produced a substantial insurance settlement check for him. The dumb-luck, American-liability lottery at its finest! He used the settlement money to buy a used car and landed yet another restaurant job he’d soon abandon. We knew Tommy was alive mostly by the toll bureau invoices that continued to arrive in the mail, indicating his regular habit of running tolls.

  Before long Tommy was flopping in the house of his morbidly obese drug dealer. Clueless, he had returned to the same place where he’d previously been abused and held at gunpoint! Not surprisingly, Tommy’s drug habit must again have racked up substantial debts to this guy, because before long we received a call from the insurance company that his car had been involved in an accident. It turned out that the dealer had appropriated the car as collateral for Tommy’s debt and was driving it when the accident occurred.

  Mary, who sometimes seems to thrive on confrontation, was soon on the phone with the dealer himself, a nasty and loud conversation based on the end I could hear. The dealer threatened to have the car sent to a chop shop and dared my petite wife to come down there to get it. Bad idea. Mary was able to connect with Tommy and, by herself without my knowledge, drove down into the middle of the crime-ridden
neighborhood to rescue our son yet again. The stolen car report she had filed worked, and within a couple days we got a call from the police that the car had been retrieved; we paid to tow the battered vehicle back.

  After my wife retrieved Tommy without incident, I returned home from a business trip to find our emaciated son curled up under a blanket on our couch. I wrestled with a blend of pity and disgust. This time we decided to do his detox at home, determined not to spend another penny on anything insurance didn’t cover. It was a nasty process with the vomit bucket, sweats, chills, and mood swings associated with withdrawal and detoxification from pill-form heroin. He mostly just slept or whined. After a few days, Tommy was ready to give Delray Beach another try. Like a scene from Groundhog Day, I was again behind the wheel of my truck for a long ride, my relatively incoherent, barely functioning son riding shotgun.

  Christmas season came quickly that year, and neither Mary nor I were much in the mood to deal with the shopping, hustle, and over-commercialized ruination of the season. We were exhausted, physically and emotionally. By now I’d ballooned to my nearly all-time high in weight, continuing a yo-yo with weight that had to put a huge strain on my heart and other vital organs. The signs were not lost on my doctor, who warned me to get healthier or not expect to live to see grandchildren. For Mary, it was the level of stress that concerned me most, given the scientific linkage between stress and cancer. Our daughter developed a very unhealthy addiction to food during this period that she continues to battle, and her size also continued to increase.