On Pills and Needles

by Rick Van Warner

  The deep frustration I’d harbored toward my son began to morph into resentment, as I recognized the physical ills and emotional scars he’d inflicted on our family. Much like when visiting my estranged father prior to forgiving him for being a lousy dad, I grew to dread having to visit Tommy and was relieved when I left. The day after Christmas we wrangled our other three kids into the car despite their protests and made the three-hour drive south to see him. After a relatively forced reunion and lunch, Tommy returned to his recovery center and we returned home.

  In January Tommy moved into his third halfway house in eighteen months, this one in South Florida. The cycle continued. Each time the story was the same. Our slim hopes that he would finally “get it” would soon be dashed, and we now had reached eleven rehab attempts, not to mention the misery of eleven relapses, rescues, and detoxes. By now, one painful rescue attempt after another had blurred together, and today we’re not certain how many times our son tried recovery and failed. One morning while I was finishing this book, my wife and I spent more than forty-five minutes on the phone trying to piece together a timeline of all centers, jails, halfway houses, and jobs my son had held during this four-year period, even going through file folders and bank records to try to jog our memories. Suffice it to say, we didn’t keep a journal and never got to any definitive answers. We had spent these years, and the years prior and since, simply trying to survive the ordeal ourselves while keeping our son afloat.

  By the end of 2013, Tommy was attending an outpatient program thirty minutes away, after somehow convincing us to break our vow never to have him live with us again. He had at least separated from his codependent girlfriend, Sarah. As usual, he did well for a while, but it didn’t take long before familiar patterns began to emerge.

  First, he found a new muse, a sweet girl a few years his elder who was also fighting to beat synthetic heroin. Unlike previous girlfriends our self-loathing son connected with, this young woman seemed to be good for him. At first it was purely platonic, but by the time she left the boyfriend she’d been living with and who had supported her recovery attempt, it became clear that she’d fallen in love with our son. This was a big mistake, especially for her. My clean and sober brother had long ago warned against dating addicts. He spoke from experience. He’d married and had two children with one before divorcing.

  “Fix yourself,” Ron always admonished. “Learn to love yourself before you even think of trying to have a relationship with someone else.”

  Tommy, of course, still wasn’t ready to listen and didn’t. Missy and her long-term boyfriend split up, and it became clear to us that she and Tommy had crossed the line from being just friends. It wasn’t very long before his built-in sundial completed its circle, and he returned to the hard drugs again.

  As much as I’d developed a fair amount of self-pity regarding our son’s addiction and how harshly it had impacted our lives, it felt minor compared to the tragedy that had crushed my closest confidant and friend, Bob.

  Bob and his then-wife, Shelley, brought a beautiful boy whom they named Robert into the world. Years earlier, prior to any children, Bob, Shelley, Mary, and I, along with our respective dogs, had lived together for a year in a one-hundred-year-old, three-story Colonial-style house Mary and I had purchased to restore. By the time Robert Jr., “Bobby,” came into the picture, we had just welcomed Barry into our family. Bobby was a sweet, gentle boy, more like my son Tommy than my other little hellions. He fit in great with our three youngsters, and we enjoyed a few occasions together at the beach, park, and other places.

  During a business trip to New York City, where Bob and his family lived, I wrapped up my business late one afternoon and began to get excited about the Neil Young concert Bob and I were scheduled to attend that night. I was hoping to have enough time to stop by the apartment to give Bobby and his mama a hug. It wasn’t really odd that Bob had not communicated at all during the day; among his closest friends he’s legendary for being the most perplexing communicator any of us know. He’s also infamous for pulling disappearing acts during group gatherings, among other idiosyncrasies that have diminished little in later years. We all came to accept that Bob would only talk when Bob felt like talking, which except when in person wasn’t too often. On this day it was getting close to concert time, and I finally called his office. His secretary had a concerned tone in her voice, putting me through a series of questions before finally telling me I needed to call his apartment. Whoever answered, presumably a relative, gave me heart-stopping news.

  “Bob’s at the hospital,” he said. “His son is in ICU.”

  After finding out which hospital, I raced over by taxi. The scene in the family waiting room was surreal and far beyond my worst expectations. When I entered, still having no clue of what had transpired, I saw both Bob’s mother and mother-in-law clutching rosary beads and chanting Hail Marys. While I knew both of them fairly well by this point, they barely acknowledged my presence as they continued their chants in a trancelike state. After what seemed like an eternity, Bob’s wife entered the room, hugged me, and began to cry.

  Little Bobby, just shy of his fourth birthday, had a few days earlier caught a stomach bug, common for a day-care-age youngster a few months away from the germ-rich world of kindergarten. With the normal advice any parent has heard from their kid’s doctor, Bobby’s doctor told them it was a “virus that would run its course and to drink plenty of fluids.”

  The next morning he stopped breathing at the breakfast table after telling his parents his legs hurt. The paramedics reached Bob about half a block from his apartment as he was sprinting toward the hospital with his lifeless son in his arms. They managed to revive Bobby, but he was in a coma. After a few days on life support, Bobby passed.

  The aftermath for my heartbroken friend and his wife was not that unusual, given that individuals rarely grieve or process tragedy the same way. Their marriage did not survive, and ultimately his ex-wife unfairly decided that somehow Bob was to blame, vindictively making things even worse for him during the divorce.

  For his part, Bob retreated and focused on work. Aside from his closest friends and colleagues, he lived quietly and in relative solitude for the next few years. While his generous nature, sarcastic wit, and adventurous personality returned, the scars remain. It’s impossible for anyone who hasn’t experienced the loss of a child to truly fathom the depth of despair this brings.

  When Tommy’s endless saga would bring me to my knees, I’d reflect on what my best friend had gone through and try to regain perspective. Tommy’s girlfriend Missy, the latest female to fall for his pretty eyes and convincing lies, bonded with Mary. They texted and spoke frequently. It was as if they’d become candy stripers (like the World War II nurses tending to wounded soldiers) with the shared purpose of healing my son.

  But their efforts became nauseating to me, given my present state of mind. While I appreciated Missy as a well-intentioned young woman with a caring heart, she was clearly as broken as my son and somehow too saccharine for my liking. Meanwhile, it seemed that my wife was back in denial, simply refusing to admit that she couldn’t fix a son who had already used up his nine lives and more. I felt disgusted and couldn’t stand to be around either one of them.

  Tommy continued to fantasize about being a normal kid. I’d simply had enough with all of the drama and utter nonsense. Increasingly I sought refuge at my local pub and elsewhere, secretly beginning to wonder if I might be falling prey to the type of dependency that had cursed the lives of my father, brother, and son. During this period we experienced a few visits from our son’s probation officer, who was content to stay in the driveway thanks to the deep barking of Barry’s rambunctious and massive Chesapeake Bay retriever. I was thankful for the probation officer’s fear since it ensured the interactions were short.

  It’s hard to imagine how difficult it would be to go through the trials and tribulations of an addict child alone, as so many single parents have. Mary and I had again shifted
roles, she becoming the nurturing parent and me the tough-love father. There are many ups and downs in a thirty-two-year marriage, and I’m proud we’ve managed thus far to weather the issues related to our family. But the sands continue to shift, and tension between us seems always just beneath the surface. At least for now we’re on the same page.

  While we shouldn’t have been surprised that Tommy’s typical pattern would continue, his next eviction from our home was particularly gut-wrenching. A few days before his third failed rehab attempt in South Florida, Missy called Mary one night in a panic. She was with our son who could not stop crying and spoke about killing himself. What triggered his self-loathing was unknown, but we suspected he’d slipped. Missy convinced him to come home and the four of us sat around our living room, Tommy continuing to sob uncontrollably about his worthless life and the other three of us trying to console him and give him reasons to live. On the one hand, it was encouraging to see that he was feeling emotions again as compared to the robot-like state he seemed to be in when in the grasp of his preferred drug. But on the other hand, we wondered if the breakdown was severe enough that we should consider psychiatric options. Many tears were shed and hugs exchanged, and he finally fell asleep on the couch, completely spent. For the first time we considered him capable of taking his own life. At the same time, there wasn’t a thing we could do.

  The Baker and Marchman Acts, Florida laws created to protect despondent or mentally ill individuals from themselves, were short-term Band-Aids for a situation like our son’s. Lasting only three to five days, they were quick-fix bridges to tremendously expensive long-term solutions. By now well over six figures in debt and having been through about a dozen aborted rehab attempts, throwing more money at the problem was neither logical nor possible.

  Tommy seemed much better the next day, and we foolishly convinced ourselves that we’d all gotten through to him and the acute crisis was over. A day or two later, he still seemed fine and just after lunch told me he was going to take a shower. Minutes later the doorbell rang and it was his girlfriend, again in a state of panic.

  “Where’s Tommy?” she gasped.

  “He’s in the shower,” I responded. “Come in.”

  “He’s essentially been texting me good-bye,” she said. “I’m worried he’s going to hurt himself.”

  My heart racing, I ran to his bedroom door, which was locked. I could hear the shower running. Rushing to his brother’s room on the other side of the Jack and Jill bathroom, I found that door was also locked. Panicking, I sprinted across the house to retrieve the doorknob center-hole key and soon managed to get his door unlocked. By now I was certain that he’d be lying there, perhaps in a pool of blood, perhaps with a needle sticking out of his arm.

  Instead he was gone, along with the expensive laptop we’d recently bought to help him resume his graphic arts studies. The window to the bathroom was open, the screen taken out. Turning off the shower, which he’d left running as a diversion, my terror turned to anger. His girlfriend left in tears, and I hugged her, thanking her for how hard she’d tried to help my miserable son.

  Returning like the Hulk to the rage that was then the bane of my existence, I jumped in my car and sped to the neighborhood where his favorite pawnshop was located and stormed inside. People stood back and steered clear, waiting to see the confrontation that was clearly about to come.

  First I lied, saying my name was Tommy, and I’d returned to reclaim my pawned items.

  “Driver’s license,” the slimy twenty-something employee behind the counter ordered. After I produced it and he said the number didn’t match the record, my anger boiled over into a full verbal assault.

  “My druggie son just stole my laptop, and I need it back,” I demanded.

  “Sorry, you have to wait twenty days, and then if he doesn’t claim it, you can have a chance to buy it back,” he sneered.

  “Listen, you jackass, it’s my damn laptop and I want it now!”

  “Look mister, it’s the law, and I don’t make the law; I can’t give it to you,” he replied.

  “Real nice business you have here, preying on drug addicts and stolen merchandise,” I yelled, now in full out-of-control rage like I hadn’t experienced since New Jersey about two years earlier. As I stormed out, still cursing at the pawnshop’s employees and the onlookers who dared to stare at the raving lunatic stampeding back toward his car, it hit me that I was right back at the beginning of the recurring nightmare.

  “Will this ever end?” I asked myself.

  Later that night, with the money received from pawning the computer and cell phone, Tommy bought and ingested a huge amount of heroin in an attempt to kill himself.

  16

  Beyond Twelve Steps: The Business of Recovery

  As Tommy’s battle continued to wreak havoc on our marriage, family, and health, I resumed weekly sessions with my therapist. The topic was almost always Tommy. Mary had gone on a health kick, lost weight, and was eating the healthiest she had in her life. My daughter and I continued to struggle.

  My therapist, David, is a former professional tennis player from Australia who has an easygoing, yet no-nonsense demeanor that I definitely need. Once skeptical, perhaps from years working as a journalist, I by now had become cynical, particularly relating to psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists. Tommy’s journey had run us through a gauntlet of them, and most seemed only a step or two removed from televangelists. “Come and see the light of recovery!” was often the refrain. “Now that will be $200.”

  David is different, and we connected nearly immediately. Our earliest sessions, which in my mind were to help navigate through a bumpy time in my career, soon shifted to my relationship with my father. Before too long I found myself confronting deep feelings of rejection and isolation dating back to my tumultuous childhood and opening up black holes in my memory that I’d blocked as a way to cope. In retrospect, these sessions likely prepared me for the parental challenges ahead. Over time—including the life-changing act of forgiving my father for his transgressions and absence during most of my childhood, only a few short years before his death—I was able to shed much of the self-pity and insecurity that had dogged me for years.

  Now, about seven years later and after months of not seeing him, David and I sat down to catch up. For the next few years, the topic usually was Tommy.

  “I’m angry again and blaming myself,” I said.

  “You and Mary are doing the best you can,” he replied. “I admire how much you are willing to get down in the trenches, fight hard to save him, and never give up.”

  “I spent too much time on my other sons because I love sports; I should have been there more and gone on camping trips with him instead of coaching so many baseball and basketball teams.”

  “You can’t blame yourself. There’s no handbook for parenting, and you’re far from alone. He must know you love him. Even the struggles you’re going through now are a clear signal to him how important he is. You’ve just got to keep him afloat, keeping his head above water. You’re doing a great job.”

  By the time Mary and I had become de facto experts in the science and business of recovery, thanks to the growing number of our son’s relapses, we began to question the conventional wisdom that twelve-step programs are the one and only way a person can get clean and lead a productive life. This was presented as established fact by every recovery program and addiction specialist we had met, including my twenty-five-plus-year clean and sober brother. It was all or nothing, according to leaders in the “rooms.”

  After surviving seven years and over a dozen failed recovery attempts by Tommy, including residential treatment, outpatient programs, AA and NA meetings, and just about every other potential option, all with virtually no success, I began to have doubts about this all-or-nothing approach, particularly where opioid addicts are concerned. If total abstinence is the only answer, why does this approach seem to rarely work with opioid users?

  It’s a topic David and
I wrestled with at one of our sessions. He shared my skepticism.

  “It works for some, but not everyone,” he said.

  “Exactly. Like my brother,” I replied. “I’m not knocking a program that has helped so many people. But we live in a gray world, and few things are that black and white.”

  A music fanatic, I’d read and listened to Howard Stern interviews with several musicians who had overcome drug addictions. Greg Allman’s testimony was particularly encouraging given Tommy’s track record; it had taken Allman fourteen rehabs before he successfully beat back heroin and alcohol dependency. Maybe there was hope for Tommy, I thought.

  Each musician had a different story on how they had escaped the powerful and destructive forces of their addiction. Some, such as James Taylor, had worked the twelve steps, accepted a higher power, and never touched a drink or drug again. Others, like David Crosby, had put down hard drugs years earlier but continued to smoke pot or drink moderately without experiencing a relapse. Stern always challenged such claims and dug deeper, but each subject’s answers made sense from my perspective. One size doesn’t fit all.

  “Hey, it’s a deeply personal thing, and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another,” responded one rock musician. “We don’t all share the same body chemistry, spiritual beliefs, or life experiences.”

  Overall, twelve-step programs still seem relatively sound to me, at least for the structure and shared camaraderie they can provide. But to assume that a program designed for alcoholics more than half a century ago is the one and only way an opioid user can possibly overcome their dependency seems illogical to me at this point. My younger brother beat the odds by getting clean and staying clean for over two decades after a single thirty-day rehab program. But countless others fail. Stats in the complex cesspool of addiction are so hard to track that trying to pinpoint success rates is futile. Most addicts yo-yo in and out of various programs frequently, making any progress nearly impossible to scientifically measure.