On Pills and Needles

by Rick Van Warner

  Before we could find an alternative, his disgust with the woman escalated to such a point that he took video footage on his phone to prove she was using. He planned to report the couple to the police and provide the video as evidence. Once she caught him filming, an argument ensued, and he was kicked out of the house. A far-too-familiar cycle began once again.

  For a couple days he slept at a new girlfriend’s place until her mother put an end to that. He spent other nights at no-tell motels with fifteen-dollar-a-night rooms, good for an hour or the entire night. For all his lack of common sense, retarded social development, and psychological struggles, he certainly was resilient. But it didn’t take long between food, lodging, and presumably drugs for him to run out of money and again call home tearful and defeated.

  It was clear he was using again, but we couldn’t bear the thought of him back on the streets. I purchased him a train ticket back to Orlando. He missed the train of course, no longer having a car, so we called Paul, the brother who had coaxed him to Tampa with the best of intentions. By now, however, Paul was fed up.

  “He can’t stay here,” he said.

  “But he has nowhere else to go; he missed his train, and there are thunderstorms tonight. Can’t he just crash on your couch a couple nights until we can help him figure out what’s next?”

  “No way, Dad, I don’t trust him,” Paul replied. “I have my friend’s expensive guitar and other valuable items here, and I’m not going to risk it.”

  “Listen, you self-centered prima donna,” I responded, anger rising in my voice. “You’re the one who wanted him there in the first place; we tried to warn you what would happen. And now you can’t even let him sleep on your couch!”

  “Screw you, Dad, I’m not doing it,” he said, hanging up on me.

  While Paul kept his word about not letting Tommy inside his rented bungalow, he did go pick him up and let him pitch a tent in his tiny side yard. He also let him shower inside the next morning. Paul, now experiencing the conflicting emotions of having failed to help his brother and probably feeling he’d been duped, was discouraged.

  “None of us can do anything,” Paul said. “He has to do it for himself. You have to stop rescuing him and just let go.”

  While I knew he was right, knowing and doing remained two different things in our household. We let him come home again.

  18

  Breakthrough

  As I painfully hobbled my way toward the hospital elevators that would lift me to Tommy’s floor, my swollen knee was throbbing. Walking briskly around a corner in my house earlier that morning, I had been blindsided by my son’s rambunctious, 105-pound retriever with a full head of steam running to greet me. I never saw him coming, and his full body weight sideswiped me at knee level like a linebacker unleashing a full speed hit on a running back. Both my knees buckled, and I crumpled to the tile floor in pain.

  The physical pain was nothing compared to the mental pain Tommy’s latest fall had instantaneously created. When I got to his hospital room, I could see he was hooked up to an IV with heart monitoring wires spread across his chest. At first I was relieved not to find him bloodied and battered. But the relief soon turned to frustration, and then anger, when he would not admit to me what had occurred and the familiar lying began.

  “What happened, son?” I demanded.

  “I’m not sure; I blacked out and woke up here,” he replied. “But I feel fine and need to get to work, and the nurses are giving me a hard time about leaving.”

  “Where is your scooter?” I asked, concerned about his only mode of transportation, given that he had managed to squander two different cars. He also had paid us back about only $200 so far of the $1,500 purchase price.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” I asked.

  By now I was certain Tommy had relapsed and was hiding something from me. This was further confirmed when I tried to get any information from the nurse.

  “It’s up to him to share any information with you. I’m legally prevented from telling you anything unless he grants me permission.”

  Irritated with the runaround I was getting, I asked my son to grant that permission. He declined. It was clear from his cranky and nasty demeanor, now resurfacing after lying dormant for months, that he had relapsed. He told me nothing.

  “What is going on?” I asked, my voice rising.

  “Get out of my room,” Tommy barked at me, then shouted to the nurse, “I don’t want him here, he’s stressing me out!”

  “You’re on your own,” I told him, storming out of the unit as fast as my gimpy legs would carry me. My mind racing, I paused in the lobby just before exiting the hospital doors and decided I simply could not accept this turn of events. Stubbornly I turned around and headed back for the elevators. This time a pair of security guards were waiting for me outside Tommy’s room, ready to physically block me from entering.

  “Did my son commit a crime?” I asked.

  “Sir, you need to keep your voice down,” a nurse said, scolding me for potentially disturbing other patients who might be resting.

  “No,” said one of the security guards, “we’re here to make sure he doesn’t leave.”

  Still with no answers, but on the verge of getting myself into trouble, I hobbled away. For once I practiced self-restraint in the desperate chaos of my son’s struggle.

  Tommy had not come home the previous night, the same day he had rear-ended a car while driving my truck. He never borrowed my SUV and was much more accustomed to driving his mother’s car, but because she was working and an afternoon thunderstorm was rolling in, I offered to let him take it.

  “Remember, Tommy,” I said, in what turned out to be a prophetic warning. “My truck is a lot heavier and older than Mom’s, so it takes a lot longer to stop. Be careful.”

  Less than two hours later he slid on the wet streets into the back of a car he’d been following too closely. Thankfully, he was completely sober. Sadly, it triggered the worst of his self-loathing and another relapse that almost killed him.

  He was despondent when he returned home with my truck’s grill destroyed, headlight smashed, hood crumpled up, and bumper hanging by a thread.

  “I’m so sorry, Dad,” he said, looking like he was about to cry.

  “What happened?” I asked, not doing a good job at hiding my disgust.

  “It wasn’t my fault; she stopped short, and I went into her.”

  “I can’t talk to you right now,” I said, walking away.

  Despite years of practice, I still had difficulty accepting such setbacks with grace or patience. This time I was able to refrain from articulating the unkind thoughts popping into my mind at the moment and had enough control to try to calm down. A lousy poker player, my emotions were easy to read. My attempt to separate before saying something I’d regret wasn’t enough for my son though, who followed me into our bedroom, badgering me to talk about it.

  “Enough. I said I don’t want to talk about it now,” I shouted.

  As he hung his head and walked away in shame, I immediately felt remorseful. I went down to his room to talk.

  “Look, son, I’m really sorry I just yelled at you. I’m pissed about the situation, not pissed at you,” I said. “A car is just a material thing, and it’s why we have insurance; it will be fixed. The main thing is that you’re okay and that no one was hurt.”

  Despite this backtracking, Tommy fixated on my immediate reaction. I asked him to spend time together that night, but he said he had plans to go out with a friend. I begged him to come with me and not take his scooter out that rainy night, but his mind was made up.

  Before he left I again told him how much I loved him and how glad we were that he hadn’t been hurt. I repeated my statement about the truck being a material thing that would simply be fixed and wouldn’t cost much due to insurance.

  “I’m sorry I let you down again, Dad,” was all he said. “I love you too.”

  We did
n’t hear from him again until he woke up in the hospital the next day and called Mary.

  It turned out that he had attended a party on Cinco de Mayo, which like St. Patrick’s Day is a holiday mostly used as an excuse for people to over-drink. He ran into an old accomplice at the party who happened to have just what Tommy was looking for to escape from his feelings of worthlessness. On the way home, high on whatever combination of alcohol and drugs he ingested that night, he managed to guide his scooter into a 7-Eleven parking spot because he had to go to the bathroom and wanted a bottle of water. Miraculously, the moment he blacked out occurred on the sidewalk outside the convenience store rather than behind the wheel of his scooter.

  He was rushed to the hospital by ambulance and, according to the emergency room doctor, was barely breathing. The reason for the mystery surrounding my visit the next day was that the doctor had ordered him committed to the hospital for a minimum of three days of evaluation under a Florida law designed to protect people who were a danger to themselves or others. The doctor later told us that especially when consumed with alcohol, the combination of drugs he had taken was lethal. She said that he was very lucky to be alive.

  The spiral downward was rapid after he was released from the hospital. Breaking the promise to rest for a few days before returning to work, he pressured the doctor to sign a release form, and he was back in the restaurant’s kitchen within three days.

  Professional rationalizers by this point, Mary and I convinced ourselves that it was the best thing for him and that lying around the house worrying that he’d lose the job he loved would only make him more depressed.

  Previously I’d convinced Mary to try a new approach. We were both so worn down that we felt there was nothing to lose. The one thing we agreed on was that under no circumstances were we going to throw any more money at the expensive recovery machine. Our love and desperation overshadowed our better judgment, as it had so many times before.

  Our children thought we were nuts.

  “What the heck are you guys thinking?” our other two sons asked, each in their own ways. “Hasn’t he done enough to hurt you already?”

  Tommy’s siblings had long ago become fed up with his up-and-down routine and although they all still loved him, they had erected much stronger boundaries than we were capable of. Ever since the deliberate overdose and despair that led up to it, I’d begun looking at our son’s addiction from a different perspective. No program, residential or outpatient, series of meetings, or halfway houses had worked. The only thing that kept him alive was the love of his family and the fact that we wouldn’t give up on him. He later confirmed this multiple times. Since Mary and I were now in a stronger place mentally and physically, we decided to try a different approach. Virtually all other options had been exhausted except for sending him back to the streets homeless and broke, which we couldn’t bring ourselves to do again. So we let him move back in.

  He was very frail and emotionally shattered. His only chance was to stay off the hard drugs and heal in a loving environment, we reasoned. As always, his younger sister was delighted to see him and greeted him with great enthusiasm and affection, even though she remained cautious. Over the next few days Tommy cleaned up his appearance, getting a haircut, having a pierced stud removed from his cheek, and shaving off his beard. He looked good for the first time in many months, and before long his smile began to reappear, especially when he was clowning around with his sweet little sister.

  We even went along with the idea he’d long held on to that just because he had a beer or smoked a little weed once in a while didn’t mean he’d return to hard drugs. As my therapist, who affirmed our decision, put it, “You’re just trying to keep his head above water.”

  It felt liberating to consider a different approach that wasn’t so rigid, and I even treated myself to the slight hope that he could fully recover. The approach seemed to be working great at first. One night I even took Tommy, now twenty-two, to a local Irish pub where I play on a steel-tip darts team and introduced him to several friends. For the first time ever, I also had a drink with my son.

  This simple act made a huge, unexpected impact in our relationship. It was like an invisible wall between us had suddenly dissolved, and he seemed as happy that night as I’d ever seen him since childhood. It hit me like a ton of bricks. More than anything, Tommy needed my unconditional acceptance!

  Mary had been saying for some time, “He needs his father.”

  As much as I inherently knew this, it was tremendously difficult to spend time with him while he was using. In my initial belief in the all-or-nothing doctrine of twelve-step recovery, I thought that even having a single drink with him would be contributing to what most experts still consider a disease.

  But now the dramatic change in his behavior and the joy in his smile made it obvious that what he needed was not just my love but also my acceptance. How could I not have seen this earlier, having grown up with a father who preferred to spend time alone rather than with his family? Having grown up feeling rejected by a father who didn’t have a full-time job but still couldn’t find time to attend even one of my countless sporting events or concerts, I knew the pain of indifference as well as anyone. In this moment of clarity, I changed. From that night and every day since, I treated Tommy as my adult son and fully accepted his unique viewpoints, clothes, and grooming preferences. I no longer viewed him as a pinless grenade that could explode at any moment. He sensed this shift and was elated.

  On the way home the night we shared our first drink, he asked if I wanted to perhaps pick up some cigars to share so we could continue the one-on-one conversation and father-son bonding at home. We stopped by a store to pick up two stogies and proceeded to sit next to our pool, music in the background, and talk for hours. It was a new beginning in our relationship, and while my son was still far from out of the woods regarding his drug problem, we began to look forward, not back.

  When I’d taken my father on a ride back to the farm of my youth during my final visit to his home, for the first time I understood things from his perspective and how hard life had been on him. In fully opening the communication channels with my son that night, I felt an eerie similarity. Once I stopped looking at Tommy as someone whom it was my job to save, the vibe between us immediately changed. Puffing on our cigars and enjoying the cool, breezy break in the hot weather that night, we had the most honest and open dialogue we’d ever shared.

  I learned how he first got into drugs and how things had progressed, things he’d shared with others during various recovery attempts but was too ashamed to tell us. As if hearing everything through a fresh set of ears, I got a much better sense of where he’d been, how he was now feeling, and the triggers that led to his repeated relapses. I got to know my son far better that night and the following few days than I had over the previous five years. For the first time, I shared with him some of my own shortcomings and father issues. I honestly answered his questions about which drugs I’d experimented with during my college years. We were completely open and honest with each other, and if he asked me a question, I responded directly and truthfully.

  It dawned on me during the next few days of reflecting and discussing this breakthrough with my wife, closest friends, and therapist that my full acceptance was more important to Tommy than anything else. All he wanted was to spend time with me and have me accept him for who he was.

  With the communication door between us finally wide open, things went along very well for several weeks. With the exception of a slipup on Christmas Day, where our full house of relatives and friends triggered his social anxiety disorder and led to him to buy and ingest a tranquilizer pill, Tommy was functioning, happy, and getting healthier.

  He found a job on his own working at an upscale but funky restaurant as a cook. He was diligent about arriving on time and the managers seemed to love him. He decided he wanted to go back to working on his degree and enrolled in classes at the local community college. He earned great grade
s for most of the semester, proudly showing us the tests and papers he’d written that got high marks. We felt that chalking up enough small victories would rebuild his self-esteem, and this is exactly what was happening.

  As his sobriety neared 120 days, a new record, some familiar signs began to worry us. He spoke to me about his lack of friends and inability to sustain any relationships with the two or three girls he’d recently dated. Unfortunately, he’d blown up too many bridges, and even his best friend, Scott, whom Tommy had stolen from and lied to, no longer would speak to him. His work life continued to go well, as did his classes. Physically, he was back to a healthy weight and was even undergoing a treatment process to rid hepatitis C, a disease he had contracted from either drugs or tattoo needles, from his body. But with no social life, Tommy began to become depressed. We all knew Orlando was the wrong place for him to be feeling lousy about himself. All he needed was a trigger to flush the tremendous progress he’d made. The accident with my truck was the proverbial straw that broke his back.

  Tommy had yet to learn how to cope with setbacks, and sadly, seemed snakebit by life. Like the sad donkey Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, it was as if a black cloud followed him around. Even when he was sober, problems seemed to find him. Unfortunately, his response to any significant thing that went wrong, each of which must have been amplified in his mind, was to run back to his drug of choice.

  Our new, open, and honest communication commitment survived his Cinco de Mayo debacle, and we discussed this recurring theme extensively.

  “Son, life is full of ups and downs,” I recall telling him. “Lots of times things suck. But every day is a new chance, and you just have to not let the bad things pull you down into a hole that you end up making deeper and deeper.”

  He shared with me that he just felt it would be better for everyone if he wasn’t around, and he again was obsessed with his perception that he’d let me down with the auto accident.

  “Our relationship is the best it has ever been,” he said, “and I really felt you were beginning to trust me again. But then I screwed up and wrecked your truck. Mom and you have spent so much money on me already, and now I’m costing you more. I let you down again.”