On Pills and Needles

by Rick Van Warner

  By the next morning Tommy had become convinced that the murderous drug thug he owed money to was also the girl’s pimp. He said she had been acting strangely, and he was convinced she’d ratted him out to Six Pack. He was certain that the ruthless dealer was coming to make him pay for his debt. He had left through a back window of the girl’s house and was hiding in the bushes outside a nearby home.

  On the one hand, there were legitimate reasons to fear Six Pack. Before fleeing the country, Six Pack was the primary suspect in the murder of two young men over a handgun deal gone bad. Both had been shot execution style and their bodies had been set on fire and dumped along a popular bike trail not far from where Tommy was living. The boys’ charred bodies were found early the next morning by joggers, and news coverage was extensive. Tommy knew both the victims and the prime suspect in this horrific crime. On the other hand, a person under the haze of heroin is hardly rational and is prone to paranoia and delusion.

  I got another call from Tommy from an unknown number.

  “Dad, are you almost here?” he whispered.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Six Pack came looking for me just now. I saw his truck go by the house, slow down, then back up and stop right in front before leaving. I ran out the back and through the yards to escape and rang the doorbell of a nice man who let me use his phone to call you.”

  He gave me the address.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said.

  With my adrenaline rising, my phone rang again a few minutes later.

  “Is this Tommy’s father?” the voice on the other end asked.

  “Yes, why?” I asked.

  “I’m an officer with the sheriff’s department,” he said.

  My heart sank as I immediately thought Tommy may have been killed.

  “I’m here with your son,” he said. “He says you’re on the way to pick him up. Is this true?”

  “Yes, I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said, relieved but tense about a potential confrontation with a dangerous drug dealer who might still be lurking about.

  After a few minutes during which the deputy explained the situation, I asked him a question.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” he replied.

  “Give me your gut feeling,” I asked him. “If you were to guess, do you think this drug dealer is really after my son or do you think he’s being paranoid and delusional?”

  “My guess would be the latter,” he said.

  “Thank you, officer, I’m almost there.”

  I pulled up to the house where the owner had let Tommy use his phone, and there were two sheriff deputies, each in their own car, waiting for me. They asked me to follow them and Tommy hopped in my car, looking and acting like someone who had just seen a ghost.

  All Tommy’s belongings from the recovery center, including a large duffel bag of clothes, a good watch, and his cell phone, were now locked in the new friend’s mother’s house. Following an argument in which he accused the girl of setting him up, she had left the house and locked up. He’d earlier unlatched a back bathroom window on purpose. The deputy said that under the law he had the right to retrieve his possessions, provided there was a way to get into the house without breaking anything or kicking in a door. With his slender frame, Tommy had no problem slithering through the window and within a couple minutes, he opened the front door to let the deputy inside. Within fifteen minutes, we’d gathered up all of Tommy’s things, locked up, and left.

  “So here we are again,” I said to Tommy calmly. “Help me understand how all this happened. I need details.”

  Since he’d used drugs less than twenty-four hours earlier, he was still stuck in the “stupid zone,” meaning that his logic was circular, his thoughts were all over the board, and his demeanor was jumpy and nervous. Whether or not he’d really seen Six Pack the night before or that morning was irrelevant. We had to find somewhere for him to go.

  Moving home was out of the question, I reminded him, giving him the choice between dropping him at a free city recovery program shelter or somewhere on the street. He was terrified to go to a free city shelter, still certain that Six Pack was after him and would be alerted. He also pointed out that most people in such programs were court ordered and were finding ways to use drugs while inside.

  “What about Grandma?” he asked. “She and I have been talking, and she says she’ll have a room for me in her new house.”

  “Tommy, she’s getting old, gets stressed very easily, and does not need to worry about someone else,” I said. “I think it is a bad idea and completely unfair to her.”

  Mary’s reaction to the idea earlier in the day had set her off. “No way, are you crazy!!” she shouted at me over the phone before I hung up on her screaming at me. Not particularly helpful.

  “But I’ve got nowhere else to go,” Tommy said. “If I go to one of the detox facilities downtown someone will recognize me and let Six Pack know where I am. He’ll kill me! The people in Umatilla are in it for the money, and besides, there’s nothing more I’m going to learn at this point.”

  By the end of our Denny’s lunch, his idea of living with his grandmother didn’t seem as crazy. By now I had reached the point of just dropping him off at a street corner if that’s what he decided he wanted, though I hated the option. My patience for the madness of the past several years had completely run out. As much as we loved our son, there was nothing left we could do to help him if he wouldn’t help himself. I no longer harbored the illusion that we could change things for him or keep him afloat. I was at peace that we had done all we could possibly do, and then some. The only certainty was our resolve that we would no longer subject our daughter and ourselves to his self-destructive behavior.

  His grandmother Dona had experience dealing with addicts, having worked for many years in social services and having counseled prison inmates, many of them substance abusers, as well as prisoners who had completed their sentences and were attempting to reenter society. Unfortunately, her huge heart made her easy to manipulate, and many years earlier my wife had found out she was going beyond counseling former inmates to sending some of them money to help them regain their footing in the world. Despite such noble intentions and certain street smarts gained growing up in the Bronx, Dona tended to be easily conned. Mary had become furious to learn that while her mother cried poverty to her, she was secretly sending money to ex-cons.

  Dona’s love for her grandchildren clouded her judgment when it came to Tommy, who seemed to have a special place in her heart. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been burned by his manipulative behavior before, such as when he talked her into “lending” him $1,000 to buy his first scooter, the one that landed him in the hospital when he foolishly decided to drive it down a busy highway on a Saturday night. Or the time she had collaborated with our oldest son to bail Tommy out of jail against the wishes of his parents. Or the time he and girlfriend Sarah had stolen and pawned her antique silver to buy drugs.

  Despite all this, Dona was ready to take him in. She even drove to Orlando to collect him and what little remained of his possessions.

  20

  Death and Discovery

  Tommy and I paddled our kayaks into the saltwater cove where the manatees were known to gather. There were at least eight of the sea cows splashing in the shallows, breaching partly out of the water. They seemed to be engaged in a game, rolling across and around each other. As we paddled closer, they swam toward us in curiosity, perhaps hoping we’d have something to feed them. They were much larger than we’d realized, and they bumped our kayaks as they swam right under us, rolling onto their backs to look up at us through docile eyes. A couple of them pushed their large snouts out of the water just inches from the kayaks, snorting water out as they got a closer look at the strangers now in their midst.

  It was just a few weeks after the Six Pack encounter, and he looked relaxed and happy during my visit. Tommy had wanted to go fishing, but la
cking time, boat, and tackle, we settled on renting kayaks instead. It was an idyllic morning with blue skies and big, white fluffy clouds. Best of all, we had the lagoon to ourselves with the exception of the marine mammals, sea birds, and fish who lived here.

  I stopped to pull my phone from the plastic bag protecting it, wanting to capture the moment with a picture of my son. Living near the beach with his grandmother seemed to have rejuvenated him, and he looked healthy. Just as I positioned my iPhone to snap the picture, a bottlenose dolphin surfaced just a few feet from Tommy’s kayak, and I was able to capture both in the frame. The boy who had always loved dolphins seemed full of joy, at least today.

  He worked at local restaurants by night and surfed by day. I helped him attach a special surfboard rack to the side of his scooter, and he became quite a sight riding down the streets and beach, his curly hair flying out from under his backward hat, his tattoos glistening from the salt and sweat. His tan deepened.

  “Hobo brown,” he said one day with a smirk.

  The slower and laid-back pace of the ocean town suited his personality, and he seemed to be in a good place. The stress of his jobs and grandmother would overwhelm him at times, but he mostly spent his days communing with the ocean, playing music with friends, or cooking in restaurants. There was the occasional girl in his life, of course, but even his attitude toward relationships had changed.

  “I’m not interested in a relationship at this point,” he told me. “I’ve had enough of that. I want to figure out where I’m going first.”

  He told his brothers that he never planned to get married or have kids and that he saw himself playing the future role of crazy and fun Uncle Tommy to their kids. Most of all, he loved the peaceful beauty of the beach and ocean, discovering the spiritual connection he had sought but never found. Paddling and surfing for hours, meditating as the sun rose over the water, and quietly observing birds and marine life, he had finally found peace.

  For nearly a year, things seemed to finally be clicking for Tommy. He had new friends, was making money, and best of all, was surfing and meditating on a daily basis. It seemed that finally he might find his path forward.

  All this changed with a call he received on a fateful Friday afternoon. Sarah, the girlfriend he had once loved so deeply and shared so much with, had died from an opioid overdose.

  The news devastated Tommy. He left work early and proceeded to flood his Facebook page with picture after picture of the two of them. When our eldest son, Paul, called Mary to alert her, we immediately knew that he’d become depressed, and we hoped that his circle of friends would provide the support he needed. Mary’s brief conversation with Tommy did nothing to ease our worries.

  “He’s really down,” she said. “This is crushing to him.”

  “I know, but he has a great group of friends and has to learn how to get through the ups and downs of life,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do unless he wants us to go there or he wants to come here.”

  “No, he says he’s fine and doesn’t want us to come,” she said. “He’s with his friends, and they are comforting him.”

  “I’ll go see him tomorrow,” I promised her, then called him myself.

  “I’m so sorry, son, I know how hard this has to be.”

  “She’s gone, Dad, it’s my fault.”

  “No, son, it’s not your fault; you haven’t even seen her in months.”

  “You don’t understand. She has been trying to contact me for weeks, and I blocked her calls and messages,” he said between sobs.

  “You had to cut off contact to stay clean and rebuild your life.”

  “I know, but it’s not fair. She was the love of my life.”

  “Can I come over now or tomorrow?” I asked.

  “No, I’m okay. My friends are here, and I’ve got to work tomorrow.”

  “What about Sunday?”

  “That works.”

  “I’ll come over that morning and call you on the way.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes, I’m okay, just really sad.”

  “I understand. Stay strong, son, you’ve worked too hard to give up. This is one of those horrible things that life throws at you, and I know you are in a different place now and can overcome it. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Dad.”

  I later learned that Tommy spent a long, tearful evening with friends and on Saturday called in sick and pawned his first item to get enough money to buy drugs. When I arrived on Sunday to walk with him through a natural area of the beach, he seemed fine and appeared to be rebounding from the devastating news.

  He blamed himself for first introducing Sarah to Oxys years earlier, for abandoning her in his efforts to preserve his own life, and then for turning his back on her toward the end. They had been completely codependent, unable to separate from each other even when both knew they should. It was all too much for him, and he convinced himself and us that the stress of living under his grandmother’s roof was only adding to his problems.

  Desperately wrapped up in his struggle again after nearly one year clean, we reluctantly agreed to help him move out and rent a room from a friend. We had no idea he had resumed using. We also didn’t realize that the friend he was moving in with also was likely using, was married with a young child, and had his mother living there as well. On the day we helped him load his bed, dresser, and clothes into my friend’s borrowed trailer, we nearly gasped when we laid eyes on the decrepit house he was about to move into. Only slightly better than a clapboard shack, the house was one of several old and poorly maintained homes along the rails, presumably built originally to house railroad workers. As we navigated the trailer to the best spot to unload the furniture, a shirtless old man sat on a dilapidated porch across the narrow street, eyeing us suspiciously while chain-smoking cigarettes. A cute young boy with curly red hair and wearing just pajama bottoms came running out of the house into which Tommy was moving to greet us.

  “Hi, Tommy, who are they?” he asked.

  During introductions I couldn’t help but notice horrific burn scars across the boy’s chest. We later learned that he was being homeschooled by his mother, did not attend the public elementary school just two blocks away, and was recovering from lice.

  Inside the house was a disaster, full of cats, kittens, and a couple of dogs. The place was filthy and completely cluttered, which Tommy blamed on the fact that his friend and family had just moved in and hadn’t yet had enough time to unpack. Mary and I sensed immediately that drug use had to be a big part of the puzzle, having by now observed similar unmitigated messes in other places we’d visited or retrieved Tommy.

  We wished him luck and drove home, certain that this would be a very short-term arrangement. It was. Tommy, who had begun using again on the day after Sarah’s death, soon got into a fight with his friend’s mother over a late rent payment and was asked to leave. While attempting to network at a business conference in Scottsdale, my phone rang over and over. It was Tommy.

  “Dad, can you rent me a U-Haul? They threw all my stuff out on the porch in garbage bags, and I have to get everything out of there before it rains.”

  “Tommy, I’m out of town and am not going to be able to do this for a couple hours, will that work? What about Grandma?”

  “She won’t help me.”

  “Give me a little time, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Within hours, a U-Haul truck was secured via my credit card, and Tommy and a friend got his stuff out of the rotting house. Since his grandmother refused to let him store his furniture in her garage, he spent the next twenty-four hours aimlessly driving around trying to figure out what to do, racking up one hundred miles on the rented truck. The next day he took the furniture to a friend’s shed and returned to his grandma’s house to resume residence on her sofa bed. His brief shot at independence over, Tommy fell further into depression.

  Within days I received a frantic call from Don
a.

  “I’m really worried about Tommy, he’s not himself and I’m afraid. He’s irritable and slept twenty straight hours on my couch.”

  “Who are you talking to?” I heard Tommy ask in the background.

  “I’m talking to your father,” she shouted. “Now he’s asking me to loan him ten dollars because his car is out of gas.”

  “That’s not true; stop exaggerating, Grandma,” I heard him yell in anger.

  “Look, I can’t deal with this. Can you talk to him?”

  “Put him on the phone,” I said.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Tommy said, crying, his voice barely audible.

  “You relapsed, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you try to overdose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tommy, do you realize that dying is the worst thing you could ever do to your family?” I asked, fighting back tears. “We love you so much, and you’ve been doing so well.”

  “I just couldn’t see any other way out,” he said, still crying. “I dug the hole so deep this time that I just didn’t know how to get out.”

  From the time Sarah died three weeks earlier, Tommy had lost it all. He’d returned to drugs, lost his job, lost his place to live, sold his most prized belongings—his guitar and surfboard—and was ready to die.

  “I’ve got to think at this point that it’s not only the drugs but that there are other issues making you feel so depressed that might be treatable,” I said, grasping for anything that might convince him to stay at his grandmother’s house and not walk out the door as he was threatening to do. “Do you think that there might be more to this than just the drugs?”

  “I don’t know, Dad, I think maybe.”

  “Will you wait for me? I can be there in an hour.”

  “I don’t know; you guys have done so much for me. I don’t deserve to live. I’m a failure. You would be much better off without me.”

  “Tommy, that’s not true! We love you and will never give up on you. Please, don’t give up on yourself. We can get through this. Okay?”