After giving his girlfriend, Missy, and me the slip using the running-shower trick and then pawning his new laptop to afford a lethal amount of synthetic heroin, Tommy had returned to the house of his bloated drug dealer to try to permanently end his pain. Just two days after the sobbing episode in our living room that had terrified his girlfriend and parents, he shot up an enormous amount of drugs in an effort to pass out and never wake up again. He succeeded, briefly.
When he stopped breathing, the enormous man who had sold him the stuff and who owned the house performed CPR on Tommy and brought him back.
“You’re not going to die in my house, mofo!” he told Tommy once he had been revived. “Go somewhere else to die,” he ordered, showing the level of concern drug dealers truly have for their customers.
Tommy called Missy, who mobilized Mary, and within hours they’d managed to pick him up from a neighborhood she later described as “very scary.” Missy convinced him to enter the hospital to detox. Sadly, there was to be a third time we would process through this hospital’s emergency room, only to learn that the facility no longer accepted detox patients due to a change in medical laws.
A few days later Missy drove him from the hospital to a treatment facility an hour north of Orlando, a place that was relatively new and had earned a good reputation. This time we did not participate beyond continuing to keep Tommy on our family’s insurance plan. It was entirely through Missy’s efforts that he was given another chance at recovery. Any costs that our insurance didn’t cover were his problem, not ours, we decided. Mary kept tabs on the situation through Missy, and we also spoke to our son a few times on the phone and tried to be encouraging.
Once the amount of time that insurance would cover ran out, the center of course determined that either we would have to pay privately or he would have to leave. Coincidentally, it was the day before Thanksgiving. We reluctantly decided to bring him back home to see his family for the holiday.
After his second death-by-overdose attempt, my attitude toward him began to shift. Again Mary and I reversed roles. This time she had simply had enough and felt completely betrayed by him after trying so hard to get him on track. She was finished, except for the deep love and hope she still harbored and the intense worry only a mother can truly understand. I felt the tremendous sadness and hopelessness, wondering if there was anything we would ever be able to do to help our son.
Tommy looked and sounded great during the holiday; extended sobriety apparently had cleared some of the cobwebs from his damaged brain. We decided to let him stay home through Christmas to give us time, for a change, to consider future options without the pressure of a twenty-four-hour deadline.
In a somewhat surreal experience a couple weeks later, Mary and Jessie were driving back into our neighborhood when Mary spotted Tommy’s stolen car in our neighborhood, the second automobile appropriated by drug dealers over money Tommy owed them. Mary again decided to throw caution to the wind and now was tailing his car just a few blocks from our home. An aggressive woman who rarely lets go of anything without a fight, she was determined to recover this car as well. It was a wild coincidence that she had spotted it at all, since the drug dealer lived twenty miles away in a different city.
The driver didn’t notice that a diminutive suburban mom with a Christmas tree on her roof rack was tailing him, a feisty lady who wasn’t thinking about the potential danger of confronting the driver.
When he parked at a house and went inside, she drove around the corner where she could keep a sight line and called the local police chief. By the time the driver came back outside, two uniformed officers greeted him. Since we had yet to file a stolen vehicle report, the driver was released. Our son’s car was retrieved and eventually sold for much less than he’d paid for it just months before.
Tommy again decided that he needed to leave Orlando before slipping back into his old ways. He seemed to hate the merry-go-round he’d been riding and was sincere in his desire to start fresh somewhere else.
Our son Paul, back from working in Seattle and now living in Tampa, began talking with Tommy about moving there. Paul made it clear that living with him was not an option, so the two of them began seeking halfway houses that weren’t far from where Paul lived. Despite separate conversations with both his parents about what a foolish idea we thought it would be to disrupt his life by bringing his addicted brother into it, just like his grandmother Dona did before him, Paul ignored our warnings. Soon we found ourselves setting Tommy up in his fifth halfway house, this one owned by a married couple, themselves recovering addicts. At first the woman seemed to truly care about the lost souls paying a significant sum each week, most courtesy of their parents, to rent a room. The renters were encouraged to attend meetings. In time we would find out that her concern was an act, just another elaborate lie in the deceptive culture of drugs and the recovery business.
For several weeks, Tommy seemed to finally be moving in the right direction, landing a job as a lead cook at a new restaurant that opened just blocks from his house. The general manager loved him and the gregarious regional manager, whom I’d known for a few years, took him under his wing. For the next several weeks he worked overtime at the job, which experienced a strong opening and much higher than expected sales. Our family visited him on friends-and-family night, and he beamed with pride when introducing us to colleagues.
Unfortunately the other cook that Tommy was splitting most of the duties of running the kitchen with was injured in a motorcycle accident and had to take a leave of absence. Tommy suddenly found himself working sixty hours a week, sometimes twelve hours straight, something he was neither physically nor mentally ready to do. Never saying no to taking on double shifts or coming in on his day off, he drove himself to exhaustion. Faced with this new type of adversity and because of his longing to be normal, which included smoking weed behind the restaurant or at parties with his coworkers, he soon slipped back into opiate use.
Paul noticed it too and came to the realization that having his brother living nearby had become burdensome. Tommy began showing up to work late and, on at least one occasion, high. Within a matter of days Tommy went from being the star kitchen employee of this busy new restaurant to being fired. The slide down was always fast.
By now the halfway house ruse being carried out by the woman who ran the house became evident to us all. A couple weeks earlier on a Friday evening, we pulled into the parking lot adjacent to the halfway house to pick Tommy up to take him to dinner. The woman sprang off the front porch when she saw my car and rushed to the driver’s window, moving much more quickly than I’d thought possible. She was anxious to collect that week’s rent. I immediately recognized the familiar look of desperate angst in her eyes, an anxious stare we knew from experience was that of an addict craving a fix. Tommy had told us she was using, but we no longer believed anything he said so had dismissed his claim as paranoia. Adding to his anger and growing spiral downward was the fact that other halfway house residents were routinely stealing from him. Despite his constant protests, the sloppy, deceptive house manager refused to let him put a lock on his door. We agreed that he needed to move on and that the relatively expensive house in the decrepit neighborhood was doing more harm than good.
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.