OPIADDICTS

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A FAKE HIGH. If you’re high, you’re high, but I’m not sure how else to categorize the things an addict will abuse that don’t fit the regular caste of opiates and synthetically produced drugs, such as fentanyl, that are introduced into America’s bloodstream via the bellies of airplanes and trucks. They arrive tucked into stuffed animals and behind the panels of cars. Sometimes drugs are stuffed into condoms and for a mere $1,000 a mule will swallow as many as six of them. Their mouths are sprayed with Pill Glide Swallowing Spray to help get them down, and then, bellies bloated, they enter America and shit them out. Heroin is the drug that gets all the attention; another pop-star dies and the media peppers their coverage of it with words like “rash of” and “epidemic.” It’s almost sexy—and I mean that in the most diabolical of ways.

Imodium, not so much. It’s like the opposite of sexy. Some people would find a way to abuse toothpaste if it were possible, and the latest example of this is Imodium. It turns out if you pop enough soft gels or drink enough straight from a bottle, the over the counter, antidiarrheal will get you high. It’s undetectable in urine and almost impossible to overdose on.

But you can. Overdose. Essentially, Imodium—its clinical name is loperamide—is an opiate, but because of a protein called P-glycoprotein that pumps it out of the brain, it doesn’t make you high. However, if taken in very large quantities, like drinking bottles of the mint-green liquid or swallowing five hundred pills a day, those P-glycoprotein pumps are overwhelmed and stop pumping out the drug so that it builds up in the brain and creates a high. Abusers call the drug “lope.”

Once in the brain, Imodium can cause marked depression of the central nervous system as well as heart dysrhythmias that are difficult to correct (CVS, Rite Aid: time to lock up the blue bottles.). One girl with short, cropped hair and beautiful brown eyes, who stayed with us for a short time, began abusing Imodium, overdosed, and suffered permanent heart damage. As far as I know she’s doing okay now, but we’ve lost touch.

So far there haven’t been a large amount of overdoses from Imodium, and since it’s only recently become better known, doctors are playing catch up. In emergency rooms doctors might test for the usual drugs and find nothing, and yet the heart continues in some kind of vapid decline (the embrocation that the Imodium has stippled around in the brain causes the heart to skip beats, then halt, unable to correct itself, so that the patient needs to be paddled back to life) and it can’t seem to get back into the right rhythm; one side powers down or powers up while some white-coated person stands over them ready to administer the next shock. Hopefully the heart will respond and kick back into rhythm, although sometimes it doesn’t. There have been a rising number of deaths in the United States due to Imodium abuse, and as it becomes more widespread the assumption is that they will continue to rise. Heroin, however, bypasses the ugly, chalky blue liquid. Heroin overdoses are pretty straightforward.

There’s Prince and Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Janis Joplin and maybe even Elvis for all we know—as a kid the rumor was that he died on a toilet. I used to picture him slumped over half on the floor, pants still around his ankles. And of course, there are all the other people who’ve died from overdoses that we will never know, and maybe more important, other people’s moms and dads and brothers and sisters and friends and spouses who’ve watched them die. Oh, and children. The babies without a parent. A child without a parent. The children who live with grandmothers or, almost by accident, wake up one day to find themselves adults after jumping from one foster family to the next.

Sometimes I think about the worst kinds of drugs as enormous shovelfuls of what I know now is a pale, cream colored powder, packed into back alleys and empty lots. In my mind there are usually a handful of pockmarked people; still loved, but intentionally forgotten because it’s easier for people who love addicts to forget than to walk around every day with their hearts caved in, loving them so much but not even knowing where they are. If not forgotten, the mind goes to how they were long ago, young and innocent, and this can be the most painful thing of all; thinking about what’s been lost. They’ve become grown children with their mouths open like baby birds. Their necks are stretched ropey and their eyes are bulging with the hunger.

Now, allow me to officially introduce you to the subject at hand: your everyday traditional bag of smack. “Bag” is almost a misnomer. In fact, one hit is tucked into such a tiny bag of glassine paper (it looks like a miniature, folded paper lunch bag the size of a postage stamp) it’s hard to distinguish it as a bag. The powder looks almost like residue that’s been left in the folds. They’re stamped with labels that divulge where they originated from, what dealer or area, Mickey, 9 Lives, Rocking Horse . . . and then the more prophetic labels: Misery, Gotcha, Flatline. The heroin is emptied into a spoon and then “cooked” via a flame from a lighter. Once it’s melted it’s sucked into a syringe and the rest is history.

A needle and a bag of heroin is a meteoric run on the brain compared to Imodium’s rather slow absorption, but either one can land you in an emergency room in the middle of the night, a doctor leaning over you with the paddles, trying to shock you awake.

And so a guy sits in front of a fluorescent screen: a stalled video game, a movie, it doesn’t matter what because he’s not paying attention. His arms are mottled with tracks and he has a gray pallor and his veins float above muscle and almost punch through skin as he presses his elbow awkwardly convex. In his other hand he holds a syringe between his thumb and index fingers, his fingers on the flange, his thumb on the orange plunger. As he presses the plunger into the syringe, the heroin eases into the slipstream of blood. The syringe, previously resembling a cross (small t), is flattened into a big T. He nods off while the blue light of the screen keeps on doing whatever it’s been doing, whatever it will be doing when he hopefully wakes up.

JEREMIAH

JEREMIAH IS ITALIAN with dark hair and the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. When he was a Lost Boy he had dreads that he kept telling us, as though embarrassed by them, he planned to cut off. He taught me how to make lasagna the way his mother did, with real ricotta cheese, not cottage cheese and precooked noodles the way I’d always made it. When he first started coming over he was going to college at Temple and doing a decent amount of drugs, more of the weed, hallucinogen type, probably a molly here and there, maybe coke, but I doubt he would ever have tried heroin. That said, the acid had messed his brain up a bit and conversations sometimes got as tangled and cragged as his dreadlocks. I would sit at the table with him and try to steer the conversation into some kind of cognitive sense. Rick and I quickly grew to love him.

One night I sat with him in the kitchen, the window behind him dark except for a reflection from a light that hung low over the table. Both of us were carving designs into Jenga blocks. Someone had already carved “Piper” into mine, and I was filling in the other side, scratching repeating triangles into the wood with a pen. Piper was a girl who came over from time to time. Once, she and Jules spent an evening making Christmas ornaments out of felt, and often our dining room table was cluttered with drawing pads and markers and paints, a few kids at work on something, especially when Jules and Sophie were still at home. Sometimes I gave impromptu art lessons in a studio I have upstairs in the open space next to our bedroom. I would put together a still life—usually a piece of fruit next to a silver plated dish of some kind so that there was a complicated reflection of the fruit on the silver—and a few easels and guide a couple kids through the basics of painting. Some were surprisingly talented. The ones who weren’t usually stood back from their work and laughed.

That night Jeremiah was wearing a drug rug, one of those sweater-like shirts made of hemp with ties at the neck that look like they’d give you a rash if you slept in one. There’s a lot of names for them: hookah hoodie, joint jacket, cannabis coat. . . . He was easy to talk to, and I always enjoyed being with him, talking one-on-one. As he worked at scoring lines into his block, he told me he was done with drugs and every once and a while he’d look up and his blue eyes made me feel like I could stare right through them to every acid trip he’d ever taken. Drug rug notwithstanding, as he talked, I was surprised. I’d always thought of him as not so interested in drugs. More of a drinker. I had no idea he was into acid. By that time his mother and I had gotten together for coffee and a few walks, talking about Jeremiah and Sweetboy and then praying for them. When he told me he was done with drugs I told him I was so glad and it was the best decision he’d ever made, and then asked him why he all of a sudden decided not to do them anymore. He told me about a dream he’d had, or vision—he wasn’t sure which. His mother was the charismatic type of Christian, speaking in tongues and things like that, so the fact that a dream or vision was in the mix didn’t surprise me. It seems to me that charismatic Christians are especially sensitive to spiritual things.

“I was in some kind of darkness where nothing made sense and it just made me depressed, like I was really depressed.” At that point it was hard to tell if he was talking about real life or his dream. “It was all the drugs. There were words and the words were all over the place and they just kept coming, I would see them, one and then another, and I felt closed in.” He was talking slowly but he smiled from time to time as he turned a Jenga block around in his hands. The block had an arrow carved into one side, the kind of arrow that has lines pointed out at the ends that indicate feathers the way they’re drawn on chalkboards for weddings, on farm tables next to cupcakes.

As we talked, a boy with long hair that was dyed bright orange came in the kitchen and headed into the basement looking for Sweetboy. I’d seen him before. Always hanging back, silent in the background. I never learned his name. He would come and go, his orange hair making a kind of moving bull’s eye surrounded by the other kids. He would float around the house like a fishing bobber, disappear for days and then show up again. He said hi before heading to the basement.

“It wasn’t like a dream, it was more a vision, something like that,” Jeremiah continued, “and then there were words that didn’t make any sense, and I saw all these words that were really dark, like death and empty, and I knew they were part of drugs, that the words are what would happen if I kept doing them, that I would be empty and depressed, like if I kept using them they’d make me crazy, so I was depressed.”

“In the dream you were depressed, or in real life?”

“I guess so. Yeah.” He grabbed a handful of blocks and began setting them one on top of another until they were about to fall. “It was messing with my brain, all the drugs and the darkness. I know it was God that gave me the vision, the Holy Spirit. After all the darkness and drugs and depression, as clear as, I don’t know, really clear words just came in front of everything else and they were light and I could tell I didn’t feel depressed anymore and that I didn’t have to choose darkness anymore. It’s like I knew I had a choice. I was doing a lot of drugs. Then the words Choose Life showed up. They were big. And I knew as soon as I saw them that I had been given a choice and that if I waited any longer I wouldn’t have a choice anymore. So I chose life.”

“Wow, Jeremiah.”

“So yeah, I’m done with them. Yeah.”

After that night Jeremiah did change. He went through a couple stages where he tried to figure out God and ended up with a few crazy ideas, but overall, slowly, we could tell something was different in him. I don’t know if he abruptly stopped using drugs because of his vision or if he had some starts and stops—I know it wasn’t an easy time for him. But as time went on, we could see his mind beginning to clear, becoming more lucid. Eventually he decided to go on a missions trip to work in the slums of Indonesia, and that’s when he started reading his Bible.

Rick began having a Bible study every Wednesday night. In the winter everyone sat around the fireplace and talked. There were only a few kids at first, but after a couple months the room was full; kids would squish onto the couch and sit on the floor as the fire blazed. Jeremiah fed it logs until it reached up to the flue and crackled and popped out a tiny ember onto the Persian carpet from time to time because we didn’t use a screen. Most were around seventeen through twenty-five, and completely different. They didn’t all do drugs. Some grew up in stable families that went to church every Sunday, and even as they grew older and moved on, kept going to church and kept reading their Bibles and kept growing in their faith. Others still went to church but weren’t sure they believed anything they’d learned when they were growing up. Some were using drugs and didn’t care about much of anything and I had no idea why they came. Others were doing drugs and wanted to stop. (More than a few times one boy in particular, tall and thin, almost lanky, came and sat to the right of the fire where he leaned against the wall and kept nodding off even as everyone talked. I truly believe The Lost Boy nodding off was coming because he desperately wanted to stop doing drugs and thought maybe coming to our house would magically make it happen. He had been in Sophie’s fourth grade class and I remember him at an end of the year pool party bursting up through the water and flipping his hair with a sideways half-shake of his head, laughing, and then diving under again. During the Bible study I would watch as his shoulders gave way to the slow travel of sleep until his head hung down over his chest. The fire must have overheated one whole side of him. I found myself with a strange maternal desire to lift him up and carry him to bed.)

Some were in recovery. Some came because their parents made them come, dropping them off at our front door. At first I went to the Bible study too and sat next to Rick and tried to be like Socrates and ask brilliant rhetorical questions, but eventually it seemed better for me to stay upstairs and pray as I listened to the muffled voices and silences and sometimes sudden bursts of laughter I heard coming up the stairs from the living room.

Sweetboy was usually in the living room too, but then he’d go grab a smoke and wouldn’t come back. For me, that was the hardest part—that Rick was hanging out with everyone, but his own son seemed to care less. When I was downstairs, if I saw Sweetboy leave, my heart would sink and everyone talking around me would fade so that, like a dog attentive to a certain sound becomes deaf to the rest of the world, the voices in the room became nothing but white noise to me. I was selfish that way, all I wanted was for Sweetboy to come back. Sometimes I’m not sure how much I even cared about The Lost Boys.

Eventually the study petered out, although a handful of kids kept coming over to talk. That’s when Christopher really started hanging around. He wasn’t very talkative, and would often leave with Sweetboy to grab a cigarette, but he always came back in. He slept over a lot and eventually I made up a bed in the basement for him and he moved in. He was the oldest of Sweetboy’s friends. He was a soccer star in high school and was an Eagle Scout. Every parent’s dream kid. I felt somehow proud of him. He and Sweetboy would talk late into the night—on the porch with their cigarettes then down in the basement and then back up, a pattern that repeated itself until they finally fell asleep—about life and truth and God. Every once and a while Rick hung out with them until two or three in the morning because they had fallen into some intellectual rabbit hole and needed a little help to find their way back. I think sometimes the three of them even prayed together. Sometimes I’d wake up around three or four in the morning and hear them downstairs talking.

Eventually I found out that Sweetboy, Christopher, and Christopher’s younger brother, Sam, would occasionally drive out to a park with a couple six packs and talk or mess around. Sometimes other Lost Boys went too. Sweetboy told me that one night they went to a small farm I often passed on my way to the grocery store. It’s the kind of place kids go to for summer camp and has goats and a large tepee and a handful of old wood play sets. In a small fenced in area there are usually a few goats on top of a wooden shelter sliding their jaws sideways as they chew their food. There’s also a Shetland pony. The night Sweetboy and a few of The Lost Boys went to the farm, they coaxed the pony out of the gate and led it across the road to a small Cape Cod with a fenced in backyard and left it there. I laughed when he told me about it.

I thought about all of this the night Sweetboy left. I’m not sure why it stayed with me, perhaps because it’s the way I always thought things should be—harmless and funny like a high school prank. Something they’d be laughing about for years.

I once saw a picture of Sweetboy on Facebook sitting in a stuffed chair in the middle of the night next to overgrown bushes with a beer in one hand, the flash from the camera, like a fluorescent explosion, having for one infinitesimal moment appeared and then disappeared, leaving his face chalk white. He was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and a hat and was smiling.

SKIN HEADS

IT WAS LIKE an ambush of Marlboro reds in the breezeway. Obviously, they couldn’t do drugs in the breezeway and in The Chill Spot we checked on them, so they smoked cigarettes—first American Spirits (which I was told, and didn’t believe, weren’t habit forming because they didn’t have additives), packaged in a cool looking blue box with colorful feathers that made them look deceptively organic—a nod to both the Grateful Dead as well as Native Americans and peace pipes—point being, they were natural and possibly even good for you. (There’s a widely held belief that natural equals healthy and it drives me crazy: opium is natural, coca leaves are natural, snake venom is natural.) So the kids smoked their “natural” cigarettes convinced they’d never smoke a “real” cigarette. It was a matter of months before the empty garden pot, a stand-in for an ashtray, was filled with the smashed stubs of Marlboros.

Smoke followed them around like the dust of horses.

Max, the boy Sam was with the night he rode the shopping carts in the K-Mart parking lot, is a gifted artist and he seemed to like the art, the sketches and paintings in our home, and the way people would often be sitting at the dining room table drawing or doodling or stitching something together. He lived forty minutes away, so when he came over he tended to stay for a while. At one point, his mother called—she wanted to make sure we were here and that it was a safe place for him to be. I told her we kept tabs on things and that there wasn’t any drinking or drugs. I told her a lot of them smoked but that was about it. Some of Max’s art was simple cartoon drawings of people, almost childlike, that captured something unique about them. They were funny but also somehow profound. He drew Sweetboy on the couch in The Chill Spot playing Mario Brothers. Sweetboy was leaning back with his head resting on a cushion; the emphasis was on his hair and his hands. His hair flopped over one eye and his hands were too large and covered the console like the paws of a lion.

There’s an abandoned house called The Cult House about thirty minutes from here where kids sometimes go at night. I’ve seen a picture of it and it’s covered with vines that have grown up and over the roof and through windows hollowed out like empty eye sockets. It’s one of those places, like watching The Exorcist on TV, that pulls fear from the ground and the wood of the house and the hovering atmosphere around it so that it feels like it will swallow you up if you’re not aware of the fact that it’s real like an exorcism is real, like The Evil is laughing from behind a tree somewhere and you need to be careful. Sometimes brave kids go inside the house and look around.

The road that leads to the house is called Devil’s Road and is lined with trees (Sweetboy showed me a picture of it on his phone) but the trees, instead of arching over the road the way they usually do—like a line of soldiers touching swords above a bride and groom—instead arch outward as though yanked back by their leaves like a line of helpless women with their hair caught in someone’s fists. When Sweetboy showed me the picture, the road looked like an enormous zipper split open by mysterious air. Then he told me what happened the night he and The Lost Boys tried to find The Cult House.

The moon is a sweet friend if you’re on the back porch looking up, but an accomplice to fear if you’re on some lonely dark road out in the middle of nowhere; the area is legendary and fear doesn’t skim the ground like it can easily be outrun. There are a few YouTube videos of the road filmed from the dashboards of cars, and even though you only see headlights shining on a dark road with creepy trees on either side, it looks like you’re about to encounter a Delphinianly dark personality. The Evil on that road could plunder a soul.

The road curves here and there and there are a few hills. That night Christopher was driving, Sweetboy was in the passenger seat, and Max and Sam were in the back seat. The windows were rolled down, and they were all smoking when a truck approached from behind, tailgated them, and started flashing its lights. It pulled up closer, bumper to bumper, and turned on a floodlight so that the back seat of their car was flooded with light. Max turned around to look and the truck suddenly swerved and pulled up beside them—a guy began yelling out the window.

The truck swerved away, swerved back, and then hit the car, swiping a dent along the side as though trying to drive them off the road. The guy kept yelling eff this and effing that, n----r then held up a white hood, smiled, and began throwing rocks at the car. He lifted the hood up again and gave them the finger. Sweetboy told Max to duck, turned around, and pushed his head down on the seat. More effing this and effing that and N this and effing N all while trying again and again to drive them off the road. Christopher made a hard left, skid a U-turn, headed the other way, and hit the gas but the truck did the same, pulling back up to their bumper. They followed them for miles, all the way back into town until the traffic made their pursuit impossible and the truck finally turned around.

Sometimes I think The Evil is like a virus in so many forms. It gets into the blood and stays latent until circumstances are optimal, then blasts up and out like a car bomb in Syria.

DREAMS

IN THE WEST, we don’t take our dreams very seriously. We laugh about how we woke up right when the neighbor from down the street was telling us that he and his cat had made a Sweet Lady of Imperial Perfection cake for us. But that’s about it. By the end of the day it’s forgotten.

I don’t think there’s always some deeper meaning behind our dreams, but I’ve come to believe that sometimes there is, that sometimes a Sweet Lady of Imperial Perfection cake is worth a second glance.

In the Middle East dreams are considered messages from God. The culture’s emphasis on dreams causes them to pause and turn a dream around in their mind’s eye and deconstruct whatever oddness they’re waking from until the meaning becomes clear. In most Middle Eastern cultures dreams aren’t ignored but held tight like precious stones.

I’ve been told writers are allowed two dreams in a book of fiction. But since this is a book of nonfiction, I’ll take liberties. Most dreams are fascinating for the dreamer but as boring as a can of soup for whomever has to listen to them. Dreams with visions tucked in them on the other hand, pop up out of the ethereal world beyond and startle you.

By the time The Lost Boys began smoking American Spirits and then Marlboros in our backyard I had started to pray more. I prayed for Sophie and Jules and Sweetboy and The Lost Boys. At that time I didn’t know the extent that kids had begun messing with bottles of painkillers from parents’ and grandparents’ medicine cabinets, but I wasn’t an idiot when it came to garden variety drugs. We weren’t yet at the point of testing Sweetboy or telling anyone to stop coming over, but we knew the danger was there. Drinking, weed (I was constantly sniffing for the soury smell of it and looking out for red, glassy eyes or ravenous hunger that emptied our pantry or bursts of laughter that seemed too giggly for their ages). I didn’t know yet about the telltale pin-dot pupils that accompany a brain full of opiates.

It was when I began praying more—in earnest—that I began having dreams. Or visions. I’ll call them visions because I always had them while I was praying and in that half state of sleep, when you’re waking up or falling asleep, half here, half there. The meanings of the visions were always clearly responses to prayer and went hand in hand with promises. Although I didn’t know it yet, I was beginning to watch my son die. He was getting sucked into the vortex of drugs, deeper than I could have ever imagined—and even though I didn’t understand how deep he was, I could still feel him slipping away.

About a year after The Lost Boys began hanging out here, Jules left for California without a return ticket home. Initially, she’d gone to San Francisco for an internship, but when she returned home, she decided she wanted to go back to live there. She was seventeen and hadn’t graduated from high school. She worked at Blockbuster until she had enough money for her ticket, and flew back. She finished high school online. Inherited fortune notwithstanding, in our minds she perfectly fit the story of the prodigal son, so I was praying for her a lot.

Jules and the flowering bush: One morning, as I was praying and still in the shade-light of half sleep, I saw a large, green bush and I knew it was Jules. The bush was flourishing, and as I watched, it began to flower—the most beautiful light green, almost white, flowers I had ever seen. It was covered with them, and as I looked, my heart soared with joy and love for God, and thankfulness. I knew God was telling me he was answering my prayers and that Jules, just like the flowers on the bush, would keep growing. I thanked him as I looked at the flowers, over and over, just as I had prayed over and over please God, please God, I prayed thank you God, thank you God. But then, as I was thanking him, the bush became dark green again and the flowers disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. My heart sank. My God, my Lord in Heaven, why? But then, in the middle of my distress, I looked closer, and realized there never had been flowers. What had looked like flowers had actually been the light green of new growth. O Jules, O Alnilam, my second star. “Like a tree planted by streams of water.” Thank you my God and my King.

On a country road with a country bird: This time I was walking on a narrow country road on a summer day and there were trees on both sides of the road, not tall trees, almost hedges, but high enough to line the road with green and provide some shade. I could glimpse between them what looked like fields of wheat. It was very sunny but I wasn’t hot. As I walked, about four feet in front of me, slightly to my left at eye level, a yellow bird flew, slowly, almost hovering, and it looked back at me from time to time to make sure I was still following it. As I followed my feet barely touched the ground, I was so happy. The road stretched out in front of me and I was happy. The bird’s name was Providence and I was chosen to follow of my own accord.