I’m driving from the coastal area where I live inland to collect a carload of Linnie’s stuff from one of the last places she’d been staying. Another deal that didn’t work out. Another person one step from the street: no place to live, no car, no job, no money, no hope. She had called me.
She is driving from another direction. Yes, I’d gotten her car back on the road. I’d given her a placed to stay. I offered her two things we all need, safety and hope. When my cell phone rings on the way to this inland hell-hole of a city where her stuff is, it’s her. “Tommy won’t be there.” She had already told me this the night before. “Tommy won’t be there. We’ll have to move the stuff without him.”
But I’m thinking, of course he will be there. After all, that is how my life is.
I arrive at the apartment before Linnie armed with a wad of money to release her stuff and release her from any obligations she had racked up with this guy. Steamer they call him. Steamer, as if he’s burning up his life too fast. Well, so many people I’ve met are. There’s no surprise here. Steamer is tall, rough and grizzly. Except for the few missing teeth he could be attractive if you like that slim biker type. He’s got a job. He’s a mason. He’s got a hobby. He’s a biker. And I can tell he’s got a criminal record. I can sense it. He’s grateful for the handful of fifties I give him.
He’s got a girlfriend living there. She is scrawny thin with blemished skin. “She’s a crack-head whore,” Linnie had told me. “It all went downhill when she moved in.” Hmmmm. In this hell-hole city things don’t go downhill. They are already down and low.
I’m sitting there on this large hassock. At least it’s clean. The place looks clean enough, although I can’t really see into the kitchen. It’s diagonally in front of me but the lights are off and there are no windows. From somewhere past a closed door, which I take to be the bathroom, one thin shaft of light from the dazzling day outside seeps in and lands a thin band of illumination into the shadowy space before me. The band is not the bright band of light one expects to see on such a beautiful, sunny day. You know, those magical bands with particles dancing in them. The light must be passing through a small, dirty window.
I’m chatting away with Steamer and the girlfriend. This is one of my talents. I can yak away with almost anyone. Maybe one could even drop that “almost” when describing me. I’m chatting away, and that closed door opens, shuts. A man is moving through the gray light toward us. He’s wearing sunglasses. He is wobbling. That is the best way to describe how he is moving. In his long, basketball shorts he looks a little bow-legged anyway, but he is definitely wobbling.
I look back at the girlfriend and raise a finger, silently asking for an excusal from our light chat. When I stand up the intake of breath from Steamer and his girl is almost audible. I can feel it. They are holding their breath. Their eyes are on me. They are waiting. They are wondering. Their cover as two upstanding citizens chatting away with me is certainly blown.
I move to the man and meet him at the threshold of the gloomy kitchen and the bright, sunny living room. I stretch out my hand. “You must be Tommy. You can’t be anyone else,” I say smiling. Of course, I had never seen Tommy. I had seen a picture of him. He looked tall and had short-cropped dark hair, soft brown eyes, a sad and sensitive look on his appealing face. But this guy looks crumpled and wobbly, has a sore on his cheek and just looks wasted. He is past sad.
As I introduce myself I figure out the timing. He had headed for the bathroom when I parked my car out front and then he’d shot up the heroin. And he’d overdone it. He had too much of a load in him but not an overdose.
How did I know this? Linnie had mentioned his drug use. He wasn’t the first heroin addict I’d met. There were a few so long ago. And then there was the other one. The one I had gotten to know so well. He wasn’t supposed to be where he was either. I had never seen him there before. But there he was.
I had seen him other places, though, the other one. I had seen him nearly every day in the city where I worked. And I knew part of his story before I was even told his name. It was all in the way he moved, all in the way he looked. Even after someone did tell me his name, I continued to refer to him as “Rock n Roll.” But I knew he was not a rock star. I knew he was a heroin addict. And I knew he would tell me his story and that we would be friends, if only for awhile. I knew all this before I saw him there, seated alone. I approached him. He smiled. I sat down. We talked. And I got the beginning of his story and no surprises except two. He was more intelligent than I thought he would be, and he was polite.
Just as Tommy and I finish our introductions, Linnie walks in. He walks toward the door to her. Words are exchanged. She tells me later she had spoken to him sharply, “Where were you last night?” And after when he sits down on the couch and begins to nod, she gives him a slap on the shoulder and tells him to go outside and help us.
She and Steamer move in and out of the house bringing the boxes of her belongings to the cars. I’m putting them into the vehicles, both hatchbacks. I’m not sure what Tommy is doing. Melting in the sun, moving around aimlessly.
I go over to him and ask him to help me get a blanket between two pieces of furniture so they won’t get scratched, and we move in the pieces. Steamer and Linnie are inside. This is my opportunity. I lean against the front of my car and casually say, “Looks like you got yourself too heavy a load”
He sort of weaves back and forth and motions agreement with his head and a grunt.
“How did you get on the junk in the first place?” I ask. Looking at him I am aware again of how dazzling bright the day is with the hot sun, cool air, stunningly blue sky. The sunlight is glaring off the bumper chrome of Linnie’s car and now I wish I had on sunglasses, too.
His story is so familiar but then, they so often are, these stories. A family in crisis. No time to focus on the child, who is at an impressionable age, or the child in the adult, who is not yet equipped to handle the sort of loss he is expected to accept.
“My grandfather had cancer,” he says. “They gave him so many pills to kill the pain. He never took them all, so I did. When he died, they helped me with that. They helped me deal with it.”
The delivery of his story is straightforward and lucid despite the overload of dope in his body, despite the fact that I’m a virtual stranger. I can tell he’s been through therapy at some point for his addiction. I’ve come to recognize the tone of delivery and the honesty.
He pauses as if remembering, or maybe he’s just done with his answer.
“What were they, oxycontin?” I asked thinking of the last time I had heard a similar story.
“Before that. But it was oxycodone.”
He would know this. I remember Linnie telling me he went to college to study pharmaceuticals. Maybe he would have eventually been a doctor.
He continues. “Eventually there weren’t any left. And I was hooked. I had this girl. She was younger than me. A girlfriend. Younger than me. She told me heroin was the same thing.”
He’s stumbling here. He stresses this, her age. Why is this important? She didn’t know any better? But he should have known about heroin and synthetic opiates given his course of study. Perhaps halfway through college he’d lost hard drug connections, or perhaps now he is losing his focus.
He mentions her again, mumbling. He seems a little confused about the girl and her status in his life.
But he’s not in denial at all. “I fell in love,” he says with a familiar, sardonic smile. I know he means with the drug. I smile up at him wryly, my head cocked to the side. “I’ve heard that before,” I say.
He smiles a weak smile.
I keep him talking the way that I do, gently, genuinely interested. I ask him if he’s ever been through de-tox. He has, and he stayed for long-term rehabilitation. He talks about his father. There’s a problem there. Something about his parents being separated. He’s looking away from me seeing something else behind those dark shades. He talks about his mother. Something about his stealing stuff for dope.
“You hurt the ones you love,” he says. And there it is, the words that match the sadness in the pictures I had seen, moments captured, and now he looks nothing like that. He’s gone beyond. Maybe it’s the junk that’s in his blood and lodging itself in his brain. There’s sadness shattered into tiny shards and bloated with guilt. I wonder if his parents’ unhappiness with each other motivated a close relationship with the grandfather, or could it have only been that he wanted his drugs. I don’t think it was just the drugs, but he’s not so lucid on the topic of his family. It’s like the girlfriend. When he talks about the people in his life, he stumbles. When he talks about himself, he’s clear.
He tells me after re-hab he was clean for seven years. Three months ago he started using again.
Okay, that’s when I raise my voice incredulously. “After seven years? Three months? Three months? You know how easy it would be to kick after three months? How did you get back on?”
“The people I live with. They’re dealers. They gave it to me. It was there. I didn’t say, ‘No.’” Through his sunglasses he’s looking at the pavement.
“That sucks,” I say. I’m thinking about the environmental aspect of drug use and addiction. I’m thinking about this hell-hole, little city. The ex-con helping us load the cars. The ex-con who threw Linnie out. Linnie’s fast decline once she moved away from the rural towns she lived in and began bouncing around between these rough, little, run-down cities with her rough, run-down, so-called friends. I’m thinking about the people in her life that let her down, her inability to cope, her hitting bottom here where Tommy and I have met.
Linnie knows none of this information about Tommy. “I’m only interested in who the person is now in the present moment,” she had told me when I had pressed her for information about Tommy.
I stated, “I want to know how the person got there, too. How did the person become the person that’s here with me? Does the person even know?”
Neither of us mentioned the future in that conversation.
Both cars are packed and neither Linnie nor I will be able to see through the rear-view windows while driving back to the coast. We are in the apartment wrapping up the event with small talk with Steamer and the girlfriend. Tommy is on the couch nodding. Someone has placed a glass of orange juice on the table in front of him, a sweet, thoughtful gesture. Linnie slaps him again on the shoulder and gets him up.
He wanders around the room. I move to him and shake his hand, tell him how glad I am to have finally met him. “I’ve heard a bit about you,” I say.
“Nothing good, I’m sure,” he mutters.
“Only good,” I say with a smile. “You’ve been a good friend to Linnie. Not everyone has.”
He sort of shuffles toward the doorway. There’s more small talk and then Linnie’s out the door. On my way out I rest my palm on Tommy’s shoulder, press in affectionately. “Tommy,” is all I say and I walk out the door.
I’d done that before, press my hand into a shoulder. Not Tommy’s, the other one. I had pressed my hand down onto his shoulder as if the effort and sentiment, the energy in my body, would ground him. My worn, cowboy boots were softly pounding the Boston pavement as we walked, but I was not so sure his beat-up work-boots were. Always a fast walker anyway, he was virtually fleeing and raving and his words were spinning and I thought he may go airborne away from me. I reached up and pressed down on his shoulder to ground him, to still his fleeing spirit, to calm his fear and anger.
He had come to pay back money I had lent him and to say, “Goodbye.” The moment I saw him enter the lunch-break meeting spot I knew this was not going to go well. He looked at me, not the others. He gave me the money and ranted. He appeared to break into little, dark fragments: blue clothing, black hair, black mood. Words tumbled, words of confusion, anger, fear.
We both knew where he was going. We didn’t know he would leave abruptly. The logistics to arrive timely at the de-tox facility were impossible. Worse, from his perspective, he still had heroin that he had scored with my money.
I walked him away from the others. “It will be okay,” I repeated. “It’s important,” I said. He nuzzled a kiss into my neck and walked away. I think he’s okay. I never saw him again.
I’m upstairs packing away my work and listening to Linnie sporadically shout up comments about her weekend as she feeds the dog.
“So, I saw Tommy. He looks really good. He just came out of de-tox.”
My boot-steps on the hardwood stairs echo in the stairwell.
“Oh, now she comes down the stairs,” Linnie says, as if she’s been waiting for me all along, waiting for some attention after her weekend absence.
I stand under the living room archway gaping at her. She turns and smiles. “Yeah, you heard me. I picked him up Saturday night. That’s where I was going when I called.”
What she doesn’t tell me is that she picked him up before he completed his short de-tox program. She also doesn’t tell me what I later suspected: she was all too happy to do so.