Not Quite So Random

That house over on Linden, the one I have thought was a drug house, has changed hands, so to speak. No more cars parked helter-skelter on the lawn and wherever. No more trash in front, people hanging out on the front porch or standing in the front doorway at random times. It's not a pretty house anyway, but for those couple of years it looked really bad.

It always made me think of my students--no I'm not still teaching. I had some drug people in my classes, of course, and I wrote about them once.

Addicted

Someday I may ask my students how many of them have been addicted to drugs. Or how many have tried drugs. I’m not sure I really want to know.

Just now I have three former addicts. Two Kevins and a Michael. They write their histories, filled with grisly detail of personal degradation, of doing things they would never have expected of themselves, of living in filth, of nights with no sleep, days without food, none of it causing them much concern, except in those moments when the drugs were out of their systems. Little Kevin--he's come here from Iowa--describes it as waking from one of his comas, clear-headed, able to see and think and wish with all his heart to stay that way and away from the drugs. But then someone in the house would come in and urge him to “get to work” and he would start the day’s infusion of cocaine—snorting, smoking, and shooting.

Paranoia. It comes with drug addiction, say these boys. They stay indoors weeks at a time. Paint the inside of their windows black. Hide from whatever they think may be lurking out there to do them harm. Their stories are similar, their experiences horrifying, only details of place and time and length of addiction separate them.

They have much in common, these three boys, though they do not know one another. There is, of course, their helplessness, the inertia that characterized their every day. They were all truly captured by the drugs and held tight, and when that was their life, I am sure they all looked the same: filthy, ugly, unwell.

But when they are truly off drugs, as the three I’m thinking of now, they are clean. Their faces, hair, clothing—all clean, as if they scrub themselves raw each morning. And they look like innocent children. For all they have done and seen and thought to do, they look pure, baptized and made new. As if now that they have passed their childhood in filth and crime, they take on the look they should have had through all those early years.

I feel proud of them, hopeful, and, yes, always apprehensive. How long is the cure? When are they safe? I don’t know.

Because now little Kevin has stopped coming to class. I worry about him and feel responsible. He had been writing about his drug life, and I’m afraid he wasn’t strong enough yet to do it. Should I have kept him from it? Could I have? I wasn’t wise enough to know. I’m afraid he’s gone back to the darkness he had only 13 months before stepped out of. Who were his friends? Have they sucked him back into some black-windowed house?

* * *

I think of that boy often and always thought of him when I drove by that house on Linden. I suppose I'll always wonder about him. Hope for him. And never know.

About the house on Linden, the look of it has changed. Only one car parks there. It's a van, a family car, and it's in the driveway. The lawn is trying to come back. Two plastic chairs sit out on the front porch, and I have seen a child's toy there, too, the kind with wheels, and the toddler sits on it and pushes to scoot along. It's quite encouraging, I think.