On Pills and Needles by Rick Van Warner

Author:Rick Van Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography / Memoir;Tommy Van Warner—Mental health;Opioid abuse—Patients—United States—Biography;Opioid abuse—Treatment—Family relationships;BIO026000;REL036000;REL012070
ISBN: 9781493412792
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

14

Fleas, Fiends, and Fractures

The shift in the tone of Mary’s voice in the kitchen told me something was terribly wrong. We were about to shuttle some of our friends to the airport after the surprise birthday bash weekend that my wife had staged for me, including a great party featuring my friend’s band.

“What! Oh my God!” she shrieked, the blood draining out of her face.

Well, at least his overdose didn’t ruin our great weekend, I morbidly thought, immediately feeling guilty and selfish.

“Tommy’s in the hospital and has been since Saturday,” she said after hanging up the phone.

By now Tommy was sharing a flea-and-cockroach-infested trailer in an unincorporated rural slum east of Orlando with his relatively long-term girlfriend and an older man she called her uncle, but who wasn’t. In the poor judgment typical of drug abusers, Tommy and his girlfriend had decided on a dark Saturday night to drive an old scooter, capable of top speeds in the thirty to thirty-five miles per hour range, on a major four-lane road into Orlando. He later claimed to have been trying to attend my surprise birthday party. Whether the back taillight of the scooter was working remains a mystery. What is known is that a large car traveling sixty to sixty-five miles per hour ran the scooter down from behind, launching both passengers, neither wearing a helmet, many yards through the air. Somehow both survived, landing in grassy areas rather than the pavement. They woke up in separate hospital rooms the next morning, neither remembering how they got there.

Self-esteem is a complex recipe stirred by experience, circumstance, brain chemistry, and many other factors. In my case the lack of acceptance from a detached father, coupled with a medical side effect that left my teeth somewhat gray and without enamel throughout my grade school years, made me insecure and desperate for acceptance by the time I reached my teen years. For my son, never finding his tribe and feeling like the odd man out in his own family led to feelings of worthlessness, social anxiety, and over time drug abuse.

Perhaps it is my own low opinion of myself as a kid that has made me so keenly empathize with the pain my son wrestles with. The daily school bus ride during my early years was a terrifying experience. Some of the single-cell teenage miscreants that rode my bus full of kids ranging from kindergarten to twelfth grade took great pleasure at picking on the younger kids, particularly anyone with an obvious physical weakness. “Black teeth” was the name they abused me with, sometimes several of them chanting this in unison. By the time I was nine or ten years old, my tears had turned to rage, and sometimes I’d try to fight back. These were futile attempts that only turned the verbal abuse physical, and more than once I got off the bus bruised and bloodied.

Even to this day there is nothing that infuriates me more than a bully picking on or taking

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