Hooked (6 page)

Kevin was angriest of all when he was in between doses. See, OxyContin is a painkiller, so when you use it a lot, it decreases your ability to handle pain without it. I tried it once myself. I wanted to see what had turned my brother into this totally different person. It was awful. I couldn't sleep while I was on it, and I felt really itchy. After the high wore off, it was even worse. For three days, I had sore muscles and bones all over. I couldn't imagine why you'd ever want to take it a second time—except maybe to make the soreness go away.

My parents ignored it

Mom and Dad never really did anything about Kevin's drug use. Dad was a really straitlaced guy, and every now and then he'd try to put a stop to it, but he didn't take it that seriously. He was very naive about my brother. For the longest time he believed Kevin when he said he wasn't smoking cigarettes, even though there were yellow stains on his fingers. During high school, Kevin wasn't even trying to hide things. He would leave empty bottles lying around his room and would yell at Mom. And still our parents never really did anything about it.

Every now and then, Mom would say, “That's it. You're going to live with your father.” Dad was way less of a pushover. He would come and take the TV out of his room and throw away all of his beer bottles. But when push came to shove, Mom would usually change her mind. Kevin sometimes threatened to leave home altogether if he was forced to live with Dad. I think Mom was afraid he'd follow through and she'd lose her baby. I guess I understand that, but I think sometimes her emotions got in the way of what needed to be done.

I think in a lot of ways Mom was just too scared of Kevin. She was terrified of drugs too. She had a really strict father growing up, and she had always been taught that you could end up dead if you took drugs. Either that or you'd get busted and end up in jail. So my mom was more worried about the fact that drugs were dangerous and illegal than about the fact that they were ruining Kevin's life.

Dad's other family

When I was in tenth grade, our dad built a nice house with his new wife. She had kids too and raised them very differently. They were allowed to take the bus into the city at a really young age and they got huge allowances compared to us. Not to mention, my dad's wife was spending a lot of our family's money. Meanwhile, Kevin and I didn't get anything. So as you can imagine, that didn't sit well with him. He got this notion into his head that one day Dad was going to die and his new wife would take all his inheritance. He became really obsessed with that idea. To be honest, I was kind of annoyed too, but never to the same degree as Kevin.

For a while, Kevin and I did move in with Dad and his new family. Kevin was going to have the big room over the garage where the pool table was; he just had to quit smoking. (By then our dad had accepted that he was addicted to cigarettes.) But he couldn't do it and so he ended up back at Mom's, where no one told him what to do.

How I coped

When it came to Kevin, I would usually keep my mouth shut. I knew there was no point in arguing with him. Sometimes I would try to get information out of him about where he was going or what his plans were, but it rarely worked. But I was always so eager to know anything and everything that he was willing to tell me, however small. It felt like he had so many secrets, and I wanted to know what they were. But most of them were pretty ugly, I think. It's funny, though: he was so private about his own life but demanded to know everything about mine.

Even though Kevin did his best to protect me from everything (including himself) I think I matured quickly. I remember thinking about really weird things when I was still very young. I would sit in the playground wondering:
What would the world be like if I wasn't here?
Where would I be if I wasn't in my body?
And I would always come back to the same answer: it wouldn't matter. None of us matter, really. That was before Kevin started taking drugs all the time. But I kept having those kinds of thoughts as I got older, and I think it was because of everything I was exposed to.

The silver lining was that nobody ever gave me shit for anything because of Kevin. When I was getting to the age where I was hanging out with him and his friends, I had a big crush on his friend Tracy's boyfriend. Nothing ever really happened between us, but we used to hang out. And I guess he had told Tracy, because she was giving him a hard time, but she never said anything to me. She was always really nice to me, even though I was hanging around with her boyfriend. And I'm pretty sure it's because she knew that Kevin was looking out for me. So, thanks to Kevin, I never had to deal with any bullying or gossip from anyone.

Turning out different

What did upset me was the fact that things never got better for Kevin. When we were growing up, my best friend, Casey, had a brother the same age as Kevin. They lived right down the street and Kevin and Jeff always used to get high together. Only with Jeff, it was just a temporary thing. By the time high school was over, he had cleaned up his act and had been accepted to study chemical engineering. But Kevin never really got over it. Instead of studying anything, he ended up in jail and, later, rehab. So her brother and my brother were best friends growing up, but they landed in totally different places. There were other guys at our high school too, guys that were just like Kevin and did a lot of drugs for a while but eventually got their lives together.

That's something I don't really understand. Why didn't Kevin end up in a better place, like those guys? Why, for that matter, did Kevin do drugs when I didn't? We were more or less dealt the same hand of cards. We both had divorced parents and grew up in a boring town, but I always knew where to draw the line. Maybe I have Kevin to thank for that. I could always look at him and see what I didn't want to become—what I had to avoid. But he didn't really have anyone to look to or see as an example in the same way. I always had him looking out for me and protecting my reputation, so I was never afraid to walk away from a situation that made me feel uncomfortable. He, on the other hand, never backed down from any challenge. So I sometimes feel proud that I turned out differently, but I wish I could say the same for Kevin.

Kevin, today

I don't see much of my brother these days since we're not living together anymore. Truth be told, I'm kind of afraid of running into him, because he's still so aggressive and angry. I've seen him around a few times and he's wasting away, almost to the point of being dead. I'm not sure if he's still using or not, but it sure looks that way. It's hard to see him that way, but it makes me want to avoid him. Like I said, he taught me how to steer clear of bad situations, and now I feel like that applies to steering clear of him.

Who's My Real Dad?

Karl didn't know about his dad's cocaine addiction until, as part of his recovery, his dad apologized for it. For Karl, it was only after “sorry” that the pieces began to fall into place.

Finding out

Growing up, I never knew my dad was a cocaine addict. He hid it so well that my mom didn't even know for a while. And truth be told, we had a pretty normal life, for the most part.

Many addicts are amazingly good at hiding their dependencies from friends and family. They will do or say anything to keep their addiction from being discovered, and in some cases are not even aware of how deceptive they're being.

When I was a kid, my dad would sometimes lecture me about not doing drugs. He'd say, “I experimented with plenty of different substances and it's a bad idea. Never do what I did.” But it never occurred to me that he was
still
doing drugs. It wasn't until he started going to meetings of a group called Cocaine Addicts Anonymous that he decided to tell my brother and me about his addiction. By that point I was seventeen, but when I look back I think I've always known something was up with my dad. I could never really put my finger on it, though.

As it turns out, he was doing cocaine pretty heavily beginning when I was eleven and going until I was at least thirteen. When he first told me that, I was more curious than scared or angry, because by then he had stopped and I didn't have much to be angry about. But it did make me wonder if cocaine was the reason he used to get so mad. Sometimes when I was younger, I would be crying or upset about something, and he would grab my arm to get me to stop or make me listen. And when he told me about his addiction, he apologized for this too. He says he did it because of the cocaine.

Dad's anger

I wasn't the only one who dealt with my dad's anger. A lot of my early childhood memories involve listening to my parents fight. Mainly it was my dad shouting. I hardly ever heard what it was about, but I sure heard the yelling. I would usually try to drown it out, or I'd just go to my room. Dad never hurt anyone in our family, and I'm pretty confident that he never hurt anyone in his life, but he sure did know how to argue. And if I ever pushed or hit him when I was little and upset, he would hit me back—never as hard as he could, but hard enough that I could feel it.

Other signs

He worked as a software engineer, and I used to hang out in his office all the time because it was close to our house. Usually I would sit outside his door, and sometimes, when I'd walk into his actual office, he would say, “No, no, no! You can't be in here right now. I'm doing important work.” But after I left, I'd peek through the window beside his door and he would be sitting there doing nothing—just staring off into space. So I noticed lots of weird things like that. I never came to any conclusions about it, though. I never had any idea that he acted the way he did because of drugs. And it was so interesting when he told me that he was using, because suddenly I realized that maybe his actions would have been completely different if it weren't for cocaine; maybe the guy I grew up with was not my real father. So in that sense, it was a real shock to the system.

How it changed him

I can only assume the reason my dad started doing hard drugs in the first place was to help him deal with the stress of work, and life in an expensive city like San Francisco. It gave him energy and helped him get things done, so I guess, if it hadn't been for the cocaine, he wouldn't have been able to be as on top of things. But I'm pretty sure he also would've been less angry toward people. And he would have been healthier too. When I was a kid, I didn't sleep very well, and I'd wake up in the middle of the night all the time. But no matter what time of night I got up, my dad would still be awake. So that was another thing that sort of fell into place when he finally told me about his addiction.

The good thing about our shared sleeplessness was it usually meant that I got to see him a lot. But every now and then, instead of keeping him awake, the drugs would make him crash completely. That's the thing about cocaine: doing it gives you a jolt of energy and keeps you awake, but then afterward it can make you irritable and extremely tired. So all in all, I guess it helped him to get through work, but it also made him less active and more zoned out around us at times. I think that was just one of the ways it was bad for him. He made drugs a part of his daily routine and his body paid the price.

Sustained use of cocaine can cause heart problems and respiratory failure, as well as seizures and headaches. People who use cocaine for a long time can also develop a tolerance to its effects, meaning they have to take more each time in order to experience the same high.

Drinking too

When I was fourteen, we were pretty much forced out of the building we were living in and moved to a much tinier apartment. That was stressful for our family. At the time, I didn't think about my dad or realize that his expensive cocaine habit might have had something to do with it. I didn't even know he
had
a cocaine habit back then. But I
had
begun to notice his drinking. Sometimes I'd be sitting in the living room watching television and he'd come into the room, get a bottle of booze out of the liquor cabinet, and just do a shot. It was as though it was part of a normal day.

I'd say to him, “Why do you drink so much?”

And he'd say, “I'm not drinking that much. It's healthy for people to have a shot of alcohol every day.”

“Okay,” I'd say. “I guess I don't know much about it.”

So I kind of accepted it. And even though I was aware of his drinking in a way that I wasn't aware of his cocaine use, I still didn't think about it that much. I certainly didn't think he was an alcoholic. It wasn't as though he walked around with a beer in his hand all the time. But it seemed to me that he relied on those shots. It was like he was dependent on booze, without ever being visibly drunk. And so drinking also became part of his normal day, without changing his behavior that much.

How I coped

It's hard to say how I coped with my dad's cocaine addiction as a kid because, like I said, I wasn't really aware of it. But when I was little, I was quiet and often played by myself. I watched a lot of television and was very into video games. Sometimes I would go to the park and hang out with friends, but I never spoke much. Looking back, that's kind of strange because both of my parents were very outgoing. It's not like they had no shame, but they certainly weren't quiet and they liked to socialize a lot.

One thing I think I did as a kid was bottle up my emotions. This meant that sometimes I would have angry outbursts where things came to the surface. It was usually small things that would prompt them, like not getting a toy or something. That's when my dad would grab my arm like I described earlier.

Still my dad

Even though all this was happening, I still just thought of my dad as my dad. I mean, he still taught me to play baseball and soccer and hockey, and most of the time he was fun to be around. So I never thought of him as bad, and life never seemed all that unusual. Sure, we were never the kind of family that had meetings or ate dinner together, but we still did fun stuff. The four of us would go visit relatives or friends out of town. And whenever we were on vacation together, we enjoyed each other's company. We could talk about almost anything. I knew I could come to my parents if I had major problems. But I never had major problems as a kid, or at least nothing I couldn't deal with myself. So my dad and I had a good relationship, despite his addiction.