Tar
Our lease was ending today. My older brother’s life looked dim as he lay on the floor of his bedroom when my dad walked in. A spoon and a hypodermic needle lay on his nightstand. The shallow breath coming out of his blue lips whistled for help. Cody had fallen out. Sirens swept over Louisville, Colorado, as my parents desperately tried to bring Cody to consciousness. Paramedics ran up the stairs. An injection of Naloxone violently breathed life back into him.
As Cody felt the overwhelming effects of overdose take control of his body, I can only assume that he began to realize how far he had fallen. He knew the deadly risks of using heroin. The pleasant sensation of injection coaxed him into using anyway. His habit finally caught up with him, and his respiratory system gave out as an excess of drugs flooded his brain. Control of his life now rested on the off chance that my parents would find his unconscious body and call for help. An injection of Naloxone ended up saving his life, but it came at the cost of pain and nausea from precipitated withdrawal.
I woke up to the whistle of boiling water. My compadre Travis and I shared our last gourds of sherba mate as housemates in South Boulder. I fried up some eggs for us to fuel our move.
In front of my fully packed Honda Accord, I looked out at the flatirons from the vantage point of the place I called home for the past two years for the last time when my phone rang. “Dad” blinked on the cover and I flipped it open. Wearily, he asked if I could come home as soon as possible.
My 63 year-old parents stood waiting for me outside when I arrived at my childhood home. Their tired, bloodshot eyes washed over me as they ushered me into the house. The purple spots on my dad’s baldhead darkened as he explained Cody’s overdose.
I stood in disbelief as his words fell over me. My brain flooded with chemicals and I wept. Sitting on the floor of my childhood home’s living room, I learned that Cody used heroin intravenously.
The thought of Cody injecting drugs into his veins made my stomach drop. Cody wasn’t like that. I knew he smoked pot and liked to drink at concerts, but I never considered him a drug addict. Almost nobody starts using heroin with a needle, though. He had fallen deep into addiction. It finally made sense why he wore long sleeved shirts all year long. He used fabric to hide track marks that covered veins in his arms where he injected black tar heroin. With a racing mind, I rashly decided to return to Boulder to finish cleaning out my house before visiting Cody.
My route home on US-36 felt like a racetrack. Summer in Colorado means heavy highway construction. Approaching the Table Mesa exit, adrenaline coursed through my body as it began accelerating in a new direction. The floor of my car felt as if it fell beneath me. My front left tire had blown out. I lost control of the car and drifted into a concrete wall. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Veins protruded from my hands that tightly gripped the steering wheel, which kept me from ejecting from the car. I began to spin out of control. My bass amp flew from the passenger seat, slapping me in the face. The momentum from the impact carried my soul and car into a ditch on the side of the road where the stench of burnt tar filled the air. I sat in a daze with broken glass in my face. The next thing I knew, the wide eyes of my former coworker, Sam, gazed down at me through my open window.
“That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen man, are you OK?”
He called an ambulance.
In the ER, I learned that whiplash from my accident caused compression of discs in my cervical spine, which now pressed down on nerves at the C-5 and C-6 levels. I now lived with stabbing pain shooting down my left arm and lost feeling in the index finger and thumb of my left hand. Severe depression now dominated my life.
I moved back into my childhood home to live with my parents and Cody. After six months of researching procedures to fix my neck and fighting with my insurance company, I underwent cervical fusion surgery. I woke up from the surgery with feeling back in my hand. The IV stuck in my arm connected to a bottle of morphine. For two days I had near unlimited access to the drug with just the push of a button. The spike in my vein allowed me freedom from pain in my body and mind for the first time in six months. In a hospital bed at two in the morning, life seemed beautiful. I could feel Cody’s attraction to the drug.
Back home, Cody treated his addiction in an outpatient Suboxone program. He saw a psychiatrist, who concluded he had bi-polar depression after he described having constantly racing thoughts. He began taking medication. I began to see him regaining control of his life as he worked full time as an electrician. We spent our nights making funky music together. During this time, Cody explained to me the details of his opiate addiction.
A doctor prescribed him an exorbitant amount of Percocet after breaking his arm snowboarding. The opiate medication would slow down his constantly racing thoughts. At the time he worked a mundane job detailing cars. On opiates, instead of feeling depressed with his job, he felt mellow and content. Life felt beautiful. Humanity seemed beautiful.
He became addicted. He built a tolerance fast. When his prescription ran out, he began spending most of his income on Oxycodone off the streets. When pills became too expensive, he began copping black tar heroin off the streets. When smoking black tar heroin became too expensive, he began cooking the black tar and injecting it into his veins.
The house stood with a monstrous silence the morning Cody died. I awoke to the sound of my mom screaming his name. She found him in his bed. His face and lips turned blue and black. His nostrils covered in dark red dried blood. A toxicology report informed my family that he overdosed on heroin cut with Fentanyl, an opiate 40 to 100 times stronger than heroin that anesthesiologists use when putting patients to sleep before surgery.
After Cody’s death, I have witnessed my parents become shells of their former selves. Comforting my mom while she weeps in Cody’s old bedroom has become a daily routine. My depression has worsened. My mind feels tired and restless most days. Despite knowing the possibility of the pain he would cause, Cody lost control, and in the early hours of the morning on January 12th, 2016, an injection filled with tar drove into his flesh with a wild energy for the last time.
