- By the time I was 18, I had been arrested over 10 times
for things regarding heroin addiction.
Burglary, commercial burglary, possession of heroin,
the list goes on ad infinitum,
but the point was I had some trouble with the law
and addiction.
I say that with a little bit more gravitas today,
but if you had asked me when I was 17 what I felt about it,
I was really proud.
In fact, I thought I hadn't been arrested enough.
There's something that we don't talk about often,
which is how exciting heroin addiction is.
I mean there's something exhilarating about the cycle
of waking up, stealing, swindling,
finding that way to get money, deceive, buy, use,
run from the cops, repeat.
I don't know, it gives you a purpose.
Through a chain of events, I ended up getting arrested
right before I turned 18 for the final time,
and this time, I was deemed unfit to stay with my parents
and I was made a ward of the court, which essentially means
that my parents couldn't take care of me anymore
and I became a foster kid.
And from there, they put me into a transitional living,
where I turned 18.
Push came to shove and they say you have to get sober
or you have to leave.
And I don't know what I was thinking up until that point,
but as soon as that ultimatum came to me,
I just decided, oh, thank you for reminding me
that I can leave.
So that day, I walked down the street and I made friends
with a homeless heroin addict named Red.
Red and I hit it off because I needed somebody
who would approve of the lifestyle that I wanted to live
and I think he needed somebody to corroborate
some of the choices he'd made in his life too.
He took me under his wing,
you know, showed me how to be a proper heroin addict
or a better heroin addict.
We were having the time of our lives believe it or not
until, one day, after about a week,
he started talking about his mom.
And as soon as he mentions her, he starts to cry.
That struck me because, when you do heroin,
you do heroin so you don't feel things.
You generally don't feel anything
and he was feeling something in front of me.
And he started to tell me
that he had initially tried to get sober
a couple years before that to show his mom
that it wasn't her fault,
it wasn't her fault that he ended up the way that he was,
that it was him, solely him.
He then told me that his mom had died
about a year before that moment we were sitting in
and he never got the chance to tell her that.
We just sat there in silent for about a minute
while I let him finish crying,
and at the end of that minute, he looked up at the sky,
said, "I love you, ma," and then he looked down
at the puddle that was right next to him
and used it to fill a syringe with water,
cook up heroin, and then shot up with it.
And, you know, in that moment, for the first time ever,
I just saw through the reality that I was sitting in.
This wasn't as exciting or as fun
as I thought it was before.
It was very real.
This man sitting in front of me
could very well be me in 30 years, if I make it 30 years.
And for some reason, I'd never thought about that before.
What did I think I was gonna be when I was 45, 50?
And I saw myself at 50 with a wife, kids, a job, a house.
I kinda just looked around
and I saw I was sitting behind a dumpster
in a subway parking lot.
As profound as that moment was,
I, too, went to the same puddle
and used it to cook up heroin and shoot up again.
But the next morning, I went to an AA meeting.
I tried for the first time
to hear what people in recovery had to say.
I'm not gonna say that going to that meeting
was what cured me 'cause it wasn't
'cause I struggled for about six months.
But that moment that I had with Red,
while it didn't exactly cure me,
it was the seed that needed to be planted.
It was the first time I saw through the matrix.
There were several things that could've led me to get sober,
you know, the arrests, the pain of withdrawals,
the losing of friends, the family,
and it's funny to say that, out of all those clear signs,
the one thing that stuck was a homeless guy named Red
telling me a story about his mom.