Friendships can be an adventure. There’s good, there’s bad. There’s social gatherings to go to, there’s arguments to be had…but at the end of the day, you’re still friends. Friends are sometimes worse than family. You try and try, but nothing works.
I had one of those friends. For the sake of this post, let’s call him Randy. Randy came from a Texas Baptist family. His dad died when he was younger and his mother remarried when he was old enough for the man to not be any sort of impact, good or bad. Matter of fact, as long as I could remember, his stepdad was basically a just there. He never stepped in when Randy got into trouble at high school. It was his mother that was the disciplinarian in the family.
They were the quasi-typical oil boom family. Stepdad worked at the local petrochemical plant on shifts, Mom volunteered at the church and worked part-time at someday care in the town. I met Randy through a mutual friend and we immediately hit it off. We were both children of the Eighties in a lot of ways. Fashion, music and partying. Of course, growing up in the Houston area, we were able to access a lot of things easily and cheaply.
It was during this time that Randy’s addiction tendencies started raising its ugly head. We had already graduated and Randy was working for the same guy he had worked for in high school. A guy named Howard that owned a pool cleaning service. As far as I knew, Howard’s business was the only like it in town. Howard has cancer and was told that he only had a short amount of time to live.
Howard had supposedly began partying like a mad man and Randy was right there beside him injecting speedballs, a mix of cocaine and meth, taking pills, and it was rumored injecting each other with heroin. Randy and I had started going our separate ways by then. I had grown tired of waking up and wondering where all of my money had gone and questioning how in the world I made it home safely.
One night I was at one of the local clubs when Randy came up to me with a wild look in his eyes. “Man, I NEED some stuff,” he said. I asked him if he actually “needed” it or “wanted” it, because as I tried to reason with him and to myself, those were two different things. I walked him over to an old connection and the deal was done. We walked out to my car and I started asking him about the rumors I had heard about his heroin use.
He convinced me that it was Howard. That the pain he was going through with the cancer had become unbearable and he was self-medicating with drugs. He walked back into the club and I left to go somewhere else to meet other friends. People that weren’t angels, but didn’t have the same addiction tendencies of Randy.
Shortly after that night, I left it all behind and moved out of state.
I started college. I went back home to see friends, including Randy. The first club we walked into, he got punched in the mouth by someone I had known a lot longer than him. I calmed my friend down asking him not to ruin my time visiting. The friend agreed and he told me that Randy had stolen a leather jacket and money that was in it from him. We decided to leave there and go to a strip club down the road.
Randy waved at a rather large man sitting by himself in a booth. When we sat down, I noticed immediately that the man was extremely intoxicated. I excused myself to go to the restroom and it was during the walk back to the booth. I see the man slap Randy. I hurried back to the booth and asked what the hell was going on. It seems that Randy owed money to this man as well.
I think we ended up at the mutual friend’s house, drinking the night away, talking about old times. I headed back home after a few days, promising myself that I would never do that again. I had moved on in my life. I came back home and never heard from Randy again. A few years later, he somehow got my number and told me he was working an hour away from my new home and asked me if I wanted to grab a beer with him. We had been on the phone for less than five minutes when he asked me if I could get any stuff. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I made an excuse that I need to get off the phone and he called a few times after that, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer the phone.
Flash-forward a few years after social media and Facebook had taken off. I did the usual reconnection with old friends and I connected with a mutual friend Randy had once lived with. We talked a little about our kids when Jed told me about Randy.
What I’m leaving out here is that many, many times Jed and I, as well, as other friends and family had tried to intervene in Randy’s life. We had attempted to get him to stop. Even when we had stopped hanging around together, I would talk to him about getting help. He would come by my work at the music store I was working at then with almost a different person every time and I could tell he was wired on coke or something else.
Jed told me they had physically driven him to a clinic. He promised to get better. Before Howard passed away, he tried to give Randy the business, which I understood was lucrative, but he didn’t feel like Randy had the strength to get off of the drugs and clean himself up enough to keep the business running after he was gone.
I was also told Howard wasn’t the one doing the drugs, it was Randy. Howard had tried to get him to stop and he offered to pay for Randy’s clinic run, the second time. Yes, Randy had already been admitted into a detox clinic that Howard had paid for once.
He had lost job after job after job due to drug use and if there was ever a blacklist in the area for getting hired, Randy must have made it, which is odd because there is always someone hiring. Somewhere along the way, Randy started going to church again. He was living back at home and he was supposedly doing better. He had met a woman at the church and they had fallen in love.
The photos I saw from back then, he looked healthy. He had started working out again. The woman’s family owned a business in the area and he was given another chance to run the business once he learned enough about it. But like all the other times, he had screwed up the opportunity and chance. He was using again.
It was his wife that caught him. She was a RN and familiar with the characteristics of an addict. She saw them early on and she thought she could rescue him. She thought that becoming a part of her family that he would see the good in the world.
Of all the places he could get caught, it was on the toilet at the family business.
She walked in on him right in the middle of doing a line of cocaine. She had had enough. He was removed by the local police department and arrested for possession. She gave his mom the money to bail him out, but he was to get his stuff out the next day under the direction of the police department. He didn’t get his stuff, instead he went to his sister’s house. It was his sister that went over and picked up his things.
She was gone long enough for him to make a phone call to get a rig and some heroin. It was delivered and he gave the person his sister’s DVD player for payment. Mallory came home and found Randy laying in the kitchen with the needle still stuck in his arm. He was transported to the nearby hospital, admitted to ICU, but it was too late. He had suffered too much brain damage and the overdose, intentional or not, had done its work. He died alone.
What can you do for someone if they don’t want help themselves?
I feel responsible for helping him feed his addiction one of the last nights I saw him. I regret not going to see him the time he was working in my newly adopted hometown. But I also remember the frustration of our group of friends trying to get him to help himself to stop. We all took him away independently to talk to him…to try to get him to stop the self-abuse.
Growing up in an abusive environment myself, I tried to tell him and get him to relate my own anguish and how I dealt with it. I offered to get him to the people he needed to see. I told him I’d somehow help him pay for it or get the church to help him. They had offered through his mother’s service to pay many times. He never took them up on it. His mother brought home some cash and he stole the money and it went straight up his nose.
I was fortunate that I never developed or had an addictive personality or problem. I was able to put that part of my life behind me and move on. I only have one, maybe two drinks nowadays. I haven’t touched drugs or anything related to it in over 35 years. I’m not proud of my past. I regret it. I regret not being able to help my friend. I think about this often, but I have my own issues that I am addressing and my journey has just begun.
But as with a lot of other things in our lives, when is enough, enough? When do we just hold up our hands and give up? Which do we choose? Our own sanity, safety, family…. or those of our friends, who do not want the assistance, love and care to help them? There is that old saying, you can’t help those who don’t want to be helped.
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