Outside the Whale: Treatment Politics

By Tanya Willow

When the holiday season arrives and the skies turn gray, and present life feels muted, my imagination will sometimes pull me to the past of my childhood. My friends were children of shipyard workers and shoe factory workers, whose parents were laid off in their 50s or lost promised pensions to nothing less than legal larceny. With industry moving south for cheaper labor, their homes were sometimes sold and many moved away, off the map of my life.

“Google Maps” allows me to float down those roads I played street hockey on like a ghost. I can see where the nets were placed on the opposite side of the road so cars could zigzag past us. We were all Bobby Orr then. Looking down on the roofs, I wonder whatever happened to that kid who lived there in that house I now hover above invisibly. New, unfamiliar houses have since been shoehorned on former patches of high grass where some of my friends would sit “between periods,” out of view of parents and smoke from boxes of Marlboro’s. Some of their parents were at home, taking their own break from a bottle.

My first best friend I met when I was 6 and he was 3. He was balanced on his mother’s hip. When David got older we played Batman with sheets pinned around our necks. I bit his knee once. His mother was furious and came to my house and complained to my mother. I hid between the wall and a lamp table where the ashtray was kept in a space that only cats and kids could fit until our parents’ talk calmed.

We would bike together down the “Big Hill,” much smaller in adulthood but huge then, zooming down on our stingray bikes. One year there was a road patch that dipped in the asphalt. We went through and our bikes launched, bucking us both off our banana seats. I hit the pavement and did a road-slide. A thick leather, double-prong belt from the era saved my hip. But David hit the pavement face first, permanently crossing his front teeth. Blood was falling in rapid beats on his dungaree jacket. His sister carried him home.

As we got older things in the neighborhood started to change. David was now “Lewie,” a play on his last name. There was a group of kids that kept playing street hockey and a group that had lost interest and hit the woods to drink liquor taken from home cabinets and to smoke Marlboro’s. Then it all stops. Childhood comes to an end. You see their houses but never go inside them anymore. They move. You move. You never see them again.

The last time I saw David it was at his father’s wake. I had not seen him in decades, but when he realized who I was he gave me one of those rare, real hugs, and left the room without saying a word to me. I would never see him again.

David’s mother had died a few years earlier from emphysema. One day in her pantry where she had prepared some 30,000 meals, her lungs failed and she collapsed. When she got to the hospital and told the doctor how terrified she was, he told her that we all have to die sometime. This woman who had stood on her feet and stitched thousands of shoe soles only to lose that job to clean out waste baskets for doctors like him, turned away and left her in tears and her bottled air.

I recently went through the Google portal and learned this Thanksgiving holiday that my first childhood friend had been dead for over a year. David was a lanky kid, but time had filled him out to a bearded, barrel-chested man with powerful arms. The obituary said David, “known to friends as ‘Lewie,’” was a concrete cutter for a union. He had left behind one child, a pregnancy his mother had worried about, but it seems she had no reason. He was a grandfather and the obituary said he loved spending time with his grandchild most. He loved his dogs. And his Harley Davidson.

Obituaries never tell you how someone dies. So whatever charity they ask you to donate to “in lieu of flowers” is usually a hint.

David’s obituary asked you donate to the “American Lung Association.”

Marlboro’s were the Juul of my era.

To google someone from my old city is like visiting a battlefield. Parents were often broken from hard labor or money terrors. Cigarettes or some quicker form of fatal addiction offers temporary relief, an inherited strategy.

Years later, when people from Brockton were dying of opioid addiction, it was because they suffered a character flaw. Decades later, when those in the whiter, wealthier towns like Canton started to die from heroin, it was a national health crisis caused by external forces.

David’s death rushed my thoughts to our mutual, troubled neighborhood friend. I was scared to google his name and as it turned out, I spelled his name wrong and found nothing. Then, by a chance so uncanny I wondered if I were now the one being invisibly hovered over, when I returned to work after Thanksgiving, I glanced down at a tiny blurb in the Canton Citizen. A man with the same name had been arrested by the Canton Police. When I googled him under the correct spelling a face from my childhood stared back at me. He was not just older; he was hollowed out. I was reminded of the quote in the book Junkie when the author said he could always tell someone who was addicted to heroin because it changed them “at the cellular level.”

Canton is considering another addiction treatment center, but this one promises to appetizingly cater half its beds to correction officers and first responders. I was reminded, listening to a politician say that somehow a particular class of addicts deserve our priority, that he was reinforcing this false belief we have around who is addicted because of external forces and who is addicted because they lack character. Who deserves help and who doesn’t, depending on their zip code or what their job is. I don’t think my father, who drove his Harley Davidson to Bridgewater State Hospital to do his job as corrections officer, would deserve help more than David, who drove his Harley to go cut concrete.

So much of who we become depends on where we are born. Research is now saying even houses separated by a street that leads to a different school makes all the difference as to who we grow up to be.

Yet we expect a certain class of addicts to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and take personal responsibility while others we are willing to give community help and our sympathy. But the truth is, as research in now proving, we are where we eat. The Marlboro Man, despite the myth, cannot make it alone. Everyone deserves help as much as anyone else, regardless of zip code or how they earn a living. Treatment should be equally accessible to anyone who needs it.

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