“Because that’s what family does” – A Family’s Struggle with Crystal Meth

(Note to reader: This is the most personal piece I have ever done on this blog and I debated with myself on whether or not to write it. There is some strong language in this piece so please be forewarned. My intent is not to offend anyone, but I hope the telling of this story is some how helpful to anyone else who’s experienced the ravages of drugs in their lives.)

 

KVIA and the CW aired a program about the dangers of using crystal meth last night. Sadly I know first hand about how crystal meth can destroy a life and cause havoc in a family.

 

I want to share a story with you. It’s a story that is unfortunately becoming more and more common; the story of wasted talent and lost potential. It’s a story about my best friend when we were growing up.

 

His dad was involved in politics and community activism, but his passion was baseball. He played Triple A baseball in the Giants organization before a tragic accident that broke his pelvis and ended his dreams of playing professionally. He had eight sons and never lost his passion for America’s past time.

 

Almost at birth, my friend’s dad made his sons play baseball. It was a lot of pressure being the son of a talented ball player, but my friend seemed to revel in it. While his brothers hated the endless drills and practice, my friend loved it. At night, he’d be outside tossing a racquetball against the wall so that he could practice fielding grounders. He liked using the racquetball because it bounced more than a real baseball and was harder to catch. He said if you can field a racquetball, a baseball seems easy. Even at age ten in Little League, he was serious about baseball.

 

Ten years old was also the age that my friend first tried marijuana with his other friend Jonas. At first it was only every once in a while. He kept it a secret from everyone, even me. But eventually he started smoking weed more and more until it was no longer an unspoken secret.

 

Even his dad just started to look the other way, as he had with his grades, because my friend was a good athlete.

 

We grew apart after high school. I joined the Army and only talked with him every once in a while and tried to catch up with him when I’d come home on leave. But it was never like it was when we were kids. He’d grown closer to his friend Jonas who was pretty much a loser in every sense of the word.

 

My friend developed into a great athlete and star baseball player. He was never as good as his dad (how many of us ever are) but he had a chance to try out with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox.

 

He did well at the try-outs. I went, along with his family, to support him and cheer him on. The scouts said that he did a great job, but he was just too small. At 5’4, a future in the Big Leagues just wasn’t in his future. He was devastated.

 

His life began to spiral out of control. The marijuana use evolved into harder drugs. His wife left him. He could rarely hold a job and when he did manage to hold on to one it was fast food and lasted only a couple of months.

 

Eventually my friend started hanging out with characters that were right out of cholo movies like American Me or Blood In / Blood Out. We’d grown up in a rough area, but these guys were bad even for that neighborhood.

 

He was first a mule and went on to become a small time dealer. I know for a fact that he’d seen Scarface, but apparently he didn’t remember the scene where the rules of the game are laid out, like don’t get high off of your own supply.

 

He was busted in Oklahoma for transporting two pounds of marijuana. His dad called in as many favors from his political friends as he could and my friend got off with a couple of years of probation since it was his first offense.

 

He was clean for a while, but went back to his old ways once he no longer had to provide his probation officer with urine samples.

 

I was hanging out with my old friend and his brothers at a bar in west Phoenix a few years ago, just shooting some pool and having some beers. A woman came in and sent the bartender over to me with a pitcher of beer. The bartender told me it was from the woman sitting at the bar. I went over to thank her, but I was not the least bit interested in her.

 

She was a tramp. There’s no nice way to put it. She was the type of woman that my parents spent a life-time telling me to avoid. I could see her lower-back tramp stamp tattoo just above her thong that was showing above her jeans. A real classy lady.

 

She wore clothing that was two sizes too small for her. She had on too much make-up with stereotypical chola-blue eye shadow, thick eye liner, and even thicker and darker lip liner that drew attention to her bad teeth. Her face was slightly pock-marked, like she used to have bad acne. Her eyes where blood-shot and wide open.

 

I thanked her and made pointless conversation out of bar room etiquette, but the first chance I had, I pawned her off on my friend. They seemed to hit it off well and he took her home that night. I went back to my game of pool.

 

At first, I was relieved my friend was stuck with her, as long as it wasn’t me. After all, is that what a wing man is for? I figured it was just a one-night stand with a skanky bar fly. But as it turns out, he ended up staying with that bar fly. They ended up with a son before he could get out of the relationship. The tramp’s mother was raising her other four kids.

 

She’s the one who introduced my friend to crystal meth. He went from a pot head to a strung-out junkie seemingly overnight. They would go on binges for weeks at a time. My friend’s poor mother was worried sick about her son and his father was ashamed of what his son had become.

 

Like all drug users, he became a user of people, bumming money from everyone he knew, and burning all of his loved ones. Tramp ended up pregnant again. By this time my friend’s parents were basically raising the first child. Tramp was using meth throughout her pregnancy and even did a “puddle” the day she went into labor.

 

Tramp gave birth to a baby girl. The baby was born addicted to meth. The state of Arizona immediately started the process to take the child away from her parents.

 

When people would tell my friend’s parents to stop giving him money or a place to stay, his parents’ anguish turned into anger. Their pain was deep and raw. Like a festering, infected wound.

 

The Inevitable

 

The inevitable happened about a year and a half ago. I received a call from one of his younger brothers telling me that he’d overdosed and was in a detox center. Apparently my friend and Tramp were at some drug house. God only knows what she did for money, but they were at the end of another binge.

 

My friend had over-dosed at the drug house and Tramp just left him there while he was convulsing and drifting in and out of consciousness. Someone there at least cared enough to drive him to a hospital and push him out of the vehicle and onto the sidewalk in front of the emergency room. As soon as he was medically stable, he was sent to a detox facility.

 

I left work right away and came home to pick-up my daughter. We drove to Phoenix right away to pick up my friend from detox. If you’re wondering why I took my daughter it was for two reasons. First, I wanted her to see first-hand what drugs could do to a person. She was eleven and at the age where she could be exposed to drugs (live gives us plenty of teaching moments). The other reason I took her was more personal. You see, my “friend” is also my little brother and my daughter’s padrino.

 

My brother and I as kids (with my mom)

 

Along the way I explained to her what was going on and tried to prepare her for what she might expect to see. The truth was that I didn’t know what to expect myself. When we arrived in Phoenix a few hours later, my brother was ready to be released from the facility. He was a complete zombie. He recognized me but it took him a couple of minutes to remember that I wasn’t in the Army anymore and now lived in Texas.

 

I told him that his hijada was in the car and to shape his ass up and get his shit together. It was like talking to a wall, only the wall would probably comprehend more.

 

He was trembling and twitching. He kept fidgeting and picking at his skin. I had a family-size bag of chips that he devoured before we got to one of my other brother’s house. There was no way we were going to allow my parents to see him like that, but they insisted and came over. We couldn’t get him into a rehab facility until the following Monday, so that meant we had to keep him around for a couple of days.

 

We didn’t know how long we’d be able to keep him around, so I decided to watch over him in a hotel room near my brother’s house. I didn’t want to mess up my brother’s house or expose any of the younger nieces and nephews to an addict detoxing. Plus, we boys wanted to be alone with him when he was finally coherent. The plan was to have him to stay with us until the rehab facility opened on Monday. Plan “B” was to kick his ass if he refused and force him to go to rehab on Monday. Either way, he was going to rehab.

 

It was a long weekend and that first night was the worst. I took the first shift baby sitting him and at first all he did was sleep. But then he’d shiver, moan, and eventually scream. He’d wake up every couple of hours freaking out. For some reason he wanted to take a leak in the closet of the hotel room. Problem was, there was no closet!

 

Things got physical a couple of times, but we managed to keep him at the hotel. We had the tough-love talk with him, along with out parents and it was a painful day for our family. He went outside to talk with our mother and he suddenly took off running. He managed to get away and it was several months before anyone heard from him again.

 

I never found out how or why, but he cleaned up eventually. He now has a job in a warehouse and is in a steady relationship.

 

The Baby

 

There was no way we could allow the baby my brother and Tramp had to end up in the state system, so my sister stepped up and started the process of gaining custody of the baby. She’d already taken in their son and was quickly officially named the foster mother of the newborn.

 

My sister had three kids of her own along with two step kids. It’s funny, but when we were kids, we were so mean to her. One of my brothers pushed her out of a tree once and broke her arm. Another brother busted her on the head with a brick giving her a few stitches, and I tried to light her Cabbage Patch doll on fire because she lost some of my GI Joes. Yet though all of that, and with a gang of kids of her own, she stepped up to the plate.

 

The rest of us boys along with our other sister, help her out with money and stuff for the kids. My sister gave my brother and Tramp a chance to be parents if they cleaned up and got their lives together but it didn’t work out. Tramp was only around a short time after the baby was born and she eventually was on the run. She got into some more trouble and the last I heard, she was locked up.

 

My brother’s ex-wife (she’s still close to our family) asked my mother why we even bothered to take the baby in and my mother answered, “Because that’s what family does”.

 

In March of this year, the adoption was finalized and the children official belong to my sister. Both are doing well and are healthy. The pediatrician says there doesn’t appear to be any major damage to the baby because of the meth, but they will have to monitor her for many years to come.

 

(My sister & kids the day adoption was final)

 

The Moral of the Story

 

Drugs don’t discriminate and it can happen to the best of us. My brother and I were raised by the same parents and came out totally different. He has no one to blame but his own poor judgment.

 

You can’t completely shelter your children from everything life throws at them, but there is some truth to the old Mexican saying my mother used to say, “Dime con quien andas, y te dire quien eres”.

Another Thousand Words…

Another contribution from the good folks over at Freeway Carpets. If I ever get sponsorship for my blog, I think I am going to hit them up first!

Even though I consider myself a strong political activist, I own a business and I don’t think even someone as outspoken and politically active as I consider myself to be, would be willing to give up advertising space for a political message.

All the more reason I admire these folks. They could easily use the space to advertise their latest deal on carpets, a sale, or catchy slogan. Glad to see they use it for political commentary. That’s what freedom of speech is all about.

I think I’ll stop in one day to interview the owner and ask him more about his billboard and pass it on to you Dear Reader.

 

Here’s the other side of the sign.

Gotta love the humor, gotta love the moxie (cajones for those of you not familiar with the term).

Don’t think they’ll be asked to carpet Rachel Quintana’s office anytime soon! May have them do my offices though…

El Paso’s Youth Movement in Politics

If you’ve been paying attention to elections over the last couple of years, you’ve probably noticed El Paso is going through a change in leadership. There is a definite youth movement going on. The 40 and under crowd is starting to make up a large portion of the elected officials here in town and I think it represents an important transition in El Paso politics.

 

The “Old Guard” has done a lot of good for El Paso but its great to see so many young leaders in our community emerge. Hopefully the emerging youth movement in the leadership will also represent some progression in how business is done.

 

On Commissioners Court there is Veronica Escobar who will soon be joined by the energetic duo of Willie Gandara, Jr and Anna Perez. (I think Judge Cobos may be in the 40 and under crowd too, but I am not sure with all the hair he’s losing. Plus there is the likely probability that he will not be there much longer depending on how this whole FBI public corruption investigation pans out.)

 

 

The great thing about most of the newly elected youth in office is that they are well-qualified professionals who still have that youthful idealism that hasn’t been worn away into cynisism.

 

In city government there are several Gen Xers leading the way like Beto O’rourke, Susie Byrd, Steve Ortega, and Eddie Holguin.

 

At the state level, El Paso recently decided to send Marissa Marquez to Austin.

Of course there are a few Gen Xers that probably went into office a little too early, namely Rachel “Wanna Get Away?” Quintana, and Melina “Candyland” Castro. They seem to follow rather than lead.

 

Power is the subject of constant struggle. Those that have it don’t want to let it go, and those that don’t have it, struggle to get it. My hope is that our other elected officials will not be threatened by the youth movement and serve as mentors to the younger leaders, taking advantage of the wealth of political and legislative experience we have in our other elected officials.

 

The interesting thing to me, as a Gen Xer is whether the youth movement will follow the lead of the “Old Guard” or blaze their own trail. It will also be interesting to see when/if/how the “Old Guard” relinquish their power.