A Kid in a Casket

The first time I ever encountered a syringe was outside of the Boys’ Club on 17th Street in Niagara Falls, NY. It was called the Boys’ Club back then – the Girls part was added eventually. The brown brick building is situated in a downtown residential neighborhood, right off a busy two-lane thoroughfare – Pine Avenue. Main Street in Niagara Falls became a place you just don’t wanna be. Then, Pine Avenue became the place where all the businesses were. Now, even the small Mom-and-Pops of Pine Avenue are trading their glass windows for plywood, too.

Located on 17th Street in Niagara Falls, NY - Still Going Strong

On the left side of the Boys’ Club, there was a small grassy field. A place where a house once stood – now it’s a fenced-in playground. No doors on that side of the building. So, we’d go out there sometimes and toss a ball around. It wasn’t soft grass, though. The grass was spotty, the dirt was hard, and it was mixed with gravel. The Boys’ and Girls’ Club has a rich history. It was safe in the sense that the Director, “Knuckles,” was there when we needed him. But it was still a place where we had to learn to fend for ourselves, most of the time. There was no better example of this statement than when a boy from NYC was murdered there – right in the gym, during a basketball game.

The syringe was on the ground, right next to a ceramic coffee cup. I remember telling Knuckles about it. Then he grabbed another man – bald, chubby, and wearing a shirt and tie. He asked me if anyone was there, and if I touched the needle. I remember him taking each of my hands and rubbing them – asking me if anything hurt. Eventually I figured he was checking to make sure I didn’t poke myself, or anything like that.

We all know that there wasn’t a vaccine clinic being held on the side of the building there, nor were anabolic steroids on the scene yet. It was heroin. A thing I wouldn’t encounter again until I took a booted syringe away from a 17-year-old girl at Stoughton High School, where I was Vice Principal in the early 2000’s. Then, right around the time that my son was born in 2011, I had to go to Witty’s Funeral Home in Orange, MA, to pay my respects to the family of a teenage boy, who was lying in a casket. Just a kid, who shortly after his graduation from Ralph C. Mahar Regional High School, he was accepted to the school of addiction.

This picture appeared in the New York Post - Similar Topic

I went to school to be a social worker, then a teacher. Who’d have predicted that I’d be the one orchestrating counseling services for groups of teens who lost a friend? Or that I’d be the very first person to knock on the door of an apartment to talk to a mom who just lost her 14-year-old son in a freak accident. That it’d be me who tells the kid to take off his shoe and give me the cocaine I knew he was hiding in it. Or, that be on my Nextel, beeping SRO Billy Tracy to get his ass to the school – with reinforcements – because two cars of armed grown-ups rolling up makes an impression.

You gotta respect the people in hospitals who deal with death every day. And the first responders who are making Lazaruses out of addicts – bringing them back to life with NARCAN. One EMT I know told me that he had to get the same guy back from the dead twice in the same night. On two separate calls. It amazes me that they do it every day, and I wonder the toll it takes on them…because I know the toll that some of the dramatic events took on me.

When I was at Witty’s that night, surveying the room – I saw all the sorrow. But the worst…I mean, the absolute worst was seeing that kid’s mom. A face that’s been stressed, and crying for days – it has a particular look. She sat with a hunch in her back, dark eyes, both hands clenched on a wad of Kleenex. Family members flanked her, and one by one, people stopped briefly to say whatever one says to a mom in that condition.

What was she thinking? Was it about the day that she pulled a dozen cookies from an oven and asked her little boy come over to evaluate them for which of the twelve was the most perfect? Then, let him take the one he chose? Or was she thinking about how it got to this point? Whose fault was it? Was it her fault for not doing enough about the addiction? Was it the fault of the drug dealer who sold him that crap? Or was it something bigger? I mean, it comes from somewhere. How’d it get here? How did he get caught up in it?

Addiction is a scourge that gets plenty of attention these days. But let’s face the facts. It’s been going on for quite some time. So, when my curious 14-year-old son started asking me about all this Maduro stuff yesterday, I had to think about it…and what the right thing to say was. I try so hard not to do the politics convo with him – because, well, honestly, they suck. I have no desire to instill an ideology in him. I want him to be able to think.

Venezuelan President Maduro - Pre Capture

I kept it simple. I told him that when I am at the store, debating between drumsticks and chicken breasts because one is cheaper, I don’t think much about the fights the billionaires who caused this inflation have with one another. I only care that he has chicken to eat. As for the Maduro thing – the cost of heroin is going up, and its availability is going down. A thing that brought me back to thinking about that kid in the casket.

And here’s the part I finally understand – not the politics, not the economics, not even addiction itself – but the responsibility we have to pay attention to one another. To protect kids when we can. To show up when it’s uncomfortable. To put up a fight, even when it would be easier to leave.

That syringe on the gravel beside the Boys’ Club didn’t turn me into a savior, and it didn’t make me immune. It just taught me early that pain doesn’t announce itself, and that it shows up everywhere – on playgrounds, in gyms, in quiet living rooms, and in caskets for the far too young. For as long as I’ve lived, people have been carrying more than they let on. If there’s anything worth passing on to my son, or to anyone reading this, it’s that simple truth: we don’t fix everything. We just choose, again and again, not to look away.