Chapter 3: A Flight to California
This is very raw. It took me a few days to write. Damn … I can’t believe this was more than 12 years ago. I can still remember it as though it was just the other day.
It’s coming together.
I knew my mother was going to die. There was not much I could do about it.
It all happened so fast.
The first time I remember knowing it was serious was at the shore. My family used to go to Sea Isle, New Jersey every summer. There is a bar called Shoobies that smelled of drunk teenagers and stale beer. We had the entire club to ourselves. I was wearing a Jimmy Rollins Phillies Jersey and we danced the night away.
My mother was laughing, dancing and having the time of her life. I remember grabbing her hand and we would spin around the sticky dance floor with each other.
They shut down the bar and kicked us out. I remember the group of us were walking back to the house. There was a wagon on the sidewalk and I laid down in it, making a scene and drawing attention to myself. My girlfriend’s cousin jumped in the wagon and I pulled her back to the bay.
I don’t remember why that was so funny, but the laughter and the alcohol brought with it the joy of being alive.
That night was the last night I got to dance with my mother. It’s a memory that I cherish, and a moment in time I don’t think I’ll ever get to relive again.
That night, my mother had mentioned that her arm was tingling. She said she would get it looked at when she got home. My mom broke her neck a few years prior, so we assumed it was a pinched nerve.
Two days later we were back in Philly. My mother called me. I could hear the fear in her voice. She asked me to come over and so I did. I got in my Jeep and drove to Germantown and quickly pulled into her driveway.
As I walked up the driveway, I could see her Timberland boots sticking out from behind the wall. I could hear the voices talking in low and concerned whispers.
I turned the corner and looked my mother in the eyes. It was not what I had expected.
My mothers eyes were pointing in two different directions. The ambulance was on the way.
That was the beginning of the end.
Before I knew it, my mother was being flown out to California for an emergency brain surgery. Somehow, a ball of hardened dried blood had developed on my moms brain stem. It wasn’t a brain tumor exactly, but it was a very rare condition that only a few surgeons in the world were able to operate on.
Before I knew it, I was in the airport.
My father was a luggage handler at US Air for 20 years. Before 911, he used to have access to what were called “buddy passes.” More or less, this meant you could fly for free as long as there were empty seats on the airplane.
We would have to dress in our nicest clothes, get to the airport, and wait at the gates till the very end in hopes that there were empty seats. As a young boy, I remember my father being so stressed at the gates, wishing and praying that there were enough empty seats for all 4 of us to get on the plane.
It’s called “flying standby”, and we almost always get on.
But sometimes, we didn’t. Sometimes, flying standby meant that you would have to jump through hoops.
Jumping through hoops was exactly what I was doing.
I remember handing my ticket to the woman at the front desk. She said “there’s no way you’re getting on this flight.”
I said “can you put me in first class?”
I watched her type the keys, pause, look at the screen and look up at me with a smile.
“You’re in luck” she said.
That’s exactly right. My luck was starting to change.
I flew first class to Phoenix. I drank Jack Daniels and coke. My plan is to slowly drink enough to keep the withdrawals from creeping through. By the time the plane landed, I could feel my hands shaking. One more drink would help.
An hour later, I was on another plane to San Francisco. Except this time, the shakes were in full. This time I had no first class ticket. This time I was in the middle seat, I was sweating, and I was throwing up in the laboratory toilet.
“I belong in first class, how did I get here?” I thought to myself.
My step dad picked me up from the airport. I was sweating through my shirt, trying my best to keep a straight face. We drove through the cliffs of northern California. We drove through the Emerald Hills of I-280, and I did my best to appreciate the moment.
Growing up, I always imagined California as a magical place. It was another world, where good looking people flocked to so they could bathe in the sun and congratulate themselves on being beautiful. It was a place that was off limits to me, and the beautiful trees and glittering water off the bay reminded me that I wasn’t in Northeast Philadelphia anymore.
We got to the hotel, and I went straight to the hotel room.
I took a minute to open my suitcase, and just as I looked up, my step dad wheeled my mother in on the wheelchair. I hadn’t seen her in days. She looked worse than before. She looked afraid, but she was fronting a smile to comfort me. My mothers purpose is to ease suffering, even at the expense of her own.
My mother told me about the procedure. That evening, she had an appointment with the surgeon. The surgeon was going to take time to explain the operation to her. He was going to hold a plastic model of a head and brain, and use it to show my mother how he was going to cut her scalp open and cut the ball of death out of her brainstem.
My mother was a nurse. She worked in the emergency rooms of North Philly for her entire career. She knew what the odds were, and she knew they weren’t good. None the less, she kept a strong face, because that’s what she does.
After we spoke, she asked if I would come with her. She asked if I would be there to support her.
The sweat was trickling down my back. There, right in front of me, was my mother. The woman who raised me. The woman who sacrificed her entire youth for the privilege of raising a son. There she was, asking me if I would be there to support her on what very well could be the last full day of her life.
She looked at me with camouflaged fear in her eyes. And I said no.
“I’m really tired mom, I don’t feel good. I’ll be here tonight when you get back.”
She smiled and said no problem, in the way she does when she wants to reassure people that she doesn’t mean to inconvenience them. My stepfather wheeled her out of the room, and I went back to my suitcase.
I dug through my bag. I pulled out a yellow plastic tube of green pills. I needed relief.
I took the pills over to a desk that was facing out the window.
I took the green pill, put it on the desk, took the pill bottle and crushed it into a fine powder. After that, I rolled up a dirty dollar bill and sniffed the powder up my nose.
This was it. This was the moment I was waiting for. This was my chance of freedom. I had made it to California. I had made it to the west coast, where the weather was always beautiful and the people were always friendly. The sweats stopped and my nausea turned to bliss, if only for a moment.
I sat at the desk and looked out the window in front of me. There were miles of golden grass, shining bright against the low orange sun. It was so beautiful. It was so peaceful.
I sat there for a moment and dropped my head, completely ashamed of what I had become.
The day of my mothers surgery was brutal.
The drugs I sniffed in my hotel room was all I had. The withdrawals came back quickly.
The next morning I woke up early, and I sat with my mom in the pre op room. The surgeons all walk past me calmly. I didn’t understand how they could be so calm. They must have seen death every day. They already knew what was going to happen. I suppose my mother did as well.
I sat by my mom’s bed and held her hand. We didn’t say much. People walked in and out with expressionless faces. It’s hard to know what to portray in those moments. You want to be happy, but not too happy. You want to be sad, but not too sad.
The face of uncertainty. We all wear masks to hide it.
I didn’t leave my mom’s side. Eventually, they came and told her it was time. I stood up, gave her a kiss, and told her I would see her in a few hours.
Then … I waited.
I paced around in agony. I threw up in every bathroom in the hospital. I went back to the hotel room over and over again to change my shirt because of the sweat, and I embarrassed myself when coming up with reasons for doing so.
OxyContin withdrawal is indescribably painful. You think you’re dying, but you’re not. The torturous part about withdrawal is that it won’t kill you, no matter how much you wish it would.
It was one of the worst days of my life. I wanted to be with my family, but as soon as I went into the waiting room, I wanted to jump out of my skin. I remember my uncle sitting on his laptop and cordially sending emails. My father and my step dad were chit chatting about fires they fought together and people’s lives they saved as paramedics in West Philly.
My grandmother read a book in the corner. Life of Pi. The cover was a drawing of a boy and a Tiger, sleeping together in a boat.
Everyone was at peace in the moment. How did they do it?
I went for one last walk around the hospital, puked and splashed my face with water.
I turned a corner and I saw my father, walking towards me with open arms and a smile.
“She made it” he said.
I hugged him in relief, too sick to celebrate. I remember the disappointment in his eyes when my reaction was dim. He knew I was in pain. He knew I was sick. We both knew it best not to talk about it. For once in my life, I knew this moment wasn’t about me.
It was relief and agony.
I saw my mom that night. She was more coherent than I expected her to be. She looked proud and strong, even though her head was completely wrapped in bandaging. The nurse asked her if she needed anything, and she said she had everything she needed.
My mom survived. They cut her head open and cut the death ball out of her brainstem. I sat there looking at her, I had a conversation with her, she asked me to put ice in her cup because my mom always loved to have her water cups filled with ice.
I sat there in that room with my mom and my sister. I was, underweight, malnourished, suicidal, and depressed. I was directionless. I wasn’t even able to accompany my mom to a simple appointment.
I was so small.
What happened? I grew up with such optimism and thirst for adventure. Now I was a sad and pathetic little boy, pretending to be something I wasn’t.
What was it going to take for me to become the best version of myself? How was I ever going to get out of my own way?
When we got home, there was a feeling of desperation for us all. Everyone knew that I was on the verge of death, but everyone needed to take a deep breath after what my mother had been through. We all sacrificed our time, our emotional fortitude and our livelihoods to take the trip to California.
No one said it out loud, but I always had the feeling that we all knew my mom was going to die, so coming to grips with the fact that she was still alive took us all some time to process.
But, we all knew what had to happen.
I needed to get help. I needed to get sober. By this time, I had been arrested multiple times and had many scares and overdoses. I was malnourished and underweight. I was isolating and if left to my own devices, I was inevitably going to end up in a hospital, a jail cell, or a morgue.
My father and my uncle were the first ones to take a stand. They invited me over to watch a soccer game. I sat down and awaited the words.
“Tim, we love you. We want to help you.”
“I know” I said … What do you think I should do?
And that's how I ended up in Florida.