40 - An Introduction

One of the eye-opening moments of my jail stay occurred when a young man was brought into the pod late one Thursday evening.  He was going through heroin withdrawal.  I had never been around someone addicted to drugs.  Oh, I’d seen my fair share of middle-aged women – wives of friends – who would be given prescriptions for anti-depressants by the town GP.  But a drug addict?  Never.

I’d always assumed drug addiction was a product of lack of willpower.  Drugs, I believed, were merely emotionally addictive.  Then, I was arrested.  I saw young men strung out from powder and crack cocaine, crystal meth and heroin.  I saw guys who’d willingly sniffed formaldehyde (undertaker chemicals are popular these days).  I realized I knew so little about so much.

The young man addicted to heroin stuck with me.  I frankly had never seen anyone as physically ill as he was as his body reacted to the loss of heroin in his blood stream.  He was, quite simply, a mess.  He would lose bowel control and vomit anytime he ate even the slightest amount.  He shivered nonstop and was soaked in sweat.  The jail placed him on a cot in the middle of the pod day room with a bucket.  No one would tolerate him in a cell.  There was no special soft diet available.  He at the same slop we did:  rotten potatoes, brown gravy, ground low grade chicken, white bread.  The food was difficult to digest and only served to worsen this young man’s illness.

I watched this kid suffer and I would go and sit with him and talk to him.  No one, I knew, deserved what he was going through.  That young man altered my views on drug addiction and a host of other issues.

I write a fair amount.  “40” is one of a handful of short stories I’ve written. It’s loosely based on my meeting that young heroin addict.  Like all my stores, the germ of the story comes from something I’ve experienced or been told, but its still fiction.  Like most fiction, there more truth in this story than any nonfiction I could write.