Carol Whelan, a nurse, sits on her couch in her cramped, middle-class Cape home in Lindenhurst, occupied by a laughing parrot, two dogs and a monkey. She shakes her head sadly. “The truth is,” she says, “I’m getting tired of going to so many funerals of young people.”
The young people she is talking about are her son Edward’s friends. They were around his age, 24, when they died, and the death count is now about 10. The most recent was the worst—Thomas, Edward’s best friend.
advertisement
And what are they dying from? Heroin.
Edward is an imposing young man, 6-foot-2-inches tall, 195 pounds, a good-looking Penn Jillette with long hair in a partial ponytail and one of those great giant-dimpled smiles that lights up the room. That’s not the only thing that’s lit up in Edward’s basement studio on this unusually hot June evening, where several of his friends are gathering. There’s also Ricky and Lorraine, a 27-year-old married couple from Bellmore. They are junkies and they have just gotten high.
Edward, too, has been on heroin. That is, until this past April, a month after Thomas ODed.
“I just stopped,” he says. “In honor of [Thomas].”
Sitting amongst the heavy metal posters, drum sets, electric keyboards and assorted other instruments where Edward’s heavy metal band InRed practices, are Jill, 25, and Ryan, 25—two of Edward’s friends who also were heroin users, but who have since gone to rehab and are currently sober. Jill and Ryan have been clean since January of this year, and Ryan has been out of rehab since early May. Ryan came close to using heroin a week and a half ago, but a friend stopped him, and Ryan is very thankful his friend did that.
“It’s a day-to-day struggle,” admits Ryan, who looks like the clean-cut jock-next-door.
While Ryan and Jill discuss their successes, Ricky, with an almost clichéd hangdog look, is nodding out near his wife, who has such a sad aura about her it is palpable. When showing the needle marks on her black-and-blue arms, the scars of recent cuttings are also obvious. Ricky looks helpless as she shows her bruised arms—even though he does help shoot his wife’s battered veins with heroin.
Tonight Ricky—who seems like he might once have been a sharp, interesting young man—is, shortly after shooting heroin, zombielike. Edward, Jill and Ryan seem absolutely radiant, compared to him. He is their past.
“I can end any time I want,” says Ricky, obviously not believing his own empty words. Ricky, Edward says, is unusual. “He can stop for a day and be OK. That’s very hard to do,” Edward says, almost in awe of his slumped-over, droopy-eyed, sallow friend. OK is a relative term here.
Jill and Ryan, who are not too far past that life themselves, agree. Jill, for example, was shooting up heroin several times a day. And that was just to bring her down from the crack cocaine she was smoking.
“I had a 95 average in high school,” she says, wistfully describing her past. “I had a lot of dreams, but now I just make f**king $7.50 an hour in Waldbaum’s.” Unlike the others in this group, Jill started drugs late, at age 18. Coke was her drug of choice, and she had been an addict for close to seven years, first taking ecstasy, then snorting coke and then smoking crack and finally shooting heroin to come down from the coke and crack. She started late, but she made up for it big time.
She was shooting up all day, but no longer getting high, so she needed more and more. For a while she worked three jobs and says she kept up her appearance, but that all came to an abrupt end. She lost about 30 pounds (as did Ryan when he was using) and fell to 80 pounds. She now weighs a healthy 110 pounds and looks fit. She also collapsed a vein and now can’t get blood taken from the arm.
The wake-up call? There were several. ODing was a biggie. “I almost died,” she says. “My heart stopped.” At this point her skin was yellow, she had black eyes and her back teeth fell out. She also couldn’t breathe. “The doctor told me I had such a large hole in my nose [from snorting drugs] that it would kill me,” she recalls.
So she stopped snorting. And she started injecting.
Jill, who never smoked pot, says she was oblivious to the degeneration of her circle of junkie friends. “They had no teeth. They were dirty like bums,” she says in retrospect.
Remember, while these users are now in their 20s, they all started using drugs as teens, some as young as preteens.
It was rampant in school, they all say. “You can count the people who aren’t on heroin,” says Edward, “as opposed to the ones who are.” And Lindenhurst, they all say, is “the heroin capital of Long Island.” That is, until Bellmore and Massapequa and Copaigue and Levittown and countless other towns come up.
“It’s wherever you go, and the kids are getting younger and younger,” says Edward, who attended Lindenhurst High School (partly at the Alternative Learning Center [ALC]). “We’d smoke weed in the classroom. In ninth grade, kids would have coke and heroin on the table in the classroom.
“A lot of kids from the high school and ALC would get sent away for a year or so, their drug problem would be so bad,” Edward says. His best friend Thomas was one of those kids.
Why heroin?
“It’s a social drug, and everyone was doing it,” says Edward, who, like many of his friends, first began experimenting with drugs at age 11.
He started heroin when he was 14. His entire crowd was doing it. (There are some, who, 10 years later, are still on heroin.) It was cheap and very easy to get. Their stories are similar—they started by sniffing it and eventually turned to shooting it.
“It makes you not care what anyone says. It makes you an asshole,” he says. “But I liked the feeling. It was amazing.”
There is no stigma, nor a badge of honor. It’s just what everybody does. No big deal.
“It was cheaper than marijuana, coke, pills and alcohol, and one $10 bag would do the trick,” says Jill. The coke high is only 20 minutes. Heroin would last longer, until the tolerance would build.
And where are the parents in all this? Jill says her parents “thought something was up. It was obvious, I wasn’t holding down a job, I wasn’t going to school.
“When my mom would go to work, I would shoot up and it would last two to three hours and then I’d have to get high again. I had to get high two or three times a day.
“I’m getting sick just talking about it,” she says.
“Toward the end, I felt like I was tripping out. I was having anxiety attacks. I was hot, cold, throwing up, very emotional. I kept trying to leave signs, leaving needles around, stuff like that.”
Jill’s mother, who had been addicted to cocaine herself, finally said, “That’s it. I know something’s up. I want to take you to a funeral home. I want you to see your funeral. I don’t want to find you dead.” Jill’s uncle ODed and her brother is a recovering addict.
Jill: “It was disgusting. You felt dirty no matter what you’d do. You lied to everyone. Drugs ruined my life.”
So she got clean. “I took a long hard look,” she says, starting to cry. But it’s not easy.
She is now in a drug and alcohol program three to four days a week.
“Sometimes when I get frustrated and think about my shitty job, I ask myself, ‘What am I clean for?’ I know it takes a year to get really clean. But I smile again now. My family is trusting me again, and my friends are trusting me again.”
At this point, Edward’s cell phone rings, and he tells Jill that it’s a friend of hers. Jill gets in an animated discussion with her friend, who informs her that Jill’s mother is frantically searching for her, angrily saying things like, “I know she’s up to no good. I know what she’s doing. I know she’s sneaking around.”
“Fuck that,” Jill says, “I told her where I was going,” and with that she calls her mother and angrily reminds her that she is being interviewed for a newspaper story.
“I have no car. No phone. I live in a cubicle with no door, no privacy,” she says. “They are treating me like I am 16.
“There are so many things I could have done with my life,” Jill says.
Edward’s situation is a little different. His parents are more trusting. They were very supportive when he came to them last January and told them that he was a junkie.
“I suspected something,” says his mother, who is a methadone nurse.
“It’s better when you have their support,” says Edward, the soft-spoken rocker.
Part of why so many young people are junkies is the ease with which they can obtain the heroin, says Edward. “We’d go to [the dealer’s] house and there would be cars lined up—sometimes 10 cars on each block. We had to wait hours almost every day.” Ryan laughs at the memory. What they don’t address is the danger inherent in these deals. These dealers, who sometimes have their much younger siblings deliver the goods, are dead serious, and they have the firearms to prove it.
But these dangers are of no significance to a junkie, when caught up in heroin’s web. “Everyone seems to be doing it,” says Edward. “In high school it seemed like 80 percent of the kids were doing it.”
“And then there’s the environment,” Ryan adds. “Every commercial says, ‘Take this pill.’ Society is feeding you with drugs and saying, ‘This will solve this problem.’”
What’s the effect of school programs like DARE? These heroin users say, for them, the programs did more harm than good.
“They lied to us about marijuana, so we didn’t believe them about heroin,” says Edward.
And then there’s the cheap cost. “I couldn’t afford weed and alcohol,” says Edward. “Heroin was a snap: $10 a bag.”
But that $10 has a greater cost.
Married to the drug
Ricky and Lorraine have been married for three years. Ricky has been sniffing heroin for about six months, and has been shooting up for the past six weeks. “You need more when you’re sniffing it and it’s more expensive,” he explains.
Ricky’s reason for using heroin is somewhat startling. “I install carpets,” he says, “and I am in pain a lot. Tylenol will do nothing.”
That’s the problem. Heroin is no big deal.
“It takes away the pain,” Ricky says. “It takes away the physical muscle pain and the mental anguish. You’re just not aware of anything. I want to stop doing it. I am trying to get off it now. I know it’s bad. The addiction is just uncontrollable.”
Jill shakes her head, and responds, “When you’re on it you always make plans to quit. It’s not that easy.”
Lorraine, slouched over as she speaks, wears a pretty brown ribbon in her hair, making her seem girlish and innocent. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. She’s been on opiates for four years, and was hooked on morphine. She has been doing drugs since she was 13.
“Heroin addicts don’t last very long…a year,” says Lorraine, who has been doing heroin for the past seven months. She’s been shooting up for the past six weeks.
“I can’t imagine a good life,” she says, head down, about her future.
What about life with each other now? “[Ricky] seems a little more zombielike, secretive, when he uses [heroin],” she explains. “I don’t believe a word he says. He does six bags, two needles, sometimes before he even really wakes up.”
Besides mistrust, there is no intimacy amongst junkies. Ricky, who started drugs at 14, says, “We don’t think about sex. It’s not an option.”
“We know it’s bad,” says his wife Lorraine. “We just encourage each other. We say, ‘This is ridiculous, we have to stop.’ Then the other one says, ‘You want to get high?’ We’re never in agreement.”
“I don’t care if I do it by myself. I don’t really care. I’ll do it in a parking lot, on the side of the road,” Ricky says.
“Are you afraid of being arrested?” he’s asked. He looks back with a blank stare.
“Maybe that would be good,” someone adds.
“Our families are really concerned,” Lorraine says dead-eyed, with no emotion.
Quittin’ Time
How do you get the strength to quit?
“You have to be tired of the life, because you’ll never get tired of the feeling,” says Edward.
Ryan, who’s been friends with Edward since kindergarten, has been on drugs since his early teens. He started off with pain killers, Vicodin, OxyContin, and then moved to heroin a year ago, “because it was cheaper,” he says. “You’d get higher and it was a cleaner high.” He entered rehab in January of this year and got out on May 2.
All five say they stole from parents and friends to support their habit. Some worked.
“Our money situation is hard,” complains Lorraine, in the same tone she would use to say she was wearing a ribbon in her hair. Of course it’s hard; there are two junkies who need to satisfy their addictions.
“I remember what that is like,” says Ryan. “I would have rather taken $80 and spent it on drugs than eat three meals. I always said, ‘I don’t have a problem.’ Just like Ricky is doing now. I remember coming here [Edward’s house], puking. I didn’t give a shit.”
Ryan returns to the recent incident, when he almost used again. “After all the effort I put into it, it would hurt my family,” he says. “They were so proud of me. One of the best feelings was finishing the program.”
Jill looks at Ricky and tells him he’s beginning to look like a junkie. “What does a junkie look like?” he asks. “Your skin is yellowish,” she responds. “It’s the way you carry yourself. Your facial structure. It changes from weight loss. You look like one,” she reiterates.
“Have you noticed the changes in him?” Lorraine is asked.
“I guess,” Lorraine says.
Jill shakes her head. She’s been there.
Edward knows there’s no talking sense to the two. They need something to scare them, or to inspire them.
An inspiration like Thomas.
Thomas died from a heroin overdose on March 5, 2008. Edward stopped shooting heroin a month later.
“He promised me he would never die,” says Edward about the friend he had known since they were both 8. “He e-mailed me the day before he died, saying that.”
Two weeks after the gathering in Edward’s basement, Jill was in a local Applebee’s, where she noticed the clientele staring at a particular table where a couple was sitting “facedown in their food.” It was Ricky and Lorraine.
At presstime, Edward notified us that he had just learned that two more friends died of ODs. He called back soon after to also inform us that Ricky and Lorraine had been arrested for possession. They scored some heroin and on the way home, Lorraine suggested they shoot up in an abandonded parking lot in Bellmore, close to where they live. Ricky suggested they go home and do it. Lorraine won out, and they quickly were discovered by a cop on patrol. Lorraine is out on $2,500 bail but Ricky remains in jail. Ricky says that this is a good thing, and he hopes it will help him clean up.
Some of the names used in this story have been changed.
