Twenty-two random truths for Tim, one for each year

Pennie Bisbee Walters

In 2015, anthropologist Elisa Guerra-Doce claims humans have used mood-altering substances since the Stone Age and by 6,000BC, cultivated opium poppies, heroin’s oldest ancestor.
When Tim was two, he squinked his nose up for every picture I took. “Squink” was my term—the exaggerated wrinkling of his tiny nose that became his trademark.
According to drugabuse.com, 85% of people treated for addiction relapse within one year. These numbers are alarmingly high but fail to surprise me. I’ve seen drug’s iron pull, its furtive hijacking. So masterfully done that I wonder what the polar opposite could be, if its power just went the other way. Such power could recast the world. Turn a pinhole view panoramic. Bestow instead of steal.
When Tim was six, we watched “Fly Away Home.” When the young girl leads a flock of lost geese back home, he collapsed into the armrest, sobbing. But the birds found their way, I told him. Was such sensitivity a clue?
Per another website, 90% of heroin addicts relapse. The drug destroys the brain’s white matter—the part that makes decisions. With less white matter, resisting is harder, so you use again, destroy more white matter, use heroin again, and so on and so on and so on. A clever drug, it ensures its own viability.
Tim was always moving, rushing into his daddy’s legs, then into air on a skateboard. Mastering the kickflip, ollie, drop in. Despite falls and scrapes. Over and over, the board beneath his feet, wind across his bare legs. His need to move like breathing.
Using doesn’t make addicts happy. Their high is momentary, fleeting. Then there’s only guilt and shame, the pain of withdrawal. But the desire begins again. Beyond reason or choice, lodged and insatiable.
His body was built for basketball, tall and thin, long arms built for shooting. Tim could have been a star on the court. A phys-ed teacher who inspired. A loving vet tech. So many possibilities.
In 1853, Alexander Wood invents the hypodermic needle—a safe and sanitary way to get medicines into the bloodstream. Its basic design remains unchanged.
Tim chose his skateboards by their deck designs. Weeks later, tricks on rails and curbs left their mark. No longer the careful swirls of a brand logo or bright brushed colors of a city skyline, the art became streaked with black, became beauty scratched out.
In 1874, C. R. Wright boils morphine and acetic anhydride, forming heroin. Though side effects like anxiety, nausea, and insomnia end his research, the Bayer pharmaceutical company declares the drug an effective treatment for common respiratory illnesses and starts to manufacture it in 1895. Sold over the counter and distributed in free samples through the mail, it’s named for its heroic properties and touted as a miracle drug, but by 1924, approximately 5.7% of Americans are addicted to it. This prompts Congress to ban the drug in the U.S.
Tim quickly wore things out. Jeans laced with holes. Skateboards broken in half. Fingernails bitten down to the nub. Spots of his bedroom walls reduced to dust and clumps of plaster. And in the end, a drug’s welcome.
A fan of conspiracy theories, Tim sent me a link to a documentary claiming that 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government. I didn’t believe that, but liked what it said about him, that he fought to explain the inscrutable.
In 2013, 11,153 Americans die of an overdose caused by a combination of heroin and a non-methadone synthetic such as fentanyl. My Tim is one of them.
A teenager I’ll call J. is named in a Facebook posting to Tim’s wall the day after his death. “You killed him J. the law will come for you soon,” Tim’s girlfriend writes.
J. brushes it off with, “What the fuck are you talking about.” I sense fear in his words. Maybe I wish it there.
Unbeknownst to the addict, street heroin is often mixed with baking soda, sugar, powdered milk, starch, crushed over-the-counter painkillers, talcum powder, laundry detergent, caffeine, even rat poison. Such fillers mask the signs of overdose or fail to dissolve completely, leading to artery blockages, then heart attacks and infections, brain blockages, liver damage. Dealers add these fillers to have more product to sell, more profits.
The day that Tim dies, J. goes about his day as any drug dealer does. Waking up. Eating. Slipping his deadly wares into the world. His customer’s fate unnoticed or reduced to a mere ledger item, just another dirty bill in his gum-banded wad.
In 2018, President Trump suggests sentencing drug dealers to death, though it’s already possible under current law. Possible or not, killing J. won’t bring back my Tim.
The policeman’s words Your son has passed on, wash over me, their flat unfeeling tone deflating me like a popped tire. In that moment, I lose the strength to pursue J., to hunt him down like the animal he is.
Because it costs little, dealers often add fentanyl to heroin. Fentanyl is so lethal that a mere 2 MG—the weight of a small mosquito—can be deadly. A cop once overdosed merely by touching it.
The coroner says Tim had both heroin and fentanyl in his body. His voice is tired and low when he adds Tim’s is his sixth overdose death in just four weeks. He’s a dad himself, he says, four kids, and I hear true empathy in someone not paid to hold it.
I wear Tim’s old work apron when I bake, its plain black straps pulled tight against my waist. When I separate the eggs, their yolks silky and soft against the palm of my hand, I think of bathing newborn Tim, of my palm stroking the back of his wispy-haired head, of the fleeting gift of keeping his head above water.

Pennie Bisbee Walters has been a reader all of her life and a writer for most of it, since her third-grade teacher asked her to write a new ending to Charlotte’s Web. Since then, she’s worked to hone the craft, writing and studying poetry and creative nonfiction as part of the Madwomen in the Attic writing community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Carlow University in December 2018, and her writing has appeared in Full Grown People, Hole in the Head Review, Silver Birch Press, and Voices in the Attic. She is wo