On Pills and Needles Page 3

  Tonight my wife insisted that we storm the girl’s house, and within thirty minutes I was knocking on her front door. Her older brother, who answered suspiciously, claimed not to have seen Tommy. The two siblings, eighteen and twenty, apparently lived in this rented house by themselves, courtesy of a parent who was either disconnected or had given up hope. After scanning the place for hiding spots and finding no clues, we left.

  After receiving a new tip, we drove to the home of another of Tommy’s friends and spoke with the friend’s mother.

  “I haven’t seen him since last weekend, and Max is grounded. They’re all smoking way too much pot, and I’m worried they’re also experimenting with other drugs.”

  This was not a shock since our son had already tested positive for opiates once, and we had found two white pills, which we later identified online as OxyContin, stashed under his lava lamp. His friend began telephoning mutual friends while we were speaking with his mother, and before we left he gave us a tip that made our hearts sink.

  “I just spoke with a friend who says he thinks he is with our friend Connor in Baldwin Park and they are robo-tripping,” said Tommy’s friend, who seemed as excited to unearth this clue as an explorer discovering a new island. “He says he saw them, and they’re really messed up!”

  We learned that it was becoming increasingly popular for kids to chug an entire bottle of Robitussin cough syrup, activating enough of its active ingredient DXM to induce a hallucinogenic trip—that is, if the user’s heart didn’t stop beating first. Tommy’s friend suggested searching for our son in this planned community, which had been built on an old naval base in Orlando. More specifically, he added, we should check out the abandoned naval barracks there.

  Thinking overdose or worse, we sprang into crisis mode. Given that it was now after 10:00 p.m. and our exhausted young daughter was with us, we decided that she and my wife would return home and I’d continue to search. Ill-prepared for what lay ahead, I grabbed a flashlight and began the twenty-minute drive to Baldwin Park, enlisting the help of my friend Rich along the way. After picking him up and explaining the situation, we headed to the abandoned building.

  It was an imposing structure, rising seven stories high and longer than a football field, and completely engulfed in darkness with not even a streetlight near it. Situated in the middle of a completely overgrown, trash-strewn lot and surrounded by a chain link fence, it looked like it belonged more in a ’70s-era burnt-out South Bronx neighborhood than in the middle of this manicured new development.

  “What are we going to do if we find him?” Rich asked after I picked him up.

  “Bring him home,” I replied, not really confident this would be possible.

  “But what if he doesn’t want to come?” he asked, foreshadowing events that were to unfold in New Jersey less than a year later.

  “I don’t know.”

  By this point I’d already considered what might happen should Tommy refuse to come with us if found. I knew he was fast and could easily outrun either of us. But if I had the chance to get close enough, I was confident in my ability to restrain him until reinforcements arrived. After all, I outweighed him by one hundred pounds and, although out of shape, had retained much of my upper body strength from previous athletic pursuits through workouts and outdoor physical activities. The ballooning tire around my midsection would have made chase futile, but there was no way he could escape my grasp. Worst case, I’d hold him until police or medical personnel arrived with proper restraints. Nothing was going to stop me from getting him into a hospital for treatment, with the exception of leaving him an open path for escape.

  Once at the site, we stepped over a section of the chain link fence that was knocked down, one of a few entry points we would later find out was used by the numerous kids who frequented this place to use drugs or escape from their parents. As we got closer to the building, it became even more imposing, massive in size and covered in graffiti. We were almost immediately swept with a sense of evil, a very dark vibe I felt every time I was in close proximity to the building and a feeling so strong it resurfaced each time I drove past the monstrosity in later months.

  As we navigated broken bottles and shattered glass along a sidewalk leading up to the building—in our haste to reach the destination I was still wearing flip-flops—we were overcome by fear. It was pitch dark except for the weak beams from our small flashlights, and we could see many of the windows had been broken, most covered by plywood, with police “no trespassing” warning signs stapled to the wood. As we circled the building looking for an opening to get inside, we came across two empty Robitussin cough syrup bottles on the ground. They looked new and freshly discarded, which indicated our tip was likely accurate.

  Just around the corner we found an opening where a piece of the plywood had been kicked and broken off, creating an entryway into the sinister den. When we stepped inside it was even worse. The floors were strewn with broken glass, empty cans, insulation, and other debris, and more graffiti plastered the walls. We soon discovered that the place was a labyrinth of long hallways lined with rooms, supply closets, bathrooms, and stairwells, not to mention empty elevator shafts. Tommy and his friend could be anywhere, if they were here at all. So could anyone else. After calling out Tommy’s name a couple times with no response and taking stock of our weak flashlights, lack of defenses, and inappropriate footwear, we decided to retreat.

  Back on the street we called the police.

  The first officer who arrived was bored and disinterested in our plight.

  “How long has he been missing?” he asked.

  “Since yesterday.”

  “How old is he?” the officer asked, clearly annoyed by my first answer.

  “Sixteen,” I replied, adding, “He didn’t get off the bus after school and we haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. He may be on hard drugs that can kill him!”

  “Look, he’ll probably come home when he gets hungry or comes down,” the officer said, tucking his notepad into his pocket. “You can choose to file a missing person report, but since you don’t live in this city, you’ll have to do this where you live. Kids run away all the time these days, and usually they come back before long. Sorry I can’t help you; good luck.”

  As he turned to walk back to the driver side of his cruiser, I could feel my face flushing in anger.

  “You mean you won’t even help us search the building?” I asked.

  “Look buddy, that place is way too dangerous to search in the daytime, and certainly too dangerous to search at night. I wouldn’t suggest putting anyone at risk by going in there. For one thing, you never know who could be hiding inside. I’ve also heard the floors are crumbling and not structurally sound. You should not go in there, and I’m certainly not going to send anyone in there. Good luck finding your son.”

  With that, one of Orlando’s finest climbed into his car and drove away, leaving my friend and me standing on the edge of the overgrown lot, dumbfounded. The same pattern would repeat itself over the next seventy-two hours, as we tried several more times to receive assistance from the city’s police department.

  When you have a kid who disappears, the first thing you learn is that unless they have been gone for a long time, most police officers do not want to hear about it. With the many challenges today’s police officers face, including lack of basic respect from those they serve to protect, it is understandable they are not anxious to spend time chasing runaway kids. But this does nothing to change how disheartening this was that night. We were on our own.

  We combed Baldwin Park for the next few hours, asking the few people who were out if they’d seen the two boys, with one saying he had and repeating the friend’s line from earlier, “They looked really messed up.” Dejected and more worried than ever, I pulled into the driveway at 3:00 a.m. to give Mary the bad news.

  “What do you mean you can’t find him?” she demanded. “What did the police say?”

  As usual, Mary’s tone
was shrill and accusatory, as if I’d left stones unturned or absentmindedly forgotten to mark some of the boxes on whatever checklist resided in her mind. Only recently has she become aware of how quickly her tone can spark defensive or combative responses from any of us on the receiving end. Too exhausted to be irritated, I replied, “They were not helpful at all. We need to get some sleep. Then I’ll go back in the morning when it is light out.”

  She began sobbing, reverting to her habit of envisioning the very worst. While I fully recognized that his drug abuse might kill him, I wasn’t ready to go there yet. When any such dire thought would manage to slip past the curtain of my fierce focus on finding Tommy, I’d immediately stomp it back down. Like confrontation, which I usually try to avoid—likely a result of the loud verbal warfare that dominated the house I grew up in—I subconsciously knew that allowing such thoughts any space could disrupt my ability to complete the task at hand.

  “We may never see him again!” she moaned. “What did we do wrong?”

  Fighting back my own tears, I did my best to comfort her before she fell asleep.

  After a couple hours of restless sleep, I returned to the scene early the next morning, determined to fully search the vacant building. This time I was prepared, wearing steel-toe boots and carrying a high-powered flashlight in one hand, an aluminum baseball bat in the other, and a particularly nasty hunting knife in my pocket. In the early morning light I reentered the building, which remained mostly dark inside. Scared and alone but determined, I began searching the first floor room by room, swinging open doors to pitch-dark boiler rooms and quickly scanning the area with my flashlight beam, half-expecting someone to jump out at any second. I kept pivoting my head, certain that someone was sneaking up behind me. As I entered the black stairwell leading to the second floor, I had progressed from scared to terrified.

  The higher floors of the building were each split into two wings, separated by stairwells with an elevator at either end. With no windows, the stairwells, areas outside the elevators, small broom closets, and boiler rooms on both ends of every floor were pitch black. I systematically searched each of them but found no sign of my son. Stepping to one of the outer wings was a relief by comparison, with at least some light coming through the mostly broken windows. Presumably once the sleeping quarters, each wing was about the length of two bowling alleys; massive bathrooms were located at the ends. The huge, communal, windowless bathrooms were also cloaked in darkness, making the process of pulling back every shower curtain and opening every bathroom stall door tedious and scary. In one of the bathrooms a broken mirror had a disturbing message borrowed from the horror movie The Shining written in what appeared to be blood, but was more likely lipstick or red spray paint—“REDRUM” (murder spelled backward).

  Floor by floor my routine continued, and at any turn I half-expected to find my lifeless son on the floor. There were many signs of the drug use, drinking, and vandalism that took place here, but no indications that my son or anyone else was present this morning.

  By the time I reached the top floor, sweaty and tired from my two-hour search, my fear had abated, and I was more confidently moving through the building, especially the well-lit wings. Hope that my son was likely still alive gave me relief. The entire morning I’d moved through the building in relative silence, except for the eerie creaking of metal doors I opened to peer inside and the thump of them closing behind me. As I started up the final stairwell, this one leading to the roof, a sudden explosion of sound nearly caused me to fall down the stairs. A startled pigeon flew inches over my head and away from his interior perch. Breathing a sigh of relief, I continued to the roof and found no one.

  Never had the air felt so fresh and the sun so bright as when I left that decaying building and returned to my car. But I was discouraged. Perhaps Tommy wasn’t here after all and was somehow on his way to California, somewhere he talked frequently about wanting to travel to. We learned later that the Golden State was also where he told friends he planned to go.

  2

  Despair aboard the Oxy Express

  As I peered at Tommy’s face in his recent rowing team photo used to create the missing-person flyers I was distributing, I noticed that he no longer smiled when having his picture taken. A quick glance at family photos from the past year confirmed this; he was not angry but dispassionate, offering only a blank stare of indifference. Drug use had replaced any happiness with nothingness.

  On day three of our search, I began to believe that Tommy might already be far away from Orlando, although my instincts kept drawing me back to the hellish abandoned naval barracks like a magnet. Just a few weeks ago my son had been part of a crew rowing team that successfully broke and established a new indoor world record for continuous rowing on an Erg machine. It was set up in the home of one of his teammates, and the eight boys kept rowing in shifts around the clock, smoothly changing places so as to never let the machine stop turning, for ten consecutive days. The feat earned them a spot on the television news, with a remote feed on the night they broke the record, as well as subsequent national magazine and newspaper articles.

  Crew, a sport in which four- or eight-man boats are propelled by teammates rowing in precise unison, was not the first team activity Tommy had gravitated toward in his longing to be part of something, to belong. Trying to follow in his older brother’s footsteps and possibly to placate his father, he had tried a couple of seasons of baseball when younger. A lefty, he had a nice swing and seemed to enjoy it when coaches were lobbing in easy-to-hit strikes. His baseball career ended at age ten when he started facing kid pitchers and the prospect of getting hit by the ball.

  “Do you want to play baseball this season?” I asked him one autumn.

  “Do I have to hit, or can I just play the field?” he asked.

  “You have to hit too,” I said.

  “No thanks, I don’t really like baseball that much anyway,” he replied.

  Boy Scouts and being outdoors were the things he liked best, and he continued to progress all the way to Life Scout, just a step away from Eagle, and frequently camped with his troop. He even had his Eagle project plan approved two weeks before deciding to run away. Since several of his troop members also played soccer, he took an interest in the sport and began playing around the time he abandoned baseball. He really loved playing, and his speed helped make up for what he lacked in fundamental soccer skills. But most of all he simply loved the acceptance of being part of the team, and whenever he had a chance to get into a game, his teammates would loudly cheer for him to score.

  At the same time Tommy was wrestling with the typical teen struggle of forging an identity and finding a group to belong to, Florida’s opiate epidemic was growing like wildfire, with the insidious pill-mill industry stoking the flames. With new pain clinics proliferating like rats, deaths by overdose in the state spiked by 61 percent between 2003 and 2009. As the Sheriff of Broward County told a reporter, “We have more pain clinics than McDonald’s.”1 Greedy, unethical doctors were passing out prescriptions like free water bottles at a disaster site, with fat, happy pharmaceutical companies gladly filling the pipeline. During this period the supply lines spread north into states such as Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia, with Interstate 75 now nicknamed the “Oxy Express.” Similar to how cocaine had penetrated all of America once Colombia’s drug lords established a base in Miami and South Florida, the Oxy Express brought death and despair to Appalachia in the form of what was dubbed hillbilly heroin.

  By the time the father of the opiate epidemic, Purdue Pharma, created a gel-form “tamper proof” version of their medicine in 2013, more than seventy tons per year of the addictive pills were being dispensed by US pharmacies. In 2007, Purdue had finally admitted it was guilty of deceptive marketing during legal battles that reached the Supreme Court. The same OxyContin marketed for its first decade as a nonaddictive alternative to other pain meds was indeed highly addictive when crushed
and used recreationally, the company acknowledged. The $600 million fine the huge drugmaker was ordered to pay to settle claims against it was a relatively small penalty compared to the billions in profits it has raked in over many years,2 wealth that landed Purdue’s owners in the top twenty of Forbes’s 2015 list of America’s Richest Families.3 When considered against the tens of thousands of lives lost and ruined, the penance now seems particularly insufficient.

  We knew nothing about this while consumed with our continuing desperate attempts to find and rescue our missing son. Sitting in my SUV on watch outside the looming building that I still sensed would be central to any chance to save Tommy, I reflected on how we could possibly have gotten to this point.

  Three years earlier, we had decided to enroll Tommy in a small, private Christian school for eighth grade, concerned with his choice of friends at the public middle school. It seemed like a great fit. With his friendly and gentle personality, he rarely ran afoul of the old-school headmistress, whose dress and demeanor resembled Dana Carvey’s SNL character “church lady.” A strict disciplinarian, she patrolled the school halls and was known to pull out a ruler and dole out demerits for things like a boy’s hair barely touching his collar or a girl’s skirt being one-eighth of an inch too short.

  At the school, Tommy got involved in the soccer program, which he loved. As in his earlier club experience, he became the team’s underdog—well liked by teammates, although not a particularly hard worker, and the one everyone screamed for to score when he had the chance to get on the field during a lopsided game. Unfortunately, soccer was one of the only sports the tiny school was competitive at, and at the JV level he was one of only two kids cut. This seemed to crush what little self-esteem he had left. He would have been happy to be a team manager on that team, handing out towels or water during breaks, anything to feel part of the group. Unfortunately, the type of self-absorbed, overcompetitive men that dominate most youth sports decided he lacked the talent and work ethic to be worthy of their coaching.