In January & February 2021, Roots. Wounds. Words. partnered with The Rumpus’ Voices on Addiction section to publish 3 brilliant, gutting, and love-centered essays about addiction. Each essay was crafted by RWW alums and edited by Nicole Shawan Junior. Each essay was widely read and praised. Longreads even named Heather Stokes’ “Thief in the Night” one of the top 5 essays published that week, an honor well deserved.
THIEF IN THE NIGHT
By Heather Stokes
At twenty-nine, I found myself sitting in a therapist office, six months away from the end of my court-ordered parole. Six months after the end of a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence I served for larceny and embezzlement. This was my third visit with Kali, a blond-haired, blue-eyed recent graduate with rail-thin lips that she constantly slathered in Chapstick during our sessions. I sat across from her desk in an uncomfortable wooden chair, my legs spread slightly open, unable to cross due to the girth of my thighs. The sixty pounds that I’d shed in prison had already begun to creep back on, settling at my waist, legs, and arms, reminding me that my body was trauma’s home. The afternoon sun danced on her desk, diverting my attention from her latest inquisition.
Her pause snapped me back into the conversation. I disinterestedly responded, “I’m sorry, can you ask the question again?”
“What do you feel addiction has stolen from you?”
I knew that she was more than likely referring to my own addictions, but I did not want to talk about those. Instead, I went back in time, back to a time before I knew that substances and people were not meant to be abused. The many years my uncle, brother, and father spent in and out of prison, leaving my mother and I alone—years that robbed me of having a father, of having a stable male presence in our family. Years that morphed into the “I’ll just do it myself” attitude that haunts my relationships to this day. I thought about the shame I felt as I walked past the neighborhood bodega, eyes fixed to the ground, to avoid making eye contact with my brother who stood outside, shaking in the middle of three-day crack cocaine binge.
These were the silent losses. The things that are not talked about in the glamorization of addiction played out on your favorite television shows. Things left unspoken between family. Like opening the kitchen cabinet to find a little corner ripped off the roll of aluminum foil—my uncle used them to construct his aspirin bottle crack pipes. Cut-off straws that were useless to drink your Pepsi with made the perfect suction for inhaling poison; I would often find them discarded under the crab apple tree in front of our house. Some mornings, I would even find my uncle discarded there with them, his disheveled body wrapped around the tree, surrounded by rotten crab apples as if the poison had seeped into them, too.
Addiction steals your innocence.
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MEMORIES OF MY DADDY AND ME(TH)
BY ELARA ELIZABETH CÁCERES
I was five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, fifteen, when my dad lied to me. “Give me five dollars and I’ll double it, I promise,” he begged while pacing within the hallway’s dirty white walls—the same walls my sister and I scrubbed clean in adherence to our punishment for one minor offense or another each summer. As he picked at his face, spotted with purple manchas, his lanky six feet and bulging eyes pleaded in desperation. At all these ages, I was large-eyed and freckled, with bangs cut straight across my forehead. Long, thick hair framed my face—each year a different hue, reflecting a colorful rebellion that helped me cope with a drug-addicted father and abusive mother whose only outlet for anger when Dad’s tweaking emerged, as it often did, was to take it out on her daughters.
Dad’s addiction began when he was ten years old, when his macho, God-loving father forced tequila shots down his throat to initiate him into manhood. It was around this time that he started stealing cigarettes from his father and tíos, at first in macho imitation.
Later in life came the meth.
In 1994, my parents met through the receiving end of wired wall phones, though, some years before, they eyed each other from afar at the local rollerskating rink. By the time my mom walked the Canadian border into this country, my dad was moving from Chinatown to a suburb that edges East LA. My mom was a sixteen-year-old immigrant teenager from Bolivia with a two-year-old daughter, and befriended my dad’s sister when they met at the continuation school for pregnant girls in downtown LA. My dad was an eighteen-year-old, street-smart math whiz with braces who came from a Mexican immigrant home, where his mother made him her accomplice in retaliations against his father—a man who inflicted violence against them routinely. At the time my parents met, my dad attended a local college where he received a full scholarship thanks to his soccer skills.
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HEROIN/E
By Starr Davis
She used to shave her arms. I remembered this, the morning I got the call that she had died of a heroin overdose. Her arms, I thought. Strange, where the mind goes once you learn of someone’s death. It goes to flesh. Warmth. It returns to that person at their loveliest.
8 a.m. commuter traffic came from the 72nd Street subway. On 69th and Amsterdam, headed to the luxury condos where I worked, I crossed the street on a green light, crawled myself onto a bench. The deep breath I took smelled like a stuffy Baptist sanctuary. Suddenly, I was back in Ohio, arm-in-arm with Deja.
Flesh tastes like chocolate and salt. I wrote this on a church service program and passed it to my left. It was the first of June and my thighs stuck together under my skort. My flat ironed hair was greased in a ponytail that lazily sat on the top of my head. It was almost 80 degrees outside, and Deja’s mama still made her wear stockings and a knee-length dress. The church’s air conditioner was out again. All the windows were open. We had just spent over an hour during praise and worship blaming the heat on the devil and praising God anyway, hoping for a breeze. Pastor was an hour into his sermon, and it still had not come. Out of my corner eye, Deja smiled.
We were fourteen years old. Time did not slow for us, our bodies already matured into women. The mothers of the church steadily reminded us to not wear skirts above the knees or shirts that dipped below the collarbone. A big sign hung over the sanctuary that said, Come as You Are. One of the many lies the church sold, just to fill the seats.
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