Hello fellow members of the grand community we all take part, I am Jack Orlove. I'm 25 years old. I'm a writer, a painter, and I dabble in videography.
This entire post may seem derailed from what the title suggests as you read on, because this is 100% written off the cuff, intended as a kind of diary. Maybe to put some of my own thoughts into perspective.
When I was a teenager, I was an extremely lonely person. I was home schooled, and I lived in a house raised by two amazing parents. My father, however, was a drug addict. I feel kind of bad admitting this, because he had told me never to say anything about his personal life to anyone - that was 5 years ago.
He's been dead for the past year and a half now.
As a writer, I feel an impulsive need to put my thoughts and feelings into words, and potentially express it to hundreds, or thousands of people that may view my work.
The guilt I am experiencing as I write about how my father was a drug addict is hard to swallow. However, some part of me feels like I must say it due to the circumstances as of late.
Let me start off by saying that I had an amazing father. I had a very deep relationship with him. You see, for most of my childhood I struggled with anxiety (and only anxiety thankfully), and the one person who always came to rescue me as I hyperventilated in what felt like an inescapable vacuum chamber somewhere in a hidden 9th dimension... Was my dad. He always said the right things. His cold, hard logical approach in helping me rationalise my thoughts and feelings always ended up grounding me, and being the funny guy he was, he would throw in a few jokes and make me crack a smile. He would pick me up into his huge chest and hug me, too. He always felt like my guardian.
My dad and I did everything together. We were best friends. He was my teacher, introducing me to occult literature, scholars and intellects on many subject matters.. He would always challenge my mind with riddles, puzzles and thought experiments - though as a kid these had always frustrated me because I could never wrap my head around the material. It always made me feel dumb, but he assured me that the point wasn't to make me feel smart, or dumb - rather they were created as exercises to 'train your brain' in a way. Though, going through these old mensa books he bought me in my yonder years, I still feel dumb.
I am getting a little teary eye'd as I type these parts out because these are the memories I bear close to my beating heart. On top of that, I desperately miss my dad.
He was a big, solid, muscular guy. He was top-heavy. Had tattoos and a rocked a wicked goatee. To say he was intimidating was an understatement. However, despite some of the bad things of his character which I've yet to get into, he was also one of the most gentle human beings you'd ever meet. He had hundreds of friends, and he was the kind of guy who would take you into his own home until you got better. The kind of guy who would stop as he was driving if he saw someone in distress so he could help them. The kind of man who was open about his feelings and inversely would listen to someone and comfort them as they poured their guts out. He never judged, never ridiculed. If you find any relevance in astrological symbolism, he was a Virgo and one trait of a Virgo is to heal. Heal he did, in fact, he loved healing people. As a Virgo too, if you will, I am much the same - I love healing other people. I can't tell you how many people I've just listened to, or physically bandaged and kept them together. That's not to brag, I just have a legitimate passion for helping others.
However, this is where the good stops. My father struggled with depression, every day of his life. He had anger issues. He would frequently get into heated fights with my mother and scream at her. Like a guttural, bloody scream - it was terrifying. I think that kind of traumatised both my mother and I. He would sometimes deride her with very nasty words... Cunt, and bitch to name the two most hurtful I can recall. Going back to his depression, he has jumped through the hoops in terms of treatment up until his dog days.
I would like to stress however, he never put me down or physically harmed my mother or myself. Never.
As much as he was a gentle soul (and this may seem misleading now if you've read this far, as I try to only look at the good things) he also had another side... He had this duality of character. On one side was indeed, the caring, gentle and passionate man, the one we all fell in love with. On the other, he was a loud, terrifying monster intoxicated by rage. It wasn't unlike him to flip out at people in a store. On the road. Threaten violence. Smash in walls.
My personal guardian, also a Jekyll and Hyde-like monster. You may sense the internal turmoil that'd stirred inside me from a young age.
But, to some of his credit, he was mentally ill. He had been on Prozac, zoloft, effexor. Cymbalta. These have all been adjusted, and/or combined with stimulants, benzodiazepines, and anti-psychotics at varying doses.
He had been initially diagnosed with Dysthymia at a very young age, and sbusequently began medication, with Zoloft, I believe, initially. Though I could be wrong. This illness would prove to be treatment resistant as each drug either stopped working, or had bad side-effects.
However, despite all this, all of his struggling, he still was this amazing man when he wasn’t overcome by his illness.
That is until one fateful year, he met a doctor. Let’s call him Dr. Nose, in regard of his propensity for cocaine and to make a nod at the fact that he was a practicing GP, or doctor.
My father had met Mr. Nose through a mutual friend. At the time my father was a guitar teacher at a somewhat prestigious academy, and I forgot to note this, but my father was a career musician. He played guitar mainly, and he was a god damn virtuoso at it in my eyes, or ears, rather. His biggest influence was Yngwie Malmsteen, and I swear he could play just like him. The same beautiful tone and everything.
I digress. Mr. Nose offers a deal to my father, much like how the devil goes about his dealings with stupes. He says he’ll pay my father more money, and he can work from home doing OHIP charting and billing.
If you don’t know what that is, in Ontario, Canada we use ‘OHIP’ (signifying The Ontario Health Insurance Plan) which is essentially universal insurance coverage. If you go to the doctor you may notice they often wield a clipboard and pen, writing things down as they occasionally glance over it to seem like they’re listening to you as you attempt to describe some vague condition you’re experiencing. For us in Ontario, the document on that clipboard is a chart which is basically a form the doctor is filling out on your behalf to document your problem. This chart can also be considered a bill, which is entered into an electronic system and sent to the government (where specifically I don’t know), who in return covers the patient by paying the facility you visited. This is probably a very poor explanation, but this is to the best of my knowledge.
So, my father did OHIP billing from home. He’d get sent a big stack of charts and he’d have to enter all the relevant information into this computer program (if you ever used tax software it’s kind of like that). Often times, my mom and I had to do it because my dad began experiencing mental health complications.
His depression became worse. And I was too young to realize this at the time, but my father began acting equivocally unusual, something that is now explicitly apparent of substance abuse. He became very distant from my mom and I. Currently at that time in my life, being home schooled, I was on my computer almost all day, coping with my own growing sense of alienation and depression through a virtual medium. Growing up with anxiety as a wee lad, I started growing into a very quiet and depressed person. I wanted to be left alone most days, and I rarely talked. I stayed up all night, often ‘til 6 a.m.
One day I walked into my dad’s room to hang out with him, and I immediately heard a loud, prolonged ‘sniff’ – or as I’d come to find out, a rip. He looked frightened, seeing me. The first thing he said was “Don’t tell your mother.” And as a man with some integrity even during these kinds of awkward circumstances, he admitted to me that he was doing cocaine. Though, he downplayed just how bad his addiction was. As I’d come to find out, the Doctor would buy 8-balls or more of cocaine, and my dad would safe-guard it for him – and he let my dad use however much he desired. I mean to be fair, this is a steal of a deal for a drug user.
From then on, we all knew but did nothing about it. I didn’t know what I could do, at least. He began romanticising substance abuse, corroborating to celebrity notoriety in the matter to his own abuse of drugs, as if it were simply an act of self-aggrandisement.
The second he got into drugs, was the day I began losing the father I loved.
Things became much, much worse. In the following years, he was prescribed Oxycontin by Dr. Nose for his knee which had begun to deteriorate. It seemed relatively standard for the time due to the massive commercialization of this painkiller in North America. He let me try one, and it was like I was having my first kiss as it kicked in. It felt so amazing. My normally somber, untalkative mood was lifted. Everything bad I felt, was gone – I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to create. Off the heel of this experience, my own substance abuse problems began rolling. I became intoxicated with the idea of being high. I fetishized it in a short story called “Motel” (unpublished), where a man takes a woman to a hotel to have bizarre, kinky sex – and firstly he’d set up a line of Oxy’s from her navel to her breast, which he then proceeded to put into his mouth as he’d kissed her from down to up.
My dad began letting me try weed, which I started to use often though marijuana oddly became more of an aphrodisiac for me, making me extremely horny. After a few bad trips however, I stopped. Then sadly, my first real problem started was when I found my dad’s huge bottle of Valium, each tab being 10 mgs. It’s worth noting here, when I did attend high school before dropping out, I had terrible panic attacks, and my dad would give me some benzos for a rainy day so to speak, so I always had this proclivity for them. They put me into this safe space, where I felt calm and in control… However, from my dad’s stash, I took handfuls, not even thinking about whether he may notice. You don’t think when you’re in this state of mind, you just do. It comes as naturally as being hungry, and what do you do when you’re hungry? You eat something. You may unwittingly, or knowingly (if you’re a bastard) eat something someone was saving, but usually it’s not the end of the world. But in my case, benzos turned into a ritual abuse. One I am thankfully more in control of today. Then I got into left over T3s and Percocet in the cabinet. I began washing T1’s (legal over the counter in Canada, they contain a little bit of codeine), which is a process where you remove the acetaminophen and try to isolate all the codeine in a mixture.
I digress, again, I’m sorry.
Dr. Nose would also prescribe scheduled narcotics to my father, and then pick them up at our house to use himself. Xanax, Adderall, Oxycontin, you name it.
So, a year and a half goes by and my father is now a full-blown Oxycontin addict, abusing a few 80’s (I believe, I’m sorry I’m not sure of the exact amount he’d been taking) in a day – he had been cracking them and swallowing, crushing and snorting, etc., It came to a point it stopped getting him high and he was using it simply to stave off the withdrawal. He came clean one night, and he did the impossible.
He stopped. Cold turkey. I didn’t see it, because I was on my computer for most of it, but nobody confirmed it to me that it was withdrawal. My mom told me he had the flu. He was sweating, shaking, puking and so on for nearly 2 days. Later on, he would come out and admit what was really going on, and he told me had experienced some of the most horrific dreams in his entire life. One really stuck out to me, and I really want to include it in a story one day.
He said he was in the “land of the dead”, with all these gorgeous people holding onto their faces, for they were unattached and kept falling off. He then recalls walking down a hallway made of straw, soaked in blood – and a girl was begging him to stay. He said of this dream how he believed it to be an omen that he needed to clean himself up or he’d die… It breaks my heart remembering this, because ultimately, he did end up cleaning up his act. But…. It’s more complicated than that.
Shortly after overcoming his withdrawal, he never touched another painkiller again. However, he continued to use things like Adderall and cocaine.
Throughout all of this, my dad’s legs continued to deteriorate. It got to a point he couldn’t walk anymore. He was 300 or more pounds. He developed this horrific type of sleep apnea that was loud and made him sleep on and off all day. His physical body began breaking down.
So, Dr. Nose is going through a divorce through all of this, and suddenly he’d passed away in his sleep from a heart attack induced by cocaine, sleeping pills, benzos and alcohol.
My dad is grief-stricken. Because despite all of this, the Doctor was one of his best friends. I could go into mountains of detail concerning their friendship, but I am trying to keep this very long expose curt.
My dad realizes now, that he must stop using cocaine because number one, the Doctor isn’t funding it anymore, and number two, he doesn’t want to plummet into the land of undeath, a fate which had befallen Dr. Nose.
However, the biggest repercussion of all this is that my dad was now out of a job. My dad was physically unable to move very well. He had to sleep in the living room so to not wake up my mom. He was bound to the living room floor, believe it or not, because he wouldn’t fit on the couch. And so he was, house-bound, ensnared by this cycle of intermittent sleeping due to apnea. You’d think the guy was narcoleptic, and he may very well have been. Therefore, our relationship began stagnating, because I’d try to talk to him, but he’d fall asleep mid conversation.
His behavior became even more erratic, and with each passing day, he became more, and more delusional. He became a drain on my Mom’s earnings. Sure, he kicked his drug use, but not the actual addiction, the disease, plaguing his mind. You can still be an addict, and not use any drugs. You need counselings, therapy, and still, it's something that haunts you for the rest of your life. Often times this includes many relapses.
We tried to get him help, we really, honestly tried. But he couldn’t do it.
He was eventually rushed to the hospital after falling unconscious. His sleep apnea had done him in. He wasn’t receiving enough oxygen in his brain for years and was causing this neural-break down.
They tried to give him enough oxygen. But his heart began failing. My heart began breaking.
I can’t write anymore.
Thank you if you read this far. Please let me know if you’d like to know more about me and my father if this interested you, I’ll get myself in a better mind-set and write out another post.
I love you dad, despite this entire mess.
