Somewhere in the Shadows of Light

Some mothers bake cookies and drive mini vans. My mother cooked heroin in a cold spoon over an open flame and drove a light blue, stolen 1968 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia with a white interior, a tattered ragtop and a teak wood steering wheel. She hung fuzzy dice form the rearview mirror and could often be heard slurring a phrase she coined, “Fuzzy dice are like balls, everyone's got a pair hanging from somewhere but are petrified to use them.”

My mother was brash, both in her beauty and in her temperament. Always at odds with the image reflecting back at her in the mirror, she chased her self esteem relentlessly through drugs and a slew of aimless, directionless men. Both the drugs and the men would provide these flashes of light within her darkness. Her vision so distorted, she’d crumble into each addiction until her heart broke or her veins collapsed. Her pain was limitless, the drugs made her feel alive and the men made her feel battered. Onward she searched and along I traveled.

I was born to a mistake in the early 1970s in Elizabeth, NJ. The product of a night when my mother at 15 years old was first experimenting with drugs. I was to be adopted, dished off to an unsuspecting family, only my mother was addicted. Early on we lived with my grandmother as everyone discussed the options of what to do with this child,“this gift” as my grandmother liked to say. My mother was hooked on a smile, a hope and a dream and so we ran.

We found ourselves in the Bowery of New York City as we followed the punk rock movement. At first everything was exactly as my mother had hoped it would be, she was happy and we were growing together. However everything changed in a blink, with the flick of a lighter, the sizzle of a spoon and the sound of a rubber gasket suctioning against a glass hypodermic needle. It started with a man, when the image in the mirror again became to much for her. The realization of not being able to run from our troubles shot through her veins and poisoned her thoughts.

Somehow years passed and the darkness came and went. Often at times settling over our lives like a thick wet blanket, unrelenting. New York City was sinking into a financial crisis and I’d be god damned if it wasn’t dragging my mother and I with it.

In the early 1980s when I began developing my first real memories, the streets outside our dwelling were a war zone. The crime rate was diminishing the city’s population while many of my mothers acquaintances were being buried along with the victims. We were in deep and we were drowning. I remember quite clearly the smell, sights and sounds of our decay. Opening the door one evening to my mothers bedroom I found her draped over someone staring at me blankly. The yellow, red and orange sheet protecting the mattress cover from the filth. Her eyes spoke to me in our secret language. “ Go back to bed and in the morning I’ll bake you cookies.”

My mother died in her sleep that night, wearing nothing but black panties and bra. The man gone…he split. Egoless and broken my mothers reflection quit and ran away.

Seven years old and I sit across the table from three strangers. Joseph, my adopted father, Rebecca, my adopted mother and Kyle, my adopted brother. Hoping my discomfort for the image in the mirror is not written all over my face and that we can make this relationship work, I really need this relationship to work. Only we don’t and the darkness continues to show me the only way home I know.

“Mr Deckler, its time for your three o’clock group,” I hear muttered by a large imposing African man. I nod. Walk to the door, down the hall and into a room filled with people covered in thick wet blankets. I speak out loud, perhaps to hear my own voice or perhaps not. The reason is unimportant, the message is clear. “My name is John and I am a drug addict and an alcoholic.” The words sting and don’t make sense until I speak again.“I must find hope and define my dreams. “It starts today one step at a time.”