The Kübler-Ross Scale has five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. There was no doubt Debbie Dumas was at #2 when I reached out asked about the death of her son. I found out on a Thursday and agonized how to phrase the question without ripping into a wound we both had. It took me until Sunday.
I hoped it was COVID. I prayed it was COVID. I knew it wasn’t. And boy, did she let me know it.
“He got a hold of some bad ketamine,” she wrote, before venting on the money spent on Johnny’s rehab. I didn’t judge; she was so angry at Johnny’s death that she was angry at everything. All the circumstances, missed signs, hopeless gestures. I’d be pissed off, too. It was all so pointless. I would later find out that said-ketamine was cut with fentanyl, making Johnny one more statistic in an epidemic with no vaccine and no end in sight.
This was a death like I had never experienced. I watched as my brother, father, grandfather, and both grandmothers pass, and each one was a slow burn. Whether it was old age, cancer, or even AIDS, their dying was not dramatic; I had the time to reconcile myself to the fact that the end was coming.
Johnny was just gone.
It was also the first OD death I knew about. I sailed through my teens, 20s, 30s, and even my 40s entirely unscathed by drug mortalities; I was so isolated from it that I didn’t know of even friends of friends — and I am a gay man living in New York City who used to be a gogo boy on the club circuit. The optics alone dictate I should be an old hand at this by now. But no, from the coked-up 80s, through the ecstasy-fueled 90s, and on to the meth-mad millennium, drug deaths were a distant something I saw on the news. Did I know of people who did drugs? Sure, and I am hardly angelic in this regard. But people dying from it? Never heard of such a thing.
You know how you “sorta trip” on the sidewalk, how you stumble and immediately recover? I feel as if I sorta-tripped and flew up into the air like some kiddie balloon. That coming weekend was NYC Gay Pride; as a gay travel influencer, I HAD to go out and take videos, etc. More, it was the soft-opening of New York after the lockdown; everybody was out. And I did indeed hit the town, although I cannot even remember the Friday and only pieces of the Saturday and Sunday (the same Sunday I DM’ed Mrs. Dumas). Weeks after, I flipped through my social media feeds to see exactly what I had done; my memory was a complete blank. I was on autopilot.
And like a lot of the people left behind, I have questions with no answers. He lived alone; how did anybody know Johnny died? All I can guess was that his dog was in hysterics and somebody called the police. Did the lockdown intensify his use? Not that I saw, and not from what he told me. Where, when, and from whom did he get his drugs? I have no idea. And the big-daddy: could I have done something, said something?
I wasn’t in the best of positions; Johnny and I could go months without seeing each other, and the lockdown didn’t help. I was way down the totem pole when it came to Johnny’s friend group. I met them, and they were just like him. Being as poor as I am, then and now, I simply can’t go out every weekend, and he was born for the nightlife. I was great for walks in the park, or a rainy day in, or talks about life. I could swing a bottle of wine from time to time, but not a never-ending string of nights out where a well cocktail costs $12. I’ve often said the reason I’ve survived New York for so long is less for my ethics or more for my poverty. I was not the kind of excitement Johnny was jonesin’ for. That want for excitement may have led him to drugs in the first place; I absolutely knew about Johnny’s drug use, as much as I absolutely knew he wasn’t going to stop because of anything I did or said. But at the same time, I never tried.
This is the rub. I keep saying I never judged. If Johnny did not want to talk or hear about something, I left it alone and it went both ways. Consequently, I never told Johnny “doing drugs is bad.” I never approved, but I never disapproved, either. The closest I ever got was towards what would become the last months of his life, when Johnny and I actually had the conversation on the possibility of becoming more romantically involved. The fact that he was in his middle 20s and I was in my late 40s was already enough for me to slam on the brakes — I nicknamed him “Fetus” when I first met him — but that night I made the observation that he was far more into the drug scene than I was. This was not a condemnation; it was a flat-out statement of the facts. Johnny was smart, he knew what I was saying. But that remark was as far as I ever went. If I knew then what I know now.
And now that I’ve left it too late, I cannot help but ask if my voiced disapproval of his drug use would have done a lick of good. I have no illusions regarding the reality; the Gordian knot that is addiction isn’t solved by voice-activation. His death was not my fault, and I know that. I was not there when he died, I did not know he had died. Factually, legally, I had no agency. But because I never said “stop”, the what-if has hung over my consciousness to the point I personalized Johnny’s death. That I failed him. Utterly.
I mentioned at the start that I am not wealthy. Not by any means. I’ve been under the poverty line for years, certainly for as long as Johnny knew me. But I have vowed that if I ever come into some money, the first thing I would spend it on is a trip to Louisiana and his grave to give my last respects. And my apology.
I’m sorry you died, Johnny. I wish you didn’t. I don’t know where you are now, but I’ll see you when I get there. Rest easy.
perrytrails 