the hello/goodbye; supplement 1: heroin.

Chapter 1, supplement 1.
My father died of a heroin overdose when I was eleven, five days before christmas. I never knew what to do with this information, so I jsut kept compartmentalizing it and moving it around. In retrospect, I was carrying it around whole and unanalyzed, waiting for some new information to contextualize his death, and hopefully make it all make sense.
then I found my family, and a lot came together.

Excerpt: http://blog.myspace.com/remyinheaven

the mental furniture.

--I don't smoke....
Gimme a cigarette.
--Siddown, kid.
If you don't want to hear this, just let me know.

when the wind starts to shift, well, there's no argument...

There are things you can't fight.
There was a long silence and a long conversation; everyone tells me I have no commitment to my father and my family.
Everyone tells me I have every right to walk away.
Everyone is dead wrong.
Hello, my name is Remy, I'll be your waitress this evening. I'd like to tell you about our specials...
My father's presence hovers big and heavy and sways our judgment with a slow, momentous weightiness; if feels just like a big, relevant and all-invasive death ought to feel. I'll always be the dead man's daughter; I feel like I look like some failed experiment in junkie-love.
Time keeps moving and moving and now I get to go back and take the not-so-eleven-year-old view of what happened; It's had 13 years for them to figure out how to color the chain of events leading up to my father's death to save me the hurt; still, everything that was furniture in my tight and sturdy little world has still begun to shimmer and sway, and it's beautiful and frightening and very very sad...

when the wind starts to shift, well, there's no argument...

... so I'll watch it go.
Tell me again that I can turn away from it; I am still half made of this messy stuff.
Look, I won't stay here forever, and I'll look the other way when there's nothing else to see, when it all calms down and I can walk around my life again and recognize where I am, then I'll stop fixating on where I came from; until then, I'll crouch on the floor in the middle of it all and do my best to take it in as the world spins around me and my eyes begin to burn.

I wake up feeling calm and having slept a full night for the fisrt time in weeks; this is going to hurt, but it has to be done, guys.
It's time for change.



April-May 2005:
Bob finally explains about the lat few years of my father's life, and about heroin and prison time for my family.
My father's last major stint in prison, as fari as I can tell, was the result of an arrest that occurred in the middle of a heroin run from thailand via hawaii, where he almost overdosed in 1988 and was arrested upon resuccitation.

Let's contextualize.

We ran from LA to hawaii, without him, in 1987, and had no idea that he had been there in 1988. After leaving LA in 1987, I would never see him again.
My father almost died les than 200 miles from my house, in the middle of the most remote island chain in the world, the place where my mother had taken her family to get away from exactly that sort of thing.
My father was running heroin right past my house, and I never got to see him alive.
Nobody told me.