Rest easy Johnny: I’ll miss you

When I think back on the time I spent with my uncle, I have trouble pinpointing when I found out he was injecting prescription drugs.

Before my uncle moved into my house in the suburbs, I remember him getting married at city hall with his now ex-wife Val. After that were sporadic visits from time to time for Sunday lunches with the family, and of course Christmas. Every Christmas he’d come to the house with oysters which we would both shuck and eat with lemon juice. After my grandfather died, and my brother left for England, eating oysters at Christmas became our Christmas ritual as no one else liked the taste.

During the time he was married, or perhaps after he and his wife had split up, I sort of knew he had a drinking problem. When he took me and my cousin (his daughter) up north to go camping one weekend, I saw my uncle drunk and irritated. Camping was fun, but toward the end of every night when it was time for bed, his daughter didn’t want to sleep and slurred shouts were made and that was that.

Once Johnny moved into my house, everything sort of came into view quite quickly. Unemployed, he could not afford to drink, so he joined AA and was proud of his monthly poker chip style sobriety milestones. The milestones of course meant nothing. He may have not had a ‘drink’ at the pub, or kept peach schnapps under the bed, but if there was Nyquil in the house, you knew where to look for the empty bottle.

That’s when I found the needles. Soon after he moved in I had got the flu and my mom got me some Nyquil to help me sleep. I had the bottle in my room in the basement. My uncle’s room was in the basement as well. I remember getting home from school on a Friday and not being able to find it. My uncle left for his AA meeting and I went into his room and found the bottle empty. I rummaged through his dresser and found heaps of empty codeine bottles, blackened spoons, lighters, bloody cotton swabs, and needles. On one spoon was a greenish substance that looked almost like wassabi. The drawer was littered with bloody things. It was an eye-opener, but I kept it to myself.

I wasn’t naive of intravenous drug use. I grew up listening to the Sex Pistols and was interested in the life of Sid Vicious. I can remember being so utterly depressed by the movie Sid and Nancy. I read Junky and The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs and The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. There were documentaries on A&E, PBS, and various other stations regarding various kinds of narcotic abuse. The ¡°war on drugs¡± had educated me well on how and what people do to get up, down, and fucked.

It was easy to see when Uncle Johnny had just shot up. His eyes were glassy, his speech was slurred, and he moved in slow disjunctive movements. He fell asleep on the toilet, fell down the stairs, dozed off at dinner, and spent most of his time nodding off in his room watching TV or reading a book.

Throughout the month he would have to change injection points. Toward the end of the month was when he moved down to his ankles. That’s when I’d come home from high-school and have to wipe drops of blood from the kitchen and hallway floors.

The week before his disability payment he’d be broke and “off”. He’d get a haircut, talk more, eat more, be more visible, and have chronic diarrhea; a side effect of being “off”. That time of the month was the best time of the month. The time we would talk a lot and joke around.

Then I went to University.

I never talked to my uncle on the phone from University. If I did, I don’t remember. I saw him when I went back for visits, and of course at Christmas. The oyster ritual continued. At the end of a Christmas visit on year, I can remember going to his bedroom to say goodbye. His door was shut and I knocked a few times before opening the door to find him passed on his bed with his legs slung over the side with his pants around his ankles; a needle still dangling from a vein in his penis. For some reason I knew he wasn’t dead. I walked up to him and slapped him viciously hard in the face, and ran out. I was at the door getting ready to head to the airport and up came Johnny with his pants pulled up; his hands rubbing the cheek I had slapped. He said something incoherent and I left.

Sometime after that, I was at my apartment in Ottawa and my brother called to say there had been a fire at my house. No one was hurt in the fire, but my cat did succumb to smoke inhalation and had died. The fire had started in my uncle’s room. Apparently he had lit a cigar with a match and in his dosed-up state, had simply thrown the match onto a chair before going outside. The fire marshal noted that as most of the walls in the basement (finished by my grandfather) were made in the 1960′s out of cardboard thin sheets of wood, we were lucky the entire house didn’t go down. With a driveway full of firefighters, police, and neighbors, it was clear that my uncle was completely mashed. Because the house was my grandmothers, the fire marshal did a very kind thing and reported that the fire had been caused by faulty electrical work, hence, guaranteeing that insurance would pay for repairs. Nevertheless, insurance was unable to repair the rift that had finally widened into a chasm between my uncle and both my mother and grandmother. He moved to a rooming house in a seedy part of Toronto and I guess everyone was a little happy to see him go, including myself.

In spite of everything that had happened, he still came for Christmas and the oyster ritual continued, and if I was in Toronto, id go downtown and see him at his rooming house near Yonge and Dundas and chit chat. I knew nothing had changed. I knew he was still using, and I knew he had started drinking again. I also knew there was nothing I could do about it and accepted him for who he was; my interesting and smart junky uncle.

This past Friday just after getting to work my brother called to tell me that my uncle had been found dead in his room. He had died in his sleep from a seemingly accidental overdose of methadone and alcohol. He was 60.

My Uncle Johnny lived at my house for most of my high-school and University years. I feel it necessary to say that he had a positive influence on who I am, and despite the choices he made, he always provided advice from the heart.

I’ve been told that, in time, the hurt will fade, only to be replaced by positive memories that soothe the soul. Already, I can feel that happening.

Maybe it’s because Uncle Johnny and I had a unique relationship. He was a remarkably smart man, and I respected his humor, stories, and confidence. He was there at times when my father was not, and while I will always call him “Uncle Johnny”, he was, in a subtle way, a father figure.

He talked to me about things I didn’t want to talk to anyone else about, and the advice he gave was honest and non-patronizing. His life was filled with experiences very few people have had, and from the tales he shared with me and the mistakes he had made, I was able to make some of the right choices for myself. Even if he didn’t intend to do that for me, he did, and because he did, I will truly miss him.

“Take it easy brother. Be cooool” is how he ended our last meeting in Toronto in September of last year.

I just want to say “You too man. Rest easy”

Tagged as: Memories, People