The Night Tom’s Heart Stopped by Jackson Dickert

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 The Night Tom’s Heart Stopped

    The only thing I remember is me taking three Xanax and him falling to the dingy floor of the kitchen that almost always smells of fish food. And I started to laugh. I didn’t realize he suffered from a heart arrhythmia. In the morning, my father woke me up, dragged me from the vomit-bed I slept in and threatened to drug test me. I insisted I only drank too much. He accepted the faux-honesty and when we got home, he told me to go sleep off the haziness that followed me into the next day. So the night Tom’s heart stopped, I watched from the pockmarked couch in his living room and laughed at him, unmoving on the floor.
     Tom is only eighteen, three years younger than the rapper, Lil Peep. Lil Peep died of an Xanax overdose. I don’t know much, but I do know about Xanax. I know Lil Peep took Xanax cut with fentanyl. That he didn’t know. He couldn’t have known. At least half of the dealers where I’m from cut their Xanax with fentanyl, and you can’t tell. There’s no way to. Fentanyl may as well be heroin in pill form but I guess it’s more of a cousin than a counterpart. This is dangerous for the kids in my area. For some of us, Xanax is an escape. For some of us, Xanax will be what kills us.

   Where I’m from, Xanax abuse permeates teenage life. I remember the time I caught a conversation in the back of my ninth grade English class. Half-asleep, I turned and found two kids fumbling with pills in a small plastic baggie. They each took one out and slipped the riveted pills onto their tongues.
    Ninth grade was when I first tried Xanax, or any drug for that matter. I figured a pill prescribed for people with anxiety and depression couldn’t be harmful as say, cocaine. Jake convinced me to try it. He stole some from his mother. These days, Jake faces up to twenty years in prison after violating parole, now charged with the possession of marijuana and cocaine and destroying DNA evidence. Jake came into my life in the sixth grade and remained one of my only friends through middle school and the first two years of high school. On weekends, we stayed in his asbestos-room most of the day and played Call of Duty. One time, we spent twelve hours creating a city in Minecraft. It was one of those days when we decided to take Xanax. We sat on his floor mattress. We both took two bars, which was too much, and we ended up watching YouTube videos and repeatings, “Llamas in pajamas” for an hour before passing out.

    In the case of Lil Peep and my friends, unresolved mental illness factors heavily into peer pressure and the willingness to put one’s body at risk. Lil Peep’s music talks all about suicide and depression. Tom did a stint in a mental hospital. I did a stint in a mental hospital. Both of us tried to kill ourselves. Only an hour before he died, Lil Peep posted a picture, his tongue outstretched. Xanax sat on his tongue, the Xanax that killed him. The caption read, “When I die you’ll love me.”

    My father told me that if I ever did drugs, he would disown me. I’m not sure why I still partake. I know why my dad told me this.
The vicious reality of opioid addiction is that most people begin with addiction to a prescription opioid like OxyContin. When users can’t afford Oxy anymore, they turn to heroin. Every year, fifty thousand people die of overdose. Thirty thousand of those deaths are opioid overdoses. When I was in ninth grade, my brother became one of the thirty thousand. And my father doesn’t want that fate for me. I don’t think drugs are cool. Drugs make me feel good in a way I can’t. A way that I lack in my day-to-day life.
    Think about Egypt. The Nile River flooding, then receding, leaving behind fertile farm land. Think of addiction like that. Think of flooding as the action of taking pills. The receding as the depression that sets in post-comedown. Think of the cyclical nature. Think of the cyclical nature of dependency.

    My ex-girlfriend is from Staten Island. Staten Island is a hotbed of the opioid epidemic. My ex-girlfriend’s father is addicted to prescription painkillers. My ex-girlfriend’s father beat her mother unconscious with a detachable showerhead in a fit of withdrawal. My ex-girlfriend does coke. My ex-girlfriend tells me her friends from Staten Island have two things in common: they know someone who is addicted to an opioid and they have all tried to kill themselves at least once.

    When I was in the hospital that time, I met Harry. Harry talked with a thick upstate South Carolina accent and was the only other person in our unit over the age of sixteen. We talked about rap music, about girls and boys and how we got there. He told me about his addiction to Xanax and Ativan, how the drugs made him feel alive, how at this point he can’t really think without the drugs. He told me he wished it was all different. He told me he misses the time before the drugs.

    Tom always called people who did drugs, “Bartards,” a pejorative that combines “retard” and “bar.”. The relaxed state Xanax puts you in is a slow burn. Detachment sets in. It feels like nothing is quite there, like when you reach out to touch something, it feels all wrong. Smooth is rough. Rough is smooth. Loud is quiet. Nothing is really very loud. I had a friend named Molly who ingested her weight in the pill most weeks. I have a memory of her before all of that, when we played hide and go seek, even though we all felt too old for the game. We hid together behind a torn-up building, crouched close. I smelled the Cheetos on her breath, felt her short choppy breaths on my face. She leaned in closer and said, “I don’t want anything to change.”
    
    The last time I saw Jake, he was high, smoking a cigarette outside of his house. I could tell from his glassy eyes he was not entirely there. He offered me a cigarette and I took it, lighting it and taking a deep drag. We stood for a long time not thinking about much, kicking the dirt, small talk drifting through the air like the smoke of our cigarettes.

    I like to imagine what it would be like if we all never started doing drugs. Never ending up with the dark rings under our eyes and emaciated face the summer between our ninth and tenth grade year. What would it be like if the craving wasn’t burned into our minds, like when you look at the sun with your eyes closed, and before everything is back to what it used to be, blinking and blinking and blinking.

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Bio: Jackson Dickert is a writer from Columbia, South Carolina.

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