Richard Reiss

It was the fifth day of a seven-day father-and-son trip and I am the father.  My twenty-four-year-old son has been in and out of therapeutic boarding schools, jails, rehabs and our lives. Eight months had passed since his last and longest stint in jail.  He acts like a model citizen, but a violent past and an addiction to heroin keeps me on edge. The Arizona trip was his reward for being good.

The last time the two of us were in a hotel together was a year before when I picked him up from a filthy apartment in a horrible house in a worse neighborhood.  The flat screen TV was as big as a bed, but so were the piles of trash and clothing, and dishes in the sink, and empty packets of drugs littered among the refuse.  Gabriel was emaciated – strung out on heroin – and   I was taking him to detox in the morning.  I had to wait out the evening because every detox house in New Jersey was filled to capacity.  I couldn’t bring him home, so I took him to a hotel.

Despite his appearance, he was happy to be in a clean bed. He turned on the television and eventually fell asleep.  His quiet breathing did not reveal a hint of the chaos that reigned over his life.  Could I save him?  And if I did, would it matter?  Would he ever be normal?  Had the drugs done irreparable damage to his brain?  The odds were against him…against us.  Heroin was killing our children at an unprecedented rate and someday he too might be another horrible statistic.

On the ceiling of the hotel room in Arizona was a nearly imperceptible flashing green light. I couldn’t sleep and so I began to count the flashes going backwards from one hundred.  Reaching zero, I accepted that the room was not on fire and that I would have a very long night. I rose from my bed to look in on Gabriel in the adjacent room.  He was asleep, wiped-out from miles of hiking.  Sleeping was not just a miracle for him; it was a blessing for both of us.  For most of his life, sleep was abhorrent, something to fight like an invading army.  In miracle mode, he accepted the rejuvenating features of a good night’s sleep.  And I thought yet again (how could I not?) that normal was creeping up on crazy.

At the age of fourteen, I took him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation.  Supposedly this doctor was the best in his field.   My wife and I were counting on his great wisdom to help our son sleep, focus, and stop being violent. It was a question of preserving our family. When the evaluation was over, the doctor called us into his office.  He sat behind an imposing oak desk covered with brown files and white papers. “Your son demonstrates some sociopathic behaviors,” he said. “I see a lot of kids like him.  I’m not sure there is much we can do.  Sometimes medication works.  Sometimes it doesn’t.”  Our hearts sank.  The devastation was immediate and overwhelming.  

Then he added, “There’s a lot of research today that seems to indicate that the brain continues to develop well into the twenties.  In your son’s case, it’s the pre-frontal cortex that you want to think about.  Impulse control.  Decision-making.  Understanding right from wrong.  We used to think that by the time a person was sixteen that this part of the brain was done developing.  Now we think it’s more like 26.”  We have clung to the doctor’s final words ever since.

In the morning, I took Gabriel to detox and then, ten days later, to rehab.  Two weeks after that, my wife and I visited him at the rehab facility.  In private, he informed us yet again that we were the worst possible parents God could have thrust upon an innocent child.  Yet in the group session he tells the assemblage of drug addicts, alcoholics and social workers, how much he loves us and how much he wants to be part of our family.  His vile expressions of hatred are reserved for alone time such as long rides in the car where it is impossible for us to escape. He’s been doing this since he was ten years old.  

Another two weeks passed and rehab was over.  From rehab he was sent to a sober house where he lasted slightly more than four hours before he was back on the street and using.  He thought heroin would put his mind at ease, but it didn’t.  Gabriel’s existence had become the antithesis of everything good, and his brain, which may or may not have ever functioned properly, was incapable of rational thought.  He had no place to live, no money and no future. 

Weeks passed.  Court was imminent.  A person can only violate probation so many times before the court’s had enough.   And then, early one cold January morning, he was there, standing in the rain outside the backdoor of my house.  It was three in the morning and I couldn’t let him in.  I wanted to punish him.  He sent me a text message:  Always giving me a cold shoulder.  I know I did this to myself.   I just keep ruining my life.   I got a violation of probation for failing a drug test and ever since then I been in a rush to die before court because I really don’t want to go to prison but I know I’m going.  I promise when I’m in rehab I want to talk to you guys.  I want to tell you everything because I have so many secrets that I need to let go of that eat at my heart every single day and I do drugs like I always have to block out not feeling bad about all the horrible things I’ve done.  I can’t go to prison.  Every day I look for ways to fuck you guys over even more because I have extreme resentment and anger and abandonment problems that meds don’t help.  Nothing seems to help.  You guys predicted it.  You said that when I went to the sober house it was too good to be true and you were right. I fuck up everything.  I ruin every opportunity.  I want to try to give help another chance.  I have to try because I’m afraid.

Although I was in my bedroom, I felt as though I could hear him breathing beside me.  For the millionth time in my son’s short life, I asked myself, what do I do now?  Several hours later, with the sun rising above the white pines that lined my property, I let him in.  He took off his wet clothes, turned on the TV and fell asleep on the sofa.  Exhaustion had gotten the better of him and to my surprise he slept for fourteen hours.

I wanted him to be an innocent again; a beautiful boy filled with kindness and a curiosity about the world. But all I could see as Gabriel slept were the threats, the lunacy, the violence, the stealing, and the tears.  Every time I watched him sleep, I thought that when he wakes, he’d seize a moment of clarity, find a way to move to the light.   But light is elusive.  Instead of clarity, Gabriel craved cigarettes, video games, girls and drugs.   He was going down.  The judge knew it and so did he. And I knew what I had to do. I had to get him to court.  I had to safeguard him against death for one more week.  But I also needed to keep him at a distance in order to maintain the tiny fraction of normalcy I had in my own life.  It’s a horrible and delicate balancing act.

When he wakes, I touch him on the shoulder.  He jumps as if I were a tiger about to pounce.  “You have to go,” I told him.  “You can’t stay.”

He rambles.  He talks to himself incessantly.  When he is lucid, he says, “I have no money.  I have no cigarettes.  I have no food.  What am I supposed to do?”

“You have court in a week,” I remind him.  “We both know what’s going to happen.  You have to get to court.”

“Fuck court,” he spews.

“What if I put you in a hotel until court?”

“Okay,” he says.

For one week he was as low a person could get, putting God-knows-what into his body in an unconscious effort to die rather than go to jail.  But he did not die.  And despite the modest difficulty of getting him to court, which was really no more problematic than getting him to school ten years earlier (just a little kicking, a little screaming and a lot of cursing), he made an appearance.  And the judge said six months, and we said thank you God for 180 days of peace of mind.

There is a stark difference between jail and prison.  Jail is the place you go after a brawl.  It’s where you stay when you are on trial for doing very bad things or for doing lesser bad things over and over again.  There is a qualitative difference between prison inmates and the inmates in the county jail.  It’s how they are treated and how they treat each other.  Prison is frightening.  Jail is painfully boring.  For someone like Gabriel, who was diagnosed with ADHD long before we saw any emerging sociopathic behavior, and for whom stimulation was akin to breathing, jail might have been the worst of the two.  Miraculously, it was the beginning of his rebirth, the epiphany I had prayed for all those years.  The influence of extreme boredom, coupled with the ability to think unencumbered by drugs, without having to worry about food or shelter or angry dealers or gun-toting friends, seemed to shelter him in a different dimension.  On the day he was released he greeted us with hugs and kisses and most importantly and differently, cooperation.

Gabriel’s transformation had begun, but would it last?  At fifteen he came home from his therapeutic boarding school with endless promises to turn around his life.  “Just give me a chance,” he said. “You never give me a chance.”  But a year and a half later we sent him away again, not so much to help him, but rather, to protect us.  And then he finished high school and they wouldn’t keep him anymore.   So, we took him in and we loved him.   But a year later, it had become impossible to ignore all the things he had stolen from our family and sold for drugs.  Our compassion was exhausted and hope dried up; I told Gabriel he could no longer live in our home.

But now he was a free man, and we made a simple deal:  you need support and we will support you, but only if you live a drug free life in a drug free environment.  A new sober house was the only option.  Throughout his incarceration he’d sworn he wouldn’t go back into a sober house.  Yet within six hours of his release from jail, he had cleaned himself up, packed his things, called every person he possibly could, and moved into a sober living environment with a dozen strangers, lots of rules, including a strict curfew and random drug tests.

I allowed myself to think in terms of miracles.  Six months of calm was not only good for him, but it was good for me too.  Whenever he was away, whether he was in the wilderness, or at boarding school or in jail, I knew he was safe.  Desperation made it easy to be naïve and once again I was lulled into a spiritual hopefulness this miracle would stick.

A week passed.  All good.  Another week.   How long could it last?  And then, of course, I get a phone call from his house manager.   “Gabriel didn’t come home last night.  Do you know where he is?”  I felt the nausea rising within me and accepted that my notion of miracles had no basis in reality.   I asked the house manager to call me when Gabriel returned.  He reminded me, “When he gets back, he’ll be drug tested.  If he fails, he’s out.”

I get the call at noon.  Gabriel was with a girl, and she missed the last train home.  He couldn’t leave her at the train station for the night.  That’s where he was; waiting for a train.  That’s what he said.

When the house manager asked him why he didn’t call, Gabriel told him that his phone had died.  To which the house manager replied, “Pee in the cup.”

He passed the drug test, but rules are rules and he violated the midnight curfew.  He was house bound for a month.  A pre miracle version of my son would not have accepted those consequences.  F- this.  F-that.  F-you.  He would have been out the door in less time than it takes to snap your fingers, totally oblivious to the fact that he would be homeless again.  But something has changed.  He stays.

And that’s how it goes.  Not perfect, but better.   He gets a job and he gets in an argument.  He has a good day, and he has a bad day.  I worry.  I always worry; that’s my function as a parent.  But the wild mood swings and the relentless vitriol that were the hallmark of his life had retreated.  Three months pass and he looks amazing.  He’s found a new drug: weightlifting.  He spends two, sometimes three hours a day at the gym.  And he has friends who support him.  And he likes his job and he goes to the movies and dines out when he can.  And he’s in bed every night by eleven.  He’s acting normal and in doing so a world of unimagined possibilities opens up before me.  A job.  A family.  Responsibility.  All the normal things that humans take for granted are suddenly within his grasp.  And there’s time!  At twenty-four he’s got two more years of cognitive development for me to work with.

I wanted to do something (I’ve always wanted to do something) to reward the boy (now a man) with whom I have spent a disproportionate amount of time disciplining.   I’ve sent him away.  I’ve called the police on him.  I’ve thrown him out of my house.  I was ready to create a new father/son paradigm based on his almost fully developed pre-frontal cortex.  I needed to prove to him and to me that the hope I clung to was a treasure.

Gabriel knew that I travelled with his brothers.  It was his turn.

“Let’s take a trip,” I suggested.

“Okay.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Wherever you want?”

“How about Arizona?”

“I’ve never been to Arizona.”

“It’s beautiful.  We’ll go to the Grand Canyon.”

Of my three sons, he enjoys the outdoors the most.  It’s ironic since the majority of his outdoor experiences were forced on him, beginning with seven weeks in the wilderness at the age of fourteen when I hired two men to extract him from of our home just before daylight.  It was a desperate move – when all else had failed – sending him to the hills of North Carolina.  I had hoped that the wilderness program would make Gabriel a better person, perhaps even grateful for the good life that was afforded him.  It did not, and three years later we sent him out again – this time to Utah.  He was seventeen at the time and we were less concerned about helping him and more concerned that he might harm us or his brothers.  In the end, thankfully, no one was harmed and Gabriel gained an unexpected appreciation for the beauty that nature offers. The boy who always travelled with a knife, had a fascination for guns and a love of mind-altering substances, was entirely at ease in the splendor and quiet of nature’s open spaces. In Arizona, where we were heading, he could delight in an orange desert sunset and celebrate the wondrous beauty of crisp azure skies.

When we arrived in Phoenix, I wanted to make him happy, so I rented a brand new red Mustang.  “You have to let me drive,” he said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yeah, you really do.”

“I would except for one thing,” I said.  And then he began to laugh, the same infectious laugh that I remembered from when he was a toddler.   His driver’s license was suspended ten months earlier when the police found a bag of heroin in his car. Nonetheless, for the next seven days he would ask me to drive at least twice a day.  He knew the answer, but he persisted.  He was playing with me, acting silly, laughing, connecting with me in a way he hadn’t done since he was a little boy. It was nice to see, nice to watch him smile as we drove through the hot Arizona desert in our rented muscle car.

Something happened.  Something clicked.  I wondered…who was this easy-going, cooperative, and happy human being who simply went with the flow?  I knew a boy who, when I took him to Orlando, screamed for hours, refusing to go to Disney World with the rest of the family because he wanted to swim all day in the hotel swimming pool.  When the screaming became too much, my wife went to Disney with the other children while Gabriel stayed behind with me.  He ruined that vacation and many others.  He was clinically diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, but to the casual observer he was nothing short of crazy.  Once I thought he was going to punch me in the face.  He began to walk toward me, his eyes on fire.  I was prepared to take the blow, but instead he took one step beyond me and put his fist through the bedroom wall calmly walking away.  This was boy who threatened everyone – children and adults – with knives and razors…a boy whose natural response to anything uncomfortable was violence and vengeance.  He stabbed a person because he thought that person threw an egg at his car.  The knowledge of that piece of his life is a shame I will carry with me always.  And yes, it was terrifying.

In Arizona I get an email from a colleague of mine who knows my son’s story.  He wanted to know how Gabriel was doing.  I tell him he’s doing great.  My colleague tells me that he knew he would.  He said he’s been praying for my son.  He said Jesus is watching over him now.   My colleague knows we’re Jewish, but that doesn’t deter him or his faith.  He let me know that he will continue to pray for our contentment and took more than an ounce of credit for Gabriel’s movement away from lunacy.  In his mind, the miracle is real.

It’s day one.  The ride into Sedona in a brand-new Mustang is breath-taking.  The red rock monuments on either side of the road are tall and spiny and round.  There are gigantic cliff walls flanking the road that rise majestically out of the desert.  Gabriel is excited.  It’s nice to see.  I’m excited too.

It’s a beautiful evening as we pull into our hotel.  I approached the desk clerk to register, but she’s preoccupied.  I cough to get her attention.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “It’s so unusual to have clouds here and tonight they’re striking, don’t you think?”  She’s right.   Gabriel stepped back outside to look at the sky.  It was a light shade of sapphire, with large, brilliant gray and white clouds scattered across the horizon.  The air was crisp and unadulterated by the trillions of particles of dust and pollution that are part of our daily breath in New Jersey.

Not only was he clean and sober for nearly eight months, but he was completely off any medication for anger, for anxiety, for weaning himself off heroin, for focusing, for sleeping, for waking up, and for being crazy.  Was it possible that clarity has entered his life? That he was coming out of a deep dark awful sleep?  And since he was awake, was he keenly attuned to his surroundings in ways that were not possible before?

We checked-in and drove to the nearest vista.  I pointed out a large rock formation, not so far away called Cathedral Rock.  “We’ll climb that in morning,” I told my son.

“Cool,” he said.

“Yeah, cool.”

I wanted him to look forward but as a parent it’s hard for me not to look back at a life that’s been the opposite of cool.

One night in Sedona we decided to go to the movies.  I asked Gabriel what he’d like to see and he said, “Whatever you want, Dad.”

“Okay, where do you want to eat?”

“It doesn’t matter to me, you pick.”

“Alright, we’ve got a couple of hours before the movie starts, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know, Dad.  Anything you want is fine with me.”

In this moment, Gabriel’s overarching mind-set, whether inspired by age or jail or a prefrontal cortex in full bloom, seemed to be to avoid conflict at any expense.  So, in the movies, when a woman turned around and in a very unpleasant voice asked my son and me to stop talking, we did.  Yet as we were walking out of the theater, without any prompting, he said to me in a voice from the past, before miracles, “I should have killed that bitch.”  I’m glad he didn’t.

In no particular order we went ballooning.  We rode mountain bikes.  We drove an all-terrain vehicle through the desert.  We floated down the Colorado River.  We ate a lot of meat.  We swam. We took a couple of thousand pictures.  We climbed rocks and mountains.  And we even talked, but true to my son’s nature he was beyond sharing the depths of his feelings with me.  Maybe someday he will; maybe our next trip?    But for the moment, he didn’t have to tell me he was happy.

After four days in Sedona and two difficult but really fun vertical climbs, we went on what we were told was the most difficult hike in the area on the Bear Mountain trail.  It was five miles long and hot and hand-over-hand climbing and disappearing paths on to sheer rock mountain faces, and it was more than a few thousand feet in elevation from the bottom to the top.

“You sure you want to do this,” I asked him.

“Yes, I want to be able to say that I did something that my brother didn’t do when you took him here.”

And so we lifted the gate to the trail with the marker memorializing the person who had died on this hike more than a dozen years ago.  We would hike.  We would climb.  We would reach a vista.  We would hike.  We would climb.  We would reach a vista.  And each time we thought we had reached the end of the hike we met other hikers heading in the opposite direction.  “Not there yet,” they would inform us, “but the view is spectacular.”

The truth is that the view was spectacular from beginning to end.  A vast desert valley of burnt auburn and fading yellows and greens lay below us as we walked past the red cliff walls that stood in extraordinary contrast to the bright blue skies.  And, of course, there was the other view: my eyes focused on Gabriel.  Amazing!

After a few hours of climbing, it seemed like we would never finish.  I said, “This has been an incredible hike.  We can go back if you want to. Really, it’s not a big deal.”

To which Gabriel replied, “No, Dad.  We have to finish.”

To which my mind flashed, holy shit! The Miracle.

The last 500 feet was basically straight up.  I struggled a little, but Gabriel climbed with ease, reaching the summit long before I pulled my 57-year-old body up and over the top.  We looked at the world not just below us, but all around.  The blue sky, the red earth, and the cool stillness of the mountain top were our reward.  Gabriel was nothing short of glorious and I basked in the glow of his achievement.  He had come so far.  Not just the miles with each step he took, but with a new sense of resolve and self and the possibility that maybe he could live in the world and not be a crazy person.  It was easy for me to see, and I think he saw it too – the flickering possibility that happiness and hope were real.