Terre Haute, Indiana, maximum security prison, 2003
The kids were five, seven and nine when he went in. Debbie didn’t bring them to visit Mike for over two years. When they finally came, they barely made eye contact.
* * *
East Jordan, Michigan, 2002
Mike and his wife, Debbie, had been drinking an afternoon beer during halftime of the IU/Michigan State basketball game, listening to the drips from the icicles hanging from the eaves and discussing the month’s bills, when Freya, his mother-in-law, stopped by.
“Not out getting a job, Mike?” she greeted him, squinting at him with ice-cold eyes. He kept his face expressionless and didn’t get up to offer her a chair. Which also meant he couldn’t edge toward the doorway to the living room where the game had started up again. His reclining easy chair was probably still warm from him sitting there for the last four hours.
“Mike, Mom and I are going shopping at Family Fare. Need anything?”
He sighed with relief.
“I was just there. Checking if they’ll be hiring soon.” That was a lie. He hadn’t been there. And they probably wouldn’t hire an ex-con anyway.
He would like to have a full-time job, not just working every now and then for his uncle’s auto shop. It would get him out of the sunshine-yellow kitchen, the walnut-colored living room, and the endless hours in front of the television. His unemployment checks covered some of the bills but not all. Debbie’s job as a nurse’s aide barely paid for groceries and clothing.
His phone vibrated. Debbie tensed, staring at him, daring him to pick it up. “Who is it?” she asked, before he had even looked at it. “It’s Dan, about poker,” he said, briefly looking at the screen that said “Chris E.” Can u meet at park at 3? Important.
“I’ll probably be going out. Got some stuff to do.” He left the room quickly, feeling Debbie’s questions hanging in the air behind him.
Responding to Chris E.: yep. the usual?
A thumbs up emoji in return.
He couldn’t keep his stash in the house; the kids might find it. He kept it hidden under the eaves of the backyard lean-to that covered the firewood. Once, Mike thought his son Taylor might be snooping in the lean-to so he even rushed into the house, holding his hand and yelling he thought he’d been bitten by a snake hiding in the wood pile. Just to make sure the family stayed far away.
After reading Chris’s text, Mike waited impatiently for Debbie and Freya to finish their list and gather up their purses and jackets and gloves. As soon as the women left in the Chevy, the hole in the muffler announcing for the neighbors that they were on the move, Mike went to the woodpile and rummaged for his plastic-bagged stash.
Stuffing the bag in his jacket pocket, he hopped on his three-speed bike and rode a half-mile to the park where Chris E., a hugely fat man with swollen hands and feet, was waiting. Mike checked around quickly, then opened the door and sat in Chris’s passenger seat.
“You want to stock up this time? Maybe get 80s instead of 40s?” Mike asked. “That swelling looks bad in your fingers. Must hurt. I won’t get more until Wednesday.”
“Don’t have the cash right now. Just the usual,” Chris said, handing over a wad of bills.
“OK, you’re the boss,” Mike said, handed over the pills, gave Chris a fist bump and got out of the car. Chris mumbled goodbye and drove off, his handicapped pass swinging from the rear-view mirror.
Mike knew his mother-in-law could not abide him. He once overheard her say to her old lady friend, “Debbie deserves better but she’s loyal and she’ll stick with him ‘til the day she dies. Unless he dies first, God willing.”
But he wasn’t so sure what he was doing was a bad thing.
A few years ago, he was at work, under a car, when a damaged door fell off and sliced his right leg, severing a tendon.
This was the first time he had taken Oxy; it had been prescribed to him for pain after surgery. It was a legal transaction, smiled upon by his doctor. No one mentioned any side effects or said anything about risks of addiction.
It was a magic drug, he thought. It took all his pain away until it wore off. He was wary, and he made sure not to take more than prescribed. He even noted down exactly when and how much he had taken before he slipped into the warm whirlpool of torpor for the next three-and-a-half hours.
It didn’t matter how careful he had been. It didn’t matter that he followed the doctor’s orders to the letter. By the time he had reached the bottom of the pill bottle he was addicted.
“I’m still hurting,” he told the doctor, a month later, lying easily. “Nothing helps but the pills.”
“All right, Mike. I’ll give you another prescription. But you probably should start cutting back.”
“I’ll try, doc, and see how it goes,” Mike said.
“Also, you look like you’ve lost a lot of weight. Did the nurse weigh you? Ah, you have lost quite a bit. Are you eating well? Exercising?”
“If I could get back to work I could put on some muscle,” Mike said. He was hardly ever hungry. His jeans were hanging off his hips and his lank, greasy hair was now resting on his shoulders. Debbie kept bugging him about it. “You look like a meth addict,” she said.
It was his friend Davey who had the idea. They were in the Walmart parking lot one day and he pointed out all the people limping or with walkers or canes.
“You need money, right? And look at all these folks who need pain pills. Why don’t you do a good deed and help them out?”
Mike was familiar with the problems: some people couldn’t find a way to get to a doctor’s office, others couldn’t take time off work to get to the appointments, even if they had government assistance to pay for the visit. Many were scared of having surgery, or of the long recovery and thought they’d rather just get by with the chronic pain. But they would be happy to have some pills to take the edge off of living.
And many of them were already addicted from a previous prescription and had been cut off by their doctor so needed a black-market street source.
So Mike signed up with another doctor, this one at the hospital in Saginaw. Then he signed up for one in Traverse City. He had different stories, but it all came down to: he had had an accident at the shop, the surgery hadn’t helped much, and he could barely move without pain. He just needed something to help him get back to work, start making money again and then maybe he could find some long-term solution. The doctors were harried and overwhelmed, their waiting rooms filled with patients trying to get seen. There just weren’t enough doctors in the area and most people only came when they were really, really bad off. No one had the time or money to be seen for preventative care, so by the time they came in they were critically ill.
The doctors willingly, even gratefully, gave Mike prescriptions that he asked for, relieved he didn’t have any more complicated need. “Don’t come back if you don’t need to,” one doctor told him. “You don’t need to see me to get a refill from my office. Just call Marcie at reception. She’ll take care of you. You want to stay ahead of the pain.”
Mike took the pills home, sitting in the sunshine-yellow kitchen, while Debbie was at work and the kids at school, and carefully counted out twenty at a time, put them in plastic baggies, and sold them to select people he knew.
His buyers had a powerful need for more, more, more, until it overcame the purpose of pain control and became a deep, visceral hunger to reach an escapist state of floating through air.
Mike had money again.
But the doctors began to notice, as Mike suspected they would.
* * *
Mike had earlier experience selling drugs. He had been the go-to provider of weed in high school, which was about as high-end as drugs got back then. His cousin Ben, who lived downstate, supplied him, and Mike brazenly sold it out of his locker during breaks between classes. He was doing so well his cousin Ben suggested he try introducing the high school kids to cocaine.
“Where do you think we are, Chicago? We don’t make that sort of bank working at the bakery or the cement plant. We’ll have to eat it. Literally. You and me.”
But Ben kept on him, pressuring him to say yes, saying he had to answer to his supplier. So Mike said he’d give it a try.
One class break the police swarmed in, threw Mike on the floor, ransacked his locker, found the drugs, then arrested him as an adult. He had turned eighteen just three months before, complete with the traditional gifts of cigarettes and porn and a lottery ticket. And now added on: a record as a felon with a prison sentence.
* * *
At first, Mike told himself selling Oxy was just a way to pay off hovering debts. Then he started talking to his buyers and had a new outlook.
“Davey, you know, I’m really not a bad guy. I’m someone who will give these folks what they need, the help they need. Fuck the doctors. They’re just punishing the people like us, taking away what we need to get through the day.”
The system caught up with him within about a year and the doctors refused to give him any more pills.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Grant. But I’m pretty knowledgeable about palliative care, and you seem to be a textbook case of someone who is abusing the system. I’m not prescribing any more painkillers for you. Instead, I’ll give you some resources for addiction recovery programs,” one said. Mike walked out.
Davey had come up with another idea.
“You bring your grandma’s prescriptions to her at the care home, right? Why not take one or two off the top. Not the morphine, they check that pretty closely. But Oxy? Crush and sniff an 80 and you’re good to go.”
And then Davey asked for a baggie. He hurt his knee, he said. Mike said, “How’d it happen?”
“You calling me a liar?” Davey challenged him.
“No, no. I know about pain. I’ll help you out, of course.”
Then a bunch of people started calling Mike, saying they were Davey’s friends, and they needed to get back to work but still had pain from surgery. Or had recently had a minor accident but still had neck pain. Or had a grandma with terrible arthritis. And the doctors at the hospital were no help.
Mike knew some of them were outright lying and just needed a fix. But which ones? And did it really matter? He needed the money and he needed the drugs.
His system worked on a small scale but didn’t bring in enough inventory. He needed to go to the street. He called his cousin Ben, who was selling in Flint, and got an in with a dealer who needed a rep in northern Michigan. Dangerous? Sure. Necessary? Mike thought so.
Back at home, Debbie was getting suspicious. Mostly because he never seemed short of cash anymore.
“Where’re you getting all this from? What’s going on? How much do you have anyway?”
Mike found he had gotten very good at lying and he put Debbie off with one smooth story after another to explain his influx of cash. He had sold some car parts to his uncle. Davey had paid him back for a loan. He had won a poker game. And so on. He could think up the excuses as quickly as she asked questions. But he realized his time hiding his business was quickly coming to a close.
In the end, it was his mother-in-law Freya who caught him. She shared all of the suspicions Debbie had and none of the denial. Mike guessed she had waited and watched until she had figured out where his stash was.
When Mike had gotten home that night after meeting Chris E. in the park, he had walked into the yellow kitchen, finding it crowded with Freya and two uniforms. Debbie and the kids were nowhere be found.
“Here he is, the scumbag,” Freya had set her mug down with a clang and pointed at Mike. The cops had also set down their cups and stood up. Mike’s stash lay in the middle of the kitchen table, triple-bagged. “This yours?” one had asked, his hand resting on his gun.
“You know it is,” Freya had said. “Get him out of here. I can’t stand to look at him.”
Mike went willingly with the police to the station. He didn’t want to embarrass his family in front of the neighbors.
Reality hit when his van entered through the prison gate in Terre Haute.
He went through withdrawal writhing on the cold cement jail floor, every bone aching, sweating through his inmate jumpsuit and sleeping, when he could, coiled up near the toilet, shivering violently and wet through and through. He refused his meal tray for days, the smell of the food making him vomit. His cellmate stepped on him to get to the toilet. No one came to check on him or take him to the infirmary. No one gave a shit.
Sometimes, in a moment of lucidity that would break through like a ray of sun, he pictured the warmth of the bright yellow kitchen and he yearned for his hard metal chair there at the table.
- Mike and the Law - June 20, 2024