THE ADDICT NEXT DOOR

A city tale of drugs, desperation and the distance between neighbors

The United States is experiencing an epidemic of drug overdose (poisoning) deaths. Since 2000, the rate of deaths from drug overdoses has increased 137%, including a 200% increase in the rate of overdose deaths involving opioids (opioid pain relievers and heroin). —The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Jan. 1, 2016

About a year ago, barely awake after an afternoon nap, I heard a male voice call out. “Michael, get up, Michael. Breathe.” Our son is named Michael. For a moment, while still in a fog, I imagined the worst. But I realized the voice came from another apartment. “Michael,” the man pleaded. “Get up, Michael. Breathe.” The husky voice repeated the words, but with growing distress. I opened our front door and stepped into the hallway and saw the door to the next apartment open. I knocked. “Who is it?” “Your neighbor. Can I help?” “It’s my son.” I entered, and in the living room I saw the father kneeling on the floor, leaning over his son, who lay sprawled on his back, his eyes closed and arms out to his side. “What happened?” “He just collapsed.” “Did you call an ambulance?” “It should be here soon.” “What do you think is wrong with him?” “Wish I knew.” With that, the father, about 60 years of age, bent back over his son, maybe 30 or so.

“Michael, wake up. Wake up, Michael.”

He brought his face close to his son, clasping the sides of his head.

Then, without warning, the young man opened his eyes wide, as if surprised still to be alive. He glanced around the room in confusion, and recognized his father. “Dad?” “Michael,” he gasped. “Oh, Michael.” He clutched his son’s face with his hands, forehead pressed to forehead. “You’re all right. “You’re all right.”

Afew weeks later, I encountered the father in the hall. “I never thanked you,” he said. “So thank you.” “How’s your son doing?” “Better.” I wanted to ask what had happened to him. But I decided against it. It was none of my business, I realized, even though my appearance during the emergency weeks earlier had already sort of made it my business. Besides, if the father had any interest in telling me, I reasoned, he would.

Some months later, heading down the hall to our apartment, I saw the son heading towards his door. He looked different, definitely thinner, almost unrecognizable.

“Glad to see you’re doing okay,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said with a faint smile.

Again, I felt the impulse to ask what had happened to him. Again, I decided it was none of my business. Evidently father and son just wanted to be left alone.

Then came mid-September, a Tuesday. At about two in the morning, from our living room, I heard a voice through the wall that adjoins our apartment to the neighbor next door. The voice sounded angry.

I went back to watching television, expecting the yelling to stop. But 15 minutes later, it was still going. I pressed my ear

against the wall to hear better. Something about a business deal. Something about international travel.

Something about millions of dollars.

It was the son ranting, cursing, clearly anguished. Maybe some Wall Street merger had gone wrong. Someone tried to console him, probably his father.

I kept eavesdropping, remembering the son splayed unconscious on the floor a year before, alert for any sign of a new crisis. With the wall between us, his voice was muffled, and I could make only a few words here and there. I felt strange spying, but wanted to prepare for any new emergency. Then I heard the word “Vicodin.” And then the word “methadone.” For a second I felt compelled to go next door again. But I had done no tangible good then — such gestures of concern are often nothing more than gestures — and doubted I could do any real good now either. So I stayed

home. The son stopped screaming. I went to sleep.

From inside our apartment at about 11 the next morning, I heard a walkie-talkie out in our hallway crackle and hiss. Through the peephole I saw a police officer pounding at the front door next to ours. Outside, in front of our building, the lights on an ambulance flashed red.

Through the peephole I saw the father come out.

“It’s my son,” he told the officer. “He’s dead.” “An overdose?” “Yes, an overdose.” The police officer went into the apartment. The father stood in the hallway alone and started to sob.

“My son is dead,” he said to himself. “My son Michael is dead.”

I could have stepped into the hall and tried to comfort him. He was roughly my age and his son, another Michael, about the same age as ours. But I stayed behind my closed door. This was now a matter for the police, I decided. It was none of my business.

From the window in our living room I saw the ambulance in front of our building, the technicians rolling out a gurney.

Afterwards I learned what had happened. Some weeks later, finally mustering the nerve, I went next door to offer the father my condolences and try to console him. I told him what I had seen and heard. The father then recounted the episode.

The son, who held an important position at a bank in midtown Manhattan, putting in long hours under heavy pressure to make big money on big projects, had gotten fired that morning. His addiction to opioids had hurt his performance and finally cost him his job. Security escorted him from his office building.

He was just then only a week away from finishing at a six-week detox program, where he received counseling and took drug treatment every day to counter his dependency, and recovery appeared likely.

He cried telling his father he had lost his job. He had once spent two years unemployed. “How am I ever going to start over again?” the son asked him the night I heard him raving.

That night, at about 3 a.m., the son told his father he needed to go get something he had left in his car.

The father told his son plenty of good jobs out there awaited him. He would find something soon. They hugged, kissed and said good night to each other.

But while his father slept, his son went to score heroin.

The son got high — higher, the father told me he believed, than he intended — and overdosed.

At about 10 that morning, the father found his son slumped in his bed, dead.

“I miss my son,” the father told me, his words catching in his throat. “Every day I relive what happened. It never gets easier.”

Maybe I could have saved my neighbor. Maybe I should have knocked on his door the night before he died to ask what was going on and how I could help. Maybe I should somehow have noticed the warning signs.

But what could I have done? What should I have done? What can any of us do?

Sometimes, of course, our neighbors just want to be left alone. And sometimes what happens next door may just be none of our damn business.

Then again, we live in a big city, the second most populous city on the planet. And yes, we lead our private lives, so seldom looking each other in the eye as we pass on the street, often acting as if we’re all on our own and would rather keep to ourselves, abiding by our hard-wired genetic instinct for self-preservation. But sometimes we get involved anyway and try to lend a hand to someone in need.

And that’s because, when you get right down to it, whether we’re in our apartments or an office building or a subway car under the streets, all our walls ultimately adjoin.