by Dave Michon

My wife and Eileen grew up together on a quiet suburban street in a Chicago suburb. They lived directly across from each other and were best friends most of the time all through to their early twenties. When adolescence flowered, and I came lurking about, Eileen was usually dating one of my friends. We always found ourselves in 'double-date' situations, in the wide- open 'party' atmoshere of the '70's could actually be called dating. They remained close, however, through it all. Drugs were just a fact of life then, in ways so different from today. Although we were anti-thetical to 'hippies' our huge daily gatherings of hundreds in the outlying Forest Preserve settings were tribal and unprecedented. Heroin was soon a big part of our lives. It could not have been different, at that time in that place.

Eileen was a tiny girl and thin as a rail. She wasn't especially interested in drugs, she was just pretty typical. We all went through our periods of deep addiction. It killed a lot of us. A few, it now seems clear, weren't really physically inclined to it like the others and got out pretty easily.

Wife and I moved away. We heard that Eileen, like many others, was not doing well. She would've been just about the last one you would've expected it from. We were far from it though, and rarely heard of her. We did know there were to be four childen.

About 9 years ago we found ourselves temporarily at a clinic where Eileen was attending. Everyone who wasn't dead was there or at another MMT clinic. Wife and Eileen talked for a long time in the parking lot while I fidgeted. Eileen had her four kids with her and they were great Irish kids. The youngest was newborn practically. She appeared to be doing fairly well; real well, considering. She'd 'come back in' to methadone treatment and had given up chasing the shitty Mexican heroin of Chicago. There was a shoplifting charge and a few other minor matters, but the future looked good, especially for the children who were glad to be back with Mom.

That was to be the last time either of us would see Eileen. A few months ago, wife was talking to her sister. Sister says Eileen was found dead in a seedy Chicago building from a heroin/Valium overdose - the swan song of so many narcotic addicts these past 20 years. Wife and I were shocked but the services were long since over. In fact there were no services that anyone heard about. The family was completely moot about her and refused to discuss it. So we shook it off and went about our lives which contain plenty of our own melodrama.

Wife was talking to sister again the other day. Seems sister was somehow mistaken for Eileen and rudely held and treated by police until the mistake could be straightened out. It isn't easy these days to sort a mess like that and much new info came out. Eileen was doing very well, for a girl who had one of the worst proclivities to narcotics i've ever seen or heard of. She had a place, a car and her kids. She was steady on MMT and paying the bill with funds from her AFDC. Welfare, as they say, is no more and neither is Eileen. Her benefits were cut along with millions of others. She struggled to pay the clinic bill but it became impossible and she was dismissed, like so many others today. It was a death sentence.

Eileen had been allowed to 'slide' a bit on her bill, all of which now must be paid. She tryed to work but it just wasn't possible yet. She fell back to heroin use and that whole crowd - much more desperate characters than our old group. This was, after all, the '90's. She never could pull it all together, get enough money together at one time to both buy the street drugs she needed for the immediate moment and get her to the MMT clinic, for the car was long gone, with enough cash in hand to get her back in treatment. She was always close, but never made it. There was talk of serious crime. Details don't matter, but, to imagine tiny, little Eileen as this hunted criminal was just beyond belief. It now seems obvious that she went out in the way any desparate addict will. There was no way out. She reacted in the only way she could've reacted, if you understand these things. It was *they* who killed her with their reactionary 'welfare-reform' and their zero-tolerance, they who took the mother from those kids. Those kids are scattered now. We cannot adopt or foster them because we, too, are addicts. We would, gladly, take them in, but they are being, again, victimized by unfeeling, unknowing and uncaring people in charge.

I have in my mind now a picture of Eileen in the glorious years of adolescence. Wife and her are 18, I, a couple years older, and we are all laughing while 'Midnight Rambler' blares through the trees and we are amongst hundreds of friends, even those we have yet to meet. She was sweet, and she was smart, temperate in her use of drugs for the time. I never would've guessed she would be one to join the list - the list of those killed by human puritanical moral hypocrisy, the list we have all somehow managed to evade thus far.

We all have our own 'lists' of lost friends. We owe it to them not to become complacent. We have life where they have none and it is just through serendipity. Or is it Providence? No matter, reflecting on lost friends drives the lesson deep into the heart... we've gotta *do* something. We owe it to them. It is not enough to use this precious time of our only appearance on life's stage for merely avoiding unpleasantries; contenting ourselves with vicariously living courage through the exploits of movies and television.