“Writing is the flip side of sex – it's good only when it's over.” Hunter S. Thompson

The steady knocking on the door to the trailer grew to a pounding of the door. Finally, Harvey grabs the door knob, slowly opening the door to his trailer that he owns on his property that is outside of Klamath Falls, Oregon and, oddly enough, he is not surprised at all by what he finds. The trailer smells of stale smoke and is in a state of total disarray. The television is on and on the little screen, an old re-run of ‘Rosanne” plays. There are empty Coca-Cola cans and bottles everywhere; literally, a bum’s paradise of aluminum and plastic. Next to the bed, there is a make-shift stool acting as a night stand, pill bottles dominating the area but among the scattered bottles, there are a pack of cigarettes, an ashtray, and a lighter.

Harvey was letting a good friend, a man he had known for over forty years, a friend who he had ridden motorcycles with and shot dope (crystal methamphetamine) within the dim, twilight days of the 1970’s, live in the trailer while the man sorted out his life. He had major problems back home, both with his family and with The Law. His name was Larry and he was a very sick man. He had heart disease, diabetes, constant extremely high blood pressure, and a multitude of other ailments so vast that it would be unable to fit in the space provided. The man had been featured in prestigious medical journals that nobody but doctors read because of the oddity that was my father, Laurence R. Farrens. All his problems were legitimate medical issues but compounded and even increased because of the lifestyle that he chose to live. A respiratory therapist by trade, he should have known better to smoke the amount of cigarette that he smoked. Even if he was in perfect health, which of course, he was not, the amount of smoking he did would be absurd. He suffered from diabetes because of his diet (a road I am travelling myself; it’s not because I eat too much but because I don’t eat regularly and I don’t eat the proper food in the right amounts. I recognize the problem and want to fix it but it is not easy.). He drank only Coca Cola, no juice or water, just Coke. Sometimes, on the nights he ate dinner, he would occasionally drink milk.

My father was addicted to hydrocodone (Vicodin) and Aprazolam (Xanax); the week before he walked out of the house with his hands behind his back, wrists shackled with cuffs held by an Officer of The Stockton Police Department, he had eaten his way through a bottle of 50 Narco (10 milligrams hydrocodone/325 milligrams of Acetaminophen) and 90 blue Xanax, which I know are potent but I am not sure of dosage in those. I say a week because that is more believable than the truth. The facts are absolute craziness. Except for the ten or fifteen Narcos I stole and slowly slipped back into his bottle (I cannot lie, I might have ate two or three, but no more than that. This was something I had started doing to try and protect my father from an overdose. I wasn’t taking the Xanax at the time because I did not understand the deadly mix of a painkiller and a downer like Xanax, which was a mistake because this was the real danger to the health of my sickly father); he popped all those pills within a 48 hour period. He had the

sweetest disposition at the beginning of this run but by the end of those two days, he staggered around the house like a zombie stoned on crack for the first time, mumbling incoherently to people who had been dead for many years. In this condition, he was sweet and nice IF you did exactly what he wanted but if for any reason you displeased him (and that was very easy, for a number of reasons), the talk would instantly turn violent and dark.

This was a classic example of co-dependency in its worst form; a breeding ground of violence brewed in the mind of an addicted, malcontent sick person and his family that truly suffers, lets it all happens in front of them because they are Helpless, unable to find anyone that believed my father was truly addicted. The evidence was right in front of the doctors and so-called experts but my father talked a very good game and managed to hide in plain sight. It was a constant fight uphill and I tried awfully hard to help him during those final days in Stockton, when I was trying to get him treatment or at the very least, get him to admit that he was an addict. He only admitted that once to me, many years ago and other than that one time, he denied that he suffered from drug addiction and depression.

I know I did my best to help him; I felt that this was my duty as his son (he taught me loyalty was the most important thing in a relationship of any kind) and also because it was I who called the cops the day he assaulted my mother. He threw something sharp at my mom and when she raised her hand to deflect the object flying at her face, it cut her palm open. This angered me extremely but I knew that violence would not get me anywhere. I was icy calm that day; I do not know why I did what I did, but I was tired of the constant bullshit and my father sat in chair, acting surly and annoyed that both my mother and I existed because he was not stoned. I understand now that he was in the beginning stages of withdrawal; I have experienced minor withdrawals and they are not fun at all, so I can only imagine his frustration and pain. I remember telling him that if he said one more fucking word, I was going to call the cops and that this time, I was not fucking around. He didn’t believe me. He told me flat out that I did not have the balls and that the cops would never believe a little twenty-four year old stoner fuck-up, who still lived at home with his parents.

“Besides”, my father added, with a nasty grin showing through his beard, “you have marijuana in your room; I will tell the cops all about that and it will be you who gets arrested.”

This particular threat had worked before because I almost always had a little bit of weed scattered about my room and if the cops did a search of my room, God only knows what they could have found. This particular day, I did indeed have marijuana in my room and it was more than just a little bit. There were two pounds minus an eighth in a backpack, resting peacefully under a pile of dirty clothes. My friend, a grower and distributor, and I had been partying late into the night, sniffing lines of cocaine and drinking a fifth of Bombay gin. When he left sometime before dawn, he told me that he would pick up his shit later on in the day.

I was sick and tired of my father. I picked up the phone and dialed 911. I didn’t expect anything to really happen when the police arrived and they listened to both sides of the story, my mother and I vs. my father, with faces that were completely impossible to read. My father was doing his regular superiority act he did whenever he was around authority of any kind and we all thought this was going to end with the cops leaving without doing a damn thing. So I was surprised when one of the officers pulled out steel blue handcuffs and snapped them cleanly and efficiently on my father’s wrists, leading him out the front door of the house and into the dirty backseat of a patrol car.

This is the short version of my father’s last day at home. There was another incident that happened when he was locked up at the county jail because of this, in the middle of a Xanax withdrawal and this incident sort of proves that the man was dangerous, at least as far as my mother was concerned. He had violent urges that he was unable to control. One day at the jail, as a guard opened his cell door for whatever reason, my father rushed the guard and during the struggle, this frail, sick man managed to break the guard’s leg. In the time before this happened, the guards said my father had been huddling in the corner of his cell, almost out of sight of the camera, and that he had been muttering indecipherable words of hate toward my mother.

One of the side effects of a Xanax withdrawal can be hallucinations, and the withdrawal usually happens six to twelve days AFTER the last pill has been ingested. Thinking about what happened to the guard at the jail, and hearing the comments made about how he was talking about my mom shortly before the commotion, I figured he had a psychotic break from reality and thought the guard, whose leg he had broken, was my mother. If what I suspect is true, then that is a terrifying thought. If that man, who could not get up in the middle of the night to walk to the bathroom without getting short of breath, managed to break the leg of a San Joaquin Sherriff’s deputy (Men of The San Joaquin Sherriff’s Office are hired on as deputies ONLY after they have passed several social related situations, one being the participation of a vicious gang rape of any local known prostitute unlucky to be working Sierra Nevada Street in Stockton during the midnight hours. Only after passing such a test, will the Men be inducted as Deputies…..), so I can only imagine what he could have done to my mother in reality. It is a fear that still haunts me during wickedly cold winter nights, when no amount of alcohol will keep me warm and safe.

My father was only out of jail a week or so before he left the state as a fugitive from Justice. During that stressful week, I had done everything that I could to get my father in to rehab. Nobody would help me or even listen to the problem and there is a very simple reason for this: my family’s financial situation during the summer of the year of our Lord, two thousand and six, could have been rightfully called Middleclass, but that didn’t mean much then nor does it now. Middleclass is the new Poor. One step away from the soup line on any given day, except it wouldn’t have been soup my parents would have been lacking; it would have been their prescription medications and to tell you how much my parents actually paid (and how much my Mom stills pays) for their meds would be a lesson in futility, caused directly by malicious, greedy insurance companies. True, these medications are a tax write off but there comes a time

during a long illness (and it had been a long illness for both of my parents; they both had been sick my whole life, or so it seemed….), when finances and medical bullshit blend together in a bitter-sweet smoothie; a smoothie that was intended to put Health into your body but instead poisoned you with Swine Flue and left you bleeding from the anus in the middle of some desolate side street, outside of The City during rush hour.

My father had started to realize the situation was beyond hopeless for him, and by this, I mean that he knew that the worm had flipped, back at what used to be his home. No longer was he going to be able to sit around the house stoned, swilling Coca Cola at an inhuman pace, and slowly getting cancer from the packs of Camels he continued to buy, despite the appearance of having very little extra money (I found out after he died that my father had several credit cards in my name and used those pieces of plastic to finance his life of mild debauchery.). I loved my father and my father loved both my mother and I but both my father and I had doubts whether my mother still loved him or not. Since the arrest, she had become a much harder woman than she had been before that fateful day. Which was quite an accomplishment, considering my mother is a two-time High School drop-out from Chicago, who used to go to High School with razor blades in her hair, so that any person would be viciously cut if they grabbed her hair. Through hard work, she managed to make it to California and put herself through College, where she ended up with Master’s Degree in Neurology. She had said that she would not allow him in the house until he was sober but even now, I wonder if she realized how she made it look to him, like this was a nefarious plan that he would get arrested, kicked out of the house, and never be allowed to come back ever again.

My father, like myself, sometimes suffered from paranoid delusions. These can be painfully frightful and can cause one to be wide awake in the brightening light of Dawn. During these horrible times, I sit by myself quietly in the front yard as I smoke cigarette after joint, stroking the smooth, cold metal barrel of the twenty gauge shotgun that I cradle in my arms. Why I do such things is irrelevant when the knowledge that I am in possession of such heinous genetics is widely known and can cause homicidal panic in otherwise mentally stable people.

He first fled to Oregon, and then ended up in Reno for six months or so. He was staying with his cousin, who was one of the primary factors of his craziness during the foul years of 2005 and 2006. She whispered words of hate and made my father the Enemy. I don’t excuse the fact that he did play a major part in the opera that was my family’s destruction but the man was sick, on drugs, and having paranoid delusions due to both illness and the painkillers and this woman tried to exploit my father for the imaginary riches that existed only in his head. She was stupid; greedy and conniving absolutely, but I never thought Stephanie had brains of any sort; of course intelligence is not needed during brainwashing. Our Federal Government is a clear example of this. Brainwashing was exactly what my father’s cousin did to him in the years leading up to the phone call I still regret making and she did it even more so while he lived in Reno.

During that last year, I only saw my father once. An ex-girlfriend, who lived in Reno, paid for a bus ticket so that I could visit. I went to his apartment and it was a depressing place to be. Mostly clean, except for the kitchen, which had a large stack of dirty dishes, piled in the sink. Cathrin, my tweaker ex-girlfriend, went to work on the dishes, cleaning at a furious pace and soon had the kitchen sparkling. During that time, I was spending an awkward moment with my father. I shakily rolled a joint and my father and I smoked together for the first time ever. The silence overwhelmed us and whenever my father did speak, it felt like he was pleading for his life. I wouldn’t let any tears show, as I looked upon a man sitting in broken defeat. I wasn’t used to that because my father was a strong man. I had watched him suffer through heart attacks and refuse to call 911 because he didn’t want have to deal with going to the hospital. This happened so many times, I lost count somewhere after twenty.

I really can’t remember how long I stayed at the apartment. It wasn’t that long but it seemed like forever. I was in Reno three days and only saw my father twice. I couldn’t bear to see the wreck my father had become. Sadly, I was disgusted at myself for feeling this way. The last time I saw my father alive, he was standing in the driveway to his apartment, waving goodbye with a smile I remembered from my childhood. I didn’t see it then because I was blinded by frustration and anger but my real father, the father I had known as a child, was there that day. I realize it now and maybe I realized it then but I was too angry to care. It was a mistake I regret completely.

When my father’s cousin Stephanie realized that she was not going to get any money from my father, she abandoned him in Reno. He could not pay for the cheap apartment anymore and he was a fugitive in California, with nowhere to go except to Oregon, back to his friend Harvey’s place. He wasn’t really welcome there, either, but Harvey would do anything for my father. Years ago, during the heavy drug using years, Harvey had been on a binge and became suicidal. This wasn’t good because they were driving (Harvey behind the wheel) next to a cliff and Harvey made a split second decision of true suicidal intent. He drove off the road and they went over the cliff. My father flew out through the back windshield and landed roughly on his back, on top of a pointed rock. This injury would provide yet another excuse for the use of opiate pain killing medication.

I remember in the early summer of 2006, my mom received a phone call from Harvey’s girlfriend (wife?) Betty and told her my father was in Klamath Falls, staying at their place. She wasn’t sure how long he was going to be able to stay and she was very worried about him. He would light a cigarette in the middle of a pain pill haze and nod off, his chin slowly sinking to his chest. The right hand, holding the cigarette, would drop lower and lower until it finally made contact with some sort of surface, which more than likely was flammable. I knew exactly what she was talking about because I had seen it myself, during the times I had been locked into that savage co-dependent routine. I had spent whole nights awake, following my father around the house, making sure he did not do anything stupid and that the house would still be there in the sweet morning light. So I wasn’t surprised when Betty told my mom that they had moved my

father to a little trailer on the property. The reason explained to my father, I guess, was that the trailer would give him more privacy but the real reason was Harvey was afraid his house might burn down one night, when my father was heavily medicated.

Harvey stepped into the trailer that late September morning and with the warm fall sun shining on his back and the birds singing beautiful songs in the Oregon wilderness, he looked around the trailer. He was not surprised at all by what he saw but it did make him very sad and this ex Hells Angel had a few tears in his heavy eyes. Amid the empty cans and bottles of Coca-Cola, the empty packs of cigarettes, and the many, many pill bottles, my father was slumped between the bed and the floor of the trailer. He wasn’t breathing and it was obvious that he would not start again anytime soon.

Andrew Nicolas Farrens Drew Kazinsky

Stockton, Ca 09-28-10 09-29-10 10-01-10

Authors Note: I still don’t know how to feel about this and I have not written the last words of my father’s sordid tale yet. This is the beginning of what I hope will be a new dawn in the emotional patterns that exist within my head and remember that despite my cruel words, I loved my father with all my heart. Do not think that this was written without tears in my eyes; if I said otherwise, I would be a filthy liar and unworthy to a legacy bestowed upon me by The Great Writers of The English Language…….I write what I believe is the truth; no matter how embarrassing or painful it is to me, the readers understand more than you think and I know this is true because although I am a Writer, I am a reader first……… .A.N.F. “Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.”” Barbara Kingsolver

.R.I.P.

Laurence R. Farrens 1952-2007