The Needle

By John David Morgan

It’s 3:00 am, and I can’t sleep. Again.

I’m sitting at my desk in my home office. It is a room I find myself occupying often, now that I am retired, and no longer have an office outside my home to go to. There is a pencil holder on my desk, a gift from my wife. It is six inches wide and five inches tall. Etched into the side of the holder facing me are four small books without titles: one red, one blue, one green, and the last one brown. There and no pencils in my pencil holder, but there are several ink pens. Pens from hotels I stayed at while traveling for business, after I left the military. Pens from restaurants, which I forgot to return to a whole host of friendly young waitresses, “servers” I believe they are called now. Pens from insurance agents, banks, doctor’s offices, you name it.

And there is a needle.

There is a needle in my pencil holder. Because I’m old, I call this thing a needle, but it’s not a needle; it’s technically a syringe. And to be even more precise, it’s a syringe without a needle. I found this needle in my son’s bedroom. In my house. After I had told him not three weeks ago, that if he ever shot heroin in my house again, he would be Gone. Out. Homeless.

And that’s what he is now. Gone. Out. And homeless.

Because I’m old, I’ll continue calling the thing a needle. This needle is unlike a syringe that you would see in a doctor’s office. Those healing tools have black lines encircling them. Those lines are orderly, evenly-spaced, and both comforting and complimentary to the syringe’s cylindrical body. Each syringe, depending on its length and circumference, has a unique dosage marking: 1ml to say, 3ml or 5ml for the short skinny ones. 10ml to 50ml or more for the longer, bigger-around, heavy-duty hypodermics. They have writing on them. “Sterile Single Use.” They know what they are. They know what they’re for. It is all very professional.

The needle in my pencil holder is four and-a-half inches long. It’s an obviously cheap thing. There are no markings to show the ml’s. There are no words on this tool. This is not a tool for healing.

The needle seems like a toy, compared to a real syringe. Every syringe in a doctor’s offices has an orange cap on the plunger, and another orange cap covering the business end, the actual needle.

By federal law, all toy guns in the United States must have an orange tip. A toy gun without an orange tip may be presumed deadly. Remove the orange cap from the toy-like syringe, and it becomes deadly. Although not deadly in the case of the specific needle in my pencil holder.

My son has lost a dozen friends to needles just like the one on my desk. And how many total deaths in the country from these weapons of mass destruction?

I really don’t want to know.

I can’t remember how many needles I found in the past. My son and needles were like Lucy and the football. And I was the foolish, idiotic, simpleton Charlie Brown; believing every time, that this time would be different. It was always the same. He relapsed. It was never going to be different. My son has been to rehab and jail more times than I can count. He nearly died with a blood infection. He overdosed and did die once, but was brought back with Narcan. He had most recently started a methadone program. But still he relapsed.

Where is the line between supporting and enabling?

I have no idea. But now he is gone. Out. And homeless.

I will call this thing on my desk the last needle. Because it is the last needle I will ever find in my house.

I hope that this is my son’s last needle. I hope he recovers, and lives a long life. I hope we can someday have a normal father-son relationship. But hope is not a strategy. The more likely scenario, is that my son’s last needle, like so many other addicts, will be the needle that takes his life. Will that happen next week; next month; next year? Longer? Never?

Once again, I have no idea. Because I am old.

And I can’t help but wonder.

Will my son even live to be old?

****

John David Morgan is an Army Veteran, and thanks to the G.I. Bill, a first-generation college graduate with an accounting degree from Bellarmine College in Louisville and an MBA from Vanderbilt University. He retired from the business world in early 2022.

He and his wife Kay live in Pewee Valley, Kentucky. They have two children, James, who is a recovering heroin addict, and Jennifer, who is training to be an Occupational Therapy Doctor.