It’s an ominous feeling, looking back at a whole existence of a late loved one, I constantly feel like what’s left of my friends and family who’ve died, always accompanies my perspective. I have a lot of guilt, and a lot of resentment at my friends and family, everything all my friends died from, I did more. I was the worst of all of us. I was the Youngest by 5-15 years. I started at 15 while they were 20.
At this point in my life, even though I was younger and looked up to my friends and brother, I have now seen more of life, lived longer on this Earth then everyone of them, Including my mother.
To tell you the truth, It really fucking bothers me, I can see them in my dreams every now and then, same as it was before. I wake up and I’m grateful to that lingering impression of them upon my existence, It gives me hope that all this is fluid.
And I think about it,
Who will be left to see them in their dreams when I’m gone, and who’ll be left with me when I die.
Johnny was the first to do that to me.
He wasn’t my first to die, but the experience was the most brutal.
After years and years of this, it all just layers, builds on top, nothing actually heals, it just carries over.
The only way I can write these is to go one by one, experience by experience, in no distinct order, and maybe across the entries eventually the whole story can be put together.
Johnny had a really distinctive presence and influence on people.
He was incredibly talented, had a live touring production career in EDM, carried us all along the way with him playing shows and festivals around the country, I skipped high school to go to these shows and festivals and branched into my own opportunities.
Johnny and I related the most together because we both had a lot going on really young, but our destructive tendencies swallowed everything.
I don’t know exactly when Johnny came back to Lawrence, I had been breaking down from a lot of coke overdoses in 2013 and went out to Florida to sweat it out. Around March 2013 Spring Break, I worked ULTRA and the whole month around south Florida.
By about mid April I decided to book a flight to come back to Massachusetts and stay in our home town for the first time since i was 17. I had been touring and had several nice houses on beaches and lakes around the East Coast, but in Feburary 2012 I was such a mess with Ketamine, Coke, Dilaudid that I accidently blew up the pipes at my last house, which led me to drive to Florida from Vermont.
When I got back to Lawrence, I was clean and a bit more clear headed.
The friend I had pick me up at the Airport instantly pulled out a CD case with a bunch of Heroin on it and I did a bunch of rails, and after that It was a leap into the worst.
This kid that picked me up asked if I knew “Biz”, to which I was like ah fuck, and I said “Yeah, he’s my older brother”
he said that’s who he picked up with earlier.
So I get back to our childhood house where he’s staying and it was great. I had so much usury around me the passed years, so many fake friends that only cared about what I could get, and how I could live. I was incredibly paranoid and distrusting of everyone around me.
Johnny was my brothers best friend, and I knew him my whole life.
It was extremely comforting to be back with family. Johnny and Biz didn’t give a fuck about anything I did, It helped me ground from all the psychedelics and coke.
But we were doing heroin.
When your life is so chaotic, heroin is purchased stability. It’s always there, it’s routine, on an earth that’s always spinning, a shot of heroin is perfectly still.
And then you mix it with a shot of coke, and it’s that stillness with a warmth within your heart.
When you shoot cocaine, you get that warm still rush, and a numbness on your tongue.
But you know there are consequences. Your body recognizes it, but there’s something stopping you’re inhibition to the danger.
A good way to describe it, That Childhood fear of needles that everyone has, that goes away and stays away real quick after you shoot coke.
For all my drug use, Speedballs were the most dangerous by far. My brother actually didn’t like shooting coke, he did love coke, but he just shot dope. In a lot of ways, this is another area that Johnny and I were the same.
Biz was a character, he was chaotic and charismatic, a very imposing figure. He literally could get away with anything. Even though he’s my brother, he was 6’5 250lbs, I was 19-22 at the time and was 5’11 150….
I think its easier to be a degenerate addict when your outwardly approachable and socially charming.
Johnny had a lot of fucking integrity. He held friendships to a higher standard, that’s often left behind in the wake of addiction.
One of our other childhood friends that Biz and I still saw everyday, who grew up with all of us, Johnny had cut him out of his life completely for stealing from him while they were roommates. Our Friend maintained that someone else did it but it didn’t matter. It was unforgivable, Johnny knew if you didn’t give enough of a fuck about him, you weren’t worth his effort, and that’s because he actually gives a shit about who he’s with.
It’s really hard to write about him like this and remember these things, Time spent with Johnny is so special to me because of things like that.
A year or so goes by, we’re doing our thing together, all working mornings 5am-2pm.
We had some good years, a lot of good times and laughs. We’d get out of work, pick up, go to the beach, drive ATVs, these two brought me to my first legal drink at 21 (I was under 21 doing all this)
Around then I did a hit and run in my car, crashed into a parked next door to my place, she saw me, I flipped her off, pulled in my driveway, the police came and were like “What the fuck Brett?”
So they took my license and made me go to rehab. The cops for the most part were good to me, it was only the outside agencies that fucked me over. These cops knew me, saw how I grew up, they always helped instead fucking me over.
So Johnny and Alex become incredibly grateful that I’m clean, even though they both are still using, they decided to make sure no one used around me and shit, which was nice and all, I was really grateful that nothing changed, that they were my family still even though I wasn’t participating in getting them high in anyway. That was good, it’s a nice thought.
It lasted about 5 months from September-February when I dropped out of all my programs and started shooting up again, pretty much for no reason.
They definitely were disappointed, but didn’t judge.
Johnny still went out of his way to drive me to work and stuff, and we would meet up every night and cruise around Boston, he was such a relaxed guy, could just talk and 6 hours would go by. We would pull up to the beach or the river at night, over look the city.
Even today, when I look at the time and its around 8 pm, I can go back to that place and be like, “Johnny’s out of work”
And I like to think that he’d call and be like “yo come out” and Ill go out and see his car.
By February, Biz, Johnny and I all moved into this 5 Bedroom town house with these 2 girls. It was a nice fucking place, we each had our own room and shit, It was great. For a little bit things were pretty fucking good. I wish we could've done things different.
One night the three of us are watching “the hobbit” on HBO in our living room, just chilling, it was a bit cold out, late February, but nice. Biz and I get up to smoke a cigarette off our upper deck, we lived on the top floor of a huge multifamily building. Johnny didn’t come out with us to smoke.
After like a couple minuets smoking on the balcony, all of a sudden red and blue lights light up the street and race towards our house, I look down and Johnny is on the front porch, foaming at the mouth.
Biz and I jumped over the balcony down a level and climbed down the fire escape, Johnny’s eyes were rolled back, his mouth was dripping foam, the door was pushed open.
He had done a speedball by himself in the couple minuets we were smoking outside with the movie paused.
The EMT’s take him to the hospital, and are able to save his life.
We get to the hospital, and stable, we’re like shit thank god.
They say he has to stay a bit, like two days, he didn’t want to but he did.
The next morning I wake up at 4:30 am to go to work and I see Johnny’s car in the driveway from the night before, I worked a different job site then my brother that morning, and when I got home at 2pm Johnny’s car is gone from the driveway and Biz isn’t home. I call him and am like “Did you take Johnny’s car?”
He says yeah he’ll be back later.
Next day comes and same thing, but Johnny calls me from the hospital around 2:30pm. he said “Yo I’m leaving the hospital today and I haven’t told my work, I have a shift at 5PM, can you get Biz to pick me up”
So now I call Biz and he’s not answering.
I call Johnny back and say, Biz isn’t around and that hes driving Johnny’s car, Johnny gets wicked fucking mad.
He takes a taxi home and now has like an hour to get ready for work and no car to drive there. Thankfully one of the girls we were living with comes home and she let Johnny use her car, before he left, Johnny took a piece of paper and wrote a note and posted it on Biz’s door, it said:
“Fuck you, I will never forgive you for this, I’m never talking to you again, you can’t just take my car and fuck off”
Biz got home around 6, he had gotten the calls and texts but was waiting for Johnny to be gone to get home and deal with it. When he saw the note, he was like “Ah fuck I can fix it”
I said I didn’t think so, Johnny’s wicked fucking pissed, he said that to *redacted* and now its been 4 years and he still doesn’t fuck with him.
“He’ll get over it”
The next week shit was tense, I had to spend time with each of them separately, Biz would walk in and Johnny would just get up and leave.
We weren’t all chilling, we weren’t going to places together, we weren’t watching TV together. He fully cut him off.
This goes on for about two weeks, when one night Biz and I are out tagging in Lawrence and I get a call from the hospital…
Johnny was in the ICU.
We race there, Johnny had come home, Shot a speedball and started to go out again, this time instead of calling the Ambulance like the week before he got into his car to drive himself while Overdosing.
A Coke and Heroin OD is much different then just heroin, I’ve experience it many times, It’s a numb crawl to a stab in the heart. With just dope you nod out and drift away, when cokes mixed in, your aware and in pain, gasping like a fish out of water.
Johnny managed to get to within a quarter mile to the hospital, where his car went off the road and he crashed head on into a guard rail.
By the time he was admitted, his brain hadn’t received oxygen for 20 minuets. He was in a comma breathing through a Machine.
For a week my brother and I spent every day there watching over him, and it couldn’t continue.
His mother came in from down south and agreed to pull him from life support.
My brother was a really strong guy, as an adult I had never seen him cry till then. He was weeping the entire time.
As we watched the machine turn off, I saw his last heart beat recorded on the monitor then go flat, the oxygen mask around his face filled with a gasp, and he was gone.
The doctor printed out a piece of paper with his last heart beats charted and put them in a little glass vial for all of us. Which we used for a tattoo.
At the funeral, Biz was inconsolable. Even though he was my big brother, and made me feel like I could get away with anything, I was the one holding everything together.
There was such a shift from then on.
I don’t know if Johnny took his car that day because Biz took it the last time, Biz and I never talked about it. By this point I was 21 and Biz 25.
Johnny Died at 25.
as two years passed my brother would later join him at the age of 27.
About a month or two after Johnny died, I had a dream where we were driving around, I turned to him and said, “What’s it like?”
he said “I’m alright, it’s not too bad”
Miss you Johnny.