I keep having this dream, not every night, not every month, but consistently enough. It’s always the same. It starts in the driveway of my childhood home which was a short dead end street that pulled off parallel to the public park. There were only three houses and ours was the last. Our driveways directly next to the side of the park's basketball court, as kids it felt like we had the whole thing to ourselves. My brother was five years older than me, he’d get home from school an hour earlier, by the time I got off the bus he would come outside and we would shoot baskets for hours and skate on the concrete. After a while we’d take a break and go inside and watch MTV.
In the dream I'm standing in the driveway with my brother, the cars are parked at the dead end of the driveway facing the train tracks. Our house had a yard, in addition to the park on the other side, we had a back deck that lead out to it from the living room and there was a big fence from the town that blocked our yard from the train tracks, the rocks for the tracks were immediately off our property, trains would pull up within mere feet of our yard. My step dad built a smaller fence on both sides of our property, using the high fence in the back as a starting point. The whole yard looks like a little fenced in square, it was perfect for our dogs. We had a back shed that everyone on the train passing through could see, so over time my brother and I stole street and train signs and hung them up on full display. If you were on the train you could see right out your window a mix of town, road and transportation agency signs all collaged together. I’m not sure why no one from the town or the transportation department ever came to get their signs back, we were very prominently displaying our collection of stolen public works signs.
Growing up next to the trains made it incredibly natural for us to get into graffiti, especially for my brother. We would go to the freight yard and write and paint all over the train cars. So many times we ran right outside when we heard freight trains coming, trying to see if one of the cars we tagged would go by. My brother used the tag “BIZ” and threw it up anywhere he could. He was even able to get it on the tower of the largest mill in the city. I remember just sitting there, watching the full length of the trains go by, eagerly waiting for our tags to ride past our house. You have no idea, the excitement he got whenever one of the cars he hit would pass by, overtime it got to the point where we’d notice some of the tags being from several years before. He’d say:
“Oh shit that’s an old one, my tag sucked back then” Which we both knew was besides the point for him, what he really cared about was writing “BIZ” anywhere and everywhere for people to see.
We spent a lot of time in the driveway, even as we grew up. We’d go out there for cigarettes, usually spend most of our day lounging around the house and hanging out with the dogs outside. So in the dream it’s a very natural setting for me. It’s just my older brother and I, hanging out, talking shit in the driveway, something I always do. I can’t remember what we were talking about at first, but then my brother says to me in his typical enthusiastic way:
“Yo dude I got shot.”
I look at him and say “no you didn't”
My response was basically instinctual disbelief, just one of the typical argumentative non arguments we’d always have. Yet I think to myself: “what the fuck? I don’t think that's right.”
He says to me again:
“Dude, I got shot”
This doesn’t seem bizarre to me at the moment, for whatever reason. Oddly enough it’s not entirely that I don’t believe him, it's that I think he’s confused about something and I just haven’t yet figured out what.
A lot of our time spent in the driveway like this, had been in between going and coming back to get heroin, multiple times a day. We would go to work at 4:30 AM, go to a job site and be out by 1:30pm, then we’d head right into North Lawrence to get some bags, usually around then we’d start to get sick. Oddly enough we maintained our jobs for the most part, the early schedule definitely made it easier. We’d run out for 30 minutes and come right back, every time we went we would meet up with other people. For the most part heroin isn't a social drug, but in my brother's case it was. Everyone we knew who used would need to go and Alex would make sure he was the one to bring them, usually by holding out on who we got shit from and forcing them to use him as a middle. I could care less about doing any of that, but I went along because spending time with him was all I cared about.
A lot of the people that would ask my brother to pick up with them had a weird vibe towards me. He was very well liked, but didn’t reality give a lot of people the time of day, we would hop in their car, head out and get them their shit, he’d take his bag from them as a tax and then we’d leave to go actually chill, it was apparent people wanted to hang out with him beyond just picking up, but outside our close group we didn’t really do that much.
When we weren’t hanging out in the driveway or picking up we’d watch something on TV or go out to get something to eat. Even when we were staying up at our beach house, we’d go back and forth from the same spot once a day, get it in the morning then hang out on the beach.
There’s a lot of good memories of us sleeping in our childhood room and watching movies until we fell asleep. One of the perks about having your brother as your best friend is how normal it is to basically have sleep overs while you’re grown up. Or that you can continue to go to the places and do the things you did as kids. It was just natural that the two of us did everything together, we basically came as a package wherever we went.
I often think about the times in the summer that we’d drive out to Plum Island and just sit on the beach for hours in the late summer afternoon. We’d just sit and talk for hours looking out at the ocean, then head in for snacks and movies...
It really was special.
The biggest difference between us (other than the height, he was 6’4 250lbs to my 5’10 170) was that he couldn’t wait to do a shot. Every time we went to pick up, he had to do it right away, regardless of whether he was driving or not. I wasn’t comfortable doing that, I was scared of getting caught, I wouldn’t even carry a needle, because if we got pulled over (which happened all the time) I could swallow the bags and walk free of charge. I'd literally make Alex promise not to bring a needle, and he'd just lie and say “I'm not” only to pull one out immediately as we’re driving away with our bags. One of these instances, I remember all too well, It was the time I fully realized that our time together was going to be short.
After we picked up I was in the passenger seat and he was in the back of this kids car, he mixed his shot in a water bottle cap and hit right away. As we were leaving the city limits I noticed he hadn’t been talking, I looked back and my brother was out cold. His lips were vividly midnight blue, his eyes fully rolled back, his neck couldn’t hold his head up and his body was limp, awkwardly held up by the back of the car seat, there were slight movements of his body, moving as a ragdoll with the bumps and turns of the car.
I jumped in the back seat and yelled at the driver to turn around, the hospital was only a 5 minute drive back in the direction we came from. My brother had cooked the heroin in the plastic bottle cap, it was on the seat next to him with the needle still in his hand. His face was completely blue, the adrenaline and fear felt like I was experiencing the collapsing of my whole world, he was utterly lifeles, no breath whatsoever, I went to check his pulse, again nothing, the whole time I’m yelling:
“ALEX ALEX WAKE THE FUCK UP”
The kid driving keeps asking me what to do with the dope,
“Hand me the bags dude, you take him in and I’ll hold on to them”
His only concern whatsoever was making sure he still had his dope for the night.
I told him to shut the fuck up and just drive right to the front of the ER, I was doing CPR to the best of my ability, however I was the only person in my high school to graduate without CPR certification due to my fucking around on that day.
Once we got to the hospital the kid driving started circling passed it, telling me to just give him the bags of dope, I unrolled the window and hurled them out.
“THERE, I FUCKING THREW THEM OUT DRIVE UP TO THE FRONT”
Then I noticed the water bottle Alex had used to shoot up, it was basically full. In between CPR and tears going down my face I took the water and poured it out on him, just hoping it’d spark him awake. But it didn’t.
I put my head up to his chest to try and hear if his heart was beating, and it wasn’t.
I pour more water on him and keep doing compressions on his chest, and all of a sudden:
He starts coughing.
Holy shit, he's breathing.
We pull into an industrial lot by the hospital, Alex starts looking around extremely confused. He doesn’t ask me what I’m doing in the back seat, nor does he notice that he’s covered in water. I open the door and ask him if he can stand up, he still hasn’t said anything. He procedurally got himself to slide off his seat and stood right up. I don’t know what was happening within his head at that moment, but I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t aware of anything that had just happened. It took awhile of him just looking around, recouping his faculties, basically like having a system reboot but for a person.
“Are you ok? We gotta bring you to the hospital dude.”
He looked around then right at me and said:
“No no i'm good man no worries”
“No worries? Dude you just went out”
“I Did?”
“Yeah I was just doing CPR on you”
The kid that was driving had pulled away, he went to try and find the bags I threw out onto the highway, I didn’t even give a shit, didn't want to be around him anyway.
We started walking, up towards the hospital, he seemed ok, I called a cab to head home. While we were waiting for the cab he took out his phone and asked me:
“Where are we going to pick up?”
I looked over to him and said,
“What do you mean?”
“Where are we picking up, we still gotta go pick up dude”
“We already picked up dude, we’re going home.”
“No we didn’t dude, we just got here!”
“Alex, we picked up in South Law, you shot up right away and went out”
“ No I didn’t dude”
“Yes you did, I jumped in the back and you were totally out, I had to revive you.”
“No way dude I haven’t even done any today”
“Yes dude, you did, why do you think you’re soaking wet? Alex, you overdosed.”
He looked down at his clothes and his pants, thought for a minuet reassessing the situation, then he just simply said:
“Oh”
And so we went home. He explained it away to himself that the real cause was from trying to cook the shot in the plastic cap and it wasn’t actually the dope itself that put him out, we both knew that wasn’t true, you’d think just one situation like that would make you stop there and then, but it didn’t, and situations like that happened too many times to count.
Like I said before, my brother is my best friend. Having someone that's been through what you’ve been through, that doesn’t make judgements even when they're mad at you, that fully understands why you do the things you do even when you don’t understand them yourself. Talking and watching movies every night. Watching the Patriots on Sundays, going on ATV and fishing trips. Spending every day at the beach for week after week in the summer,
We’d have barbecues almost every day when the weather was nice, and when it wasn’t we’d order in food or go out.
Long winters were great, he would work a plow on the side and when we had especially brutal blizzards he’d spend all his cash on a trip to a casino or a resort.
He and I even took a two week trip to Puerto Rico, at an incredible Marriott Resort. In America we drove around in a shitty Plymouth and Jetta, in Puerto Rico we had a shitty Yaris to explore and drive into the rain forest.
We went scuba diving, swam in tropical waterfalls, smoked weed in cabanas by the pool, climbed coconut trees, and watched iguanas swim. Why weren’t we just happy?
“Dude I got shot” he says again in the driveway.
“Nah dude you didn’t” I say back to him.
We start walking away from the cars and towards the front steps, he hops up to the top of the stairs, holds the railing and looks back down to me:
“I'm telling you, yes dude, I got shot.”
I start thinking about it more and more, then before fully realizing it, I start to remember something, and I reflexively tell him:
“No, You didn’t get shot? you...you died of an overdose.”
It was as I was saying it that everything had come back to me. The drives to pick up, the needles, the sickness. All the time spent picking up heroin. It was just what we did, we were addicts. So much of our adult relationship was intertwined within the throws of addiction; all of it actually.
After it happened once, it happened again and again, each time he’d seemingly go out easier and easier.
While I was terrified, he never appeared scared. It became inherently clear to me that I would not always have my big brother. We would always talk about getting clean, and we actually did. I was the first to do it, I got myself arrested and had stopped, Alex was fully there for the support. We still spent a lot of time together when I was clean, he’d go out of his way to try and protect my sobriety, even though he was continuing to use. I remember him getting incredibly angry with other people that were around me.
After a certain point, it felt moot to stay sober, at that time, it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, I wanted to be with Alex getting up to everything we got up too, and sadly it still involved heroin.
Only another year goes by, and there became a turning point, where he had fully cleaned up, but I was stuck, unwilling to be helped.
In order to get clean he moved away, it wasn’t too far but it wasn’t easy getting together anymore, especially with my continued habit. I would stop by about twice a week, but we were no longer hanging out at our childhood house. We still worked together, went to the job sites every day, but he would go back to his sober house, and I would head out to pick up.
He was going out with friends, trying to keep me away from the people I was around, constantly telling me how they were shitty people, and he wasn’t wrong, I didn’t want to be with them, I wanted to do what he was doing, but I couldn’t shake my habit yet.
We both have Summer birthdays, his at the start of July mine the end of August, he had turned 27 that summer. My 23rd birthday was approaching, and due to my habit we weren’t continuing to make as many memories as we used to. I still had a great time with him, but I was ashamed and pushed him away. 5 days before my 23rd birthday, Alex had a barbeque with some old friends, he was 6 months clean, he never returned to the sober house, and was found dead in our childhood room. Our last conversation was him telling me to spend more time with him, that I needed to get away from shitty people, I didn’t engage much in the conversation, he called me on my bullshit. I didn’t know it would be my last chance to tell him I love him.
“You died of an overdose”
Looking up from the bottom of the steps I see Alex taking in what I just said, the energy has changed completely, continuous momentum of the situation has halted, everything has come back to me, and I now know I’m in a dream, speaking to my dead brother.
Alex has a seemingly disappointed look on his face, he simply says:
“Oh”
He turns back and opens the front door, as I stand there overwhelmed and still. As the door closes behind him, I wake up.
It happens the same every time, I’m never able to catch it beforehand. The truth is, even if I am able to one day catch it, I don’t know what else I'd even say. I wish I could spend that time with him in the dream in a different way, but it’s been five years now since he died, and everytime I have the dream I'm just happy that I saw him, because if it weren’t for the dream I don’t know if I would still remember what it was like to be with him.
End
-Brett Colby