He grasped my shoulder as he made his way down his front steps. He is usually in a wheelchair, but he wanted to walk outside on his own two feet. “I was once shot five times,” he told me as he pulled up his shirt to show me the scars.
We continued to talk and he continued to share stories about his past. “I was a heroin addict, but have been clean for a long time,” he said while rolling up his sleeves, “I have HIV from shooting up in the past.”
He said that he was once ashamed of the fact that he has HIV, but now he does not mind sharing what was once painful because now it is simply a part of life that he has lived with since 1994.
I later realized that he served our country in combat while in the U.S. Army. I was standing before an aging Vietnam Veteran who shares a small apartment with several others. He came home from the foreign land with images that were likely unshakable which may have contributed to his past battle on U.S. soil with alcohol and Heroin. But, that battle is mostly behind him. Today, he battles balance, sight and age.
Pax Prentiss who opened Passages, a rehab center in Malibu, once wrote in the The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure, “Heroin was a coping mechanism that I had used to deal with my underlying fears. They were the real problems; heroin wasn't the culprit, my fears were.”
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