A Guy Whose Name Is Not Johnny
Empathy and substance abuse and community.
Johnny's not too keen about me writing about him and not using his real name.
He thinks that it’s necessary, though. He doesn’t want to go to jail. He’s been through a lot in his 40-plus years, and jail is not something he wants to add to his list of “been theres” and “done thats.” He’s figures his life will take a dramatic turn for the worse if he has to head out to the Hancock County Jail in the back of a police cruiser.
That’s how Johnny sees it. Although, for most people, Johnny’s life isn’t going to great as it is.
He’s addicted to drugs.
During his calm moments, he’ll admit that he smokes pot and pops pills and does it too often to be anything but addicted. His calm moments are rare, though. He’ll admit that, too.
“I’m a real live wire,” he says.
Decades ago, he smoked pot. That’s how it started for him, he thinks.
“Pot’s nothing,” he tells me, waving his hand through the smoke as we sit in his Ellsworth, Maine apartment. “That’s child’s play, sweetheart.”
Johnny's drug habits have progressed since he’s managed to get through his teenage years.
Once, while I talked to him, he took a hand full of Percocet and popped them in. His Adam’s apple spasmed as he gulped. No water washed them down.
“I’m good at swallowing pills,” he said, waggling his tongue to show me they were gone.
Johnny’s good at lots of things, fixing cars, scrounging for money, charming ladies, fishing, telling stories, going to church once every two months, hanging out with kids. He’s a ladies’ gentleman, always ready to help. Show him a crying child and he’ll show them a Band-aid and a shoulder. Show him a friend in need and he’ll give them his shirt, pants, socks, and shoes.
On his good days, he’s a kind man, this guy everyone calls a drug addict. And for the most part he’s lucky. He’s been known to crash a Ford, fly through a windshield and then limp two miles to find a phone to call a tow truck.
“That’s Johnny,” His friends say. “Anyone else would be dead three times over.”
Not Johnny.
He tells his stories of near misses and almost deaths with a smile so wide that the skin by his eyes crinkles to accommodate it. At the end of each tale, he spreads out his hands and laughs.
“Somebody up there must like me,” he says.
Not enough.
Johnny’s tried Oxycontin, cocaine, and every kind of booze you can imagine. His saving grace, he says, is that he’s stayed away from heroin.
“That stuff’ll kill you quicker than a bullet,” he says. “And God, the trouble those user get in. It makes you steal, makes you crazy.”
Johnny points to some boys out on MDI who just got arrested on charges of robbing Gott’s Store. He knew them.
He shakes his head about a Trenton man arrested a bit ago. The guy was allegedly the Drug Kingpin of Hancock County.
Johnny knew him, too.
Then Johnny groans when he talks about the high school sports stars, basketball players, baseball players, soccer players addicted, in rehab and some dead.
Kids like Nate.
“It’s bad stuff. You don’t want to mess with it,” he tells me. “Someone like you shouldn’t even smoke a joint.”
“Someone like me?” I ask.
“Someone who’s never started,” he says. “A virgin. I’ve been a born-again virgin myself a few times.”
He has ethics, he says. He won’t steal. He won’t beg. He won’t let someone who has never done drugs start while he’s in the room, although if he’s high enough, he forgets that rule.
His biggest rule, though, is to never try heroin.
“I hope to God, I never do,” he says. “It’ll kill you. I’m messed up, but I’m still alive and I’ve still got a couple brain cells working, a couple I haven’t trashed yet.”
According to Maine Drug Data, “synthetic opioid/fentanyl overdoses began increasing in 2013 leading to nearly exponential growth beginning in 2014. In 2017, all fatal opioid overdoses in the United States and all fatal drug overdoses and fatal fentanyl overdoses in Maine peaked then dipped slightly in 2018. In 2019, fatal overdoses rose again and reached the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths in the United States between March 2020 to April 2021. In Maine drug deaths increased 7% in 2019, 36% in 2020, and an estimated 23% in 2021. During this time, drug deaths and nonfatal overdoses have also increased due in part to the global covid-19 pandemic. Below is a graph that highlights the percentage of drug deaths in Maine where fentanyl listed as a cause of death.”
Johnny is still alive because he tries very hard to stay away from that. But he knows, we all know, that he might not be able to stay away forever.
There’s not a lot of help with drug addiction in Hancock County, Maine. There’s some, yes, but nowhere near enough. Maybe Johnny is right. Maybe he is lucky. Maybe somebody up there likes him.
Here’s the other thing: a lot of people, right down here on Earth do when they get to know him. That’s because Johnny has a magical power. It’s called empathy.
Kendra Cherry of VerwellMind has a great article about exactly that. She writes,
“Empathy is the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their place. Essentially, it is putting yourself in someone else's position and feeling what they must be feeling.
“When you see another person suffering, you might be able to instantly envision yourself in the other person's place and feel sympathy for what they are going through.”
The people who get to know Johnny love him. That’s because he cares about other people’s feelings and he understands them. It's easy to empathize with him because he empathizes with you. He’s real. He’s tangible. We’ve watched him grow up and his kids grow up, too.
The problem is that people who don’t Johnny who think of him as a label, who group everyone with substance issues together as a monolith that isn’t comprised of humans. Those people? They don’t give him that empathy back. And without empathy on a societal level, it is hard to make communities better, countries better, and people’s lives better. It’s hard to create programs to help guys like Johnny stay away from things he knows he needs to stay away from. But we need to cultivate that empathy now. For people like Johnny and for people like ourselves who could really benefit from having Johnnys in our world with us as long as we can.