The words “sensory overload” run into my mind.
Back in my more youthful days, when one of my erstwhile bachelor hobbies was to jump out of planes, fellow skydivers used the term “sensory overload” to describe the sensation a parachutist feels when a radical new jump is too much for his sensory system. It had happened to me twice. I experienced sensory overload on my first static line jump when I felt like I was flying forward instead of falling down, and also on my crazy spin in my first real free-fall from 10,000 feet.
In both cases the emphasis of my flight training was to bond to my simple instructions and to cling to executing them. If I did only those two things right, the chaos coming at me would change into something very nice.
My son’s death brought that sensory overload to me for a couple of days. Physically I reached a point where I understood why a person in a certain pitched period had to become catatonic to last through the initial hours. Having to move at all felt like a nuisance and extraneous to what had just happened. I could only tolerate sitting and looking at the walls and then lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.
Not that I wasn’t hard at work inside the physical immobility. In fact, I was working very intensely trying to shape what had happened into some kind of construct that I could finally carry around with me, even if very mournfully at first,
Daniel had died of a heroin overdose. He had been clean of drugs for about a year. But on Labor Day Saturday he went off in a car with the Springville supplier known as “David the Landscaper” who had supplied him with heroin before, and he got shot up. Ironically, because his body had been freed of drugs during his rehabilitation, Daniel’s new clean system could not accept the amount of heroine that he might have lived through on a steady heroin diet.
Although Daniel Joseph Borges was legally my stepson, any time I have used the word “stepson” I feel like the term is a kind of abandonment. In contrast, using the word “son” rings for me acceptance.
I entered Daniel’s family when he was only one year old. At the beginning of my marriage my wife worked so I took care of Daniel during the day. We lived on Solon Street in Canyon Country on the hill overlooking the Von’s shopping center on Soledad Canyon Road.
We seemed to need to shop for something from Von’s every day. Since my wife had the car and since Daniel was too small to walk with me, he went up on my shoulders and I became his horse. Every time we went down that hill to Von’s and then back home again past the Sierra Hills swimming pool we practiced a new word. The trip was always long enough to make the new word part of Daniel’s young life. “Little Daniel and his Words,” was on my to-do list as a children’s book to write.
It was this type of memory I was reviewing during this Labor Day weekend. I finally settled on the rationalization that God had rescued Daniel from damage to his soul to give him a safe haven. Daniel’s soul was simply too bright and outgoing to be compatible with the droopy and malignant culture of David the Landscaper and Springville’s growing heroine atmosphere.
One of the problems with drug addiction today is that the heroin pusher is no longer as compelling to arrest as he was in – for example – the Fifties – when he was the spidery figure that formed the background of the William Burroughs book, “Naked Lunch.” Today the pusher can just as likely be someone we would try to protect – our friend, or a friend of a friend, our brother, our cousin, someone who buys our cars. In Utah, there is in addition some kind of cultural difficulty with any criminal who has an impressive personality.
It seems the Utah police and district attorneys will gladly put behind bars a violent thug or a rowdy redneck, like the Gary Gilmore prototype featured in Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song.” But they historically have been baffled and paralyzed by the articulate con-man, like the ones who have been overrunning Salt Lake City with white collar crime over the decades or serial Utah criminals like the smooth-talking Ted Bundy and Mark Hoffman.
The problem is that the people who have brought a new heroin culture to Springville Utah as well as Salt Lake City are very cagey and very networked, and for the past half dozen years or so the Springville police have been unable to enforce the law against them. In that time Springville has changed from a typical conservative Mormon town to a city that harbors a subculture of drug addicts and dealers.
But these are very unpleasant thoughts to be dealing with at an already unpleasant time. This is why for a couple of days it was so hard for me to listen to anything.
It was like trying to listen to something against the backdrop of a heavy rain.
Eventually my wife’s earnest voice broke through against the rain. So did a few earnest voices on the radio. Surprisingly so did the voice of Rush Limbaugh. It was not Limbaugh’s politics that appealed to me at that moment, but his earnestness. At a terrible time, earnestness seems to gain appeal.
It took three days in the Bible for a person to come back from the dead, and three days for Jonah to come out of the whale, and it was on the third day that I became responsive again. And here I am. And ‘here” is not just about the growing heroin problem in Springville, Utah, but in Santa Clarita, California. Daniel moved to Utah a few years ago with the idea of protecting himself under the Mormon culture from the hustlers in Santa Clarita and Southern California.
When he was clean of drugs, Daniel had worked at a local Burger King. His magnanimous and buoyant personality did well there. In the meantime our news has still been filled with the prosecution of Dr. Conrad Murray over the overdose death of Michael Jackson. I just hope that the Utah County police and District Attorney Jeffrey Buhman can take the overdose death of a little guy who worked at Burger King even half as seriously as the death of a king of pop.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California..” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.
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