My uncle and heroin: ‘What surprises me most – you have no teeth’

published on March 10, 2016 by Sarah Resnick, in The Guardian

You were always “the fun one”. On our summer visits to New York, after the long drive south from Ontario, it is you I want to see most of all. When your daughter Sophie was born, I was five. As I grew older, I envied her for having you as a father.

When your mother, my grandmother, died, we stopped visiting New York. I didn’t see or speak to you for 15 years. By the time I went to college, it was apparent that no one knew where you were.

Suddenly in 2007 you call.

I am living in New York now. You tell your brother, my father, that you are living at a shelter on the Bowery. The three of us go out to dinner. We don’t speak much of the past. You say you are doing well, and we agree to meet again soon. Your hair is cropped short and you are thin, very thin.

What surprises me most: you have no teeth.

You are not there when I stop by after work. The man at the desk gives me this news, not for the first time. On my next visit I bring you a prepaid phone so we can make plans in advance. This makes you happy.

We walk to B&H Dairy, where I order cold borscht and you cherry blintzes. I show you how to use the phone.

My father calls, tells me he has urgent news to share. I always thought it was cocaine, he says. But it was heroin. He repeats the last word, drawing out the first two syllables. He is wounded, disbelieving. The way his sibling foundered was worse than he had believed. Cocaine is nefarious, sure, but heroin is depraved. He is waiting for me to interrupt – to affirm that I, too, am appalled.

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My uncle and heroin: ‘What surprises me most – you have no teeth’

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