The Bitter Taste of Dying

By Jason Smith

Fourteen years old is far too young to find out what death tastes like, but I remember it.

Vividly.

In case you’re wondering, it tastes bitter — although when giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dying man whose body’s last gasp is foaming at the mouth, it’s hard to differentiate between the taste and the smell and the visual. It, like the memory, just sort of all blends together.

Regardless, it was far too young. I was far too young.

Remember when they told us that a brain on drugs looks like a frying egg? I can tell you first hand, that’s not what it looks like. It’s far more disturbing than that. It’s much more grotesque.

My uncle Mark was a good man. He really was. He had a great heart, an infectious laugh, and used to pull these girls who were insanely beautiful. Just gorgeous. Growing up, I admired him. I wanted to be him.

I loved him so much.

It really is a shame that the last image of him I have is of him dying, lying on the floor, my left hand behind his head, my right hand under his chin, trying to somehow exhale my life into his. Syringe to his right, burnt spoon on the table, empty saran wrap and lighter on the floor.

Just absolute chaos.

Part of me feels like Mark deserves a better final mental snapshot than that.

But then again, heroin is an evil drug.

There will always be questions about that day that I’ll never get answers to. Like where he got the heroin, since he had no car, no money, and we lived in the middle of nowhere.

Or whether his feeble attempt at staying clean by “white knuckling” it drove him to the point where he decided to just end it all that morning, before I got out of bed, not really giving a shit that a 14-year-old kid would be the one to find him.

I guess I’ll never really know.

It was the summer of 1994. O.J. Simpson had just killed his wife, Bill Clinton was accused of sexual harassment — again. I was out of school for the next few months so I didn’t really give a shit about any of it.

My family had recently come into a little bit of money and bought a piece of land in a small housing development that was about three miles from civilization. The land they bought used to be the community swimming pool and pool house, so needless to say the neighbors were not exactly thrilled with our arrival.

We took their pool and pool house. I’d have been pissed too.

The day I found out we were moving my dad called me into the living room.

“Jas,” he explained. “I’m gonna need you and your friends to build a house this summer.”

Huh? I don’t know anything about building a house.

“Let them know I’ll pay them.”

Note, he wasn’t asking. He was telling. Also note, he said pay them.

I was just an indentured servant.

But that’s my dad. He’s well known to come up with these off-the-wall, bat shit crazy ideas, 99.9% of which never comes to fruition. He’s an idea guy, but when it comes to actually implementing the idea, there is some sort of mental disconnect.

This just happened to fall into that .1%. My friends and I were actually going to build a house.

We moved all of our things into the pool house, converted one of the bathrooms into a kitchen, knocked out a wall, and turned it into a little studio apartment.

I got my own little trailer on the property, alongside the swimming pool fence, which gave me the privacy that a 14-year-old boy just needs.

Thankfully, my friends and I were not going to be doing this alone. We were bringing in a contractor. A foreman. Someone with construction experience, who would show my friends and me what the hell we were doing and hopefully keep the occupational hazards to a minimum.

Uncle Mark.

My favorite uncle. He still had the handlebar mustache that I remembered as a kid, but by now he was missing a few teeth, and had this sort of heroin chic, rock star figure. It was obvious that either the years or the drugs were beginning to take their toll on him.

It was probably both.

My uncle Mark was an anomaly. He was a heroin addict, but had never been to jail, unless you count a short stint in the same Tijuana jail cell to which I’d eventually pay a visit myself.

Family traditions, you know?

The first time my uncle shot heroin was in a park in San Diego sometime around 1970. Heroin was getting pretty big in the early 70s, with a bunch of Vietnam vets coming home with vicious habits that they’d developed while stationed in the Golden Triangle. Shit, I’d probably shoot up too if my reality consisted of jungles, monsoons, and bullets. With such a demand returning stateside, it wasn’t long before the supply end of things caught up here at home.

Economics 101.

For a future junkie, it was the right place at the right time, and for Mark, it was that park on that day.

Someone in the park hit him and his friend up, asking if they wanted to give it a try (I might note here, that “someone” eventually became a lawyer, whose personal guilt for turning so many people onto such an evil drug led him to represent anyone he’d ever sold to for free).

How generous of him.

Anyway, the future litigator sold Mark and his friend a bag of dope, and they shot it up.

Instant Euphoria.

I know my uncle had a pretty fucked up childhood, so I can only imagine the relief he must have felt when he was able to numb those demons that first time.

Unbeknownst to Mark, the chase had begun, from zero to forever with a single shot to the vein. It would never be the same after that. Ever.

“What was it like?” I asked Mark’s accomplice from the park that day on the day of Mark’s funeral. “Like — what did it feel like?”

“It felt so good, so incredible, so out-of-this-world fucking orgasmic,” he explained, “that it scared me from ever touching the drug again.”

“What about Mark?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“He felt the exact same way — except he wanted to feel that way forever. He wanted that feeling every day for the rest of his life.”

He was 14 years old.

Mark always worked, always had a job. Total functioning addict. He worked construction, but was not a “construction worker.” Mark was a carpenter. His craft was truly something amazing, and the things he could do with a hammer, a level, and a few nails were magical.

He worked every day to support his habit and was pretty built because of it. But he’d also worked his way through all of those beautiful girlfriends I remembered as a kid. All of them were clean, “normies,” all wanting to fix him. Save him. Each knew the previous girl had failed, but they were different. A few of them paid for him to go to rehab. It never took. He even once had a girl who came from some serious money, who told him if he went to Hawaii, to some movie-star rehab and stayed clean for a year, she’d pay him a million dollars. Honest to God! And he chose the needle over the money.

Heroin, boy. It’s a motherfucker.

He used to shoot up in the veins of his feet, so he wouldn’t have track marks in his arms. In Southern California at this time, if the police saw that you had track marks, they could take you in and book you. No questions asked. So he hid them by shooting up in his feet.

And occasionally in his neck if the occasion called for flip-flops.

For 25 years he’d carried on this way, working and spending his paycheck on heroin.

Every. Single. Day.

He’d finally reached that point in his life where the girlfriends could never get him to stop. He wanted to stop. He wanted to be done. For himself. No million dollar prize, no potential wife, no nothing on the other end. He finally wanted to quit for himself.

So he called my dad and asked if he could come up and get clean. My dad, being the resourceful idealist he is, figured he’d kill two birds with one stone — have his heroin addict brother teach my friends and me how to build a house.

By this time, most of the family had given up on Mark. Chalked him up as a lost cause. But not my dad. My father welcomed his little brother up to Auburn with open arms, and boy — did my uncle ever make a grand appearance. He arrived high as a fucking kite. Smiling his ass off, eyelids set to sunset, not a care in the world. He got that last fix, that last taste of seduction, that last blanket of warmth, and his first night up he began nodding off in the middle of dinner.

That’s right. That’s the uncle Mark I remember. Cool as shit.

That summer is forever burned into my memory. My dad drove a tow truck, and my uncle Mark went with him every day. My dad wouldn’t let him out of his sight. He forced Mark to go to AA meetings each day, but my uncle didn’t like it.

My dad did not care. Whether he liked it or not, Mark was going to go to meetings. It was a combination of family rehab and Prop. 36, before Prop 36 existed.

Mark got clean. For a little while, at least.

My routine that summer involved leaving in the morning for football practice, practicing, and coming home to work on the house. Not knowing it at the time, I’d met my new best friend through football, Mikey, who basically started living at my house. Mikey was “good people.” A solid friend, but always without a ride. Always. When he got dropped off at my house, I think his mom just forgot about him, because he never left. He’d catch a ride home from time to time to grab clothes and video games, and then he’d be back. When my parents gave me money for lunch, they gave Mikey money for lunch. When they gave me money to go to a Homecoming dance, they gave Mikey money for the dance.

He and I became inseparable.

I watched my uncle kick a little bit, but I think he went through the worst of it while he was with my dad. Driving around Sacramento in the middle of the summer picking up and dropping off cars wasn’t, I’m sure, his ideal place to go through heroin withdrawal. At the time I did not understand it, but looking back now, I have crazy respect for him being able to kick in this fashion. I know it must have been anything but easy.

After about 10 days, he started coming to life. He’d get home with my dad, take his shirt off and just jump in the pool, jeans and all. Perhaps it was his own way of trying to recover, a little self-baptism. He did it every day and emerged from the water with a smile on his face. Then he’d go to his trailer, change pants, light up a Marlboro Red, and socialize.

He hung out with Mikey and me a lot. Emotionally, my uncle was about 14, the same age that we were. Like a kid with a fake ID. And facial hair.

We would laugh, listen to music, and just bond. Mark was an incredible ping-pong player. I guess all those rehabs did serve a purpose. Just not the intended one. My dad bought us a ping-pong table, and we would play for hours. Epic battles to 21. Neither Mikey nor myself could beat Mark, but we got very good at ping-pong ourselves. We had to. Mark could literally injure you during a ping-pong match if you didn’t bring it.

Swear to God.

Mikey and I are both hyper-competitive and despise losing, and there were many nights we cussed each other out and went to bed swearing we’d never talk again because of some controversial ping-pong decision.

“Fuck you, man, that hit the table. You know it. Fuck it, I’m going home tomorrow. You can build your house by yourself, asshole.”

I knew he wasn’t going to really go home. He didn’t have a ride.

We’d wake up the next morning as if nothing happened and just go on with our day. That’s the beauty of youth. Resentments don’t really stick.

As the summer rolled on, I got to really know my uncle well. I got to know the real him. The clean him. The him that all of his girlfriends, all of his friends, everyone who entered his life after that fateful day in the park wanted so badly to find. He was a beautiful human being. He was loving, nurturing, and a really funny guy. He had an incautious laugh, and when he got out of that tow truck each day, before jumping in the pool, he’d yell out to me, “What is up, Jason!” Exactly like he used to do when I was little.

I loved it. For that summer, he was my other new best friend.

He pulled together a few months clean, and my parents must have really thought he’d finally gotten it. Since we lived out in the country and he had no car, my uncle was pretty much stranded on our little compound.

He didn’t know anybody in Auburn, didn’t know where to buy, who to call, who to contact. He was clean whether he wanted to stay that way or not.

He was safe. There was no way he was going to find dope — not where we lived. No way. Not in a new town that was about 400 miles from any dealer he knew.

Underestimating the ingenuity of a drug addict — that was the one mistake my parents made.

Before my uncle’s arrival, my mom’s parents had made plans for my mom and dad to fly down to Las Vegas for a weekend in late August. My parents had forgotten all about it when my grandmother called a week before the trip to serve a friendly reminder.

My mom tried to explain, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can make it. Bruce’s brother Mark is staying with us and he’s only a few months clean, and I’m not sure I trust…”

My grandmother, being the compassionate soul she is, interrupted. “Mark? I thought for sure he’d be dead by now.”

For whatever reason my mom bit, after what I’m sure was a hefty guilt trip. She and my dad rationalized their way into a weekend in Vegas, but not before laying some the ground rules:

No drugs.

No friends with cars.

No parties.

No girls.

And those were just for Mark.

As for Mikey and me, they told us to be good and keep an eye on him. At 14 years old, I was left in charge for the weekend.

They left on a Friday. I went to football practice that morning, preparing for a scrimmage that we were playing in Rio Linda the following day. I was excited. My uncle heard that I was a good football player, but had never seen me play. I was prepared to put on a show for him.

Finally, he’d get to see one of my games.

After practice that Friday, Mikey, Mark and I had ourselves a proper Friday night. Mark threw on a Jimi Hendrix record, “Hey Joe” blasting out of the house speakers. We played ping-pong, we swam, we laughed, we joked, we teased. It was great. Mark and I started a ping-pong match, and for the first time, I was hanging with him. When you played Mark, you had to play a defensive game, standing about 3 feet back from your end of the table. You had to play every shot perfectly or he was going to leave little ping-pong ball-sized bruises all across your chest.

We played to 21, all tied up, and you had to win by 2. Eventually the score was 33–32, my lead, him serving.

I anticipated his serve, hit a shot that ricocheted off his end of the table and redirected straight down, not allowing him to hit a return.

I’d done it. I beat Mark in ping-pong.

I was ecstatic. I began looking around for cameras to tell that I was going to Disney World, circling the pool with my arms outstretched as if I was set for takeoff, emitting a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a scream.

I was all smiles, and so was Mark. He had a unique look in his eyes when I beat him. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was proud of me. We shook hands after the game was over and went on with our night.

If I’d only known that was the last night I would ever spend with him, I might have let it soak in a little bit more.

Around midnight, Mikey and I were getting tired. Mark had found some vodka from somewhere, and was mixing screwdrivers.

I swear to God, I had no idea what he was preparing to do that night.

Mikey and I went to sleep, and Mark said he was going to stay up a little longer. I told him I’d see him in the morning. I never even hugged him goodbye.

Early the following morning I woke up, leaving Mikey asleep on the top bunk. I walked out of the trailer, hung a right into the gate surrounding the swimming pool, and made my way into the pool house. When I walked through the door, my heart dropped down to my stomach.

Sitting on the couch was Mark, leaned back, left arm out, head back. I saw the needle sitting there, still in his arm. The table was cluttered with matches, a lighter, a blackened spoon, and a little, empty plastic baggy. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing. His breaths were spaced out, but deep. He was breathing out of his mouth.

I froze.

I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to call 911 because I didn’t want him to get in trouble. I didn’t yet know what a normal heroin high looked like. I figured this was it — that he’d wake up and be embarrassed, beg me to not tell my parents, and we’d move on.

But there was also a part of me that was afraid he was dying. That told me to call 911. That told me it would save his life. Yet I did nothing.

I didn’t want to wake Mikey up, because this was MY uncle. I didn’t want Mikey to know. I was ashamed. My uncle lay dying on the couch, and I was ashamed of him.

After weighing my options, I decided to pull up a chair and watch. Front row seat. I grabbed a kitchen chair, placed it directly in front of Mark, and just watched him.

For about an hour, nothing changed. His breathing stayed the same. Every once in a while he’d twitch and one of those twitches caused the syringe to fall out of his arm, onto the couch. I picked it up and held it in my hands. I looked at it. It was empty. There was a little bit of blood on the tip of the needle, and it felt strange in my hands but I was also a bit fascinated by it, in a morbid way. I eventually put it on the table, next to the burnt spoon. It was about this time that Mark’s breathing changed.

Instead of evenly spaced out deep breaths, his chest shot out, like he was trying to push it out as far as he could. His chest was so far out, his back was arched and inverted. Eyes still closed, his chest would go out, and then suck in just as far as before, but the opposite direction.

Then nothing. No breathing, no nothing. Seconds passed. They seemed agonizingly long.

Then, without notice, suddenly, his chest shot back out. Then back in, same as before. This went on for about a half hour, and I just watched. I didn’t call 911. I didn’t wake Mikey. I just sat there. Watching.

Chest out.

Chest in.

As I watched, I looked at his face, noticing the lines. The scars of aging. I was so scared, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want my uncle to be arrested. I didn’t want to call 911, have police show up, just to have him wake up and look at me like I was some kind of snitch. But I didn’t know how to help.

Again, I just froze.

I heard Mikey wake up, and I walked outside to tell him what had happened, so he wouldn’t just stumble onto the scene like I did.

“I think Mark is dying,” was all I could say.

Those weren’t the intended words, but those are the words that came out.

When Mikey and I walked in together, Mark all of a sudden stopped breathing. Completely. I knew he wasn’t going to start again, because he started oozing a yellow something out of his mouth and his nose. Because he had a handlebar mustache, all that yellow shit was covering his mustache.

I felt disgusted at the sight, and then disgusted with myself for feeling that way. For the rest of the day, this is what I went through. I’d feel something, from the very core of my human condition, and then be ashamed for feeling it.

That was a microcosm for how I’d spend the next twenty years when thinking about this whole fucking chaotic day.

I finally called 911, and the operator on the phone was a total bitch.

“I need an ambulance. I think my uncle overdosed on heroin.”

“Ok, sir. What time did you guys last use the drug?” You guys? How the fuck did I get dragged into this?

“Umm… We didn’t use the drug. He did. And I don’t know, because I woke up and just found him slumped back on the couch.”

“Ok, well why do you think he’s overdosed?”

“Because HE’S FUCKING DYING, SO CAN YOU PLEASE SEND HELP?“

“Ok, sir, no need to yell. Do you at least know CPR?” Really, lady? You’re going to choose NOW to be condescending?

My whole insides were just tumbling around. My stomach in a way I’d never felt before. I just wanted to run away and find a spot where none of this shit was real.

“I took CPR in 8th grade, but I’m not sure I remember it.”

She sounded like she was getting annoyed with me now. “Ok, well, if he is not breathing you need to give him mouth-to-mouth. And if he has no pulse, you will need to give chest compressions.”

I put the phone down. I didn’t need to hear her anymore.

I pinched his nose, pulled his chin up, and put my mouth onto his. It was a strange, strange sensation. So much different than those plastic dummies we practiced on in 8th grade.

This was a real human fucking being.

His skin was warm. There was yellow shit coming out of his mouth and nose, and it was getting inside of mine, starting to coat the insides of my cheek. I could feel it on the back of my throat. His head was heavier than I anticipated.

That taste is unforgettable. Death tastes bitter, with a texture that falls somewhere between gritty and horrific, staining the memory for good. There’s no going back from it. No way to un-remember it. Once there, it remains. Forever. All the therapy in the world can’t erase it.

This was my uncle. My friend. Dying in my arms.

I pressed my mouth against his, fighting the gag reflex I felt coming as I felt that yellow shit on the back of my tongue, and tried blowing air into his lungs, but I could tell no air was getting through. Whatever was coming out of his mouth was blocking his air passage. I tried putting my finger inside to scoop it out, but couldn’t. When I pulled out yellow shit, more just took its place. Mikey began pumping on his chest, but I knew it was over. Mikey tried to give him mouth-to-mouth as well, with me pumping on Mark’s chest, as if we were the problem.

And it was at this time, for whatever reason, that my brain threw me a curve ball.

I started laughing. Hysterically. For a few seconds, all I could do was laugh. It was crazy. The laughter came from somewhere deep inside me that I didn’t know existed, and I couldn’t stop it. Perhaps it was the absurdity of the situation, or maybe it was a subconscious defense mechanism. I don’t know. But there was my dying uncle, and I sat there, with yellow shit all over my mouth, laughing like some kind of fucking maniac.

When the paramedics showed up, they arrived in two ambulances, followed by a gang of Placer County Sheriffs. I don’t remember much from then on. I don’t remember talking to the police. I don’t remember talking to the paramedics. I don’t remember anything. I remember someone asking for a phone number to contact my parents, and I told them I didn’t have one.

“They’re in Las Vegas. That’s all I know.”

But I lied. That wasn’t all I knew. I knew that my uncle was dead, and it was my fault. I knew that had I called 911 sooner, right when I found him, he’d be alive. I knew I laughed while he died, and I hated myself for it. I knew what death tasted like. I also knew that my life had changed. I didn’t yet know what direction it would take, but I knew it would be a much darker one.

The second paramedic that stayed behind to talk to us pulled me aside a few minutes after they took Uncle Mark away. He wanted to tell me that my uncle had “expired.” And that it had happened between our house and the hospital. But I knew he was lying. He didn’t want me to know that my uncle died in front of me. But I already knew. I was there. I still had yellow crust around my lips from trying to give him CPR. I’d felt his pulse. There was none.

“You should always remember, that you were there to watch his last breath.”

This fucking guy actually told me that. As if that was some sort of honor bestowed upon me.

Truth is, his last breath was the one I was unable to get into his lungs. That’s how I saw it, at least.

The rest of the day is a blur. But I know that I never cried. It was as if that crazy, chaotic, morbid scene that I’d just been through had never happened.

In fact, I played in my football game that night. The Varsity coach, Coach Von Housen, pulled me aside and told me he’d heard about my uncle and that he was sorry.

“It’s nothing, Coach. I’m good.”

And I meant it. I took all of the guilt, all of the shame, the confusion, the hurt, the pain that I felt about that whole fucking fiasco that I’d just endured, and just stuffed it inside. I wouldn’t deal with it, in a healthy way, for another twenty years.

But at that moment I was a football player. Saturated in misidentified emotion, lost but sincerely trying, I moved forward because I wasn’t sure what in the hell else I was supposed to do. Or where in the hell else I was supposed to go.

For that night, I was a football player because, quite frankly, being anything other than that hurt too goddamn much.

I had no idea that that night would be the first of a twenty-year journey where I’d learn to do any and everything to keep from ever feeling just exactly what that hurt felt like.

You’ve just read Chapter one of The Bitter Taste of Dying. Click here to read the rest, and here to order signed copies. Visit Jason’s website here.

Excerpted from The Bitter Taste of Dying by Jason Smith, Thought Catalog Books, July 6, 2015.

Available for purchase from Amazon, and iBook.

Hardcover and softcover available at www.authorjasonsmith.com

“Jason Smith, in The Bitter Taste of Dying, takes you on a jaw dropping, self-destructive ride that gets so crazy, it makes that little voice in the back of your head say ‘maybe this dude would be better off dead!’ I’m glad he’s not and I’m glad he had the balls to write what is one of the best drug memoirs I’ve ever read.”

-Jason Peter, NYT Bestselling author of Hero of the Underground