There once was a beautiful little boy. His parents were coke-fiends and pot-heads and dopers. They tried lots of ways to get off drugs, because they loved their son, and they loved their life. In fact, they loved the pleasure of life so much that they took it to full-tilt, squeezing every bit of feeling and sensation they could find out of its infinite joys... until the pleasure-seeking turned on them.

The beautiful boy's momma had run away from home when she was 14 or 15. Two men in a van picked her up on the side of the road and "had their way with her." She came home crying, and tried to slit her wrists. Nobody talked about rape then. Or not much. And the priest was no help. But the pipe...the dope... the pills... that numbed down the pain and the shame. She didn't feel things... so sadly then.

Fast forward 18 years, and skimming over the descent from use to abuse, and the family is just barely holding it together. They have gotten onto a private methadone clinic, and are only shooting up every third day or something. It was a Monday. It was the summer solstice. And when she went into the bathroom for her "turn" on the cooker, she snuck in a little extra cocaine. For the rush.

Tumble tumble down she fell. Cracked her skull and broke her heart. Broke everyone's heart. Especially the little boy.

The police came and yelled and screamed, shook down the junkie-husband, made him feel like the worst human being in the world, called him every name in the book. He had just been blowing with all his lungs into the mouth of his dying wife, and trying to protect the little boy from seeing. "Go play your video games..." No one knows any more exactly what he saw, or wants to remember what he saw. Least of all him. This is what they call PTSD. I think the psych people thought only soldiers got that back then.

On the swing, in his uncle's back yard, after the funeral, he told his Grandma it was okay. His dad would take care of him. He would get him a new mommy.

But when the new mommy finally came around, a looooong time had gone by. Seven years or so. No one to tell him how handsome he was. No one to comfort him like mothers do. Just angels on his shoulder and ghosts in the bathroom. He picked splinters off the door Dad had broken down to get to her, still hanging awkwardly when I first arrived, and hid in his computer and video games. There is a coda to all this, but I am not there yet.

We took a ride together on Sunday, up the Thruway, flying by old places where his parents used to go to try and kick their habits. It was a geography he did not know, nor was it my job to tell him about it. But when Neil Young came on the radio, singing about the needle and its damage done, we turned it up loud, static on the mountainroads notwithstanding, and tried not to cry.

"That's not the color of your mother's hair," his Dad had said, when kiddo strode up the walk a few days earlier, shockingly colored in his own version of a freak flag.

But my heart leapt to see any color but black on the little boy's shadowed soul, and we laughed at each other's mutual joy. For a change. It was good.