Don Moves In

After Bruce had moved out of the house on McCall Road, I became aware of the fact that it had been a long time since I had lived alone. The last time that had happened was when I was living on the streets, crashing wherever I could, and feeling very desperate. My addiction had pretty much isolated me from everyone at that time, and the lonliness had been very painful. I knew I didn't want to ever feel that alone again, so when Bruce left, I instinctively began the search for a new housemate. My lifestyle, my trust issues, and my need to feel totally safe with whoever I chose to share my home with left me with very few choices. As it turned out, my good friend Don, the man who had helped me to get off heroin and to the Methadone Clinic in Hartford three years earlier had just ended a relationship with a lady he had been involved with for some time, and had been living with...and he was also looking for a safe and comfortable living situation to move into. He had visited the house many times when the band had been together, and had always loved the place. He was the perfect choice to take the room I had available, and as soon as I offered it to him, he accepted. We both enjoyed our privacy, but we also had developed a strong bond of friendship over the previous nine years, so we also enjoyed a number of mutual friends and interests. Don was also very meticulous and neat, and very responsible, and I couldn't have found a better person to share my house with if I had tried. And the house did invite a party atmosphere...so we spent a lot of time indulging ourselves in that area, too. We were both firmly entrenched in the "counterculture"lifestyle...and we both had an appreciation for a lot of the same things...from fine weed and cocaine, to Dom Perignon, fine food and fine French wines, fine women, and, of course, music. Don always seemed to have a much healthier respect for the dangers of opiates than I did, maybe because he saw just what devastation it caused in the lives of people he had cared about, but he wasn't adverse to indulging in  them occasionally. I guess the difference between he and I was that...I was  in denial about the fact that I was still addicted to them...and only the form had changed. The emotional pain that I was in had never left me, and in some ways, had progressed...and I justified the level of my opiate use to myself with the belief that I was entitled to relief.  And all of us at that time still thought that heroin had really been the problem with me...and I wasn't using heroin  anymore. Don never judged me, or preached to me...and I felt very comfortable with him as a housemate...because he had already proven to me beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was my friend through times when others had walked away from me...and that he was incapable of some of the betrayal and deceit that I had experienced at the hands of people I had known for much longer periods of time. This, too, was the first time we had a chance to share a house as equals, since the last time I had spent time in a living situation with him, he was more of a caretaker for me than anything else. A lot had changed since then, and it felt good to be able to invite him to live with me, when he really needed a place...in a beautiful estate that I had been able to find and maintain...at least in part, because of all the help and encouragement he had extended to me when I really needed it...allowing me the opportunity to repay his kindness to me, and solve a dilemma in both of our lives, in the process. And I was amazed at how it seemed as though things with us had truly come "full circle"....