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Visit circle.com slash podcast. This week on Leguizamo Does America, John Leguizamo visits Miami to find out how this city became a mecca for Cubans leaving their homeland. Since the Cuban Revolution, Cubans have been flocking to Miami any way they could.
Boats, planes, and rafts. Little Havana is filled with crazy amounts of Latinx everything, but the best part is the people. Leguizamo Does America, all new episode Sunday, April 23rd at 10 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC and streaming on Peacock. What up? It's Dramos from the Life as a Gringo Podcast.
We are back with a brand new season. Now, Life as a Gringo speaks to Latinos who are born or raised here in the States. It's about educating and breaking those generational curses that, man, have been holding us back for far too long. I'm here to discuss the topics that are relevant to all of us and to define what it means to live as our true, authentic self. Listen to Life as a Gringo on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by State Farm.
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. This is Our American Stories, and this next story comes from Lily Danziger, and this piece was originally written in Psychology Today for her mother and father. I was eight the first time my father and I spoke about heroin. He was working on a sculpture sitting cross-legged on the floor with his curly hair hanging down over his face. I started his bookshelf perusing the thick art volumes. Tucked between the pages of one, I found a piece of tinfoil folded into a square and marked with small circular burns. I'd never seen one like it, but I had a hunch this peculiar object had something to do with his drug habit. I asked, Papa, what's this? He frowned in the same way he would when I declined to try out a new drawing technique, but I knew I wasn't the source of his disappointment this time. Some ten seconds ticked by before he finally answered, That's from doing drugs, but it's from a long time ago. It must have gotten lost in that book. There was another pause, and guilt must have overcome him because he then confessed that the tinfoil square wasn't actually from that long ago, though he assured me that he had stopped using drugs again and was doing better this time.
Smelling of tobacco and plaster, he planted a kiss on the top of my head and went back to chiseling a block of wood. I knew from a young age that my parents were heroin addicts. It doesn't take the world's smartest kid to figure out the purpose of a methadone clinic or to decipher loud, tearful arguments about how it's time to stop, muffled by only a thin wall when you're supposed to be asleep.
Growing up wearing what I did, in New York's East Village and San Francisco's Mission District in the early 90s, their predicament was common. Plenty of people were slowly caving in on themselves, their skin growing sallow and their eyes becoming vacant as they were eaten alive from within by drugs. But despite knowing that my parents struggled with addiction, I had only a patchy understanding of what that meant. I had only a patchy understanding of what that meant.
I had only a patchy understanding of what that meant, and I had only a patchy understanding of what that meant, either for them or for the hollow-eyed strangers on the street and in the clinic waiting room. I'd picked up enough for movies and foreboding commercials to know that drugs were bad for you, but I understood it in the same abstract way I knew broccoli was good for you. I couldn't really differentiate between my parents' drug problem and all their other grown-up problems, like making the rent and keeping the house clean. In the years after the tinfoil incident, after my parents split up and my mother successfully kicked her heroin habit, my father and I had an ongoing coded dialogue about his efforts to do the same. He would tell me that he was healthy, which was his way of saying that he was clean. He couldn't bring himself to be completely frank about his struggle, but he knew that I worried about it and he wanted to reassure me. The fact that he told me how he was doing, no matter how euphemistically, made me trust him.
It made me feel even more invested as I rooted for him from the sidelines of this invisible battle. I believed in him so intensely that I was probably the only person who didn't immediately assume drugs were involved when he died. I was 12 and living in upstate New York with my mother. He had gone to live in a cabin in the Northern California Redwoods, to be in nature and away from drugs. He died in his sleep. Even though I was across the country when it happened, I felt certain that my father was clean because of the postcards he'd sent me, always mentioning how well he was doing and how he couldn't wait for me to visit so we could camp out under the ancient, majestic trees. The autopsy report eventually confirmed that there was no heroin in my father's blood when he died. The coroner couldn't determine a cause of death, which left many open questions, but I had the answer to the one question that mattered to me.
As far as I knew, the only way heroin could become fatal was through an overdose, and I took the absence of the drug in his system to mean that his death was unrelated to his many years of drug abuse. I felt vindicated. When I hit my 20s, I realized that I didn't actually know that much about my father beyond my rosy memories, so I started reaching out to his old friends. The hazy view of heroin I'd had as a child became sharper and more detailed. I learned that he had been using it with far more regularity and for a longer period of time than I'd ever known.
I eventually came to face the obvious. The damage done by poisoning yourself for almost two decades doesn't instantly reverse the moment you stop. A 43-year-old man's organs don't just shut down inexplicably. There may not have been heroin in his system when he died, but that didn't mean heroin wasn't the cause of his death. I started to see his death not as some freak occurrence, but as something he let happen, and I was furious. Letting myself rage at him, at the memory of him, was like releasing a breath I'd held for almost twenty years. As a child, I'd thought of addiction as a big bad demon my parents were fighting to escape so that we could all live happily ever after. Now, I had to wonder how they let themselves get into that position in the first place.
How could they have looked at the peaceful face of their sleeping child in one room, then closed the door and gotten high in another? My father was a good parent in many ways. He read me Grimm's Fairy Tales and Greek myths, cherished my every piece of art, and encouraged me to voice my thoughts loudly and clearly. But all the while, he failed at his number one duty to me. To do everything he could to make sure that he'd stay in my life. The central requirement of being a parent is to be present.
All the rest is a matter of style and degree. You can't be a good parent or even a bad parent if you're not there at all. He hadn't really died by accident, I came to realize. He'd committed suicide by neglect, like a lie of omission. In a way, feeling my anger at him has lessened its power over me. The story we often hear about the loved ones of addicts, a pat tale of anger resolving into forgiveness, doesn't acknowledge the complexity of feelings layered upon each other, all of them shifting continually with time. I don't know if or when I'll ever fully forgive my father, but that's okay. Anger hasn't diminished my love for him or my appreciation of everything that was wonderful about him. It's just made him feel more real.
It's let me see him with bracing clarity. Not only as the adored father I lost too soon, but as a flawed human being who I can now mourn more fully and honestly. And what a beautiful and thoughtful piece. Thank you, Lily, for what you wrote and thank you for sharing it with us.
Lily Dansinger's story, her mother and father's story, here on Our American Stories. Folks if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
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