"Dahill Road"
By
William J. Lannigan
In the early
eighties, I was a fairly new counselor in an outpatient addiction treatment
program in Staten Island when Frankie G. was assigned to me. When I first saw
him in the waiting room, my eyes were drawn to his thick black hair . It grew
unusually low on his brow and was greased and combed straight back. He reminded
me of a photograph I had once seen of an Italian immigrant from the pushcart
era. His dark eyes, strong nose and jaw were classically Sicilian, but his
black shirt and pants emphasized the uncharacteristic paleness of his skin. He
looked as if he didn’t go outside much.
While I was meeting
with him and writing down his psychosocial history, he told me that, eight
years before, he had been a construction worker working the high steel in
Manhattan when he fell several stories down a shaft and badly injured his back.
There had been multiple surgeries, long periods of painful recovery and large
doses of painkillers to make life bearable. Frankie admitted that, from his
early teens on, he had drunk his share of beer, wine and whiskey, smoked
marijuana and sampled the pills that were passed around at parties in his blue
collar neighborhood, but he didn’t think he’d crossed the line into addiction
until after his accident. He had a history of painkiller addiction including
morphine, Delaudids and IV heroin use. A methadone maintenance program hadn’t
been able to keep him away from heroin.
He hadn’t gone back to work since the accident
and hadn’t been able to accumulate much clean time. Although he readily told me
his story and it seemed that his wife and family were supportive, I didn’t pick
up anything hopeful in his words or his affect. The best I could say was that,
rather than seeming beaten down, he just seemed resigned. Frankie was someone
whose drug history, while more common today, stood out back then from the
classic, male alcoholics I was used to in my caseload.
I knew
the city pretty well and usually asked new people where they had grown up to
make our first meeting more of a conversation than an interview.
Brooklyn, Frankie
told me.
--- Where in Brooklyn?
Dahill Road.
--- By McDonald
Avenue?
Yeah.
I had lived near there until I was seven.
When I heard him say, “Dahill Road, “ I remembered my mother and I walking past
Dahill to the trolley car on McDonald back in 1952. Usually, we would walk the
half mile or so to kindergarten and first grade at Saint Simon and Jude, but,
in rainy weather, I would be helped into my yellow raincoat and black rubber
rain boots and we would walk to the trolley and take it down to Avenue T, a
short block from the school. Sometimes, in good weather, we would walk over by
McDonald to the triangular lot with a house owned by an old Italian man “to see
the goats.” The old man had a large garden of tomatoes and peppers and several
goats who roamed down the large yard to the point of the triangle where I could
push grass and weeds through the chain link fence for them.
--- Do you remember the goats?
YOU KNOW ABOUT THE GOATS!!! HOLY CHRIST! MY
GRANFADDUH HAD THOSE GOATS!!
--- I lived near there when I was little. I remember the
goats and the tomato plants. The old man was your grandfather?
Yeah. That was
my granfadduh. He had a little baby goat. I loved that little goat. They was
goin’ to kill that little goat. They was savin’ it for Eastuh. I hid it away in
the basement and fed it. My fadduh found it and took it away. Then he beat the
living shit out of me…. That’s when all my problems stahtid.
I was stunned, I
was really stunned. I felt Freud-like. Through a previously unknown genius or
magic within me I had uncovered in an instant the deepest, darkest secret of
this man’s soul. ….Well, it was certainly uncovered, but my grandiosity quickly
faded as I realized, in the next instant, that I didn’t know what the hell to
do with it nor how to match the force of his expression.
It was a long time ago and other details of
the encounter have faded from my memory. My hazy recollection is that Frankie came
once after this to a group session and then never came back. I know that I
never did re-visit with him his experience caring for the baby goat and being
beaten by his father.
I didn’t help him
with his experience, but hearing his experience helped me. The memory of the
force and power of Frankie’s response stayed with me. I began to pay special attention to both my
own and my clients’ associations and, in supervision, I focused more and more
on how to respond to traumatic pain. I’m back doing individual counseling these
days and now I’m ready to be present and helpful whatever comes up.
I’m wistful now
when I think about those trolley cars. There have been none in Brooklyn for
generations. There were horse drawn vegetable wagons and junk wagons then also.
Soon we will have self-driving cars on the asphalt that covers the trolley
tracks. In the new culture rising from the old neighborhoods, there are no
goats, fewer gardens and pizza is sold for $5 a slice.
But I well know that some things are as they
always have been. Even as the best of things grow, the worst of things is always
nearby, waiting to happen.
That is why there
are currently 9200 children in protective services in NYC.
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