Fearless (8 page)

J
ANICE AND
L
ARRY HAD ALWAYS HAPPILY
employed Adam, not only because he was their son, but also because he’d been a dedicated worker for as long as they could remember. Once, when Adam was four, Larry had to string wire under a house. It was a tight squeeze—two feet tops—beneath the foundation and the flooring, and when he peered across the darkness through the hole he’d cut into the house’s siding, he saw it was too far for a wire pusher to reach.

“You want to do it?” he asked Adam, half joking. “You’re not scared of spiders, right?”

Adam lit up. “Yeah! Do I get to use your big flashlight?”

With Larry’s flashlight grasped in one hand and the end of the wire in the other, Adam pushed through the cutout and started crawling. Halfway in, some thirty feet or so, he called back, “Dad, there’s something dead here in front of me.”

“What is it?”

“Either a giant rat or a possum.”

“Well,” said Larry, “he won’t hurt you then. Just go around him.”

Once Adam was nearly across, Larry darted to the other side of the house. He grabbed the wire that Adam threaded through a marble-size hole.

“Now what?” Adam called through the hole.

“Turn around and go back.”

“Past the possum?” said Adam.

“Unless you can squeeze through this hole.”

“And that was Adam’s debut performance as my helper,” says Larry. “He was our tunnel rat.”

In high school Adam did just about everything for the company, from manual labor to delicate wiring learned from Larry. He was both punctual and a model employee.

“But then he started slipping,” says Janice. “That year he stopped going to college after the big party. That was what tipped us off something was wrong. First it was his work ethic, then it was his attitude.”

It started with Adam’s being late by a few minutes, then an hour, but he’d always apologize and have an excuse: he’d run out of gas or forgot his watch. When he began disappearing for an entire day or two, he no longer bothered apologizing or offering an explanation. He’d just show up and go to work “like he was entitled to come and go as he pleased,” says Larry. While Larry did tell Adam this was unacceptable and disruptive behavior, he didn’t tell his son that he was also embarrassed. His boy should have been the hardest worker in the family business.

On a day Adam hadn’t appeared for work again, Larry walked into the house and asked Janice if she’d seen him.

“He’s soaking in the hot tub,” she said.

Uncertain if he was more mad or disappointed, Larry shook his head and stepped out on the back deck, where Adam was lying in the tub looking up at the night sky. “Adam …,” he began.

“I don’t want to hear it!” Adam shouted.

“Don’t you raise your voice to me,” Larry yelled back, his frustration getting the better of him.

“Look who’s calling the kettle black,” Adam said with a scoff.

Inside the house Janice could hear the heated conversation—and was pretty sure half of Hot Springs could too. “I am sick and tired of your attitude!” shouted Larry. “You’re unreliable. You’ve got no motivation. You don’t finish anything you start!”

Adam yelled back, “A lot of kids take some time off from school. Why can’t I just have some fun? I think you’ve devoted your life to make sure I don’t have any fun!”

Momentarily stunned, Larry hesitated. Adam grinned and submerged his head in the hot water, and Larry didn’t wait for him to surface. He walked inside and saw Janice standing motionless by the window, too sad for tears.

“What has happened to Adam?” she said quietly. “That little boy I love is gone.”

Later that night Janice told Larry, “Remember earlier this year when we were talking about how lucky we were getting all our kids through without any drug problems? I think we spoke too soon.”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” said Larry. “He’s got to be on drugs. That’s just not Adam.”

They agreed not to confront Adam but instead wait until the next time he disappeared, which ended up being the following week. When he returned to work several days later, Janice marched up to him and said, “I want you to come with me down to the medical center.”

“Why, Mama?” Adam said sweetly.

“I want you to take a drug test. You’re an employee here—you need to take one just like the rest of the fellas.”

“I am not on drugs, Mom!”

“Well,” said Janice, “then let’s get this done.”

The following day, after Janice and Larry found out that their son had tested positive for cocaine, marijuana, and amphetamines, Adam was already gone again.

He showed up at Heath’s apartment in Conway and stayed for two days, during which time he told Heath how hard he and Cindy had been partying and that his parents had sent him for a drug test. Heath was shocked—and relieved that Janice and Larry knew what was going on.

For his part Jeff had been concerned that Adam seemed content to stick around Hot Springs crashing high school parties. His concern turned into disbelief when Adam told him during a phone call soon after that he’d begun to shoot up meth and crack because injecting them made the high last longer.

“Cindy showed me how to do it,” Adam said. “We do it for each other. I shoot her up, and she shoots me up.” It had “bonded” them, Adam explained.

When Jeff shared this new development with Heath, Heath decided that Cindy Gravis was not just a loser but “pure evil” as well.

Two weeks after the drug test, Adam returned to the farmhouse. He was repentant and wanted to come home. “It will never happen again, Mama,” he said to Janice. He promised he’d stopped the drugs—he knew they’d been a mistake. That meant
something to his parents, because as far as they knew, Adam had never broken a promise. They forgave him, but continued to keep a wary eye out for signs of drug usage.

Unbeknownst to Janice and Larry, Adam proceeded to break his promise. He supported his addiction by cleverly stealing from his family, using the All Service Electric account at local supply shops and hardware stores to buy tools and other items he then sold for cash. Soon he was taking credit card checks from Janice’s purse or Larry’s desk, making them out to himself and forging his parents’ signatures for cash or goods that he could sell. Over a month passed before they figured out what he was doing. When they confronted him, he disappeared.

He suddenly reappeared, then disappeared, reappeared, again and again, always weaseling his way back into Janice and Larry’s home and hearts. They allowed it because they were relieved he was alive and because they remembered the pure, sweet boy they’d raised to always do the right thing. They believed that the Adam they knew would eventually decide to kick his addiction in the butt.

This cycle continued well into 1995.

During one of his disappearances, Janice and Larry recruited Shawn and Manda, and together they combed the streets of Hot Springs until they found him—and Cindy—strung out in a “borrowed” All Service Electric truck parked beside a convenience store. Noticing his family, Adam and Cindy got out and walked over.

“Adam, you need to come home,” Janice pleaded through her open window. “You two don’t need to be together. You’re not ever going to get well this way.”

Adam looked at Cindy, put his arm around her, looked at his folks, and said, “Nope.” Staring at the Browns, Janice in particular, Cindy snickered.

“Adam,” Janice said, “you are going nowhere good with her. You come home. Now!”

Cindy pulled away from Adam and leaned in the window. “You don’t hear so well, do you? He said no. He’s staying with me!”

Janice was furious. Never had she spit in someone’s face, but—shaking with anger over what this drug addict had done to her baby—that’s exactly what she did. Jerking away, Cindy wiped at her face and cursed while Adam glared at his mom, a look she hadn’t thought he was even capable of.

Angry and disheartened, the Browns drove off, leaving Shawn to bring the truck
home. “Look at what you’re doing to Mom and Dad,” he told Adam quietly as he got behind the wheel. “They don’t deserve this. You disgust me.”

Shawn was done; he wanted nothing more to do with his brother. He would have “beat the tar” out of Adam right then and there, but he knew that would only add to his parents’ pain, so instead he drove away, leaving Adam standing in the parking lot with Cindy.

Around this time Shawn quit his job as a pharmacist in Little Rock, went to work for his father, and bought a home with his wife, Tina, near Hot Springs. Adam was no longer employed at All Service Electric, and Shawn made it clear that he didn’t want anyone telling Adam where he lived. “We don’t want him coming around,” he said. “I don’t trust him.”

Manda, who was still working on her bachelor’s degree, just wanted her twin brother back. It felt as if a part of her was dying. One day when she was home during spring break, Adam came by to pick up some clothes and she tried to talk sense into him about Cindy and his lifestyle. They argued heatedly, and finally he threw up his arms and said, “I’m done. I’m out of here.” He headed for the door and Manda begged him, “Please, Adam, please don’t go!” Never before had Adam failed to try to make her feel better, to hug her when she was hurting or sad. This time he left without looking back.

Later that day she found a card tucked under the windshield wiper of her car. On the back Adam had written, “Meme, you know I love you.”

She tucked the note into her wallet and treasured it for years. The small piece of paper reminded her that the Adam she knew and loved was still in there somewhere.

For most of the first half of 1995 Adam lived and slept wherever he could flop himself down: the airport terminal, a crack addict’s trailer in the woods, or the house of a friend he hadn’t yet stolen from.

At a loss as to how to help him, Adam’s friends did what they could, taking him in, getting him odd jobs that lasted only until the schedule and responsibility overwhelmed him. The longest stint was working the pit at Stubby’s BBQ, a job that high school buddy Chris Dunkel procured for him at his family’s restaurant in hopes that
good southern food would encourage Adam to eat more. Adam moved in with Chris, who tried to keep him on a healthy schedule, but once more, he disappeared.

In May 1995 Adam showed up at Jeff’s apartment in Fayetteville, where he was attending the University of Arkansas. Cindy had recently broken up with Adam because he couldn’t give her what she needed, according to Adam. Jeff interpreted this to mean that Adam couldn’t give her enough drugs or drug money.

“Hearing they were apart,” says Jeff, “was the best news I’d had all year.”

But Adam continued his hard-core drug usage, splitting his time either being depressed or trying to forget how depressed he was by shooting himself up with speedballs—a mixture of cocaine and an opiate, usually heroin. He confided in a friend that at times he’d wake up from a drug-induced stupor and have to ask another addict where he was.

Only Adam’s family and closest friends knew the full extent of his problem. Janice and Larry didn’t talk about it openly, instead shouldering most of the stress themselves—all the anxiety, sleeplessness, and obsessive worry.

If a fatal car accident was reported on the radio, Janice immediately thought of Adam. If a body was found floating in a lake, she’d half expect a sheriff to pull up and break the news. When she heard crime reports, she thought of Adam. With any news related to illegal drugs, her mind shifted to Adam.

Most of all, she wondered.

She wondered if she and Larry were doing everything they could for their baby, the precious little boy they’d brought into this world almost twenty-two years earlier. They had talked extensively about intervention, but most of what they’d read said that Adam had to be ready, that the only person who could help Adam was Adam himself. He was an adult; they could not commit him to a lockdown treatment program unless he was a danger to himself or others.

And the knowledge that he was using a dangerous drug—crack cocaine, Adam’s best friends confided to the Browns—only added to her stress. Crack is nasty stuff, as Janice discovered in her research. A user can become addicted after just one try, it alters the brain’s chemistry, and it renders the user powerless against an intense need for more. The side effects, both short term and long term, are horrifying: increased blood pressure and heart rate, anxiety and paranoia, insomnia, severe depression, delirium, psychosis, auditory and tactile hallucinations, respiratory failure, brain seizures, heart attack, stroke, and sudden death. One of the most unnerving effects Janice read about
was “coke bugs,” a tactile hallucination in which users sense, and sometimes see, bugs moving about beneath their skin and will do anything to get rid of them: scratch, cut, poke, stab, even kill themselves in the process.

When Janice went to bed on New Year’s Eve 1995, the last thing she wondered before drifting off was where her wayward son would sleep that night, or if he would sleep at all.

That night Adam was at a friend’s house on Morphew Road, not far from his mom and dad’s. He had become so addicted that he couldn’t go half a day without experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Several hits of crack were stashed in his pocket to ring in the New Year, and he began smoking them at midnight.