Sosha Lewis

I got out of bed and followed the smell of bacon and the sound of my parents’ voices to the kitchen. The Eagles were harmonizing from the tape deck, and I could hear laughter mixed with kissing.

Following the morning routine of fathers everywhere, mine poured a cup of coffee and flipped through the morning paper. He then noticed the time, grabbed a can of Easy-Off Oven Cleaner and sprayed it directly down his throat.

He swallowed hard, kissed my mom goodbye, told me to be good at school and left for work.

My dad. The pill hustler.

He would spend his day rocketing his white Chevy Nova over the twisting Appalachian Mountain roads to present his Easy-Off-blistered throat to local doctors in exchange for prescriptions for narcotics.

When I got home that afternoon, our tiny apartment in Oceana, W.Va., looked as if it had been picked up and shaken. There was a lingering smell of stale beer and cigarette ash. Empty pill capsules and rolled-up dollar bills littered the coffee table and floor.

My mom, Starr, was sitting in her usual place on the couch, but her makeup had slid around and formed a garish mask, and her left eye was starting to swell from a jab by my dad. Her head was slowly slumping forward like a willow that had just started weeping.

This was a scene that would be played out again and again throughout my tumultuous ’80s childhood: my parents going from giddy at the prospects of scoring drugs to petulant and abusive when they ran out.

My parents. The drug addicts.