Fearless

by Eric Blehm

  The guy lowered the gun.

  By the time they’d rushed Jeff to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital, he was having trouble breathing and almost passed out while the doctor probed the wound. The knife had entered between his ribs—inches from his heart—and into his left lung, which was filling with blood and required immediate surgery.

  As Jeff lay on a gurney in the pre-op room, a surgical nurse read his chart. “You’re a lucky young man,” she told him.

  “Yeah,” he said weakly. “My friend saved my life.”

  Details of the incident made the local paper the following day. Minutes after Adam and his friends had sped to the hospital, the police showed up at the scene. “They found a massive pool of blood, some brass knuckles, and a library book that had been checked out by guess who,” says Richard. “Adam Brown. It must’ve fallen out when he’d opened the door to his truck.”

  Adam, Jeff, Richard, and Heath were questioned by deputies at the hospital and counseled to leave the speeding tickets to them and not pull over reckless drivers looking for a fight. Adam, in particular, was told that in the future he should “run from a loaded gun.”

  That spring, Adam transferred to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway and changed his major from engineering to business administration. His heart wasn’t in either discipline. “He was pretty lost, no direction,” says Heath, who was continuing his degree in sports medicine at the same college. “The one thing he said he didn’t want to do was end up working for his dad the rest of his life. He said he wanted to do something big, something important; he just couldn’t figure out what that was.”

  In the summer of 1994, Janice and Larry announced to their kids that they were renting a big beach house in the resort town of Destin, Florida, an opportunity for the entire family to have its first five-star trip together. Not long before they left, however, Adam told his parents he should stay home and get ready for school instead.

  Though sad that her son would be missing this special vacation, Janice was proud of Adam’s maturity. “We’re going to go and have fun,” she told him, handing him two hundred dollars when she hugged him good-bye. “Your dad and I want you to have some fun too. Go out to dinner, see some movies—you enjoy it.”

  While the rest of the Browns enjoyed the beach in Destin, Adam planned a huge party at their house.

  The two hundred dollars covered the kegs.

  Word of the August 4 party spread widely, even to neighboring counties. By nightfall the house and backyard were a sea of people. Soon the roof was doubling as a high dive for the shallow pool, with Adam cheerfully leading the charge with a front flip to laid-out belly flop.

  The crowd continued to swell, pushing the fence over to make more room in the side yard. Drunken youths were in the street when police arrived to send most of the partygoers on their way. “That party,” says Heath Vance, “was a raging success, but it was also a disaster.” Aside from the destruction to the Browns’ home—a toilet ripped from the floor, a window shattered, the fence trampled—Adam reconnected with a young woman he’d known in high school named Cindy Gravis.

  At age twenty, Adam had drunk his share of beer and was no stranger to southern whiskey, but he could count on the fingers of one hand how many times he’d smoked marijuana, which he’d told his buddies always made him feel like a loser. After a night of “getting friendly” with Cindy, however, when she pressed up against Adam and suggestively said, “You wanna get high?” his response was, “Well, yeah. Absolutely.”

  The following morning when Adam’s uncle Charlie drove to work at All Service Electric, which was still based in the Browns’ garage, people were sprawled on the front yard, sleeping it off among the shrubs. Inside, Charlie found Adam with a trash bag, picking up cups and beer cans.

  “Please don’t tell my mom and dad,” said Adam, his eyes wide at his uncle’s arrival.

  “You get this all cleaned up—and fix that toilet,” Charlie said, surveying the damage. “But if they ask me, I’m going to have to tell them. I’m not going to lie.”

  When Adam went to Wal-Mart to pick up the supplies he would need, Grandma Brown was working at the front door as a greeter, a job she’d had for years. Feeling guilty, Adam fessed up, telling his grandmother that he was trying to clean up the aftermath of a party that had gotten out of hand.

  “Just how bad is it, Adam?” she asked as he exited the store with a cartful of cleaning supplies, a Wal-Mart employee following him with the new toilet on a dolly.

  Not wanting to spoil the Browns’ vacation, Grandma Brown waited until their last day in Florida to break the news: “Adam had a big party while you were away. I thought you should be aware.”

  All the way home, Manda steadfastly defended Adam to their parents, maintaining that it was no big deal if Adam had some friends over for a little party—till she found that her closet had been rifled and some clothes were missing, her jewelry box had been pillaged, and her bed had been more than just slept in. Adam suffered his sister’s angry glare and the disappointed looks from Janice and Larry, especially once Janice discovered that more than fifty items had been stolen or broken, including a family heirloom quilt so stained that a partygoer had tossed it in the trash.

  That Adam felt terrible was obvious. He told his family he’d make it right, and Janice replied that some of this could never be made right. He was going to have to earn their trust again.

  For the rest of the month, Adam hung out with his new girlfriend, Cindy, and her friends after work and on weekends. “They were a different group than Adam knew in high school,” says Larry. “They’d never stick around for long; they’d come by the house, grab Adam, and off they’d go.”

  Then Adam informed his parents that he’d decided to take a break from school to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. The truth was he didn’t want to leave Cindy. He began to party away his paychecks from All Service Electric and was soon learning the ropes of the drug world in and around Hot Springs with Cindy as his partner and guide. On weekends, after work, or in the middle of the night, they’d go for a drive that always ended at a drug house, hanging out for hours on dirty couches around coffee tables cluttered with beer cans, ashtrays, and drug paraphernalia.

  At first Adam stuck to marijuana and alcohol, but then Cindy introduced him to crystal meth, followed by her drug of choice, crack cocaine. She told Adam that he could never fully understand her unless he did the drug too.

  “The first time I did it,” Adam explained to a friend, “I knew I had sold my soul.” For a few minutes he experienced what he described as “euphoria,” and from that moment forward he smoked crack almost every day. Each time he came down off the high, the only thing he could think about was when he could do it again.

  Too enamored of the drug to fear it, Adam believed he would simply quit when he wanted to. He viewed this world of drugs as something he was just passing through. It didn’t bother him that the two thousand dollars he’d earned working for his parents was gone less than two weeks after his first taste of crack, money that was spent supplying himself, Cindy, and many of the addicts he met—buying single hits for them the way one buys a round at a bar.

  Adam continued to live at home and work for All Service Electric until the end of 1994, when Janice and Larry moved to a nearby farm with a big barn for the offices and workshop of their business, which had continued in its success. Still hiding his addiction from his parents and closest friends, Adam couldn’t ignore it himself. At work, he couldn’t concentrate and felt a quiver in his muscles, a yearning that, try as he might, he could not ignore. As soon as the day ended, he would temper the shakiness with alcohol until he could smoke some crack, and once again life was beautiful.

  The Brown family had no idea what was going on under their noses: outwardly, Adam was the same old Adam, though perhaps a bit distracted and a little paler than normal. Aside from work, his parents didn’t see much of him, and Manda and Shawn were off living their own lives, Ma
nda attending college and Shawn employed as a pharmacist in Little Rock.

  Likewise, close buddies Jeff, Heath, and Richard saw Adam only occasionally. They knew Cindy was a bad influence and that he spent a lot of time getting high with her and had even tried cocaine, but their concern was limited because on the phone he sounded the same as always. Adam would get over it soon enough, they figured, with no clue as to the full extent of his addiction. And get over her. After all, he’d always done the right thing.

  “He’ll be all right,” Jeff told Heath during a discussion about Adam. “He’ll figure it out.”

  5

  The Dark Time

  JANICE AND LARRY 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 a
round 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.