Month: May 2018

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Remembering Dave Clancy

My friend Dave Clancy transitioned into the Mystic last Tuesday. He was a wise and wickedly funny man, gone way too soon, at 58.

In 2009, when I first met Dave, he called himself Phlo. He was a regular commenter on the Flyer website and often won our “Comment of the Week” award for his witty and hilarious remarks. One of his staple moves was to take a random phrase from an article and turn it into a band name, e.g. “I saw the Pepper Spray Panhandlers when they opened for Warren Zevon at the Agora Ballroom in Dallas back in ’79.”

He was relentlessly snarky. I still recall his advice to then-mayoral candidate Carol Chumney on how to “hip herself up” by getting herself thrown out of Spindini and wearing “way more bling … including a variety of caps and bucket hats from the Kangol spring/summer catalog.”

In all, Phlo/Dave made 1,523 comments on the Flyer website. Sometime in 2010, I think, he dropped the anonymity, put up a picture of himself, and just let it all hang out, damn the consequences. He was a fearless guy.

Around that time, we became friends on Facebook. I learned via our conversations on messaging that he was a musician and composer who played around Memphis and the Mid-South, that he was married to Genelle, the love of his life, and that his daughter, Liz, lived in Springfield, Missouri. We chatted every couple months, mostly about random, mundane stuff: What was a good bird-watching app for an iPhone? What’s the deal with Josh Pastner? Can you believe some of the idiots who post on the Flyer site? Guitars. Our pets, vacations. Could you get a good Caipirinha in Memphis? Whatever.

Then, a couple years later, we both got on Twitter, and before long we were having chats on the DM function about whatever political lunacy was being discussed in TweetWorld. At the end of these convos, we’d sometimes mention something about getting together “in real life” for a drink. But he traveled often and we lived in different parts of the county, and it never really seemed urgent. So it goes. Our friendship stayed cyber.

Then, in the summer of 2016, Dave told me he’d been diagnosed with stage four cancer. When we chatted, he was down sometimes and upbeat other times. I told him about my friend Gary, who’d been diagnosed with stage four cancer and was still living three years later. Dave said that news inspired him. We still talked about getting a drink, but the chemo made it impossible and he was unable to get out much. So we decided to wait til he felt up to it. We joked about getting together and doing some opioids.

Soon, family members started a Go Fund Me site for Dave and Genelle to help with medical expenses, which were many thousands of dollars a month. We joked about how Go Fund Me had basically become America’s new health-care provider. But it wasn’t that funny, really.

We kept up the friendship, chatting online now and then. Dave changed his twitter bio to read: “Composer hijacked by stage four liver and colon cancer.”

Dave decided he wanted to learn to fly-fish, so we talked about what kind of rod to get, flies he might want to start with. I offered to take him out on a river, but by then, the summer of 2017, we both knew that fly-fishing was a dream that probably was not going to come true. In October, I asked if maybe I could come by his house for a visit.

“I have a Catscan tomorrow and parents here tomorrow afternoon,” he wrote. “I’d love to update you early next week if that’s okay. Thanks for always checking on me. I’ve been struggling lately.” A few weeks later, I was invited to come to a family gathering to meet Dave, but I was going to be out of town, visiting my mother. Next time, we said. But Dave was really getting sick, so we stuck to occasional cyber visits.

In April, I wrote him on Twitter but didn’t hear back. Shortly thereafter, I learned Dave was in hospice. His last tweet was April 27th. It read: “I’ve been on a cancer.”

Indeed, he had. He left this quote on his Twitter account bio: “The way that you wander is the way that you choose/ The day that you tarry is the day that you lose.”

Don’t tarry.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Crosstown Brewing’s Brake Czech is a Winner

I clearly remember when Czechoslovakia voted itself out of existence. There was a lot of geo-political tittering to be had back in 1993. As well as the fact that the groovy global wall map I’d bought four days earlier was now out of date. Which makes the Czech Republic a relatively new country with a very old culture.

The first Czech state was formed in the 9th century, before being absorbed into the Kingdom of Bohemia — which was not, despite the name, a hipster domain — under the Holy Roman Empire. Then came the Hapsburgs, then the Austrians, then 15 to 20 minutes of self-rule between the world wars, and then, finally, the Soviets. The last bunch was thrown out in the wonderfully named “Velvet Revolution,” which, despite its name, was not led by Mel Tormé.

Eastern Europe has been called a place with too much history. Fortunately, that history is soaked in great beer — legendary lagers in fact, even iconic. When Adolphus Busch, a German immigrant, started making beer in the United States, he didn’t name it after a town in Germany. He cited the Czech city of České Budêjovice (Budweis, in German), best known for a pale lager it had been brewing since it was licensed under the Bohemian King Ottokar II in 1265.

Busch copied the Bohemian beer-making style as well: golden lagers laid up in icy caves for cold storage. Busch was a pioneer in the use of refrigeration. While the American Budweiser and the Czech Beer are both pilsner-style lagers, to say that they are the same thing is to stretch the metaphor so thin that it tastes like an Anheuser-Busch product.

Fortunately, the good fellows down at Crosstown Brewing Company have gone a long way to easing the inebriated diplomatic tensions between our two beer-swilling countries. Well, maybe not a long way, but a delicious one. And why not? The Czech Republic has done very well since its independence, and more recently, they have done a swell job of resisting ole Vlad Putin’s attempts to put the band back together again. So why not raise a glass?

In a nod to Memphis in May’s shout-out to the Czech Republic this month, Crosstown Brewing has whipped up a limited-release, Czech-style pilsner: Brake Czech. Honoring the long and proud Czech brewing tradition, as well as using authentic Czech hops — they’ve produced a golden, flavorful pilsner at a quaffable 4.8 percent ABV. It’s a light, bready, malty brew with a slight floral hop quality, and it dries to a clean finish.

But enough of mouth-feel and all that foolishness. CBC’s Crosstown taproom is a great place to pop in and try a glass. When asked at the bar “what I tasted,” I took a long sip and considered. I could only come up with one all-encompassing descriptor: Brake Czech is the cosmic ideal of Budweiser. It is what the advertising people at Anheuser-Busch spend millions trying to make you think America’s beer actually tastes like. I don’t want to be too hard on Bud; reportedly, the even Czech beer suffered under the Soviets. But Brake Czech is something to make King Ottokar II proud. More practically, while we’re hip-deep in barbecue this month, this pilsner pairs well with those smoky, sweet sauces and meats. It’s light and refreshing, but you know it’s there.

If you are downtown, Brake Czech is also available at Silky O’Sullivan’s and The Peabody Corner Bar for a limited time. If you’re out east, well, Uber. If you’re in Midtown, this stuff hails from Crosstown Brewing Company.

As for the century-old copyright slap-fight between Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser Budvar, after several failed legal attempts to wrest the name from the Czechs, in 2014, Anheuser-Busch InBev did the most American thing of all. They bought the old Czech brewery.

And that was that.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Waffling Bill Haslam

In 2013, when Governor Bill Haslam was presented with the opportunity to accept upwards of $1 billion in federal funding for Medicaid expansion under the terms of the Affordable Care Act, then about to be activated nationwide, he thought about it for months. He dithered. There is no other, more polite word for what Tennessee’s Republican executive did, at a time when he could have, on his own volition, turned thumbs up or thumbs down on the ACA.

Faced with a legislature whose partisan GOP majority abhorred what they called “Obamacare,” Haslam opted not to accept Medicaid expansion for Tennessee, a decision that arguably has since resulted in the closing of four financially beleaguered hospitals in the state.

The governor attempted to cover his tracks, announcing that he intended ultimately to ask the federal CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) to issue a waiver permitting as a substitute a home-grown Medicaid expansion of his own, tentatively entitled “The Tennessee Plan,” its details still in development.

Meanwhile, however, state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), one of the General Assembly’s most determined foes of Medicaid expansion, took Haslam’s announcement as an incentive to sponsor and rush through the legislature a bill requiring any such plan to be approved by both chambers of the legislature, in effect imposing a death sentence in advance.

In late 2014, Haslam did in fact propose a compromise Medicaid-expansion plan called Insure Tennessee, which received a waiver from CMS. With sad predictability, however, watchdog committees of the state legislature, by now dominated by a Republican super-majority, rejected the plan, keeping it from even getting a floor vote in either Senate or House. Such were the fruits of gubernatorial vacillation in the face of a civil emergency.

The basic plot of this movie is about to be reprised. The state’s legislature has over the years passed numerous bills aimed at repressing such elements of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as might have been made available to Tennessee’s migrant-worker population. (The people enticed into the state from Mexico and elsewhere by developers needing someone to work hard at low-wage construction jobs.)

The Trump administration has escalated this war against those whom it calls “illegal immigrants,” even to the point of stripping DACA protections from those residents, long since assimilated and become productive members of society, who were brought here as children. The federal Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been issued orders to find and expel these “illegals,” even, if necessary, to break up settled families in the process. To their credit, several local governments (though none in Tennessee) have declared themselves “sanctuary cities” and have declined to cooperate with ICE raids.

So what did our custodians of virtue in the legislature do? Why, they passed House Bill 2315, prohibiting Tennessee municpalities from functioning as sanctuary cities and requiring them to cooperate fully with the ICE raids. Haslam split the difference, announcing he would not sign the bill into law, but, er, wouldn’t veto it, either — meaning that it will now become law without his signature.

Whatever happens next, Tennesseans will in effect be watching a rerun, thanks to our ever-waffling governor.

Categories
News The Fly-By

New News?

CREDIT: Facebook

A new news-media outlet appeared on the Memphis horizon last week, and while details are scanty, the new venture is arming itself with big-name, well-loved, heavy-duty talent.

Sources confirmed last week that a new venture is, indeed, in the works. However, what the venture looks like — is it a new newspaper or an online news source? — remains unknown. Those sources did say that the new project is borne from a group of Memphians frustrated at the decline of The Commercial Appeal under its Gannett Co. ownership.

The news broke on the Smart City Memphis blog Thursday. A post there read that the new venture seemed to stem from “an aggressively expanding [The] Memphis Daily News.” However, sources said the new venture is not an outgrowth of that newspaper.

Eric Barnes, publisher of The Memphis Daily News, said he could not comment on the situation.

But three of The Commercial Appeal’s most-recognized names — sports columnist Geoff Calkins, food writer Jennifer Biggs, and The 9:01 columnist (and former Memphis Flyer writer) Chris Herrington — all announced last week they were leaving the paper.

A Sunday piece in The CA from executive editor Mark Russell said the three were leaving “to pursue other journalism opportunities in Memphis.”

Facebook

Biggs, Calkins, & Herrington

The three confirmed their departures, although by different media, but all left specifics of their new employer a mystery. Calkins said in a weekend Facebook post, “I’m not leaving Memphis. I’m not leaving journalism in Memphis.”

“I’m going to be writing for a Memphis enterprise written by Memphians for Memphians,” he wrote.

Biggs said in a Monday column online that while she’s leaving, she hoped “that you’ll stick with The Commercial Appeal” and the “hardworking people” bringing you local news.

“I have a plan and will be back in print before long, doing much the same thing I’ve done all these years,” Biggs wrote in a Facebook post. “Until then, I’ll be right here and when I can tell you what’s coming, I’ll do it.”

Herrington delivered the news of his parting on his personal blog, “Sing All Kinds,” saying “I lament the paper’s shift toward being a corporate cog in a Nashville-centric Tennessee network.”

“I’ll re-emerge later this summer, writing about many of the same topics in many of the same ways, but in different formats and at different frequencies,” he said.

The Smart City Memphis blog echoed Herrington’s thoughts on The CA under Gannett noting “that [Gannett] has, in only three years, eviscerated even those fond memories of a time when [the newspaper] mattered so much to the Memphis region.”

However, Russell said Sunday the paper is holding strong.

“Despite the exits, The CA newsroom is still home to some of this region’s best journalists, covering, among other areas, music, government, education, commercial real estate, logistics, the Grizzlies, Tigers basketball and football and high school sports,” he wrote. “The folks in our newsroom are committed to Memphis and to writing with authority and context — about the issues and topics that are important to this area.”

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

“Battle for Cooper-Young” at Crosstown Arts

Midtown artist Nick Canterucci is under no illusions.

“People are either going to love it or hate it,” he says of the imaginative posters and colorful booklets collected for his exhibit “The Battle for Cooper Young,” opening at Crosstown Arts Thursday, May 31st. “The ones who hate it may want to run me out on a rail. I’m kind of known as the Great Satan here, or something.”

When Cooper-Young revived its neighborhood watch in 2015, Canterucci went on high alert. He wasn’t opposed to the watch itself, or even to cameras being installed to monitor activity in the neighborhood. But he had a timeless question to ask: “Who’s watching the watchers?” In the spirit of great Memphis propagandists and pamphleteers like “Tobacco Kills” artist John W. Biggert, the longtime Cooper-Young resident and homeowner took his complaints to the street creating instantly controversial posters comparing the well-meaning folks behind these new eyes in the sky to genocide architect Adolf Hitler — always a problematic opening gambit.

Who watches the neighborhood watchmen?

“I knew it would be criticized,” Canterucci insists. “But the reason I used Hitler was I didn’t think a lot of people would recognize Stalin or Khrushchev. Even a moron knows who Hitler was.” When the neighborhood pushed back against the imagery and its underlying message, Canterucci escalated with more posters. Devils and angels squared off. Jesus joins the Cooper-Young neighborhood association. Stalin makes a cameo anyway.

“The basic theme of ‘The Battle for Cooper Young’ isn’t that the cameras were bad, it’s that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” says Canterucci, who remains concerned but thinks the process has become better and more transparent since he launched his crusade.

“I use a lot of black humor,” says Canterucci. “Question everything,” he says. “Resist authority.”

Categories
Cover Feature News

Breaking the Silence on Shelby County’s Opioid Crisis

On Wednesday, February 8, 2017, Cody Stephens became the 59th person in Shelby County to die from a heroin-fentanyl overdose. He was 29. Cody’s mother, Sharon Stephens, remembers being told that fact by police the afternoon she learned her son had died. It didn’t seem possible. Not her child, the gregarious, fun-loving kid she remembered and loved.  

“Everywhere he went, people gathered to him because he was the kid who was funny, very athletic, and good at everything,” she says. 

Cody’s introduction to opioids started innocently enough, following a hip injury he sustained while playing baseball at Bolton High. At 18, he was prescribed Lortab, also known as hydrocodone, to manage the pain. But it wasn’t long before the teen discovered “he liked the way pills made him feel,” says Stephens.

Vicodin, OxyContin, morphine, and fentanyl are opioid-based medications often prescribed by doctors to help ease pain and discomfort following surgery. Additionally, these medications give users a sense of euphoria and relaxation. Like many teenagers, Cody experimented with weed and Xanax in high school. But opioids are a different animal. They alter the brain’s chemistry by attaching to opioid receptors, thereby creating cravings and an ever-increasing demand for more pills as tolerance to the drug builds. 

For some, what starts as pain management gradually morphs into addiction. As his dependence grew, the number of pills Cody took escalated. The spiraling expense of chasing a high took its toll, too. He couldn’t hold a steady job. He stole. And when his habit finally grew too costly, Cody turned to a cheaper alternative — heroin. He was 23.

“It’s like the drug took over. He couldn’t look in the mirror and see himself,” Sharon explains. “You become a slave to addiction. It sucks you in and you can’t let it go.” 

He didn’t travel this dark road alone, however. Cody lost a number of friends to addiction. “How many?” his mother pauses a moment. “Maybe 12 or 13? It’s hard to keep track.” 

In fact, Cody Stephens is just one of a legion of young Americans who have been lost to the opioid epidemic. Opioid-related overdose claims at least three lives every day in Tennessee. Nationally, deaths from opioid and heroin abuse have steadily climbed over the past decade. With 42,249 lives lost in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. 

For families whose children’s lives have been hijacked by drug dependence, the road to recovery can be a frustrating, lengthy, heart-rending, and expensive journey. Law enforcement frequently becomes part of the story, too, as users turn to crime to help pay for their habit. 

“Cody began stealing from Target and Walmart, small items he could resell,” his mother recalls. Then, belongings at their home and around the neighborhood began to turn up missing: air compressors, lawn equipment, a shotgun, even Sharon’s wedding rings. All for quick cash and the next high.

“I was ashamed to even go outside for a while. I still loved my son, but I was in disbelief as to what he’d done,” says Stephens. “I thought, ‘There’s something deeper going on. This isn’t Cody.’ Seeing your son deteriorate before your eyes? You just feel helpless — and hopeless.”

A Public Health Crisis

In 2016, 1,631 Tennesseans died from a drug overdose. In Shelby County, between 2013 and 2016, 474 lives were lost, according to health department data. Opioids are the main driver. As this public health crisis rages on, state and local government has finally begun to amp up the resources necessary to reduce deaths and deliver the services urgently needed for recovery. Governor Bill Haslam’s proposed 2018-2019 budget earmarks $30 million in state and federal funds to tackle the problem.

Locally, on May 14th, the Shelby County Commission’s Opioid Task Force unveiled a comprehensive, $2.4 million plan that creates a partnership between city and county government, law enforcement, the health department, and other health-care agencies to more effectively address opioid abuse. The four-pronged plan focuses on county-wide data collection and mapping of heroin deaths and overdose locations, prevention education, treatment, and law enforcement aimed at slowing opioid trafficking.   

One preventative measure that’s making a difference is having Narcan (naloxone) more available to the community. Nurse Jill Carney with the Memphis Area Prevention Coalition has trained more than 500 first-responders, medical and rehab professionals, and family members on how to administer the drug, which revives someone who has overdosed. 

“We used it and it has saved three lives at our Sober Living house,” says Walter Williams, executive director of MidSouth Sober Living. “Hopefully, with more information, people will draw a line in the sand so they won’t try heroin because they know too many people who have died.”

The state has earmarked $2 million in funding to treat opioid addiction using Suboxone, a medication-assisted treatment program. Centers like MidSouth Sober Living and CAAP, Inc. (Cocaine Alcohol Awareness Program) are partnering with the Addiction Science Center at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) to provide the drug and rehabilitation services that can help users toward sobriety.

Center director Daniel Sumrok, a physician, has been using medically assisted treatment along with trauma therapy with his patients for more than a decade. He likens addiction to a chronic illness, which must be treated, and says drugs like Suboxone can effectively help to manage cravings and stabilize patients’ lives. 

“Most were living in a car and had stolen from those they knew,” he observes. “Now, they’re more stable, they’re better parents, and they’re more reliable because they aren’t chasing the next high,” he says.   

While Sumrok sees first-hand the evidence that MAT can help people manage addiction, members of the treatment community remain decidedly divided between total abstinence (managing sobriety without drugs) and medically-assisted treatment for addiction.

Fighting the Addiction

For parents, sometimes just recognizing that an adult child is struggling with addiction can be challenging. Many mask drug dependence and successfully hide their habit from family members. 

As a nurse, Terri Fick knew first-hand the addiction issues that could result when treating pain with OxyContin or hydrocodone. So when her son, Kevin, had reconstructive surgery to repair a knee injury at age 21, she made sure his pain management was appropriate. 

“He had morphine for surgery, but there were no meds for chronic pain. I’d had patients with chronic pain that led to addiction. I didn’t want him going down that path,” she says. She even talked about the dangers of addiction with her four children.

But Kevin had also endured surgeries earlier in his life to correct the effects of congenital scoliosis. The fusing of 15 vertebrae left him with a limited range of motion and self-consciousness about his appearance. As he grew older, he experienced bouts of anxiety and depression. Fick says his addiction to Percocet (made with oxycodone) started sometime after the knee surgery, though she has no idea how long he actually used. 

When she finally did realize his addiction, they sent him to a treatment facility in Alabama, where he stayed for two weeks before returning home. Fick only learned of his heroin use when Kevin died of a fentanyl-laced heroin overdose on November 4, 2015. He was 25.

“I never thought Kevin would use heroin. I was shocked. But young people don’t have the stigma against heroin that once existed,” she says. “Drugs today are less forgiving. Experimenting now can be life or death — with fentanyl, you don’t get a second chance.”

To cope with their loss, Fick and her husband, David, sought  counseling at the Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief, and participated in a parents grief support group at Collierville United Methodist Church. She now speaks at area high schools and runs Remembering Kevin’s Light, a nonprofit that distributes new and used sports equipment to inner city youth programs.

“We went the sports route because Kevin loved sports,” says Fick. “The nonprofit gives me purpose again. You want to keep their memory alive and talk about his life. We take gift bags to a recovery residence in Southaven and tell Kevin’s story. We say, ‘We care about you.’ Maybe we can make some good come out of a tragedy.” 

Breaking the Silence

The difficult part of living with addiction is the silence and secrecy that surrounds the subject. Addiction is not easily broached. Parents wrestle with a mix of shame, guilt, anger, and anxiety trying to manage and/or fix an adult child’s life that has spun out of control.

“I think families have a lot of shame. You don’t want people to think badly of you,” Fick says. “Heroin use goes on a lot, but people keep silent about it. I think my son was too embarrassed and ashamed to come forward for help. I think the stigma keeps people from getting help.”

Tackling that stigma was part of the focus of a recent conference entitled Faith and the Addicted Brain held at the University of Memphis. Approximately 150 church members gathered to learn more about the epidemic and how congregations can better respond to those in need. 

One speaker, Stacie Glover, says using drugs helped her numb feelings of abandonment by parents too involved in their own drug use to care for her. “I had a family of addicts and alcoholics,” she says. “Drugs helped me escape from my issues. I wanted to stop using, but I didn’t know how.” At The Salvation Army’s Renewal Place, Glover found new direction and began her recovery. Today, she works as a case manager for the organization and is in college pursuing her master’s degree.   

The hope is that churches will borrow a page from places like Collierville UMC and Christ Church Memphis, where their No Whispers Initiative provides support and counseling to families who struggle with mental health and addiction issues. Butch Odom, director of behavioral health at Church Health, says his organization is actively training people in mental health first-aid, offering eight hours of training that “teaches participants how to ask questions to help others get the help they need,” he says.

Sumrok firmly believes trauma-informed therapy can be most effective in helping those with addiction begin to understand the root causes behind why they self-medicate. Angela Quadrani, a treatment consultant with American Addiction Centers, agrees, saying addressing addiction requires a multi-disciplinary approach. 

“We need doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, mental health behavioralists to treat the actions behind why people use,” she says. “It might be anxiety, depression, or some other trauma.”

How to Intervene

Being able to talk about drug use is one thing, getting help is quite another. Sometimes, families bring in an interventionist to convene a family meeting and confront the drug user about their problem. 

“There’s a small window of opportunity when an addict wants help,” notes Jack Wyatt, executive director of the Memphis Area Prevention Coalition. “If you put them on hold for 24 to 48 hours, you lose that opportunity to give them help. And it can be another year before they hit bottom again and seek help.”

That means being able to find a detox bed quickly, which often isn’t the case. Going into detox for opioid use is painful and requires medical oversight. (Unassisted withdrawal may not be life-threatening, but it can lead to relapse.) Getting clean takes three to seven days, depending on how much the individual has been using, but cravings can often take months to subside.

“The biggest barrier in Memphis is that most treatment centers are not set up to do medical detox, and the few that do require insurance,” says Wyatt. “Most heroin addicts don’t have insurance.”  

Quadrani tells of a 29-year-old opioid addict she’d been working with who was admitted to Regional One’s emergency room. Even though the young woman was 13 weeks pregnant and wanting to get off pills, because she had public insurance from Arkansas, Quadrani couldn’t find her a detox bed. “She’s carrying another life, yet she’s the hardest to find a bed for. If she’d had private insurance, she would have been a shoo-in.” 

Following detox, a patient checks into rehab for seven to 28 days, with some extended residential or halfway houses stretching services to 90 days. However, once a user returns home, the challenge is not to fall back into old habits. That’s where sponsors and Al Anon or Narc Anon meetings play a role in helping users stay clean. 

Rehab is not a one-time process. Many users relapse and return to rehab numerous times before finding lasting sobriety. “Some people need five or six times in treatment before it finally clicks,” notes Myron Edwards, clinical supervisor at CAAP. “That’s why you can never give up on someone, no matter how many times they go to treatment.” 

“I needed community support and outpatient care,” adds Wyatt, whose own drug habit kept him on the streets for several years as a young adult. “Everyone in my life had given up on me but one person, and he’d call to say, ‘Hey, I think you’re gonna be all right.’ And that made all the difference in the world to me.” 

While the constant state of drama drug dependence brings can be difficult and expensive for families, parents must be willing to be part of the recovery process, too. “One person with an addiction impacts all of the family,” says Edwards, “though they aren’t usually aware of the impact until members sit down with someone to show the ways in which it impacts them.”

The Lingering Impact

Sharon Walker’s son Ryan had completed 30 days of rehab when he overdosed on heroin at age 27 two years ago. He died alone in a hotel room, just four days after leaving rehab. Experts say users are most vulnerable to relapse at that time, and the possibility of death is real.

“That’s frequently the most dangerous time,” notes Sumrok, “since their tolerance is down and they’ll go back and use the same dose again.”

Ryan left behind a young son who was born drug-addicted. Now a chatty, sunny 2-year-old, there’s little evidence of his difficult start in life. In addition to she and her husband raising Carter, Walker also oversees her nonprofit, Remembering Ryan. She sends sound machines and layette items to caregivers of drug-exposed babies and mothers in recovery.

“I often wonder how we missed this. I wasn’t the cool parent. We would never have guessed it was heroin,” she says. “We couldn’t save our own son, and that makes me feel so powerless. But if I can talk about it and my story can save one person, then I can make a difference.”

RESOURCES

• Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief

bmhgiving.org 

Counseling for individuals who have lost a loved one.

• Memphis Addiction Help

memphisaddictionhelp.org

A service of Church Health, this prevention and education website has

links to a variety of services, including detox, treatment, family and church support.

• Memphis Area Prevention Coalition

memphisprevention.org

The coalition provides Narcan training, peer-to-peer support for users,and treatment information.

• TN Redline

(800) 889-9789

Addiction treatment referrals. Callers can connect with treatment providers in their area.

• TN Together

tn.gov/opioids/html  

This state-run website provides drug education, prevention, and treatment resources. Also includes county-by-county data on drug overdose.

• UT Addiction Medicine • universityclinicalhealth.com/search-symptoms/

Help for people who struggle with addiction issues, including medically-assisted treatment for opioid use. Click on Practices and then UT Addiction Medicine

ONLINE RESOURCES •

Allies in Recovery

alliesinrecovery.net

Website focuses on helping family members learn new ways of addressing and thinking about substance abuse and the issues it raises with loved ones who use.

• Lost to Opiods

losttoopioids.nsc.org

By the National Safety Council, this site memorializes the thousands who have died from opioid abuse. Family members contribute pictures and stories of loved ones.

• Memphis War on Heroin

Private Facebook group that shares information and education on heroin use and treatment.

PARENT-LED NONPROFITS

• Cody’s Closet 

Collecting clothes for people leaving recovery and prison.

Contact: Message Cody’s Closet on Facebook

• Remembering Kevin’s Light 

Collecting new and gently used sports equipment for programs that serve inner city youth.  

Contact: rememberingkevinslight@gmail.com or message Remembering Kevin’s Light on Facebook

• Remembering Ryan

Helping drug exposed babies, caregivers, and mothers in recovery with their children.  

Contact: Sharon Walker — sharwalker6@gmail.com

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

inclusIVitY — The Ivy Bottini Story at TheatreWorks

For the last show of its 21st season as a resident company at TheatreWorks, Memphis’ Emerald Theatre Company is moving in a new direction and ETC co-founder Den-Nickolas Schaeffer-Smith is excited to try something new. “Other than our cabaret-type shows, this is the closest we’ve ever come to producing a musical,” he says.

inclusIVitY — The Ivy Bottini Story isn’t a musical, exactly. The new script was designed to give producing bodies the freedom to choose how they presented the unconventional story about the unconventional life of an artist and activist and her clash with Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan.

inclusIVitY — the Ivy Bottini Story

“It’s an unconventional structure for a show because the entire script is written in rhyme,” Schaeffer-Smith says. The whole thing rhymes from beginning to end. The author structured it as 17 poems or songs, and each company that produces the show can decide how much of it to turn into song and how much to turn into spoken word. I wanted this to be a collaborative effort and, thankfully, I’ve been able to have a fantastic cast with a lot of knowledge of music. So we have four original compositions in our show.” Three other segments have been arranged set to music in the public domain.

“I just fell in love with this script,” Schaeffer-Smith says of the LGBTQ activist who co-founded the New York Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) with Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan. “But Betty thought Ivy was too radical,” he adds.

inclusIVitY tells Bottini’s story from her early life and conventional marriage through the AIDS quilt movement of the 1980s.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Opening soon: Elemento Neapolitan Pizza and Global Cafe.

Originally, the pizza place in the Crosstown Concourse was going to be called Radici, Italian for roots. But trademark issues quashed those plans. So now it’s going to be Elemento Neapolitan Pizza, which says owner Justin Dorroh, is a better fit. The idea of simplicity, that elemental thing, is a building block of the restaurant.

Elemento Neapolitan Pizza will, of course, focus on the Neapolitan-style pizza. Strict rules govern how the Neapolitan pizza is made in accordance with the Associazione Verace Pizza napoletana or AVPN. The rules dictate what tomatoes and cheese are used and extend to the flour for the dough. Cooking times and temperature are also key for an authentic Neapolitan pizza.

“We want to showcase what Neapolitan pizza is,” says Dorroh.

To help them achieve a by-the-book pizza, Dorroh has partnered with Adrian Arcuri of Ciao Baby Neapolitan Wood Fired Pizza in Collierville.

Dorroh says he’s long considered Ciao Baby a hidden gem. “It became apparent pretty quickly his passion,” he says. Consider this a sort of Collierville-to-Midtown transplant. “We saw the opportunity to offer a hand-crafted product and elevate that experience,” Dorroh says.

Authentic pizzas made according to the rigorous Associazione Verace Pizza napoletana guidelines.

The star of the show may be the two wood-fired ovens imported from Italy. They are, as of this writing, pristine white, with peaks — like giant meringues. The ovens will be on view behind a half-circle bar near the back of the restaurant.

The ovens are brick-lined within and heat up to 800-1,000 degrees and cook the pizzas in 90 seconds.

In addition to pizza, Elemento will offer salads, meatballs, gelatos, cannoli, and buratta dishes — centering around Italian buffalo milk cheese made from mozzarella and cream.

As for the locale. The site in the southeast section of the Concourse (at the front if you’re on Cleveland) seems ideal. There are windows around the corner looking out to what will soon be a patio. “We bought into the vision for Crosstown and the neighborhood,” Dorroh says. “We appreciate that the architecture gives us the ability to create a one-of-a-kind space.”

Elemento Neapolitan Pizza is set to open in June.

Elemento Neapolitan Pizza,

1350 Concourse, 485-3004

Speaking of spaces, the Global Cafe has carved a healthy chunk out of the west side of the Crosstown Concourse’s Curb Market, part of the market’s “right-sizing” initiative.

The space will include a full bar and seating for about 70 with the patio. The decor will be modern.

Owner Sabine Langer says she was considering a spot down Cleveland when she heard about the Curb situation. She likes the idea of having a captive audience of folks living and working in the building. Plus, she buys into Crosstown’s “better together” ethos.

Global Cafe’s raison d’etre is helping immigrants and refugees. “We’re not an incubator,” says Langer. “They can stay as long as they like.”

Langer, who is an immigrant, envisions a place that is part-restaurant and part-community center. It’s a place to get comfortable and meet up with fellow expats, where patrons can feel cared for and supported. She plans to hire all, or mostly, immigrants and refugees and hang art for sale by them.

“We are really expecting a universal experience, where they can look forward to hanging out,” she says.

Langer recruited three chefs — Ibti, Indra, and Fayha — for the venture. They are from Sudan, Nepal, and Syria. While the menu is not set yet, it will serve soups, dumplings, kabobs, and tabouleh.

Juan Viramontes is also an immigrant. He will serve as general manager. “One of the biggest things,” he says, “is to bring focus on the freshness of the food. Even though it’s fast, it’s not a fast food joint. It’s what mom, grandma cooked for them.”

Ultimately, says Viramontes, the goal is for “[patrons] to leave with expectations and their belly filled.”

Global Cafe will open in July.

Global Cafe, 1350 Concourse, globalcafe.com

Categories
Book Features Books

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight.

Sri Lankan/Canadian author Michael Ondaatje’s early poetic, elliptical novels were adored by the cognoscenti and stuck him with the label “writer’s writer.” Then someone made a silly but outrageously popular movie from his third novel, The English Patient, and Ondaatje found himself unexpectedly a bestselling author. The novel The English Patient, I imagine, was more bought than read. When fans of the film got it home and found its sophisticated prose getting in the way of the romantic center of the story, they sold the paperback, with its Ralph Fiennes/Kristin Scott Thomas cover, to used bookstores by the thousands; it was the Lincoln in the Bardo of its day.

This new novel, Warlight, is a bit more conventional, though its narrative is circular and kaleidoscopic rather than chronological. The action takes place mostly during and right after the second world war. Its first line is “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” The voice is 14-year-old Nathaniel’s. His older sister, Rachel, is the other abandoned child. The “criminals,” The Moth and The Darter, are a couple of men who seem shady, but who are also entertaining and enlightening. “So we began a new life. I did not quite believe it then. And I am still uncertain whether the period of time that followed disfigured or energized my life.”

The lingering mystery of the novel’s first half is where their mother went. She was supposed to accompany their father to his new job in Asia, but, seemingly, she disappeared. It is up to Nathaniel, in this account, which he’s writing as an adult, to try and make some sense out of what happened. He says, “There are times these years later, as I write all this down, when I feel as if I do so by candlelight. As if I cannot see what is taking place in the dark beyond the movement of this pencil.”

In Warlight, Ondaatje employs his masterful, melodious prose to ask questions about history and memory. It turns out that the children’s mother, Rose, was working for the government in some secret capacity that, even later, she is unable to elucidate. It also turns out that The Moth and The Darter were put in place for protection. The children, at the time, were unaware that they were in danger because of their mother’s wartime activity.

The second half of the book concerns Rose’s return home. Rachel flees; she will not forgive her mother for abandoning them. Nathaniel stays to witness, to be his mother’s forgiver and questioner. He’s never sure if he gets the story straight, which, Ondaatje implies, is true of all recorded history, filtered, as it is, through cerebration and retrospection. And all stories are subject to what remains hidden, no matter how much research or recollection is brought to bear. “Omissions and silences had surrounded our growing up. As if what was still unrevealed could only be guessed at, in the way we had needed to interpret the mute contents of a trunk full of clothes.” Nathaniel is the reluctant interpreter of his mother’s life. “She and I had lost each other,” he says, “long ago in those confusions and silences.”

Another name enters the story, a man named Felon. He was, in some clandestine way, involved with Rose during the war. He becomes another guardian, another piece of the puzzle, and another voice in Nathaniel’s ear. The lesson that Nathaniel learns, or is in the process of learning, is that the past does not stay in the past. He says, “Historical studies inevitably omit the place of the accidental in life … But Felon in fact is always open to casual accident … He is inclusive, just as he is broad-shouldered, boisterous in the company of strangers, all this an escape from his secretiveness.”

Michael Ondaatje is rightly recognized as a master stylist. His prose is crystalline, his sentences as refined and shapely as the petals of flowers. Like Kazuo Ishiguro and Steven Millhauser, his novels are as jazzy as they are beautiful evocations of time and place, as well as masterpieces of storytelling. Warlight will stay with you like a foggy but luminescent memory.

Categories
News News Blog

Explore Bike Share Officially Launches

After months of anticipation and years of planning, Memphis’ bike share system rolled out Wednesday.

Explore Bike Share launched with 600 bikes at 60 stations spanning from Downtown and Uptown, Midtown and South Memphis, to Crosstown and Orange Mound.


A crowd of about 200 gathered in Court Square to celebrate the launch, which Trey Moore, Bike Share executive director said “has been a long time coming.”


Doug McGowen, the city’s chief operating officer said the launch is “further proof that Memphis has momentum.”

“It’s a new day for mobility,” McGowen said to a cheering crowd. “And how appropriate that as all the bikes were riding up, three trolleys rode by at the very same time 200 bikes were arriving in Court Square.


“It’s a nexus of all good things that are happening and it’s just the beginning.”

After the celebration, volunteers rode the fleet of bikes to their respective stations around the city for the first time. Next year, 300 more bikes will be added to the system at 30 additional stations.

Prices for bike rentals range from $5 for a single ride to $120 for an annual membership. 

Explore Bike Share Officially Launches