Empire State Building I would have done it. So when he started snorting heroin, I started doing it as well.
Pretty soon my father and mother were both hooked. And things began to change.
All of a sudden I noticed things going missing around the house, things like TVs, and I soon figured out that my parents had to be selling our possessions to get money for the drugs. Then there was no food in the house. Things got so bad that weâd sometimes go through peopleâs trash cans to try and find something to eat. And when we did have a few bucks for food, we would always eat things like beans, rice, and tacos. But mostly any money my parents had was going toward feeding their habit. It wasnât long before I realized that they seemed to be high all the time.
JOYCE ROBLES
At first the kids didnât notice the change. We would still go camping and go out on fishing boats and continue to do normal family kinds of things. The only difference was that we would make sure we brought some junk with us. We would be on a fishing boat, and weâd sneak into a bathroom to do the heroin and then weâd be able to get through the rest of the day without any problem.
My parents had started out just smoking it. But they began hanging out with people who were mainlining it and pretty soon they were mainlining it too.
Heroin had become a big part of their lives and so it became a big part of their kidsâ lives as well.
Dad and Mom didnât even try to hide their drug use from us. I knew when they were doing drugs because there was always the smell of matches. When I smelled the matches I could tell my parents were cooking up the drug, which is why, to this day, the smell of burning matches makes me very sick.
It had reached a point where watching them shoot up became a part of my daily life. After school or playing outside, I would walk in on them and they would quickly hide their works and try to act like nothing was going on. But I knew. There were times when they were getting high right in front of me; the only thing that separated us was a curtain.
I remember looking at that curtain and seeing the outlines of the spoon and the needle as their habit grew worse.
My father stopped showing up for work. He had gone from having a full-time job to just doing occasional odd jobsâa couple of weeks here, a couple of weeks there. He was doing just about anything he could to bring in money to feed their habit while my mother continued to stay home.
JOYCE ROBLES
Anything we had of value in the house would be sold for drug money. At first Titoâs father would steal things from work to sell. Eventually things got so bad that he ended up selling his business. It reached the point where he was so hooked that he would just lay in bed for days. And besides, he didnât have the guts to do any big things to get money. So I was the one who kept a roof over our heads. I was the one who would go out and steal stuff from stores and then take it back and try to get a refund. At that point everything we did was on the sly. We did not want the neighbors to know, so we did whatever we had to do to hide it.
By the end of the first year of their addiction, it had gotten so bad at home that I did not want to be around my parents at all. Especially when they were high, which seemed to be all the time. I would come home from school and as soon as they came home I would leave and go hang out with my friends or just wander around the streets.
My parents didnât care. As long as I was home before the streetlights went out in the morning, they were fine with me being gone. I tried to stay away from them and what they were doing as much as possible and tried to lead as normal a life as I possibly could.
I was always getting into mischief, nothing real heavy, just kid stuff. Sometimes it would involve drugs. One time I snuck out of the house and went down the street with a friend to a place that had pot plants growing in the