Sonny Driscoll was sitting on one of the high stools at the back of the tavern in South Boston the other day, drinking the strongest thing that touches his lips these days, and that is soda water.
“The first time I used heroin,” he said, “I was 15. In Charlestown. I started sniffing some of my dad’s dope. My dad found out I did it and he ended up beating the (expletive) out of my cousin for it, because he assumed my cousin got me into it. I stopped for a while and started smoking dust.”
Switching from heroin to angel dust is not exactly making a healthy choice. But in his screwy world, Sonny Driscoll thought he was doing the right thing.
“I didn’t see my dad for nine years,” he said. “From the time I was 5 years old until I was 14. He just wasn’t in my life.”
I asked Sonny Driscoll what his father did for a living.
“He shot heroin,” he said. “That’s what he did.”
He looks back and sees a father who was grievously sick, not inherently bad.
“Even while he was an addict, he was generous,” he said. “If a kid was dope sick, he’d give him a hit.”
When Sonny Driscoll was 16, he went to visit his relatives in the projects in Charlestown, on O’Meara Court. He was in the hallway and heard someone upstairs, near the exit to the roof. Whoever was up there was snoring.
“I asked my grandmother, ‘Who’s up there?’ But I didn’t go up. If I did, maybe my father would still be alive.”
When curiosity finally got the better of him, Sonny Driscoll went up to the roof and found his father.
“He was blue,” Sonny Driscoll said. “The needle was still in his arm. It had snapped.”
Something in Sonny snapped, too.
“After my dad died, that’s when I got bad. I was already doing dope, but just once in a while. When my father died, I effing lost it. I was doing dope every day. Me and my cousin. We started sticking up people.”
His cousin got arrested after robbing a taxi driver. It didn’t scare Sonny straight because Sonny was dope sick and he would do anything for that next hit.
“It was a release,” he said. “You didn’t worry about anything except getting high.”
His mother tried tough love. She wouldn’t let him in her house in Lynn. She told him to get clean and sober and then she’d help him.
He overdosed more than a dozen times. Narcan saved him time and again. He tried rehab.
“Twenty times, at least,” he said. “I was on Long Island before they closed it. There was a blizzard one night and I walked away, off the island, to get high.”
He stole baby formula from big stores and sold them to convenience stores in Lynn at a big mark down. He walked into Home Depot and stole drills, gloves, heaters.
There was always someone willing to buy the stuff he stole.
He even robbed drug dealers.
“I gave everybody in the car a bag,” he said. “I did a bag and, bam, went out. Karma. I OD’d and almost died. I was clinically dead. It didn’t stop me.”
He was arrested more than 20 times. He did more than two years in and out of jail. But if you ask Sonny Driscoll for his epiphany, it’s not there. It wasn’t one moment. It was a culmination of rehab and jail and just being sick and tired of being sick and tired.
“February 10, 2014,” he said. “Sober day, stopped all drugs and alcohol.”
His father had been dead for six years. Sonny Driscoll had been dead all those six years, too. He just didn’t know it.
“I’m on methadone now,” he said. “Some people think that’s not sober. But I do. I don’t go out and steal. I don’t rob people. I don’t look for drugs. I don’t do drugs.”
When he stopped using, he was a scrawny 110 pounds. Now he’s a pudgy 200.
Teddy McDonough, an old Marine from West Lynn, met Sonny Driscoll one day when Sonny was panhandling. McDonough became his surrogate father, keeping an eye on him, driving him to meetings, to appointments, encouraging him.
Sonny Driscoll went to see his mother.
“Mom,” he said, “I’m done. I’m truly done. I surrender.”
He says his mother was right to throw him out, but he was grateful when, after he stopped using, she took him back in.
McDonough got him a job at a butcher shop, but it didn’t last. Sonny Driscoll will start classes at North Shore Community College in September to get his high school equivalency. He left school in 9th grade.
Sonny Driscoll is 24 years old. He is being weaned off methadone slowly. He hopes to be off methadone completely in the next year. He goes to a group meeting in Lynn and at every meeting they talk about someone they know who just died.
“I have bad days,” he said. “But I’ll call up Teddy. I’ll talk to my mother, I’ll talk to my mother’s boyfriend, and I get through it. It’s mostly a head game. It sucks, but it’s always going to be there, no matter what.”
His goal is to become a counselor, to help others get to the place he’s still becoming accustomed to.
“I should be dead, but I’m not,” Sonny Driscoll said. “I made it, unlike my dad. And I think I survived so I can help others. Former addicts make the best counselors. You can’t fool a former addict. You can fool yourself. But you can’t fool someone who used to be in that life.”
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.