A Family’s Drug Warning

There is one year in particular, squalid and fast and dangerous, that sticks out in Ron Moore’s memory.

It saved him really, that year like a whirlpool, because Ron Moore held his head above water and registered what he saw floating by. He clung to something that he can’t really describe now, a jagged crag that bloodied his hands but kept him alive.

Ron was a still a teen-ager, in a technical sense, but being a 19 year-old from the projects of Chicago, he had already survived way too much to think of himself as a kid. He’d just put in two years with the Navy and now he was back at home, without a job.

A year later, scared and bored at the same time, he would sign up for another two years of military service, this time with the Marines. After that he never lived in the old neighborhood again.

Now Ron Moore, 36 years old, is talking about his oldest brother, George, the one they called Butch, and Gregory, the next in line, the one they call Nick.

“I drove for them that year in between,” he says. “Butch made me the designated driver, I guess, only we didn’t call it that back then. I wasn’t entitled to get high. I wanted to . . . . But it wasn’t like I was smart enough to see what was going on. I wanted to be cool so bad.

“Girls would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, where’s your brothers?’ I was skinny, with these big eyes. I didn’t believe in me. Drugs made everybody so cool. And I wanted to do it too. They were so cool. I wanted to hang with them. Then he said that I could drive.”

Butch was just six years older than Ron, but in a way, he replaced the father who died when Ron was only 4. Butch was someone you could talk to, someone to admire, with a job and even two years of community college. Nobody in Ron’s family had ever done that.

So Ron Moore, the one his family calls Nukey, was honored when Butch gave him the nod. He drove his older brothers around while they did drugs. Heroin was the end of the line.

Butch is dead now. Nick is close to that himself. His liver and kidneys hardly work at all. Ron’s other brothers and sisters--there were eight in all, including Ron’s twin--have their problems too. All of them are still living close to home.

Ron Moore, however, seems fine--healthy, happily married for 15 years on this Fourth of July. He and his wife, Deborah, have two sons, 14 and 11 years old. Ron drives an elementary school bus for the Cypress school district. He says he doesn’t drink and he doesn’t do drugs.

But he broke down in tears when I saw him the other day at his apartment in Anaheim. Once he had to leave the room. He was sorry, he said. He thought he could keep it together better than this.

Except that it still hurts all the time.

“People always say, ‘Hey, leave me alone. It’s my life,’ ” Ron says. “My brother used to say that all the time. Well, it’s not just your life.”

Once again, Ron’s eyes film with tears. He stares straight ahead. He’s remembering faces and different times. He excuses himself; he says he doesn’t mean to be rude.

Ron Moore had shown me his scar, the one that strangers can see on his skin. It starts on the right side of his abdomen, then slopes upward across his side and up his back.

Ron gave Butch one of kidneys, so that his brother could live. It turned out to be for only two more years. Butch died just after he turned 38. Years of drug abuse made his death very cruel.

“I remember he called me,” Ron says. “He says, ‘Man, Nuk, I’m dying.’ I said, ‘Oh, come on, you’re not dying.’ He says, ‘I need a kidney.’ I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I didn’t ask any questions. I said, ‘You’re my brother and I love you.’ ”

Butch had asked others before. Ron was the only one to say yes.

“I figured since he did me the best favor possible, he told me not to do drugs, I figured it was my gift,” Ron says.

A nurse made this notation in Ron Moore’s University of Chicago Medical Center file: “He states that he feels good about donating a kidney to his brother, particularly since his brother has recently ‘cleaned up his act.’ ”

The date was May of 1985.

Ron says today that he has no regrets about what he did. He fingers the thin gold chain around his neck, the one that he never takes off, because it was Butch’s way of telling him thanks.

His brother never did talk too much about the tempests that he had raging inside. This hurts Ron still. Butch knew how, and when, he was going to die. His doctor told him he had only two days to live. Only Butch did not share the news.

He died as the doctor had said. He left behind a 4-year-old son.

Now Ron’s brother, Nick, is seriously ill. He’s been out of the hospital a month, but his doctor has warned him that any more drugs or drink will kill him soon.

“I told him I’m not going to his funeral if he does,” Ron says.

“You know, I see television with this big anti-drug push and this big rehabilitation thing, and all that, but nobody says that you just can’t do it because it will kill you, even if you quit, because your body will deteriorate,” he says.

“I explain to my older son about drugs. My sons are not in the environment I was in. I take my kids and we play sports, that’s what we do . . . I have the rare opportunity to have come out. Even though I don’t have a house, I enjoy what we have. I enjoy where I’m at. We go home, to Chicago, and the neighborhood is still the same . . . .

“If I had never run with my brother that year, I would be there too. My friends are still there, some of them are dead, some of them are still doing drugs.

“All of this, it really hurts.”