Louisville is the type of town where addiction comes easy.
Drive-thru liquor stores. Derby brio. A culture of excess, sport and gambling. The long shadow of the antebellum South and Jim Crow. A vast subterranean distribution network of meth and fentanyl runs through hollowed-out low-income neighborhoods. And the above-board and omnipresent hypnotic amber glow of Bourbon, our city’s crown jewel and cash cow, pooled like liquid gold inside those endless gleaming crystal vessels lining the backlit shelves in the galaxy of bars, calling to you like sirens, all around the River City.
Lest we not forget, there too is the sprawling web of low-paying and soul-crushing dead-end jobs—a web so intricately constructed by a cadre of exploitative Frankfort good-ole boys, manufacturing scions and venture capitalists, whose lone concern is how to maintain their chummy outfit’s authority and subservient workforce at the expense of the masses of Kentuckians trapped living paycheck to paycheck.
And if that wasn’t enough, one is confronted with the nihilistic awareness, acute for some of us, that everyone is bitched from the start, and doomed to suffer and die. And if you don’t have God, karmic hope or a feeble dime-a-dozen tribe to look to for comfort, it may be a completely meaningless Groundhog’s Day exercise in futility doing This Thing Called Life.
Therefore, you better ingratiate yourself with distress and chaos. They may become your only allies.
Accordingly, under those conditions, why wouldn’t you throw caution to the wind, snort a few lines… smoke a few rocks… drown a few sorrows… and enjoy yourself a little?
As detailed in my two previous Lyft diaries, which I mistakenly thought were complete, over the past seven years of ride-share driving, years that are now in the rear-view-mirror, I picked up hundreds of Louisvillians hooked on one substance or another.
Most were seeking treatment, but others were still in the thick of their laissez les bons temps rouler cycle.
During that time, I heard a lot of hilarious addict tales of debauchery and a lot of junkie-madness horror stories. But I also met a large cohort, from every demographic—a point I’d like to return to—of gritty-eyed pugilists, determined to make a change.
This is where this story begins and ends, and it reminds me of a notorious Joan Didion line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
(As an aside, I’d give anything to have Didion’s keen eye, among other deceased essayists of her ilk, back for these fraught times.)
But I digress.
To the point, even after many of these fallen neighbors of ours had blown up their lives and worst yet, their loved ones’ lives, they remained committed to putting one foot in front of the other to turn their jangled realities right-side-up, while also overcoming the axiomatic and debilitating truth: they could not turn back the hands of time to get a do-over to fix the things they’d broken, sometimes beyond repair.
This is no small feat. Trust me, I know. Especially in this pueblo.
Which brings me to Casey, the anchor of this saga. Several days ago, I ran across a collection of scatterbrained notes and a photo I took of a passenger I picked up from the Parkland neighborhood last December. And it got me writing.
Casey was my first ride on that sleepy Saturday morning. It was ten days before Christmas. Cold out. Grey skied. And the streets were empty.
Following Lyft’s GPS directions en route to her pickup, I headed westbound on Oak Street from Old Louisville, which turns into Virginia Ave a few blocks west of Dixie—like I said, the antebellum South casts a long shadow.
Five minutes later, just before the train tracks at 30th Street, I pulled up to the pickup location but could not ascertain which house I was looking for.
The address listed on the app did not appear to match up with the street numbers, as if the passenger intentionally put in the wrong locale, so I would not pull up in front of where it was she lived, which was not an uncommon occurrence I ran across for a variety of reasons.
Whatever the case, something was off, and I wasn’t sure where to go. Not knowing exactly where to park, I pulled over to the north side of Virginia and messaged Casey through the app to ask her if I was in the right spot.
While waiting and looking around, I remember thinking how much I loved driving through this corridor of the West End. Many of the old homes on these big blocks between 26th and 28th are grand two-and-half story Victorians set way off the street and have large front yards filled with shade trees.
Whenever I drove past them, I felt good, almost nostalgic for an era I never knew. These homes always transported me back in time, like the old photographs lining the foyer walls of the West End Republic Bank YMCA, where you can find me obsessively working out on almost any given day of the week—a fitness-induced adrenaline high is my current drug of choice.
And then she appeared.
I looked up, and like an apparition, a pale woman with an addict’s glow, manifested herself on the south side of the street, busy shuffling in boots across the train tracks like a newborn giraffe.
She was wearing an unzipped army-green shearling jacket overtop a stretchy floral dress that exposed a large tattoo on her thigh.
Her hair was wet and disheveled, and as she crossed the street and approached my vehicle, I watched her pull several long drags from a large vape attached to a lanyard hung around her neck, before expelling huge plumes of vapor into the frosty morning air.
I hoped I would not have to explain to her that you can’t vape in the car, as I often had to do with other passengers—thankfully, I would not.
Right away, you could tell, this woman had lived hard for a long time. But there was also something uncanny about her presence and the mundane scene that morning that made me feel strange, like I’d stepped into a Southern remake of Taxi Driver.
When she opened the passenger-side backdoor, I welcomed her into the car with a folksy “howdy Casey,” and apologized if I’d picked her up from the wrong location.
As she got situated, she responded breezily, “You’re good.” And off we went, following the map directions north.
“So, where are we headed this morning?” I asked.
In an idiomatic Kentucky-Indiana urban-drawl-mumble, she said she was going to a party being thrown on her behalf. “It was her one year.”
“One year since you got sober?”
“Yep!”
I turned and congratulated her. Gave her a raucous high-five. And began to pry about her drug of choice like a sleazy tabloid reporter… or just someone who understood the score.
Unfazed, she said, “I did ‘em all,” and then expounded on this thought for several seconds, recalling the spectrum of vices she’d nurtured.
From there, Casey would go on to outline how she’d moved down from Indy to get clean. How there was a lot of support for users in Louisville. And she made it clear that she had to escape her home, because it was filled with too many demons and triggers.
She said she’d lost almost everything due to her addiction. But was getting her life back on track. Her husband was still in Indy with their kids (a subject I won’t touch on, out of respect for her, but one we went into in greater detail).
She also mentioned how the halfway house she had previously lived in before the one she lived in now, and where I picked her up from, I presumed, would not allow her to work.
I found this farcical. Which prompted me to dig for more details, because that sounded like servitude. But I don’t remember her answer and did not document it.
As I noted in my previous article, as much good as the dependence services community does in this town plagued by addiction, I suspect—and have heard multiple first-hand accounts—there to be a dark and greedy for-profit underbelly underpinning the vital ecosystem and its various subsidies and resources.
An underbelly of keen capitalist hustlers, some of whom were addicts themselves, who got clean and found a way to make sobriety pay. Something I only have anecdotal evidence to go on, but something I’ve long wanted to investigate and blow wide open.
Nevertheless, when we pulled up on Market Street at her drop off, several blocks from downtown, I was surprised to find this was the same address where I’d chauffeured Wayne after I picked him up from the UofL ER (who I wrote about in my previous Lyft diary).
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Which is an opportune juncture to return to my point about demographics. Wayne was a dark-skinned man. Casey was a light-skinned woman. Both were working-class proles living in the West End. Both suffered from addiction. And both were doing their best to get by and apparently seeking treatment at the same facility.
One of the things you quickly ascertain about addiction, it affects every demographic without prejudice, and it also often unites those same folks across the identitarian divides that chop us up into petty factions delineated by ascriptive differences.
I’ve spent a good amount of time both studying identity and observing the destitute and the diseased. And one of the things I’ve noticed on Louisville’s mean streets (and many like them from Miami to San Francisco to Los Angeles, the latter metropolis I too lived homeless in for a time, sleeping out of my Mini Cooper and spending my days alongside a ragtag lot of vagrants in the North Hollywood library, while reading Christopher Hitchens and biographies on Malcolm X, after taking a life changing and career-altering road trip through the Deep South), street creatures, who often suffer from addiction, don’t have time to worry about their inessential differences the way folks in the C-Suite and professional managerial class do.
They are too busy surviving. Likewise, they could teach us a lesson or two on the insanity of tribalism.
Bob Dylan has a sage line I often return to that he tucked inside his epic eleven-minute hallucinatory 1986 ballad “Brownsville Girl,” co-written with playwright and actor Sam Shephard.
Dylan croons:
“Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content.”
Indeed.
Regardless, as I pulled up to her destination, I explained to Casey I was a freelance writer and asked her if I could get her phone number, take her photo and potentially write a profile on her for our weekly paper.
She agreed. I jotted down her number. Took her photo. Congratulated her again. And I wished her well with the long road ahead.
Unfortunately, in the interim, I misplaced her number, so I was unable to follow up. And therefore, my belated attempt to tell her story comes up short.
But even in its brokenness, this half-complete window is not just an homage to her, but to all my fellow Louisville drunks and junkies doing your best to stay clean, get clean or just maintain in the Doomed Loop.
Here’s to you, Casey. Here’s to all of y’all. I hope you’re still putting one foot in front of the next, taking it one day at a time, and getting back at least of piece of what it was you lost along the way.
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This article appears in Mar 28 – Apr 3, 2025.
