Guillermo A. Santos on his high school graduation day in 2021, with his father, Guillermo Jose Santos. The elder Santos died later the same year of a drug overdose. The Santos-Honkala Family hide caption
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The Santos-Honkala Family
The Santos-Honkala Family
In 2021, after years of societal neglect and denial around the issue, the number of overdose-related deaths in the U.S. reached more than 100,000, the largest it had ever been. One of those people was my father.
In December of that year, his life was finally taken from him by a lethal cocktail of heroin and fentanyl after a lifelong dependency. This is a story that many Americans, especially those in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington where he lived and I grew up, know well.
If you look up videos of the worst of the opioid epidemic, you will see Kensington’s “zombies.” People seem to fall asleep standing up, lingering under bridges and near subway stations. They stagger with needles still in their arms or hunch over in the pains of withdrawal, sometimes motionless in the middle of the street trying to keep standing. In those videos, you can see the house where I grew up.
It is a house in an intensely red-lined neighborhood. I went to school online and I studied music across town, in a more affluent part of Philadelphia. I had “friends” from my music classes who would never visit my house out of fear of all that lay within Kensington. Opting to stay away from the horrors of drug use associated with my domain, they instead occupied Rittenhouse Square in Center City, a local park that provided them ample coverage to smoke pot and cigarettes but didn’t scare their parents or nannies as much.
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In my own youthful desperation for the approval of these peers, I once tried to host a small party for these people at my house while my mother was out of town. I went through a lot of trouble and everybody told me they were coming. I met people at the subway and walked them to my house. But out of all invited guests it was only the other minorities in the group that came. And it quickly became apparent that no one else would.
Enlarge this imageThe author as a baby held by his dad. Guillermo Jose Santos was 26 when his son was born. The Santos-Honkala Family hide caption
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The Santos-Honkala Family
The Santos-Honkala Family
Over texts they claimed that they didn’t know I lived in Kensington and had they known, they never would have promised in the first place. But of course, they knew. It’s why they had never come before.
I was angry, and I let people know. I was told to stop complaining; it wasn’t that big a deal. One person said he knew what it was like to be a minority: “I’m used to weird looks on the street. I dyed my hair green.”
Soon after, on social media, we saw that the white kids I’d invited had their own party somewhere else. But they took selfies, tagged me, and claimed to be at my house having a great time.
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