The Mass Ave Project Presents Voices of Mass Ave
By: Leah Rush, C. Ht.
Tags: Recovery, Helping Others, Addiction, Boston, Homelessness

What do you see when you pass the herd of homeless people and drug addicts on Mass Ave? Do you see humanity? Do they register as people? Can you even look?

It’s a little easier to see the humanity in someone who made it off the block. So that’s what we are going to do in this Voices of Mass Ave series. We’ll open the door to the insanity and pain that leads a soul to find themself in the degradation that causes most people to just look away.

From this easier-to-stomach side of life, meet Blaise Conway. He’s a sweet guy, with boyish handsomeness and a mouth of white teeth smiling a feeling of earnestness and joy. He’s fresh from volunteering for Scent from Heaven, an organization that brings flowers to mothers who have lost their children to addiction. And he has arrived today with an even bigger generosity of spirit: the willingness to sacrifice his pride and his perceived reputation. He offers a totally honest recounting of his story as a man with HIV who has suffered years of addiction to heroin and crystal meth, much of which took place around Mass Ave. Willing to give up his anonymity, he offers hope to someone who might feel as hopeless as he did at one time.

Blaise came from a family with two working-class, Irish-Italian parents. He went to CCD and church-a very white America, middle-class, blue-collar existence. But there was something different about him; he was gay. This was nothing his father had any ability to handle. Blaise was told to, “Play sports.” Or sometimes he heard things like, “Stop being a little faggot.” He recounts these phrases with great compassion, understanding that in the place where he was from that’s just how men talked to their sons. But he formed a belief at that time that if his family knew who he was, they wouldn’t love him. It wasn’t really an unreasonable thought. But that belief became the seed for his ensuing self destruction. He started living a lie, doing anything and everything to not be himself. Getting in trouble seemed like a good way to get someone to pay attention to him. And eventually he was doing all the standards-alcohol, pot, cigarettes. But then, fate cast the entrance of Oxycontin, a powerful opiate, and the entire trajectory of Blaise’s life changed. “I felt like I was home,” he says, a sentiment often repeated by addicts about the first time they do their drug of choice. And it’s no surprise how enticing that feeling would be to a kid who did not feel at home in himself, or in his actual home. And even though he threw up and passed out while on the pills, he was right on board to do it again the next day. The feeling of home is a deep call, even if it makes you sick to your stomach.

Thus started his love affair with opiates. Oxys turned into heroin. Sniffing drugs turned into shooting drugs, and suddenly he was lost, drowning in his addiction. Problems were not talked about at home. But his parents knew he had a drug habit and began sending him to detoxes. Unfortunately, the removal of drugs for a little stretch of days didn’t do much but pause the action. And he was very much still active in his heroin habit at age 22 when he came out to his parents. Around that time, they sent him to a cushy rehab in Las Vegas. Maybe when he came home he would be fixed, his parents thought. But that treatment program, with its horse therapy and acupuncture, didn’t fix the problem. The real issue at hand was that for the first five minutes when Blaise woke up without any drugs in his system he wanted to kill himself. The real problem was that he couldn’t stand being himself without anything to numb his system. “It hurt to breathe.” So, he got prescription drugs from the doctors there and then quickly went back to street drugs. He found black tar heroin and the next profound love/hate relationship of his life-crystal meth. Once again, the whole course of his life changed with the introduction to methamphetamines. He got into sex work, escorting, and selling drugs. Las Vegas never slept. And there was some delusion of a fast, exciting, flashy life, but still Blaise awoke each morning to a pit of dread and blackness in his belly.

So, he came home, 115 lbs with blue hair, and arrived on his shocked parents’ doorstep. He went to more detoxes, but when there was no treatment center to be sent to, he was quickly back to drugs. Then one awful Christmas Eve he got released from a detox with nowhere to go and ended up on Mass Ave. At that point, he found what a lot of people find there: a group of people who make life not so alone and enough drugs to numb the pain. He spent a whole week walking around and occasionally sleeping in hallways of buildings. There was some more shuffling in and out of detoxes and halfway houses, but he always returned to Mass Ave again, homeless and on drugs, sometimes dreaming of throwing himself in front of a train.

Then came his first dose of recovery. He had a shot to go to Portland, Maine to a sober house and started doing the 12 steps. He got a glimpse of serenity and peace, but made the mistake of not putting his recovery first. When someone showed up with some of his drug of choice, bam. Just like that, it all fell apart again. He left Maine with this new “friend” and was living in total drug insanity, doing meth and staying in hotel rooms in different states. When that game was up, where was there to go? Back to Mass Ave, “the one place I wasn’t discriminated against. There were people who used and lived like I did.” And thus began his longest run in Boston. A seeming respite, Blaise started a relationship with a man who dealt meth and provided him drugs so he didn’t have to worry about making money on the streets. But it wasn’t any kind of dream life. They were both in and out of drug psychosis in an abusive relationship. Intermittently, they were in jails and hospitals. It was toxic, but it was the only kind of love and connection Blaise knew.

It’s at this time, sharing needles and sleeping with a lot of people, that Blaise contracted HIV. It spiraled him into an even deeper depression. He thought, “This is what I deserve because of the piece of sh*t person that I was.” Thankfully, Mass General Hospital intermittently took care of him. They would often let him come down from meth in their psych ward and set him up with the HIV medication that has had him at undetectable levels for 2–3 years now. But he felt during that time that there was no hope. He was already drowning in the stigma of being gay, homeless, and a drug addict; now he had HIV. He felt beyond redemption. Unfortunately, life added to an already broken person the trauma of life on the streets. Blaise witnessed rape, robbery, assault-more violence than one person should ever see, some directed at him. “No one cares what happens to us down there. I was just another homeless junkie. If I died, no one would care.”

In January 2019, he was arrested on warrants and while he was in jail, he found out his boyfriend had overdosed and died. It didn’t matter how turbulent and toxic the relationship was, he was in deep grief. He got released and started using drugs with suicidal fervor, wishing with all his heart that he would use enough to not wake up. And he almost got his wish, waking up in a hospital after an overdose, tubes in his body and handcuffed to a gurney. This might seem like the worst part of the story, but it’s actually the turning point. Blaise had to finish his pending 6-month jail sentence, and his family offered to give him one last shot by helping him get into a sober house. They didn’t want to give up on him.

To his surprise, the men there seemed happy. They were going to meetings and doing the 12 steps. Blaise doubted it could work for him; he didn’t think he could find a higher power like these other men. But he ran into a woman named Sara, whom he’d met many years ago at detox. This former addict, who now seemed to be glowing, had something that he wanted. So he asked her to sponsor him. Blaise was desperate, self-hate and grief coursing through his body and heart, still waking up to a feeling that life as himself was intolerable. But the desperation pushed him to do the basic things that were suggested. He started getting honest, doing the 12 steps, praying, asking for help, going to meetings, meditating. And suddenly, he lost the feeling that he wanted to kill himself every morning when he woke up. A sense of connection and community developed-relationships that were not transactional. There were people who were looking out for his benefit instead of their own. He got a simple job at a sandwich shop at first and started feeling that he had some basic value as a human. He was becoming a man of integrity and honor, dropping the fake persona he had created to fit in or appear to be tough.

In truth, there is no greater toughness or brave act than to tell your story for the benefit of others, with total disregard to the personal cost that may result. Blaise is sharing his HIV status for the first time publicly in hopes that someone else who is caught in the spiral of shame and depression, especially in the midst of an active addiction, would see a way out. His HIV is currently undetectable (too low to be detected on a test), which also means it’s untransmittable. Blaise says, “It’s very important that people get tested and are aware of their status. Unfortunately, on Mass Ave it’s spreading like wildfire and people aren’t getting tested so the spread is continuing to grow.”

It didn’t seem like there was a way to rise up from the hopelessness, desperation, and sickness. But Blaise Conway has done just that. He created a life of service, sponsoring men and women in the 12 step fellowship that got him sober. He has had a job in the recovery field for the last 2 years. The focus is on others, and he says it’s made his life flourish. The past no longer has chains around him; it no longer causes him to feel like he is not good enough. And you might pass by him today, walking down the street. But you wouldn’t look away. You’d probably smile at him. However, he’s the same human that once upon a time was crawling inside a garbage can to catch a little warmth. If you add enough pain into our lives, we could all be this human. And if you can’t find that truth inside yourself, you looked away too soon.

The Mass Ave Project meets people where they’re at on the streets in a loving non- judgmental light. They provide basic needs, but more so, they bring humanity back to people forgotten by society. If anyone they meet wants to get off the street, they are also a bridge into recovery by helping people get placed in adequate addiction treatment. Mass Ave Project Board: James Bradley-President, Justin Downey-Spiritual Director, Megan Kelly-Community Outreach, Blaise Conway, Maggie Bradley

For more information about The Mass Ave Project go to: https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=mass%20ave%20project