Somewhere in suburban Los Angeles a tall, balding middle-aged man lies in an ICU hospital bed, tethered to an octopus of medical necessity. He is dealing with multiple organ failure; his liver is shot and kidneys need dialysis help. At 57, life as he knew it is over.
How he got into this predicament doesn’t matter much, unless it serves as a warning to others and scares them off a similar dead-end trail. The bottle was his tour guide.
One of my good buddies emailed me this news the other day. Today I’ve returned a half-dozen times to my pal’s message and the ill man’s cell number. Tomorrow I will call.
This is my college roommate. We roomed together at Jacksonville University in Florida for four years, two in a dorm and two in an apartment. He was neater than me; I was a slob. He cruised through his college career not having to work. I worked all the time, 40 to 70 hours a week in the meat department of a nearby grocery store.
We had different skill sets but common interests and got along fine. He was, and remained, a bit of an obnoxious bloke. I use that word with borrowed certainty because I heard it countless times from those who knew him and other who met him.
I was always busy during college, but dated whenever possible. Girls were fun. A lot of fun. My job put money in my pocket, dinner on the girls’ restaurant plates, and beer in their cups. My roommate was shy and socially backward with the ladies. Eventually he found one. She was more experienced than he and showed him the ropes. She was in high school.
After college he and I drifted away. Ran out of friendship, I guess, the years marked by signed Christmas cards exchanged without inscription. He was from Los Angeles and returned home. I was from Annapolis and kept moving.
Yesterday I was thinking about the predicament my roomie got himself into. I kept dwelling on how he ended up this way. If you’d have judged us by college consumption, I’d be in his place and he’d be in mine. But life after college forces choices. In my case, I quit subsidizing breweries. He, unfortunately, accelerated.
He didn’t drink much in school, hardly at all by comparison, but after going back home took up binge drinking as a competitive sport. I heard from mutual friends throughout the years that he drank too much—way too much—and yet, for some reason, he did not put it down and walk away. Carried his cup through every toll on one of life’s most miserable highways to hell.
Lying in his hospital bed, I’ll bet today he wishes he had made other choices.
I am the second of four children, close in age and all still around. Our mother lost her battle with the bottle but her end came quickly, succumbing to a massive heart attack at 53. Because the four of us have seen how gin bottles end stories, none of us has a similar addiction. Three of us even marked calendar days so we knew when the day came we had outlived her. My younger brother, the healthiest of us all, will pass her soon.
When the email about my roommate landed in my inbox, I was in Ponte Vedra, Florida at PGA Tour’s Players Championship. My roommate and I attended the tourney’s earliest years, back when it was held at Sawgrass Country Club. The famed stadium course hadn’t been built yet. Since my roomie was an outstanding golfer, it was great to have the world’s greatest players a half-hour away.
It was a fun time to be young and bulletproof. The southern rock movement was exploding: Lynyrd Skynyrd had formed and released its first album, Molly Hatchet was making more noise than amplifiers could blast, Charlie Daniels was smoking his fiddle, and the Allman Brothers were playing licks no one had ever heard nor stop singing along with. Just as good was a group called The Bonnie Gringo Band. Their song “One Eyed Dan the Fiddlin’ Man” was brilliant. Had they been as well managed as Skynyrd, everyone in America would still know every word. Because they weren’t, few of us were lucky enough to hear it.
So, as time and an email force me to look over my shoulder, it’s safe to say we can go back again. But we cannot go home again.
I hope for my buddy’s sake the doctors orchestrate a miracle and that some day my roomie is able to shuffle back home to a second chance at a fuller, richer, better life. But second chances are dicey in the medical biz, especially against complicated, tag-teaming foes like these.
My thoughts and prayers are with him.