Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  After graduation from high school, Jacob came to live with Cheryl and me. Jared was gone. Not to the Marines. Just gone. Somewhere. We knew only that he slept wherever he could find a friend’s couch. Then one day he came to our house with the sides of his head shaved, leaving only that punk Mohawk spiked and tinted in purples, greens, and blues. We were clueless. The Jared we had known was shy, quiet, ordinary. Where did this unusual, flamboyant, extraordinary Jared come from?

  Maybe the girls knew. We met a Thai American named Nam. We met a soft-spoken beauty, Shannon. A grateful Destiny Lynn King remembered Jared: “I was a freshman at Orange High School when Jared came out there his senior year. I didn’t know anybody, and people frightened me. One day, on the bus, I was listening to some music and I had on a jacket that had JESUS FREAK on the back. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘What the fuck is a Jesus freak doing listening to Nirvana?’ It was Jared. After that, he always protected me on the bus and at school.”

  Laura Sullivan noticed him. “My friend Ally and I were window-shopping in the Fairfax mall and we saw this kid with that hair and a studded leather jacket and we were, like, a fellow punk!! Which was rare in the area. So we started talking to him. We knew the music he liked, bands like Leftöver Crack, Choking Victim, Kevorkian’s Angels.”

  Of the many songs on our Wurlitzer jukebox, none was by Kevorkian’s Angels. Where did that Jared come from? He had been sent away from our place in the Virginia woods at age eleven. The next six years we saw him only as the occasional weekend or holiday visitor. We seldom saw him during his last year in school, though he lived two hundred yards from us. His life had been turned upside down. On weekends and holidays, he went back to DC to be with his friends. Not only did I not know the punk-rock Jared—I no longer even knew my grandson Jared.

  Jared slept where he was welcome. With no home of his own, told by his father that he should go join the Marines, he spent one summer in a tent raised by a friend, Chris Allen, who was called Dear God. The tent had room for twelve people under a roof so high everyone could walk around. There was a dinner table inside and a grill outside. The camp sat deep in a ravine alongside I-95 at Fredericksburg, Virginia.

  Dear God, Jared, and their cohort lived in the woods, never knowing what came next. Usually the day began with Jared saying, “Dear God, let’s go on an adventure.” One morning they needed money, so they went to a bank. Instead of driving, because they had no car, they walked. And when they came to the bank’s drive-through lane, they became the Dear Godmobile.

  “My ex-girlfriend, Tamara, walked where the driver’s seat would have been and pretended to be steering,” Dear God said. “I rode shotgun and made car noises—v-room, vvv-RRR-OOOOM—and Jared was right behind me, in the ‘back seat,’ lolled over like he had passed out.”

  The pantomime so amused the drive-through teller that she passed money to the driver, after which the Dear Godmobile walked to the nearest liquor store.

  That summer set the course of Jared’s life. He met a man who had fallen off a cliff.

  Somehow the fall had not killed Michael Stephen. He was blackout drunk when he stumbled through the dark of a forest and fell thirty feet into a rocky gulch. He was twenty-nine years old. He played guitar, wrote songs, and developed conspiracy theories. A child of a broken family, living on the street, he used alcohol and other drugs to self-medicate his pains, physical and psychic. Bruised and broken by the fall into the ravine, Stephen spent weeks encased in splints that immobilized his right leg and left arm.

  He slept in an abandoned building in Fairfax, Virginia. There was a concrete post out front, the size of a child’s gravestone, with “VDH” etched into it: Virginia Department of Health. The building was a relic of the 1950s, two stories of institutional brick with windows and doors covered by plywood. The building had no electricity and no water, but it did have one virtue valued by squatters: its usable doors could be locked from inside, keeping out all predators, be they thieves or police officers.

  For Jared, who had attended schools there, Fairfax was familiar turf. The year in rural Locust Grove was an interruption in the city life to which he had become accustomed. He came to the VDH building with a mutual friend to visit the busted-up guy who was brilliant and bizarre. There he found a place that felt like home, a ghostly hull of a building, and he found a guy, broken by life, who needed help.

  MICHAEL’S STORY

  I was drinking myself to death. All alone in that abandoned building. If Jared hadn’t stayed, I well may have killed myself or died.

  He took care of me. I was in a wheelchair first, then I used a cane. He would help me with everything. It was just me and him for the better part of three months. I don’t remember ever feeling quite as safe and content as when it was just the two of us. Just the two of us in the cold, late winter.

  My parents split up when I was ten. That’s when I started traveling. First it was back and forth between Mom and Dad and grandparents. Around nineteen, I started traveling the US. Backpacking. Mostly by Greyhound. Colorado, Washington State, New York, Boston. I hung out with hippies. The “crusty punks” were always trying to start fights. Always smelled really bad. I just got on with hippies better. They had the good pot and the psychedelic mushrooms.

  I hardly ever drank. Because when I did, it was a fucking catastrophe. One day I was blackout drunk at the skate park in Santa Barbara. Apparently, I thought I was Tony Hawk and I grabbed some kid’s skateboard and dropped in on a half-pipe. Board came right out from under me and I fell fifteen feet, landing with all my weight on my right side. Broken ribs, painkillers by the mouthful for months, addicted, rehab. Then a girlfriend drops me, steals my savings, five grand that we had marked to buy a conversion van, and she runs off with a guy from her work. I started drinking again.

  Kept feeling sorry for myself until I fell off that cliff. Fucking A! Somehow I hadn’t broken anything, but my whole body was bruised. My bones were bruised. I was so mad at myself at this point. How stupid can one guy be?

  Enter Jared. Just out of high school. I was a grown man, he was barely past adolescence.

  I was so angry at the way my shit life was going that I would tell stories of my travels and paint this totally romantic picture of how wonderful the life was. I glorified it all. I glorified my “urban survival skills.” I glorified homeless travel, glorified saying, “Fuck it,” glorified partying your life away.

  He knew nothing about living on the street. He didn’t even know he needed water, let alone how to get it. I taught him to stay hydrated. Find a bottle, keep it filled up. If you’re hungry, go to grocery stores, they throw away bread every night.

  He took it all in, and there was no way he could know how fucked up I was. He was still relatively innocent and naive. I was a prophet of “Fuck It All,” and the poor kid became an eager disciple.

  He saved my life. And I fed the kid my crazy bullshit. Some friend, eh?

  Through Jared’s time with Stephen on the streets of suburban DC and later on the roads of America, one person kept track of him. His mother.

  We had hoped for a daughter after Jeff, and that daughter turned out to be Lynn. As much as it hurt that she and Jeff moved away from Newnan—and as much as divorce added to the pain—I never doubted the one thing that mattered most to Cheryl and me. Lynn loved those boys. After the divorce, she earned our respect by allowing us to love Jared and Jacob the way we had the week they were born. She did that by insisting we share their lives.

  In time, I accepted that small-town life in a deep southern state had been a culture shock for Lynn, made more difficult by a failing marriage. I finally understood her good reasons for first giving up custody of Jared and Jacob. Unable to get meaningful work, she enrolled in college and graduated with a degree in accounting. She believed that Jeff’s home, with help from Cheryl and me, was the better place for the boys. The decision to leave Newnan had become ancient history best put aside, especially in the boys’ tumultuous teenage years. We all c
elebrated together—Jeff, Lynn, Cheryl, me—on the boys’ sixteenth birthday and their high school graduations.

  That shared interest soon ended—on Jeff’s part. Lynn always knew where Jared was; she demanded that he keep a cell phone with him. In good times, she wanted to hear the happy chirp in his voice. In bad times, she wanted to know how to help. In the really good times and the really bad times, Lynn called me.

  Jeff, however, had chosen to be left out of the loop. “The whole time Jared was on the road,” Lynn said, “I only called Jeff once to give him any news about our child.”

  “Why only once?”

  “He was so mean to me that I quit calling.”

  In the cold war of his divorce from Lynn, Jeff cut himself off from any knowledge of Jared’s life. I could not do that. I made peace with Lynn. Maybe we were no longer father-in-law and daughter-in-law, but we were in this together. As unlikely as it had once seemed, we became friends, partners, and allies, brought together in common cause for the boy we loved.

  FOUR

  The trek from San Diego had delivered Jared, Stray, and Booze Cop to the haunted and haunting city of New Orleans. That Halloween of 2010, a band named Widespread Panic played at the “N’Awlins” lakefront. The “Thrilla Guerillas,” a flash mob of fifty-seven dancers, slathered on their zombie makeup to do Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Bacchanalia for everyone, orgies of liquid and flesh. Ghosts, ghouls, and goblins—goblins!—paraded down Decatur Street and Bourbon Street, a blasphemous world’s holy boulevards. Vampires worked the night, and Jared danced on the roof of the Jax Brewery building, the mighty river a leap away, shimmering in a quarter-moon’s light. From atop the Jax building, he saw the lights of Jackson Square and the three spires of St. Louis Cathedral. Best of all, for the moment and for a long time to come, the long journey from San Diego had put Jared in the presence of Christine Maynard.

  A freelance writer with a place above a daiquiri shop on Decatur Street, Maynard was the fifty-three-year-old mother of three sons, divorced more than once, a character out of Tennessee Williams, a complicated, suffering, all-enveloping woman given to romance, pathos, tragedy, and tender mercies. In a time of Jared’s distress, she would take him in from the street, befriend, nurture, and care for him. This Halloween week, she did him the favor of introducing him to a man whose road name defined him. Puzzles.

  Puzzles sometimes worked as an extra in movies made in New Orleans. He was thirty-something, charismatic and troubled, lean and good-looking with ringlets of dark hair. He had HOBO tattooed on the knuckles of one hand, AROUND THE WORLD on the back of the other, and on his ring finger the outlines of a boxcar. For a piece she wrote, Maynard had elicited from Puzzles “lurid details of the pain, suffering, and neglect that he endured growing up. He’d been on the road since fourteen, riding the rails.”

  With Puzzles, Jared hung out on a wooden wharf at the Mississippi’s edge. There was talk of Jean Lafitte and his pirates having walked on that wood. Scurvy bastards they were, someone said. And Jared decided that everyone on the wharf that night, from then on, should be called a Scurvy Bastard.

  The first time I talked to Puzzles about Jared, he said, “Goblin had the perfect name.”

  “‘Goblin’ was perfect?”

  “Kindred,” he said. “We were kindred spirits, free spirits. That kid was my brother.”

  Two weeks after that Halloween, Jared and Puzzles felt the wanderers’ need to be in motion. From the Gentilly yard, they hopped out with a girl named Alex Tallent. They were headed west, to San Diego, of all places. On a ride more harrowing than the Stray expedition, the fledgling Scurvy Bastard crew got as far as an Arizona highway.

  ALEX’S STORY

  Why Goblin wanted to go back where he’d just come from, I don’t know. Why didn’t matter to me, it was something to do and get out of NOLA for a while.

  It was a crazy trip, even before Tucson. Everything that could go right did, and everything that could go wrong did—like with Goblin and Puzzles hopping off in Houston. Goblin was pissed off at my dog, a Jack Russell, Beau, who was acting the fool. Also, we were out of smokes and booze. So Goblin says, “Hey, Puzzles, why not hop off here, fly sign, and make some money?”

  We got off way too early, and a bull kicked us out of the yard. It’s eighty-something degrees and sticky, and we’re carrying our stuff, and we had to walk five freaking miles through Houston’s Fifth Ward.

  Not everything’s clear to me yet, but Puzzles got stung by a wasp, and he had a cut on his leg, and maybe he got beat up. Somehow he wound up in a hospital, and we lost him for the trip.

  We got hung up for a week in Houston and met a guy we know, Brock.

  On the road, you often are off the road. You can wander into places you shouldn’t wander into, and the Fifth Ward in Houston is one of those places. For decades, it was a territory controlled by gangs and drug dealers. The Fifth Ward became the venue for so many murders and the depository for so many corpses that it earned the nickname “the Bloody Nickel.”

  As Alex and Jared walked from the yard through the Fifth Ward, stray dogs came running at them, snarling, ravenous. The dogs were bad enough. Worse were the small children offering to sell them crack cocaine.

  Houston to Tucson took three days. In the middle, in San Antonio, we hopped out, with me and Brock on one porch and Goblin on another porch with a girl we picked up there, a stupid stupid bitch named Jules, who did nothing but chase Goblin’s dick.

  She had a dog who had parvo, and the only food she had was marshmallow fluff. Marshmallow fluff. Then she ran us out of water because she threw it on her parvo puppy’s puke.

  And then, all of a sudden, Goblin is gone. The train’s breaking up, and we’ve lost Goblin and the bitch. We hop off and a brakeman says, “What the fuck are you doing out here? It’s freezing.” Now it’s forty-five degrees and windy. So we’re asking where the other half of the train is, where our friends are. He says, “Dude, this thing is rolling out in five minutes.”

  Goblin knows how to get around, so we see him now running after our car, and he’s trying to catch out on the fly and he couldn’t get on, so we waved him goodbye and knew we’d meet up with him—when, wow, the train stops and he and Jules climb up on a piggyback. Crazy thing about all that is, the brakeman stopped the train for us. He actually drove his truck up to the front of the train and stopped it. Just a nice guy. It happens.

  We’re out of San Antonio now and past Del Rio near the Arizona–New Mexico border and we get sided out twice—in the desert—with no water, because the bitch threw it all on her dog puke. First time, we’re there two hours, four hours, who the shit knows how long? We’re dehydrated and we see prickly pears. Goblin says, “Let’s get ’em, they got liquid in ’em.”

  I don’t know if you know prickly pears, but they’re cactus, and they have these prickly stickers that look like steel needles, and you gotta really be hungry or thirsty to take a bite out of that shit—or at the point of delirium, which we were, so we go pick as many of ’em as we can carry and we devour the damned things.

  Second time we’re sided out is beside this crappy Latino house, and we see a Mexican lady in her backyard, and we tried to bum a smoke off of her in our broken Spanish. Fumar, por favor? She came back with a giant trucker mug of coffee, a loaf of bread, and a bag of fruit. She was literally the godsend of the whole trip.

  And then we get to the Tucson yard, and the bitch Jules is standing up on the grate, exposed to the whole yard, stuffing her pack while we’re waiting for the train to slow down. Lo and behold, we see the bull truck driving one train over from us. He’s scoping us out because he’s seen her, and how couldn’t he, it’s two frickin’ o’clock in the afternoon, broad daylight.

  Meanwhile, we’re looking for the hole in the fence where we can get out of the yard. Now it’s a race to get off the train, find the hole, and get off the property before the bull gets around that other train and gets to us. So we hop off on the fly with our dogs, which can be
all kinds of trouble, but we make it okay, and we slide under the fence.

  Now there’s this highway. We run across one side and there’s a median barrier that we’ll have to jump over or crawl over, something. We look over it, nothing’s coming.

  On the road, there’s always something coming.

  So Goblin, Brock, and me crawl up and over the barrier and start running again, running across the highway—when, out of nowhere, going seventy in a fifty-five, there’s a car. Smash!

  Its mirror clips me on the shoulder and elbow, spins me around. I see Brock flying twenty feet in the air. The car’s windshield is gone, he must’ve bounced off it and destroyed it. His leg is bent, bones sticking out. He’s screaming, “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  I see Goblin writhing on the highway. He’d been hit hard too. His leg is all twisted. The car hit him sideways somehow. Maybe he saw it at the last minute and turned. It hit his backpack first. If not for his backpack, I think he’d have been killed.

  The hospital report was terrifying. It listed six major fractures up and down Jared’s body and cited an “obvious right lower extremity deformity,” which meant his leg was snapped below the knee and bent at a grotesque angle. Inside, he had to be a bloody mess: his liver was sliced apart, his bladder ripped open. Somehow, despite being flipped into the air and crashing down on a concrete highway, he had avoided a head injury. Other than that, there was only one exception to the relentless pain he would endure. He made that clear five days later when asked if there was any place that he didn’t hurt. He said, “My hair.”

  The report: