Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  Red Smith favored “razor blade soup,” sometimes known as martinis. While in college, Jane Leavy, later my buddy at the Washington Post, did a profile on Red. Believing it a kind of duty—“The ethos was, sportswriters drank and never missed a deadline”—she delivered vodka to Red as he worked, with one instruction from the great man: “Hold the fruit.” No lemon, no lime. She matched Red one-for-one, even at the airport, where they boarded a plane for New York. On arrival, Red couldn’t find his car or even the parking lot. “Where’s Lot 1?” he asked an airport worker. “No Lot 1,” the man said, “only A, B, C.” The problem was solved when Leavy realized they had landed in Newark. “We had flown to the wrong damn city,” she said.

  Leavy and I were among the American press corps en route to Sarajevo for the 1984 Winter Olympics. At a reception in Zagreb, our hosts supplied a vicious eastern European poison called slivovitz. It’s a plum brandy that has been compared to lighter fluid, paint thinner, and jet fuel. One sip set my esophagus on fire. We boarded a train for a night ride through the mountains of Yugoslavia. Attempting to extinguish the fire in my throat, I drank beer for the next seven hours. I learned both the Serbo-Croatian word for beer and the name of the comely train attendant eager to serve us. Every half-hour or so, I heard myself cry out, “Piva, Behrka!”

  One more story: After a day at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, my wife and I had a pitcher of beer at dinner. We then returned to a house we shared with other Americans. Deep into Southern Comfort, the men poured us each a half-glass of that sweet poison. Damn, it went down easy and with results a wiser man would have anticipated. All night, despite my best efforts, my bed spun on a horizontal plane. I moved to a safer place, the floor. It too spun. My wife threw up multiple times. I never did. The poison stayed in my system through the next day at the Olympics. In an upset, I lived.

  Never again, Hurricanes. Never again, slivovitz. Never again, “Piva, Behrka.” Never again, Southern Comfort.

  Jared seemed to have been quickly addicted to alcohol, perhaps as early as the day in Key West at age thirteen when he shared a pitcher of beer with Jacob. It started that way for Jay Davidson, an alcoholic in recovery who is now the chairman at The Healing Place, an alcohol abuse facility in Louisville, Kentucky.

  “I was thirteen years old when I had my first taste of beer,” Davidson said. “I liked it and I drank three more right then. My brain went, ‘Wow, this is really good!’” He said that most men who ended up at The Healing Place “experienced, in adolescence, some kind of physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual pain. They had low self-esteem, shame, humiliation, despair. They’ve lived with those feelings most of their lives. So they drank. Alcoholics drink for one reason—to change the way we feel. Drinking gave me esteem and power. I was able to relate to the opposite sex. Once I started drinking, I wouldn’t stop until I passed out. That’s the point at which you have crossed over from abuse of the chemical to dependence on it.”

  Early intervention is a powerful tool against alcoholism, Davidson said—intervention at thirteen if necessary. “Family, friends, and everyone who loves the alcoholic has to intervene as soon as the signs are there. The intervention has to identify the one thing the alcoholic does not want to lose. There’s something he doesn’t want to lose. It could be a spouse, a job, a best friend. You must identify the fear of the loss of that one thing. And the intervention group has to be solid. If one person in the group says, ‘Oh well, it was just one time, he’ll get better,’ guess who the alcoholic will listen to.”

  Once a person becomes dependent on alcohol, Davidson said, the only way out is through detoxification, rehabilitation, and abstinence, each of them a harrowing step toward sobriety. Even the first step, detox, is frightening. Many addicts prefer the high risk of continuing to use the substance to the certainty of delirium tremens and the possibility, even probability, of relapse after rehab and a need to go through it all again.

  Jared had already spent a week of horror in his stepmother’s hospital. Boxwood promised more. He said no.

  Refusing Boxwood, Jared went on the road again, first to Syracuse, New York, where in the summer of 2012 he met a street preacher named John Tumino.

  Once a restaurant owner, Tumino had left the business world to create a charitable organization called In My Father’s Kitchen. His work taught him that people walk by the homeless without seeing them—as if they’re invisible. The author Peter Matthiessen, after his own street service, said, “I heard a homeless woman say, ‘You know what we are to you people? We are like a piece of Kleenex that somebody’s blown their nose into and thrown on the rainy sidewalk. Who wants to pick that up?’”

  Tumino’s mantra on street people became “You are not invisible!” It was his assurance to them and all those wandering on the fringes of society that they were seen by the only eyes that mattered, God’s.

  He met Jared and a Lakota Sioux named Ash Dogskin flying sign under a bridge. “They were nice guys, free spirits, lovers of life, sociable. There was a softness to them, they didn’t have a mean streak.”

  Twice a week for two months, Tumino stopped to see them. “We fed and clothed them too, as well as providing things they needed to survive outdoors, sleeping bags, wet wipes, toiletries. But I made a point of not preaching against that dangerous life. My purpose was to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with your grandson. I only wanted him to hear about the love of Christ. He heard me, yes. Did he accept it? I believe he did. I believe in the power of Jesus Christ.”

  By 2018, twenty-one of the homeless people Tumino took care of had died, including a woman beaten to death a quarter-mile from Jared’s panhandling spot.

  From Syracuse, Jared worked his way west to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he again wound up in a hospital. There, not for the first time, but in the most dramatic way, a doctor told him that drinking would kill him.

  Jared had rolled off a park bench during a seizure. The University of Michigan Health System report identified him as a twenty-three-year-old man with a history of alcohol withdrawal seizures.

  The patient is currently traveling (hopping on and off carrier trains) to Pittsburgh with two friends. States the three of them consume between ½ gallon of vodka or a box of wine daily.… Initial labs additionally demonstrated pancreatitis, transaminitis, and acute kidney injury… (with symptoms of) tremulousness, anxiety, hallucinations, diaphoresis, tachycardia,… and hypertension.

  A CT scan of his brain showed “advanced volume loss for the patient’s stated age” and “encephalomalacia involving the left frontal lobe.” The volume loss was likely attributable to alcohol abuse. Encephalomalacia, a softening of brain tissue, usually occurs after an injury. The citing of brain injury reinforced the New Orleans hospital’s report of a cavitary defect in the left frontal lobe—the brain’s home of reason, judgment, and emotion. Maybe that defect allowed Jared to leave the hospital “against medical advice” (AMA).

  Throughout his hospital course, the patient threatened to leave AMA several times, eventually leaving AMA on 8/30 after

  a thorough discussion of the risks… (including but not limited to death, seizure, brain damage, sepsis, and organ dysfunction). The patient signed AMA paperwork.

  For Yossi Holoshitz, the attending physician, Jared’s case was personal. He told me, “I made a mental note, he was the same age as my daughter.” Holoshitz remembered the unique elements of Jared’s admission. The youth. The multiple seizures. The travelers, Ash Dogskin and Jersey Guy, staying at Jared’s bedside. “Here were these young people,” Holoshitz said, “undergoing this kind of rough life.”

  Holoshitz wanted Jared to stay in the hospital. “I told him, ‘You’re putting your life in danger. You’re young, you have many years ahead of you if you take care of yourself.’”

  Jared was not cooperative.

  “He didn’t talk at any length,” the doctor said.

  Holoshitz was so taken by Jared’s circumstances that he did an extraordinary thing. For the first time in h
is memory, he made a telephone call to a patient’s mother. Then Lynn called me. Her voice was flat. Of all our conversations—beginning with her sobbing report of Jared’s facial tattoo—this one was memorable for its melancholy.

  She said, “Dr. Holoshitz told me that if Jared didn’t quit drinking, he’d die.”

  In clinical language, the New Orleans hospital had warned Jared of the risk of drinking. Now, seventeen months later, a doctor had delivered the cold truth himself. Holoshitz’s words suggested inevitability.

  What do we do, then? Jared had so consistently resisted all our pleadings that we believed he would change his life only, in the terrible phrase, “when he hit bottom.” If being told you’d kill yourself by drinking was not hitting bottom, what was? He had been run over by a car. That changed nothing. He had been beaten until his brain bled. That changed nothing. He had been in a Virginia hospital for a week of detox. That changed nothing. And if nothing changed, the chilling, frightening truth was that Dr. Holoshitz’s warning would no longer be a warning—it would be fact.

  It is easy to say we should have found Jared and carried him to a detox and rehab center. His father couldn’t get it done even when he was within “an inch” of getting it done. Maybe we should have hunted him down, bound him, gagged him, kidnapped him from his road dogs, and delivered him to an alcohol abuse facility. Have him legally committed against his will, effectively imprison him? The hard, cold truth—as I would learn years later from David Sheff and Jay Davidson—is that if an addict doesn’t give himself up to the long-term agony of gaining sobriety, outside forces are helpless.

  All we did, then, was the same old lame-ass begging him to quit drinking. He said he was cutting down. We knew better. We knew he made promises that he couldn’t keep. We knew he knew he was lying. So we just shut up. Short of legal commitment—unthinkable, nearly impossible to accomplish—we could do nothing for a young man we loved.

  On the road, turning south to South Holston Lake in northeastern Tennessee, Jared went to an annual event called a Rainbow Gathering.

  One of a dozen Gatherings across the United States, it drew twenty thousand hippies and hoboes, the homeless and the wandering. There, four months after putting together Sarafina Scarlet’s wedding, Jared again saw Maggie, the girl with the mandolin.

  By then, Maggie had been on the road five years. Her fine little face matched Jared’s. Her phone ringtone was a night train’s lonesome whistle. Her Facebook page let readers know that she “Started Work as Professional Bum 2008.” She had hitchhiked from home in North Carolina to California. She worked as an inventory clerk for a moving company until she earned enough money to fly back to Charleston, South Carolina. From there, she hopped her first train, Charleston to Waycross, Georgia. She seldom sat still long.

  Maggie’s movements, per FB:

  Knoxville, Fucking Indiana, Pittsburgh hawking for hamburgers, In Philly, Wisconsinnnn, Minnesota, Los Angeles babyyyy, New Mexico! TEXAS!!! San AntonioNO, AUSTIN!! Louisiana-bound goodbye dallas, North Dakota, Augusta Georgia, In Maryland…

  A note in there:

  sharing a forty is like watching a stripper take off her shoes, a pointless, teasing waste of money.

  Another:

  What did you expect, a sunday morning saint? An optimistic troubadour from this pessimistic sleaze? Sure I change for the worse and baby I’m never coming back

  At the Rainbow Gathering, she noticed Jared right away, the wedding fresh in her memory. Besides, how could she miss him? “He was being goofy, talking silly, just dancing around, hoppity-hoppy, being all silly with hand gestures and noises, just happy. He was the happiest guy I’d ever seen.”

  ELEVEN

  They were a glamour couple in their world of grit and grime: Maggie with the black dreads, brown eyes, and the faintest of tattoo lines across her cheekbones; Goblin the small, blond, blue-eyed flirt with the badass face tattoo. They might have been figurines atop a hoboes’ wedding cake, bride and groom, living happily ever after in blackened, patched, greasy Carhartt bibs. For Maggie, it was what she thought love should be. “He made me laugh,” she said, “and he made me feel safe.”

  When Jared called home, his mother heard a difference in his voice. “He was so excited, more so than I’d ever known him to be,” Lynn said. “So in love with Maggie.” It was Lynn’s theory that Jared would come back to the real world when he found the right girl. With the right one, his mother thought, Jared could settle down, get off the road, have a life.

  Maggie said, “We were like two best friends who loved each other and traveled the country together. We lived under bridges and in skywalks and pastures and hotels and friends’ houses and on trains. We ate gas station food on food stamps and out of dumpsters where they’d thrown good food away. One time we went to TGIF for all-you-could-eat and all we could eat was $5 worth. Just not used to eating.”

  Most travelin’ kids move in pairs for company and safety. As Maggie did with her Dixie, they also often take along a dog for the extra security of a light sleeper who promises to wake up barking at an intruder in the night. Because they live moment-to-moment, dependent on kindnesses, they share the primal necessities of life on the road: shelter, sleep, food, drink, sex.

  Maggie and Jared also shared vodka. “Like water for us,” she said. Taaka. McCormick. Skol. Popov. Nikolai. “The smart kids do vodka, it’s cheaper than whiskey. Bottom-shelf, $11.49 before taxes, $12.50 out the door. One and a half gallons a day, if it was just Jared and me. It’d be gone in ten hours, that’s if we’re sippin’ it slow. We wouldn’t get shit-faced, just a steady flow of alcohol in our systems to avoid the DTs. Whatever was cheapest was Jared’s favorite. He’d drink it straight up, sometimes he’d chase it with orange or blue Powerade. Or he’d say, ‘I chase with my spit on the Mississip’.’

  “There’s plenty of people who don’t drink out here. Either they don’t drink, or know what they’re capable of, or are smarter, or are overcoming alcoholism. Jared loved drinking with his friends. He’d be more social, more talkative. He’d function better with a buzz on.”

  Early in October of 2012, they used Facebook to let their road dogs know the news:

  Jared Kindred and Mags N Dixie are in a Relationship

  She loved silly things about him. The way he told her, “I’ve got your back like a butt crack.” His goofy rhymes: “Nation station explanation!” “Nig nog, niggity noggity niggity.” “Jont-ja-jont.” “Maxin’ and relaxin’.” “Skibbity bee bop um bee.” She pronounced a road dog’s version of wedding vows: “Hospital visits, whether yours or mine, we were there for each other in sickness or in health and in good or bad.”

  She added, “You want to hear his favorite joke? A duck walks into a bar and asks, ‘Got any grapes?’ The bartender says no. The next day, the duck asks again, ‘Got any grapes?’ The bartender says, ‘No grapes, we’ve never had grapes, we never will have grapes, and if you ask for grapes again, I’ll nail your stupid duck bill to the bar.’ The duck thinks about that and asks, ‘Got any nails?’ The bartender says no, he’s got no nails. ‘Good,’ the duck says. ‘Got any grapes?’”

  Maggie said, “If he’d wanted to get married, get settled, get jobs, I’d have said, ‘Where do I sign up?’ If he’d said, ‘I’ll quit this, I just want to have a place,’ that would’ve been it. I’d have married him in a fuckin’ heartbeat.”

  Maggie was the right one.

  With her, maybe Jared could find his way.

  Jared had slogged through Hurricane Irene the year before. Now, in late October 2012, he and Maggie arrived in Philadelphia as Hurricane Sandy neared landfall on the New Jersey coast. One night they took shelter in a honeycombed concrete wall. Jared entertained Maggie with stories about World War II. She said, “Four hours, nonstop, off the damn History Channel! Nazis! Panzer tanks! Eisenhower, D-Day. I thought that war would never end.”

  He had his own war going on. He called later with that story. “We stopped at a Wawa gas station. I wanted a Gatorade, th
ought that might help. My chest hurt really, really, really bad. I didn’t know what it was, what was wrong, it just hurt really, really, really bad. For some magical reason, an ambulance was at the Wawa too. I knocked on the window and asked them to take me to a hospital.”

  A heart attack? His family had a history of heart troubles. My father’s father died of heart disease. I have coronary artery disease. My son has atrial fibrillation. Jared had been diagnosed with tachycardia, a condition that causes the heart to race, sometimes at two hundred beats a minute, less a rhythmic beating than a high-rev thrum. Was it a heart attack, or was Jared about to have a seizure? Maggie had seen seizures happen: “He’d get that blank stare. He knew it was coming. Just staring. I yelled, ‘Goblin!’ He wouldn’t even blink. Like he didn’t hear nothing. ‘Goblin, Goblin, look at me!’ Nothing. And he’d start shaking, these really hard full-body twitches. And he’d be making really weird noises. And then he’d fall over. Out of it. That’s when we called 911.”

  As he did with increasing regularity, Jared called me. He said doctors at Nazareth Hospital “gave me a little white pill, a muscle-relaxer or something, I don’t know what the hell they gave me. They said I should stay for three or four days, to detox and get into rehab.”

  I asked, “Are you still in the hospital?”

  “Fuck no. I already checked myself out.”

  He said it hard and fast, as if it were the only possible answer, as if that magical ambulance had delivered him into enemy territory, as if he had to get out of there as fast as damn possible.

  I said, “Jared, what are you thinking? You gotta get back in that hospital. You can’t be on the street now.”

  “Grandpa, I ain’t doin’ no detox,” he said.