Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  I shut up about the hospital. There is no talking to an addict, even your grandson, once he’s made up his mind to keep being an addict. I said, “Just call me when you get somewhere safe.”

  Again he had checked out AMA. As he had left Dr. Holoshitz in Ann Arbor, now he left Nazareth. Again, a hospital had given him what he needed, immediate relief from withdrawal. This time he rejected detoxification and rehabilitation so adamantly that he walked out without his clothes, which hospital staff had taken because they were covered with lice. He left in a hospital-issue wraparound gown and socks. Against all reason, and with a hurricane coming, he left a hospital AMA wearing a cotton wraparound gown and socks.

  Maggie was with him. To get help, she called the only person she knew in Philadelphia, a sixty-two-year-old Chinese American who had befriended the couple earlier that week. John Wong said he had been “intrigued by the tattoos on Jared’s face.” He was also curious about lives that put such young people on the street. “I learned they were kids who liked to ride trains, they were ‘traveling kids.’ They were good kids.”

  Wong supplied Jared with clothes and then came up with a pair of shoes that, even two sizes too large, were an improvement over socks. With Maggie at his side, Jared spent the night sleeping behind a Social Security building.

  And then he was gone. He had awakened and wandered off, leaving Maggie behind. From 6:00 a.m. until nearly 11:00 p.m. on the day Hurricane Sandy arrived in Philadelphia, Maggie couldn’t find him. In that time, the storm delivered 1.82 inches of rain. Winds reached sixty-two miles per hour. The low temperature was fifty-one degrees.

  Those mystified by his disappearance included Jared himself. The first word of his whereabouts came in a phone call to his mother, but he couldn’t tell her much. Lynn sounded at once frightened and relieved when she made yet one more late-night phone call to me with one more piece of harrowing news: “Jared said he was at a CVS pharmacy in West Philly somewhere. He had no idea how he’d gotten there or how long he’d been walking. It had to have been one hellacious walk from where he’d been, at the Social Security building, clear across town.”

  He had walked in hurricane-driven rain and in wind chills below freezing. He was likely disoriented by bottom-shelf vodka mixed with drugs the hospital had administered. He was so lost that he told his mother, “I’m looking for Maggie.”

  So Lynn called Maggie, who in turn called Wong, who picked her up and drove with her around Philadelphia in search of that CVS store and Jared.

  “He just took off from where they’d been,” Wong said. “We heard he headed to West Philadelphia through a tough, black neighborhood where it wasn’t safe to be going. To get over to that CVS, he had to take an elevated train or just walk for hours. We got over there and walked up and down the street for a couple hours. Then he finally showed his face.”

  “I don’t remember leaving Maggie,” Jared told me that night on the phone. “I was really confused.”

  “You remember anything at all?”

  “I remember talking to people who weren’t there.”

  “Jared.”

  “I know, Grandpa.”

  “You okay now?”

  “I’m feeling better,” he said. “I’m not brain-dead retarded anyhow.”

  My grandson. Talking to hallucinations. Happy to be unbrain-dead. I hear him say so. I want to howl and wail. I want to scream and pray. I want to change what’s happening. I do none of it. I do nothing because by now I know nothing changes anything. We have fallen into a darkness so dark it admits no light, ever.

  I go for a laugh.

  “From now on, boy, do me two favors.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Cut out the vodka.”

  “I know.”

  “And stay out of hurricanes.”

  My notes record another conversation two months later, on December 4, 2012. Jared and Maggie had gone from Philadelphia to her mother, Kayla’s, house in Mount Airy, a little town in the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina.

  “I’m feeling all right now, not terrible,” he said.

  A grandpa sermon number infinity: “You gotta quit drinking.”

  “Me and Maggie are cutting down.”

  “Way down, like to nothing, okay?”

  “We’re not having any more passing out. No more seizures.”

  “Good, keep it up.”

  “Yeah, seizures are no fun.”

  Alcoholics lie. They lie to friends, family, and themselves. They lie to preserve the opportunity to drink again. I knew the alcoholic’s need to lie. I knew it when I made those notes on that December day in 2012. But Jared was my grandson. Sometimes we believe what we want to believe rather than what is believable, and I wanted to believe Jared could be an exception, that he could tell me the truth, and maybe he did tell me the truth. But I learned he didn’t tell me the whole truth.

  The whole truth would have included an accounting of the road trip from hell.

  MAGGIE’S STORY

  It was about the middle of November in 2012. I had this friend with cerebral palsy who needed someone to drive her from Charlotte to Houston. Could we do that? She’d pay me and Jared $100. We would deliver her to her boyfriend’s house and then drive her car back to North Carolina.

  So we drove her to Houston. The second day there, the trouble started. Jared gets sick and the bitch gets into a fight with her boyfriend and wants us to take her back to Charlotte right now.

  She had given us only $50 on the way, with the other $50 to come later. But we’d spent the $50 getting to Houston. So now we don’t have any money and Jared’s too sick to go fly sign himself. I have to go out and make money to eat before we take off back to North Carolina. It’s a thousand fuckin’ miles.

  Within five hours of driving east, Jared’s starting to puke some blood and we’re still in Texas and it’s night and it’s two o’clock in the morning before we get a hotel. The puking’s not bad yet, I thought, until I saw some dark stains on the floor. Jared said it was spit, and I said, “Spit doesn’t leave dark stains. That’s blood. If it gets worse, we gotta get to a hospital,” and he said, “No, no, I’ll be okay.”

  It got worse as we drove through the next day, and it kept getting worse, and I’m driving with the bitch in the front seat complaining that Jared’s messing up her car, and Jared’s in the back seat sounding like he’s dying, puking blood everywhere, all over himself.

  I’m driving balls-to-the-wall with one hand on the steering wheel’s suicide knob and reaching back to hold Jared’s head up and feeling for a pulse and now she’s complaining that I’m driving crazy.

  I scream at her, “What do you want? What do you want? You keep it up, I’m gonna dump you out right here and you can fuckin’ walk to Charlotte.”

  She says, “Calm down,” and I say, “Fuck you! I am not gonna calm down! Leave me alone, let me drive.” Then she makes me stop somewhere to buy her a cheeseburger.

  Now I’m calling Mom from Louisiana, “What should I do?” and she’s calling me every hour to keep me awake and we’re near Spartanburg, South Carolina, and I tell her to meet us at the bitch’s house in Charlotte. Now I’ve been driving for eighteen hours or something, and we get to the house in Charlotte and what’s the bitch’s parents do when they see Jared and the blood? They won’t let us come in the house. Jared’s going, “I’m making so much noise, I’m sorry,” and I tell him, “Puke louder!”

  It’s four o’clock in the morning, and it’s thirty degrees, and we have to wait there in the dark. Mom wants to take us to ER in Charlotte, but I figure we’ll have to wait all night. She picks us up and we head for the Mount Airy hospital, ninety miles away.

  As we leave, I’m screaming at the bitch, “Give me our $50!”

  KAYLA’S STORY

  The ride from Charlotte to Mount Airy was one of the worst nights of my life. All the way, I was so impressed with Maggie’s devotion to taking care of Jared. He was covered with blood, he’d been vomiting, there was this awfu
l smell. Maggie was catching the blood in cups and she was pulling vomit from his mouth. He’d say, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” and we’d try to comfort him the best we could.

  I was driving as fast as I could without crashing. I thought he might die in the car. There was Maggie on her knees in the front seat reaching back to hold his head up. She’d be saying, “Another hour, baby, hang in there.”

  She was totally focused on him even after two and a half days of driving. She wasn’t going to let him die. She loved him, man, she loved him to do all that, and I saw a different Maggie than I’d ever seen. She wasn’t just some cold bitch who wouldn’t talk to me. We were in this together.

  And once we got to the hospital, she helped him walk in there, and she was there every day, all day, for the next however many days until he was well enough to come to the house.

  TWELVE

  Maggie and Jared had planned to stay at her mother’s house only briefly and then be on their way to warmer weather. Instead, when Jared left the hospital, they came to a stop. They spent the winter in Mount Airy. For the first time in years, because Kayla wouldn’t allow booze in the house, they weren’t drunk 24/7, or even much at all. The months in North Carolina were so pleasant that the wanderers allowed themselves to imagine a life off the road.

  We hear sometimes what we want to hear. When I heard Jared, in a phone call from Mount Airy, say, “We’ll be here a while,”

  I heard a whisper of hope in that simple, beautiful sentence. I hoped he was tired of the running and the drinking and the pain. I hoped he had heard the concern in Dr. Holoshitz’s warning and the love in John Tumino’s preaching.

  We see sometimes what we want to see. I saw hope in the form of a kitten. Jared told me that one day, shortly after leaving the hospital, he was sitting on Kayla’s front porch. A kitten, small and golden, solitary and trembling, climbed onto his lap. The boy had grown up with cats because his mother had a houseful, as many as six at a time. Lynn said, “I spoiled ’em so rotten that Jared always said, ‘When I come back, Mom, I want to come back as one of your cats.’” Jared gave this little golden cat a name, Spud, and he took her into the house to stay. I hoped Spud reminded him of home and his mother, and I hoped Spud would be a reason that Jared might stay in Mount Airy longer than a while.

  He liked it in Kayla’s house. “Pretty cool here,” he said. “Maggie’s mom has two dogs, named Fiona and Ruby. You’d like them. They look like Hercules and Jackson.” Hercules was his father’s dog, black and burly. Jackson was our dog, a red-coated stray that came out of the woods to our house and stayed. We believe what we want to believe. I believed, in that moment when he spoke of two scruffy dogs in Virginia, that he wanted to be with us, to be home.

  Jared also reported the day’s big news: Maggie had shined up her mandolin.

  “It was dirty?” I said.

  “She’s been carrying it places.” A laugh here. “She loves that mandolin. She likes that green color. It’s really green. It’s a super-green mandolin. She really really likes green.”

  For once, Maggie was happy to be in Mount Airy. She had spoken to her mother only by phone, and only two or three times, since her release five years earlier from the local juvenile detention center. She’d already led a peripatetic adolescence. She was ten years old when her father left home for good. She declared herself happy with his departure because he was “a southern redneck dude. All he did was get drunk and watch NASCAR and wrestling on TV.” Yet, after her parents divorced, Maggie lived on Long Island with the father, then a car salesman. The daughter of a southern redneck dude didn’t fit in well at a Queens high school with “the Jewish American Princesses and their limousines.” But Maggie loved the city. “New York! All the punks in the world! I partied my ass off.” After returning to Mount Airy for her senior year (“which did not come out well”), she blew off one school, transferred to two others, and wound up in that detention center. Her offense? “Getting in trouble.”

  In those years, Mount Airy had nothing for her. The small town in the foothills of the Appalachians is remarkable only as the hometown of actor Andy Griffith. It sells itself as the model for Mayberry, the setting of Griffith’s iconic television show. Maggie never visited the Andy Griffith Museum (with a statue of Andy and Opie going fishing). She never ate at Barney’s Cafe or watched a haircut at Floyd’s Barber Shop. What she did mostly was leave Mount Airy for anywhere else.

  This time was different. She was excited about being there. For reasons she couldn’t explain, “least of all to myself,” she wanted her mother to meet this guy Goblin.

  On January 3, 2013, Jared and Maggie walked up bare wooden stairs to their all-time champion of unlikely sleeping places—the unfinished attic above Kayla’s bedroom.

  Kayla had repurposed the space from storage to a quilting room. Now, for the wanderers who might spend the winter, she made it over into a bedroom. Maggie and Jared dropped a mattress on the floor, brought up a desk and a small chest of drawers, and draped an American flag on a wall. As near to a home as they had known in years, the little room in Mount Airy was an escape from their escapes.

  Maggie had had other boyfriends. Kayla never liked them. But she wasn’t afraid of this one. Jared was courteous and sweet, but she also saw him as slight and frail, vulnerable. He needed to be nursed back to health. She said, “We even went to the Earle together, just me and Jared.” At the Earle, the old movie theater on Main Street, they saw Lincoln. “Afterwards,” Kayla said, “he told me Civil War stories.”

  He did the dishes. No one asked him to do the dishes. He did them because he wanted to do them. “Not now,” he said after dinner. “I’ll do ’em in the morning,” and every morning at seven thirty he did the dishes. If Kayla asked him to do something around the house, he did it. “If I asked him to dump the compost whenever he had a chance, he’d jump up from the table and do it right then.”

  Mornings, he would feed Spud, Dixie, Fiona, and Ruby. He would do the dishes and make himself a bowl of cereal. Then he would have another bowl of cereal, and another. “I’d eat a lot of cereal and a lot of milk,” he told me one day, “because there was nothing else to do.”

  Kayla’s mother had one rule for Jared and Maggie. No drinking in her house. She had been in that dark place with a husband, and she had been there with her daughter and Jared in a car, blood everywhere. No drinking, she said. Each day she looked for bottles under the attic mattress, and she checked the kitchen trash for bottles, and she never found a bottle.

  “The couple weeks that Jared was in the hospital, detoxing,” Maggie said later, “I’d drink only half of a half-gallon of vodka, trying to get myself off it for when he came home. He wanted to drink, and he would’ve if I did. But if I drank then, I’d be such a dick. I didn’t drink so he wouldn’t. I was able to do okay, so he was okay.

  “It took him a while, though. He was pissed off at first and said, ‘I want to keep drinking.’ I said, ‘You’re really sick this time. I’ll help you get through this, but I won’t support, like, killing you.’ It was hard, I won’t lie to you. He was really pissed. I let him holler at me, and I told him, ‘You’re not going to do anything to cause me to not be in your life.’”

  No vodka. Then, one Friday night, Jared went to Kayla asking if they might, please, have a beer.

  “No,” she said.

  “Just one,” he said.

  “I said no.”

  “Come on, it’s Friday night!”

  “No.”

  He left the house. Maggie told her mother not to worry, to let him cool off, he’d be back in a half-hour. And he was.

  They settled on one forty-ounce beer a week. They bought it at the Red Barn, a convenience store operated by Mexican immigrants that was a stop on their daily walks with the dogs, Dixie dragging Jared around the neighborhood. They said they split the forty.

  Sometimes the world they had left would insinuate itself into the attic hideaway. The road dogs’ grapevine reached them in March 2
013 with rumors of a murder in California. Some travelin’ kids beat the shit out of a teenager and left him to die. One name Jared knew, Eddo, a kid he’d met in New Orleans. He didn’t know the other names on the grapevine, Jewls and Aggro.

  Maggie said, “Damn.”

  Jared said, “Dumb shits.”

  Every couple weeks, he called his Fairfax friend and urban-survival mentor, Michael Stephen.

  Stephen said, “In the beginning at Mount Airy, he was bored and fidgety and didn’t know what to do with himself. Later he would call, all happy about how he woke up at sunrise and made breakfast, did the dishes, and didn’t know what to do next, so he made

  coffee and breakfast for everyone else, and then didn’t know what to do next, so he cleaned up for them, cleaned the kitchen, went outside, did yard work, took a break, watched some TV, and when everyone had left, he started cleaning the house.

  “I was really proud of him. I would say, ‘See? Without the booze, it reveals what kind of person you are, Jared. Helpful, courteous, decent, a good person.’ He was happy, proud of himself.”

  Stephen remembered a telephone conversation as Jared sat outside a Chinese restaurant.

  “I could hear Maggie say something about the Chinese newspaper machine,” Stephen said. “And Jared said, ‘That’s not Chinese, that’s Korean.’ Then, sort of to himself in shock, he said, ‘How the fuck did I know that?’ I told him, ‘Jared, you knew that because you’re really smart. Smarter than the average person. And a helluva lot smarter than you give yourself credit for. If you weren’t smart as fuck, I wouldn’t be your friend.’”

  Jared was also working with a carpenter, Butch, a friend of Kayla’s who had done work on her house.

  “It was winter,” Butch said, “but all he ever wore were those bib overalls, no shirt under them, and it never seemed to bother him. I paid him $10 an hour and picked him up at the house every morning. We had great conversations on the way to the job, mostly about his travels. He was a wandering man.”