Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  Instead of going with his pals to Tennessee, Jared decided to stay at Brooke’s place in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Aggro, who thought of Jared as her little brother, frail and failing, didn’t like what she saw happening: “All Jared did for months on the road with me and Jimbo was get sicker and pine away about missing Maggie. He liked Brooke, no doubt, but he told me, ‘She’s not my Maggie.’ He needed help, and here he was dropping us for Brooke.”

  Brooke’s row house stood across from an auto body shop on a crumbling alleyway of a street. The building’s brick front was discolored, as if charred by fire or blackened by years of Kensington’s gloom. A three-step concrete stoop led to a metal door framed by splintered wood and faded paint. Iron bars crossed the two first-story windows and two basement windows.

  A half-mile away, at the intersection of Kensington Avenue and Somerset Street, an elevated train picked up and delivered passengers. The spot was notorious for heroin dealers and prostitutes working the corners, their business seldom interrupted by Philadelphia police more concerned with homicides and gang wars. Brooke’s advice: “Don’t go there at night.”

  “That neighborhood never had a lot of people on the streets,” Aggro said. “The house had a weird location, kind of on a side street. I wouldn’t really say it was a hellhole, but it is an open-air drug market. Those people congregated at the el stops and by food-stamp offices. Mostly, the neighborhood lacked activity. You could feel it in the air, sort of a ‘blah’ effect, like nothing was going on, no life in it.”

  Brooke’s place had “long, narrow hardwood floors, all of it dirty, like they never cleaned,” Aggro said. “There were dog and cat hair balls camped around the baseboards, and her roommate’s dog thought the best bathroom was in the corner of the kitchen. The dog wouldn’t even ask to be let out, would just go. With the exception of the furniture, you could, at a glance, mistake it for a squat. And no dishes. They had no dishes. I was always wondering how they cooked, until I found out they didn’t. Whatever. It was not a place to walk around in barefoot.”

  On January 3, 2014, Jared was admitted to Episcopal hospital, six-tenths of a mile from Brooke’s house. He was diagnosed with pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas most often caused by alcohol abuse. The pancreas is a small organ that sits behind the stomach, hidden inside the rib cage. It is essential to the digestion of food. Pancreatitis is said to feel like a burning knife twisted into your back. It can kill you.

  On January 6, instead of accepting treatment for the pancreatitis, Jared discharged himself, AMA.

  Six months had passed since Maggie left Jared in an Alexandria hospital and went home to Mount Airy. She found a job tending bar. She knew Jared was still on the road, traveling with Aggro and Jimbo. She wanted to be out there with him. They kept in touch and tried to find a time and place to meet.

  Jared’s cell phone didn’t save his sent texts, but it did keep Maggie’s written to him:

  I want to see you too. I gotta make some money and get boots and a harness and stuff then Im out. So we can meet up somewhere soon if you want.

  Cause I’m just sad all the time here. I never sleep upstairs cause it makes me sad.

  And Im gonna feel like shit for leaving mom but life is supposed to be happy and Im way better at being a shit talking drunk sign flying asshole than a biscuit.

  Just housey problems I cant handle this. I’m misserable, it wasn’t so bad when you were with me but it sucks. I love mom I just am not made to work and pay bills.

  And yer the only person that understands or that I can talk to.

  Send me a pic of u so I can smile.

  There was one piece of dialogue on Maggie’s phone. It began at 11:01 p.m. on January 10, 2014.

  Maggie: Hope yer feeling good…

  Jared: Im kinda not okay. Im goin back to the hospit. I already tried once at the er today but the wait was too long.

  Maggie: Oh no! What’s wrong, how are you feeling now?

  Jared: I have pancriantidice. I don’t know to spell it but it hurts like shit. I cant eat or drink and it hurts to walk. Plus iv been dtin all day cuz I cant drink my booze.

  Maggie: I’d find something for pain to help you sleep till morning at least.

  Jared: Ya. Home girl down the street is goin to try and hook it up with some perc 10 or some zannys. Brook had been tryin to get her friend but she didn’t pic up. Oh well. Ima just go back tomorrow morning.

  Maggie: I’m glad you gots good people around you and I hope they have yer back like a butt crack!!! Oh dude, gobs be careful and please get better you can’t leave yet, I don’t wanna follow into the dark yet.

  No one knows when the last chance will come. But now we know that Jared had passed on more chances at staying out of the dark than made sense for a young man so sick. Now we know he was admitted to the Episcopal hospital a second time on Saturday, January 11, 2014. And we know that on January 13 he was in bed at the hospital when his mother called. She remembered what they said that day.

  She said, “Jared, you gotta quit drinking or you’ll die.”

  He said, “Mom, I don’t want to die.”

  That Monday morning, a social worker named Deborah Lamb came to him with one more chance.

  Episcopal called on Lamb to consult on patients with substance abuse issues. A week earlier, she had met Jared for the first time. “He was low-key, very polite, cordial,” she told me two months after that meeting. “He wasn’t rude or short with me. But he didn’t spill his guts to me either.” She remembered him because he was so young (“I usually get fifty- and sixty-year-olds”) and because his visiting friends were unusual (“an artsy crowd, a lot of tattoos”). She said he had not been interested in talking about detoxification and rehabilitation.

  The hospital administrators knew of Lamb’s previous visit, so when the same young man with chronic alcoholism showed up again, they asked her to see him a second time. At Jared’s bedside, she made her pitch again. She believes that at some time, maybe not now, maybe years from now, maybe when the patient has heard the pitch a hundred times, maybe then, he will hear it one more time and say yes. “The weight of it,” Lamb said, “may finally be decisive.”

  Because she so often heard from alcoholics that they had no insurance and no money to pay for rehabilitation, Lamb came to Jared with an extraordinary offer. “I told him I could get him into detox and ninety-day rehab at a substance abuse facility for free.”

  She could do that through a Philadelphia County program called the Behavioral Health Special Initiative. He could get sober and he could get well. He could have a life that he chose rather than one chosen for him by bottom-shelf vodka. No one in any health system had ever made such a proposal to Jared. In response, Jared said what he had said so many times before.

  “He sounded the same as the first time we talked,” Lamb said. “He minimized his drinking. He said he’d ‘cut down’ because of the pain, ‘cut down’ from vodka to beer. They think that’s the answer. But it’s still alcohol. It’s still the most deadly drug. And then they drink more beer—more alcohol—to get the same buzz they got from vodka.”

  As he had said no to Jeff and Lisa eighteen months earlier when they had gained him admission to the Boxwood substance abuse facility in Virginia, Jared now said no to Deborah Lamb in Philadelphia.

  “How could he turn that down?” I asked Lamb.

  She said, “The mistake we make with addicts is thinking they have any kind of logic.”

  There is a logic to it, only it’s a logic of despair. Jay Davidson, the Louisville Healing Place administrator, said, “Jared said no for two reasons. One is that going through the withdrawal is physically, mentally, psychologically, and spiritually painful. The other part is the outright fear of living without the chemical, not being able to cope with life without it. We alcoholics have these feelings of guilt, shame, and remorse, feelings of ‘I wish I could have, I should have, would have, but didn’t.’ So it’s all those feelings of guilt and sham
e, and we can’t deal with those feelings. It’s emotional despair. So we drink for one reason: to change the way we feel.”

  It was 3:12 p.m. that day when Jared signed himself out of the hospital, AMA.

  An hour later, he called me. All I knew then—I knew nothing of Deborah Lamb—was that he had been in Episcopal twice.

  “How’re you feeling now?” I asked.

  “Just got out of the hospital,” Jared said. “Feeling pretty good, actually. They gave me some Ativan, some morphine too, I think. Not in so much pain right now.”

  He said he needed money to buy three prescriptions. I thought the money might go for prescriptions, but I guessed it would buy vodka. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. If sending the money made me an enabler, so be it. I didn’t ask a question, and if that makes me a poor grandfather and a worse reporter, so be it. All I cared about that day was helping my grandson the way he needed help.

  “I’ll get you the money, Western Union, right now,” I said. “But, Jared, you know you gotta quit this.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Take care. Love you, boy.”

  “Love you too,” he said. “Tell Grandma hey and I love her.”

  At 4:45 p.m., I did a Western Union transfer of $100.

  For the second time in seven days, Jared had said no to his best chance at finding a way out of the dark.

  He returned to Kensington.

  Lynn had told him she would get the call. She told him she just knew it. Even the day before, she had warned him the drinking would kill him. She had tried to scare him straight by insisting on an answer to her question, “Cremation or burial?” She had said all that and still she was his mother and she really never thought the call would come. Something good would happen. He would find the right girl, there would be grandbabies and Christmas mornings and birthday parties. Someday they could remember the travelin’ kids and the good times on trains and how harrowing it had been and how wonderful to have come through the dark into the light.

  Jared left the Episcopal hospital on a pleasant winter day, mostly cloudy, fifty-two degrees, with a wind from the south-southeast at 9.2 miles per hour. There had been nine inches of snow in the new year, but none remained on the ground that day. Night had fallen by the time Jared returned to Brooke’s row house.

  Then, at 12:21 a.m. in Myrtle Beach on January 15, 2014, the call came.

  The Philadelphia County medical examiner asked if he had reached the next of kin of Jared Kindred.

  What he said next, the mother remembered only for the emptiness of the words, words she never wanted to hear, that could not be meant for her, and yet the man said the terrible words about her child, and months later she read the medical examiner’s report and saw his words, whatever they had been, rendered clinically in a section called “Circumstances”:

  Medics responded to a call for a person found down at his residence. They responded and found the decedent in agonal respirations. He was transported to the ER with oxygen. Upon arrival he was in asystole. He was intubated, given four rounds of epinephrine, one of bicarb, and one of calcium. All attempts to revive him were unsuccessful and the decedent was pronounced.

  The time of death was 1:45 a.m. January 14. Because the hospital could not immediately find a record of next of kin, it was nearly a full day later before the medical examiner called Lynn.

  His report quoted Lynn:

  “We just talked to him the day before. He had just gotten out of the hospital. He said he was doing fine. What the hell happened?”

  Jacob heard the conversation and cried out, “No, no, no.” It couldn’t be Jared. He told his mother it had to be a mistake. Ask them, Mom. Ask them if they’re sure. Ask about the tattoo.

  Lynn said into the phone, “Can you tell me, is there a tattoo on his face?”

  The man went away for a minute. On return he described the tattoo, and the medical examiner’s report ended:

  Mother of decedent was unable to continue conversation.

  Cheryl was watching television when she answered the phone at our home in Carlock, Illinois. She came to the foot of our bed. In the dark, she said six words.

  “Jeff’s on the phone.”

  I raised my head.

  “Jared died.”

  It was 12:31 a.m. I dropped my head on the pillow. My greatest fear had been that I would hear those words. Jared died. Those words did not belong together. I felt time stop and start up, a heartbeat later. In that lost moment, those words emptied the bedroom of all but its darkness. I no longer felt the bed under me. I was suspended in a void, floating, feeling nothing. I got out of bed and embraced Cheryl. We wept and we wanted undone what was done.

  TWENTY

  The Scurvy Bastards came to the funeral. They came the way Jared would have wanted them to come. They came the way they lived. They came in dirty, stinking bib overalls held together by fraying twine and mismatched patches. The girls came with tangled dreads, the guys with beards gone wild.

  At 1:09 p.m., Saturday, January 18, 2014, the funeral director said, “Thunder out there.” He tilted his head toward the highway. I made a note of the time, the date, and the words. The reporter’s work gave me a reason to look away from the casket. Grandfathers die, for they are old, and grandsons live on, for they will have children to raise and grandchildren to adore. A grandfather is out of place at his grandson’s casket.

  Jared’s reddish beard had been trimmed to a perfect edge around his small, fine face. He wore brown Carhartt jeans, a white T-shirt, and, at his neck, a travelin’ kid’s bandanna, his “train rag” blackened by thousands of miles of road grime. A small boy had placed a Lego locomotive on Jared’s chest. There, in the casket, he was Goblin, gone. There, in the casket, he was Jared, in my heart forever.

  Jacob came up. One sidelong glance, he left.

  Outside, Jacob stood with Jeff and they smoked cigarettes. Father and son said nothing.

  Inside, a girl named Brandi came up to Jacob. Once a couple, they hadn’t seen each other in a year.

  “Why’d you come?” he asked.

  “For my friend Jared,” she said. “And to make sure you, the love of my life, are okay.”

  The thunder was the thrum of Harley-Davidsons. The local chapter of Hells Angels had asked its members to come to the funeral. Lynn and Joe Perron, her longtime boyfriend, were Harley people. These were not the Hells Angels raising hell at Altamont. These were middle-aged guys who were a threat only to sell you insurance.

  A bright young girl came to the funeral. Samantha Street, sixteen years old, knew Jared as the cute guy she saw maybe once a year at his mother’s house, two doors down in their Myrtle Beach neighborhood. In the chapel, Samantha asked her mother about those people in the dirty, stinking clothes.

  “They’re from Jared’s world,” the mother said. “They jump trains to different parts of the country.”

  “What about their home, their family?” the girl said. “And where is the rest of their stuff?”

  “They don’t have homes, honey. They are each other’s family. And all they have is what they can put in their backpacks.”

  As much as they could, the Bastards had shined themselves up. They were quiet, respectful, dignified. They sat a row ahead of Samantha, and she saw tears and she saw tangled dreads leaning against beards gone wild. Later, for a high school English class, she wrote about the Scurvy people:

  “When I first saw them, they stood huddled together, holding one another and offering kind words of support. They did not care about the bewildered looks some threw their way. All they cared about was being there for one another. I was in absolute awe. It tugged at my heart to see such loving people so deeply affected by the passing of a dear friend.”

  I looked for a girl I had never seen.

  I wanted to meet Maggie.

  I saw a girl who couldn’t walk into the chapel.

  She was tiny and pretty with the faintest of tattooed lines on her cheeks. She came to the chapel’s wide door
way. She leaned forward to look around the corner, a little at a time, as if in fear of seeing what she knew she would see. The casket was thirty feet away. She stopped. She dropped her face into her hands, turned, and went to another room.

  That girl sat on a couch, and I took a place next to her.

  “Are you Maggie?” I said. “I’m Jared’s grandfather.”

  She leaned her head against my shoulder.

  “Thanks for being so good for Jared,” I said, and she whispered, “The best time of my life.”

  From the chapel, I heard Arlo Guthrie singing about a train called the City of New Orleans, rolling on Illinois Central lines…

  Jared’s friends had asked for the song to be played under a slideshow of his life, the train of a travelin’ kid’s dreams singing good night, America…

  Under the music, a slideshow… we saw Jared with Maggie twice, three times, four, five, eight times. The two of them golden in sunlight. Sleeping, his forehead on her shoulder. In rubble alongside railroad tracks, laughing, mugging for the camera, a twelve-pack of Busch in their happy hands… we saw again the picture of Jeff, the new father, twenty-six years old, with a week-old son in the crook of each arm, his face made soft and radiant by joy. “My country boys,” he had called the twins, “Jake and Jed.” And we saw again, wonderfully, Goblin and Booze Cop, shoulder to shoulder, lost under the grime and tattoos, looking at us and daring us to think of them as anything other than brothers.

  We had come from Illinois. The Scurvy people had found their way from Maine and Florida, from Louisiana and North Carolina, from California and Indiana. Every picture in the slideshow was prettier than the last, and I loved those moments when Jared laughed for the camera. I knew those were moments of light in a life of darkness, and yet, I asked Aggro, “Was he always like that?”