so, tonight we had a party. It’s one we do every year, really ever since we bought a house. It’s a combination house warming/anniversary party, and friends and family always get invited. We drink and talk smart, eat food that would cause our many doctors to look at us with the hairy eyeball, and tire the dog right the fuck out.
It is often the only time we see many of these folks, and we all have a grand old time. But the friends become scarce and family starts to fade. Mortality takes its toll, and where once we would party like college students, now we are old people. Hell, even most of our kids have aged out, and now don’t really want to spend a night with the parent’s old clueless friends.
Oh! Hey! I have to mention the kewl gift I got from one of my bestest friends. This takes a bit of backstory; we got to be friends while playing league darts for a local dive bar (steel tips, not those namby-pamby machine darts) and competitive drinking. At one point, his father wanted to get a computer, and he asked me if I could help set up the old man, which of course I was happy to do. Well, his dad and I hit it off, and in addition to becoming his IT department, also became good friends. Sadly, a few years back R’s dad had to enter a nursing home and then passed, leaving R with a shitload of debris and belongings. And amongst those, was a certain item.
R knew that his dad meant it for something, since it was published well before we ever did the Macintosh stuff together, and it must have took work to track down.
R knew that his father would love that I now have it, R was happy that I would have it, and I am tickled fucking pink to have it. It is a pristine copy of the inaugural, number one issue of Macworld, from 1984:
Now, here’s the thing about this that makes it something I will put in a safe place and treasure:
I am not entirely sure about R’s future, and I fear that it may not be long before this is what I have to remember him by.
When I first knew him, he just was an ebullient drinker. But as time went by, he lost several jobs because he would drink at lunchtime and become inconsistent and unreliable. Eventually he became a cab driver (and a good one! at one year’s Milwaukee Film Festival, there was a short film about him!) and all the while, we remained good good friends.
But at the same time, other friends were fading and ghosting, not wanting to be seen as ‘enablers’. While I was seeing R being abandoned and becoming more isolated; I have since learned that is often the result.
R eventually ended up in Hazelden, and worked to become sober for quite a long time. But again, as is often the case, the addictions snuck back in; yes, addictions both smoking AND drinking; the classics!
R has been off and on, sober or sober-ish, and then backsliding. Tonight, he was abjectly apologetic that he was too drunk to visit me in the hospital on my Events (which I assured him I never held against him and instantly accepted his apology, trying to assuage his feeling of guilt).
But things got worse. He had a doctor diagnose him with cirrhosis of the liver (which may have been erroneous, but nonetheless alarming) and had throat cancer discovered.
Thankfully, we once had a President and government that actually gives two squeaky shits about the normal fucking people, and expanded the range of health care coverage; R was able to obtain health insurance on the ACA markets, and went to the doctors for the first time in years. Not only the alarming things up above, but started getting his diabetes under treatment. Thanks Obama (not sarcastically) and fuck you Republicans (in complete earnestness).
he had the throat cancer successfully treated and removed, hurting like a motherfuck.
R and I are not only good friends, but also concert buddies of the first order. I recently sent him a text, remarking on the upcoming concert schedule, that I had seen all that I cared, and nothing was coming up. Recently, we saw the Outlaw Music Festival at Summerfest, Jason Isbell at the BMO Amphitheater, and the incomparable Figgs at the tiniest East Side bar, Circle A.
So I spent the late evening, dialing up our favorite songs to give him hope and courage; Jason Isbell, Trapper Schoepp, Okkervill River, Sally Timms, Trampled by Turtles, Mountain Goats, Gaslight Anthem….basically anything visceral and affirming, that might give him the feeling that there is value in staying around. We talked late into the night, and I sent him off to spend the night with his fuzz bucket dogs and aggressive greenwing macaw named Biko and telling him he could be strong enough to get through.
Rory is the kind of guy that everybody loves. He admitted tonight, that his happy-go-lucky life of the party persona is a front – it kind of had to be, I think – he was not only an instant lover of our first dog Mieshka, he also came up with a hilarious drunken backstory at at the first party we had her, identifying her as a ‘Kalaka’ a fictitious Russian attack breed. Check it; this dog is only lethal if you are allergic to dog licking;
But….yeah. I don’t know how this ends, except like that line from the Mountain Goats song “this scene ends badly, as you might imagine….”
But it is a one time I wish I wasn’t joking about this zombie thing, so I could bring R back in the worst case. Because he would, undoubtedly, be an AWESOME zombie.
Empire Of The Senseless 
Yeah. As the typically humorous line goes, It’s all fun and games until it’s not.
Those of us who lived our life…profligately…thrive in the love and admiration of the ‘regular folks’ who go to work and get married and have families. They wish they were us – but they have the sense to understand there is no ultimate reward – everything is delivered in the moment – and the last chapter is nothing but an accounting.
I had a lot of fun, I got through some dark moments, but in the end I discovered I had utterly failed, and couldn’t even care for myself. I empathize with Rory – and with you – because we can never say for certain we wouldn’t do it all the same way again, even knowing how the story inevitably ends…
UPDATE. Not a good one. I missed a couple of phone calls from R, and the message he left was rambling, near-incoherent and he was obviously fucked up. He said he had spiraled further down, and was checking himself in – somewhere. And that he had discovered the bleak, horrible comfort of cutting in recent days.
As I said, I don’t know how this ends. At least he had the presence of mind to arrange for care of his animals. He also made reference to sending his GreenWing Macaw, Biko, my way, which he had often threatened if he died.
Last time I saw him, he admitted that he couldn’t bring himself to work. Well, nothing like dwindling funds to make everything seem more desperate.
I sent him a text back, but who knows where that might end up. I hope I hear where he is, and they have visiting policies. But for now…. I just don’t know. I am kind of fucked up about this.
As a demonstration of how bad he sounded, my visual voicemail gave up on trying to transcribe the message, as it was halting, mumbling, and not something even an AI could parse. It alarmed, me, it did.