by Dave Kindred
He met a homeless man at a gas station. “I talked to him, gave him some change, told him my name was Jacob. We talked some a long time and finally I left, and when I was leaving, he said, ‘Thanks, Jared.’ What? Jared? I’d never mentioned Jared. A lot of people with no clue I even had a brother would meet me and call me Jared. What’s that about?”
At recess in kindergarten, Jacob saw Jared swinging on monkey bars until, halfway across, he stopped. Here came a kid from the other direction, a second grader, a bigger kid. The kid kicked Jared in the chest, knocking him off the bars and to the ground, where he broke an arm.
“I was afraid of heights back then,” Jacob said, “but the first thing I did was run and jump on the monkey bars and swing across to that kid and I kicked him in the chest and knocked him off. Then I jumped off and landed right on top of him and proceeded to punch him in the face, and I would not stop punching him. Teachers had to pull me off of him. I don’t remember this, but Mom says I beat the shit out of the kid so bad that it took five minutes to wash the blood off of him before they could figure out who he was.”
It was brotherly love in the way that things happen with brothers. “Yeah, we’d be at each other a lot. You know that story where I hung Jared over the railing by his ankles?”
“Do tell,” I said. “I’ve heard a version of it.”
By Jacob’s account, the boys-will-be-boys thing started in his bedroom upstairs, moved onto the loft landing, and continued until he hoisted Jared over the railing, dangling in midair, upside down, his head six feet from the living room floor. It was high enough—higher than monkey bars—that a kid dropped from there might get hurt in ways the other kid didn’t intend.
“Dad and Lisa were freaking out, like, what was happening, what could they do? Hell, I wasn’t going to drop him,” Jacob said. “Anyway, Dad was about right below us. He’d have caught him.”
That was the summer that Jeff and Lisa split up the boys. They sent Jared to live with his mother eighty miles away. That was the summer of the phone call I got while on a vacation trip in Montana, the summer Jeff told me about the boys fighting and the loft railing incident, the summer he said, “I’m the parent here.”
Jacob said, “Yeah, that’s the story, that they made Jared move to Mom’s so we wouldn’t fight and do all that shit—and that’s total bullshit. The whole reason was because Lisa was scared Kaleb would somehow get hurt and she didn’t want Jared there. The last straw was Jared didn’t want to go to school one day, and Lisa was telling him he had to go to school, and he said, ‘No, I’m not going, I’m going to stay here.’ And Lisa couldn’t get him up out of bed and get him to school, and she’s like, ‘Okay, I’m done with you, you stay here today. I’m done with you, you’re going to go live with your mom after this.’ And that weekend was the weekend he went to live with Mom.”
Jacob said he had a choice. He could go with Jared or stay in Locust Grove. “I felt really bad that Jared was going there and I wasn’t. But we did see each other every other weekend, back and forth between Mom’s and Dad’s. It was just one more thing that was screwed up. Our whole life it was, like, Georgia, Virginia, Alexandria, Fairfax, Locust Grove—why the hell can’t we stay in one spot? We’d be in one school and make friends, the next year we’d be out. So I wanted to stay in Locust Grove.”
Through it all, he said, there was one constant: they were brothers. “In the big picture, whether we lived together every day or not, it didn’t matter. Because when anything got to be important, we always had each other.”
And yet…
Jacob told me a story.
One morning in his first year at the Myrtle Beach aviation-mechanic school, he stopped at the refrigerator to grab a breakfast taco. Only it was gone and he shouted out, “Jared, you eat my taco?”
“Yeah, I was hungry.”
“Fuck that. Get your own tacos.”
Jared and Lyndzy had come to Myrtle Beach for a weeklong stop that left Jacob bewildered by what he saw in their behavior.
“They didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything, they just sat in the house, played video games, and drank,” Jacob said. “Sometimes while I was out going to school, they’d go panhandle to get some giant bottle of vodka. They were just drunk the whole week, never really sober.”
“What’d you think of it?” I said.
“I wasn’t a fan of it, and Jared knew it.”
“Did you talk to him about it?”
“Yeah, and he said, ‘I can’t help it, man. If I stop, I’ll get the shakes and I’ll start seizing. I have to drink.’ I said, ‘Well, slowly bring yourself down off of it. Don’t get drunk whenever you drink. Just drink to get well. Try to get yourself to come down off of it.’”
A pause here.
“But he wouldn’t,” Jacob said. “He didn’t listen to anybody. He wasn’t listening to me. He wasn’t listening to Mom. He did what he wanted to. They slept in my living room on an air mattress, and he’d wake up in the middle of the night because he’d start DT’ing. They slept with a bottle of vodka next to the bed. He’d take a couple swigs off it, then lay there, and go back to sleep.”
Maybe only a brother could know what Jacob then knew. Maybe you had to have lived in the womb with Jared. Maybe you had to protect him from monkey-bars bullies to know it. If you shared every day of your life to age eleven and then, separated by order of your parents, met every weekend at one parent’s or the other’s, maybe then you could feel what Jacob said he felt that week in Myrtle Beach. Maybe you had to know, by your own failings, the trouble that came with alcohol.
Jacob said, “What I felt about Jared, it’s an instinct thing, a gut feeling. He’s gone.”
I said, “What do you mean, ‘gone’?”
His answer was chilling.
“That whole week in Myrtle Beach,” Jacob said, “I liked being able to see him and everything. But when it got to that point where he had to drink, he wasn’t Jared anymore. He was something else in the shell of Jared. Every now and then you’d get a glimpse. But mostly it was whatever the hell it was nestled in the shell of Jared. It looked like Jared, talked like Jared, but it wasn’t Jared.”
TEN
Goblin’s life is the story, and I am his grandfather telling it. So there is love in the telling. And yet, when the grandfather is also a reporter moving into a world unknown, he needs good reason to think the story is real and true. He started the reporting with only a name. Goblin’s mother knew a name of a girl on Goblin’s first train ride. “Stray,” the mother said. A Facebook search turned up a Stray Falldowngoboom. By Stray’s stories, the grandfather moved through the New Mexico night on a thundering freight with the dancing boy. Maybe Jared danced, maybe he didn’t, but the story is the truth as his road dogs remember it. And they remember Maggie’s mandolin, and they remember climbing over a highway median wall. Nothing was coming until a car was coming and left the boy in pieces. So the grandfather/reporter tells Goblin’s story the best he can or there’s no honor in it for the boy or the old man. Was Goblin living free or trapped by life? Brave or fearful, strong or weak? He was all of that, all those contradictory things that made his life a dazzling, dangerous, dismaying dance.
Then, in the summer of 2012, he had a chance to do the dance a different way.
After leaving Jacob in Myrtle Beach, Jared and Lyndzy spent two weeks at Jeff’s home in Locust Grove, Virginia. They camped out on the front porch and slept in a backyard shed. They stayed that long because Jared’s condition had deteriorated so badly that he woke up each morning coughing blood—until Jeff and his wife, Lisa, a registered nurse, persuaded him to go to her hospital for treatment. There he endured a week of detoxification that set off waves of DTs.
His winter at his mother’s home, recovering from the Arizona accident, had given him a chance to change his life. Now he had a
second chance. But even in his stepmother’s hospital, he wanted what he’d wanted that long winter in Myrtle Beach. He wanted only to get back on t
he road. One evening he pulled himself to the edge of the bed and began unhooking IV tubes and monitor lines. “I gotta get out of here,” he said. “I gotta go to the train station.” No sooner did his feet touch the floor than a nurse, Charles Harrison, once a gunner’s mate in the US Navy, said, “Dude, you ain’t goin’ anywhere until I say so.”
Jared had ignored repeated warnings. Not this time. This time a week of relentless pain beat him down. With Lisa and Lyndzy encouraging him, he said he’d try to get sober. Jeff and Lisa did the preliminary work to have him admitted to Boxwood Recovery Center in Culpeper, Virginia. Then came the drive to Boxwood, thirty-six miles from Lisa’s hospital.
She drove, Jared sat beside her, silent.
They drove ten miles, fifteen miles, twenty.
Abruptly ending the silence, Jared said, “Where’s Lyndzy?”
Lisa didn’t want to answer.
“I said, where is she? She wanted me to do this, where is she?”
Lyndzy had left Jeff’s place the night before. She told Jeff she could no longer handle the bloody mornings. She said she couldn’t wait for Jared to do the rehab. She had to leave. She would go to Fredericksburg and meet a friend.
Lisa said, “She went to find Patches.”
“Patches? What the fuck! How’d he get in this? Turn around. Lisa, turn around.”
“We’re practically there,” she said.
“Or I’m getting out.”
Jared had said he would go, he knew he should go, and of such plans and promises and hopes are an addict’s days and weeks and months filled. The addict says it all to make everyone feel better, to give everyone hope, to give himself hope, and yet, when it comes time, the addict’s brain says no in fear of the pain coming with the DTs of detox. Before Lisa, loving him, could get him to Boxwood, Jared found a reason to say no, hearing about Patches, and he said no, he would not go.
“He’d been getting all agitated,” Jeff said. “He wasn’t his normal happy-go-lucky self because Lyndzy was leaving to go off with Patches and he just couldn’t take it. He was jealous of that guy and didn’t want her to leave. If she’d stayed, who knows? We were an inch away from getting him to Boxwood. But once she left, he couldn’t do it. I should have just tied him down and made him go.”
The sad truth is, convincing Jared was impossible. He no longer made his own decisions. The addiction decided for him. He was, literally, not in his right mind. That’s not the theory of a grandfather loving a grandson. It’s the finding of neuroscientists, psychologists, and drug abuse researchers who believe that addiction damages the parts of the brain responsible for judgment. They say the last person to know his brain is broken is the person whose brain is broken.
David Sheff, a journalist, is a rock star among addiction experts. Time magazine placed him among the world’s one hundred most influential people in 2013. In his book Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy, Sheff explains alcohol’s effect on the brain:
When drugs are withheld, the brain goes into a kind of shock. The system is starved for dopamine and other neurotransmitters. It’s not quite as serious as oxygen deprivation, but it can feel like that—as if death is imminent. In distress, the entire body system now has one purpose: to return to equilibrium by finding more drugs to stimulate dopamine flow. Addicts can feel as if they’re fighting for their lives, and they may be… cells are dying and neurons misfiring, which can cause tremors, nausea, anxiety, hallucinations, fever, and disorientation. But that’s not all. The heart rate can rise dangerously, and the addict has a high risk of seizures, which are sometimes fatal.… Detoxing from alcohol is particularly dangerous.
Alcohol is the deadliest drug. It kills insidiously. The body converts alcohol into a poison, acetaldehyde, that passes through the liver into the bloodstream, where it damages every organ it touches. In thirty seconds, the poison reaches the brain. It’s like cutting a lamp’s cord. Electricity doesn’t get through anymore. It’s dark. Regions of the brain can’t talk to each other. Confusion ensues. All this is going on quietly.
The big noise is the party. Even as the poison eats away at the white matter, it also sets loose a flood of dopamine, a feel-good chemical. Anything a person likes—food, sex, gambling, vodka—can start dopamine flowing. The more poison in an alcoholic’s brain, the more he likes it. Enough of it, he feels good, confident, powerful, sexy. More than enough, he is a bulletproof freakin’ god. Past that, he is blackout drunk on the way to coma.
The liver, awash in alcohol, produces acetaldehyde quickly and acetate slowly. Acetate is a feel-bad acid that sends most of us looking for a place to throw up. We stop drinking when the alcoholic is just getting warmed up.
The alcoholic’s big trouble comes when the brain adapts to the poison. Then, to get that bulletproof feeling, he needs more alcohol than before. The longer this escalation goes on, the greater the need. The brain is so numbed that not only is there no buzz when he’s drinking, but the alcoholic no longer feels normal when he’s not drinking. Now the drinking is more than a matter of feeling good. Now it feels like life and death. His brain is now physically dependent on alcohol. Without alcohol, it will shut down. The alcoholic will suffer the DTs, withdrawal, blackouts, seizures.
Now you are an addict. Now you’re no longer in charge of your drinking. Your brain gives you orders that you have no power to turn down, like, “Get off your ass and get us another half-gallon or we’re going to die here.” You must get alcohol across your tongue, down your throat, into your gut, through your liver, and into your brain. Or else it will never shut the fuck up.
So you and your brain go to the liquor store.
Every year in the United States, there are eighty-eight thousand deaths for which the primary cause is alcohol. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that alcohol-related deaths result in two and a half million years of life lost, an average of thirty years per person. Every year, eighty-eight thousand obituaries. Every year, millions of survivors diminished by the loss of loved ones.
Yes, Jared chose to drink. He did not, however, choose to be addicted. For all that science has learned about the brain and its workings, it remains a mystery all but divine in its complexities. Science tells us that some brains resist addiction while others are addicted from the start. Because there is a genetic link to alcoholism, Jared and Jacob were at risk from birth. Alcohol abuse was present in their immediate family history, from both their father and mother.
Jeff told me, “I guess I’m what they call now a ‘functional alcoholic.’ I’ve never drank at or during work, but when I do drink, I drink too much. Lynn drank too, but not as much as I did.” He also said, “The boys would see me drinking. So I blame myself for a percentage of Jared’s drinking. He just wouldn’t quit. Jacob could handle it better.” Jeff’s idea of Jacob “handling it better” was nearly as frightening as Jared not handling it at all. “Jacob would get sick and quit.”
Lynn’s father, an alcoholic, died at sixty. She said, “I didn’t drink nearly as often as Jeff, but when I did, I would almost always overdo it. I blame myself for Jared too, but not so much for drinking. If I hadn’t moved to South Carolina, Jared would never have been on the street. He’d have never been the drinker he was. I told him, ‘Smoke pot. Smoke all the pot you want. Get happy. Don’t be stupid, don’t destroy your liver.’”
It’s too much to say I grew up in a tavern. But from around age six to fifteen, I stayed with my grandmother in Lincoln, Illinois, so I could play Little League baseball, and that meant I spent summer nights in Forehand’s West Side Tavern. It stood on Sangamon Street along the Illinois Central Railroad tracks that passed by our house in Atlanta, ten miles north. Grandma Lena and her husband, Tommy Forehand, ran the place. My father built the tavern’s bar. For customers with strong stomachs and bizarre tastes, there was a glass jar of pickled pigs’ feet at the bar’s far end. Men stood at the brass bar rail (four spittoons, cigarette butts floating in tobacco juice) and drank Pabst B
lue Ribbon, Falstaff, Stag, and Schlitz. On New Year’s Eve 1949, I was eight years old and danced with a woman named Flo, who pressed my head against her pink angora sweater and between her considerable breasts. A grand place that tavern.
I never drank—until I was eighteen and traveling with my college baseball team in New Orleans. As Booze Cop might put it, there’s no need to be twenty-one on Bourbon Street, so a teenager goes straight to Pat O’Brien’s. The saloon’s famous drink is the Hurricane—four ounces of fruity rum and four ounces of O’Brien’s special Hurricane mix over crushed ice in a twenty-six-ounce hurricane glass, garnished with an orange slice and a cherry. It’s pretty, it’s smooth, it tastes great, and no one can drink just one. I spent the night bent over the edge of my bed. I dizzy-walked through the next day’s game, striking out three straight times against pitches that danced in blurred curlicues.
Beer made my sportswriter’s world go round. It was a major sponsor of every big-time event, the foundation of stadiums across America. Two of Sports Illustrated’s stars, Frank Deford and Rick Reilly, appeared in beer commercials that added a “Great taste! Less filling!” element to sports journalism’s Oscar Madison stereotype.
In Louisville, I worked with Clarence “Slick” Royalty. Though Slick couldn’t write a note to the milkman, he was famous in our office, mostly because he rescued the great Grantland Rice on deadline at a Kentucky Derby. According to Slick, Granny had sipped two or three mint juleps too many. Slick became Granny’s ghost, typing under the famous byline and shipping the result to New York. No one believed Slick’s story. But everyone believed something like that had happened a thousand times. The San Francisco Examiner’s Wells Twombly began typing only after pouring two fingers of Scotch in a tumbler by his machine. The New York sportswriter Jack Lang arranged a cross-country airplane charter for sportswriters at the World Series that became known as “Captain Jack’s Flying Drunk Tank.” Pete Axthelm of Newsweek was told that he’d die if he kept drinking. “Then I’m going to die,” he said, “because I’m not stopping.” He died at forty-seven.