by Dave Kindred
Mom’s time came near on Monday, April 7, 2014. I was in Augusta, Georgia, for the Masters. Sandy called to say that our mother, on morphine, was nonresponsive. I began the long drive home and arrived at the nursing home in Morton around midnight.
I sat on the edge of her bed. She was curled onto her left side, asleep. I could hear the gentle hiss of oxygen flowing through tubes into her nose. Her breathing was slow and shallow. I thought of what she had said: “When I’m old enough to die, I’ll die.” I kissed her forehead. I whispered into her ear, “Thank you, Mom, for being you. I love you.” She died the next morning.
I stood by Mom’s casket in an Atlanta funeral home and told her friends and family, “I was last in this room fifty years ago, for my dad’s funeral.” That day, as on the day of the turkey shoot, I was there and not there, present while being absent, a better observer than a son. But a lifetime later, I stood and spoke for Mom.
I said, “Dad died when I was twenty-two and I knew nothing about life, and only now do I know the most important thing—that I was loved no matter what. Mom’s and Dad’s greatest gift to me, and a gift that I continue to receive, and that my sister, Sandra, receives was—I didn’t have a name for it fifty years ago, but I now know it was unconditional love.”
I held a notebook of Mom’s. “Here’s her scorekeeping from an Illinois Wesleyan baseball game in Jackson, Tennessee. You’ll see ‘Dave’ batted eighth that day. He walked, got hit by a pitch, and popped up to second. The extraordinary thing about the notebook is not that Mom had learned to keep score—did I teach her or did she teach me? The extraordinary thing was not that she was in Tennessee in March for a baseball game or that she and Dad had driven four hundred miles to see their kid pop up and make an error. ‘E4’ is in the notebook too. The extraordinary thing is that Mom and Dad did all those things. It was years later before I learned that some parents do none of those things.”
I read from a paper written by our great-niece Jessi Menold as part of a school project. She interviewed Mom when she was ninety years old. Mom said, “I enjoy life at ninety because I’ve got my kids, my grandkids, my family. A lot of people don’t have that, but I still got it. I’ll always be thankful. I wouldn’t change a darn thing.”
There by the casket, I said, “Neither would we, Mom, neither would we. We love you. God bless you.”
FOURTEEN
As they worked together in North Carolina’s freezing early months of 2013, Butch, the carpenter, heard Jared’s stories. He heard about an El Salvadoran who walked into a river, and he heard about prickly pears in the desert and nights sleeping on a Mississippi River wharf. The carpenter heard his helper’s stories and he knew, before anyone else, that Jared wasn’t long for Mount Airy. Butch said, “The stories he told, the way he told ’em, he had a young man’s wanderlust in him. He didn’t like to sit still. He’d had enough of that with us.”
Maggie’s mother knew it too. “As spring came,” Kayla said, “you could see Jared was getting itchy.” But she thought his restlessness had nothing much to do with sitting still. She believed Jared knew the cost he would have to pay if he quit the road. “I think getting hit by that car in Arizona altered his own self-concept so much that he was so broken, inside and out. And he was not willing to make the effort to settle down.” Kayla knew that meant a return to drinking, and that meant more than splitting a forty-ounce beer once a week. It meant a river of vodka. Kayla said, “I told Jared, ‘You’re going to die way too young,’ and he’d go, ‘Probably,’ and change the subject.”
Maggie wanted a life with Jared, and if it couldn’t be a life with a place of their own, a life so ordinary as to be wonderful, then she would settle for a life on the road with him—but no, no, it would not be a life that took them where she knew Jared wanted to go. She would not go to New Orleans. Too much booze, too many Scurvy Bastards on the wharf, too much danger in the derelict squats. Maggie gave Jared a choice, “It’s New Orleans or me.”
Happily, if slowly, he had learned the dangerous lessons of New Orleans. He agreed on an itinerary that took them north out of Mount Airy, away from NOLA.
The morning of Mother’s Day, May 13, 2013, Jared finished planting an herb garden alongside Kayla’s front porch. Then she drove Maggie and Jared halfway to Asheville. There they caught a ride with a traveling friend, Tammy.
And they were gone.
Jared left behind the golden kitten that had come to him on Kayla’s porch. “Spud always made me happy,” Kayla said. “I felt Jared’s spirit in that little cat.” Spud slept on a high shelf in Kayla’s bedroom closet, as close to the attic room as he could get.
Three weeks later, Jared called me.
“We’re back on the road,” he said.
“What? Where are you, boy?” I said.
Life’s a blur when you’re hopping trains and you’re back to drinking half-gallons and you’re not sure where you are or where you’re going, you just know you’ve moved through Asheville and Johnson City, Tennessee, and Westville, Ohio, and you’ve come to a nighttime stop in a big yard that you remember is…
“Hagerstown.”
They were in Hagerstown, Maryland, three weeks out of Mount Airy, three weeks since Kayla kissed him goodbye.
“I had another seizure here, had to go to a hospital,” he said.
“Damn, boy.”
“Maggie says she’ll kick my ass if it happens again,” he said.
I said, “Good for Maggie.”
Jared laughed and repeated the words to Maggie, and I heard her voice in the background, a shouted voice, “Fuck yeah, I’ll kick your ass good.”
I asked when we might see him again. It had been too long. Cheryl and I had left Virginia for Illinois three years earlier. In the time before train-hopping, he occasionally came by our house in the country, usually with his buddy Dear God, just to say hi, and then he’d be off for another adventure. At least once, Dear God persuaded Jared to fire up my big John Deere tractor to go two miles down a country road to a convenience store for a six-pack of beer. Now, never really sure where he was and certainly unsure of where he would be, Jared said, “I’m trying, Grandpa, to get down your way.”
“Jared, we’re not ‘down’ any way now,” I said. “We’re in Illinois. Get yourself to Chicago sometime, I’ll find you.” And I said, “Be safe, take care. I want you to be an old man someday. Love you, boy.”
“We will, Grandpa,” he said. “See ya later.” And he said, “Gotta go, bye.”
The phone went silent. I’d come too close to what he didn’t want to talk about, that stuff about take care and get old someday. When he had nothing to say that he wanted his grandfather to hear, he ran silent.
I now understand those silences. I understand why he left Myrtle Beach after being hit by a car, why he switched from yes to no on rehab in Virginia, why he left Mount Airy after a winter idyll with a woman he loved. I now understand that Jared had no choice. Addiction made the choices for him. I understood it best after reading David Sheff’s Clean. The book includes a chapter entitled “Addicts Aren’t Weak, Selfish, or Amoral—They’re Ill.” Sheff writes:
Unless you’ve been there, you can’t imagine what it’s like to watch helplessly as someone you love descends into addiction. The transformation defies logic—until you understand that your loved one is gravely ill with a brain disease that’s debilitating, chronic, progressive, and, if left untreated, often fatal.
FIFTEEN
It was the summer of 2013. A month and two days removed from their attic space above Kayla’s bedroom in Mount Airy, Jared and Maggie had hitched a ride in upstate New York with a woman named Suzanne Moore. At a stop along the road, while Maggie slept, Moore walked into a field of flowers with Jared.
“Jared picked flowers for Maggie,” Moore said. “He said, ‘I know she doesn’t like this stupid girly stuff, but she’s so pretty and I just want to make her happy.’ We walked back to the car, and he laid the flowers in her sleeping hand. It’s been so lon
g since I’ve seen a guy pick flowers for a girl out of a field. That moment made me so happy and gave me so much faith that there were still amazing people in this world. It was just the most romantic and most chivalrous thing.”
For travelin’ kids, a year on the road is a long time. Uninterrupted by the obligations and duties of a mainstream world, road dogs are at each other’s sides most of most days. They fly sign together, hop out together, scrounge in dumpsters together, drink together, and wake up together. They may live in a world apart from most of us, but there is no hiding even there—or perhaps especially not there—from the frictions of a relationship. The summer of 2013 was Jared’s fourth year on the road. That was a long, long time to be traveling. By then, danger was an hourly presence in his life. It’s hard enough to travel America’s freeways and railroads with only guile as a ticket. It’s harder yet when moving under the influence of alcohol.
One day in Ithaca, shortly after they left Suzanne Moore, Jared saw in Maggie what she had seen in him too many times.
Maggie had taken her dog, Dixie, to a veterinary clinic. In an examining room, waiting for the doctor, Maggie felt dizzy and had hot flashes followed by cold chills. Next thing she knew, she woke up as EMTs were lifting her onto a gurney.
Jared brought liquor to the hospital, cinnamon whiskey with Mountain Dew to chase it. No, no, a nurse said, her blood-alcohol level is still way too high. Jared said she hadn’t had a drink all day. That’s when he learned that the liver processes an ounce of alcohol an hour. A half-gallon is sixty-four ounces. Her liver was still awash in alcohol from the day before. Maggie said she saw Jared at her bedside “freaking out.” He couldn’t handle it. Her seizure and hospitalization reminded him of his own DTs, detoxings, and terrors in the night. After that day, they became “picky with each other” and decided to find their way separately into New York City.
They were to meet at their usual spot, a churchyard near Tompkins Square Park in the middle of the East Village on the Lower East Side.
Maggie arrived an hour early, feeling good about it. In five days apart, she had missed Jared and was eager to fix whatever was wrong. But Jared didn’t show. He wasn’t there at 9:00 p.m., as agreed, not at 10:00, and not after that. Nor did he answer his phone. In the previous two days and again that night, she had sent these six text messages without a reply:
I’m talking to Tiger. She said yer gonna be in nyc tomorrow so ill be in boston tomorrow and I can get a cheap chinatown to nyc. Please baby. I went on another angry rough patch but I love you and wanna get back together. I thought a lot about it and I cant not be with you. Sorry I was bitchy. Be safe. Sleep good and I really hope to see you soon.
Im coming to new york to meet back with you. I miss u.
I’m at the spot. 2d ave and 10th.
Jared!!! It’s Maggie please call me.
Goblin where the fuck r u?
My phone is gonna die so I guess Ill see ya round. I’ve been here for two hours waiting. Wtf!!! I love you. Charge yer damn phone.
Finally, she walked into Tompkins Square Park. There she saw wanderers she knew. She asked if they had seen Goblin.
Yeah, one said. Seen him with Bird.
She knew Bird, a pretty girl.
Bird knew Jared from the year before. They had met in New Orleans in the French Quarter. He had returned from Myrtle Beach on a walking stick, the “hobblin’ Goblin” of Sarafina Scarlet’s memory. Bird thought he was “so sweet and funny.” They stayed together at a squat called the Pink House.
Bird said, “One night we were walking to the Jax Brewery to sleep, and some random dude bro said loudly to me, ‘I’ll give you twenty bucks to see your tits,’ and Goblin went off on him for it.”
Jared and Bird had been together in New Orleans only a short time before she rode to Savannah and on to New York City. When Jared showed up in New York in that summer of 2013, he had not seen Bird in over two years. She knew nothing about his time in Mount Airy with Maggie. To Bird, he was the same old Goblin. They shared vodka and they shared the night.
Maggie found Jared with Bird in Tompkins Square the next morning and asked what the hell.
Bird told Maggie, “I didn’t know you guys were dating.” Then Bird turned to Jared. “Go ahead,” she said, “tell Maggie what happened with us.”
He had no answer for Maggie, only that he didn’t know why he’d done it. Maggie saw vodka half-gallons, empty, and she said, “We’d been doing so good without it. Staying on beer and wine. Five days and you’re back in it. Damn, dude.”
He cried. He said he was sorry. Sorry about Bird, the vodka, sorry about not meeting up. He said, “I fucked up really bad.”
They came to an uneasy peace there in Tompkins Square, but Maggie was frightened. She saw darkness ahead. “Someday you’re going to be on a train and have a seizure,” she said. “Then what the hell are you going to do? You’ll fall under the train and get ground up, that’s what.” She didn’t have to ask what would happen if, in his sleep, he had a seizure and rolled down a concrete slope under a bridge onto a freeway. She knew the answer to that because it had already happened.
From New York, they had hopped out on a train to Virginia. Near the squat Jared once shared with Michael Stephen, Jared suffered a seizure under a freeway bridge. He woke up with paramedics over him. He had tumbled downhill until he cracked his head on a sidewalk. Maggie wanted him taken to a hospital, but the medics said he was okay. She knew better. Without alcohol, she knew one seizure would lead to another.
“I told them, ‘You might as well come back in an hour, he’s going to have another one,’” she said. “It turned out to be forty-five minutes. We were on the Metro subway. They stopped the train and took him off to a hospital. Mike Stephen came to the hospital too, and we took turns sitting on the bed with Jared.”
Stephen believed God had sent Jared to repair his broken life in the darkness of an Alexandria squat. He also believed he had unfairly repaid that kindness by so glorifying life on the street that the kid one-upped him and hopped freight trains around America. Stephen wanted redemption, and he wanted Jared to know peace.
MICHAEL’S STORY
Hundreds of times I tried to get to the deep stuff from Jared’s childhood. His catchphrase was “I don’t want to talk about it.” Who knows why these things happen? What was the psychological pain that he had to self-medicate with vodka? Jared never talked about his childhood. He would become defensive.
Not one day went by when I didn’t wonder what would have happened to Jared if, instead of me being so caught up in my own pain and my own bullshit, I had stopped even for one second to think, Here is an impressionable eighteen-, nineteen-year-old kid who really looks up to me. He stayed by my side for months. Didn’t visit any of his friends. Just me and him day and night. What if, instead of filling his mind with the “romance” of being a fuck-up, I had preached the gospel? Or talked about plans to go to school? If we had spent our time praying instead of me drinking away my pain and letting him drink? What if I had taught him the future was going to be better? That we would get out of this? That we could start a band? Do anything we want. I could have taught him to play guitar. Anything. But I didn’t say any of that. He saved my life, and I just said this bullshit. And he listened.
I spent three years trying to undo the damage I did. I wanted to drag him to detox. He always said he just didn’t care, that he wasn’t going to live to be forty, so why do it? The truth is, he cared too much. He just didn’t think he could get through detox.
He called me once and said he’d had a “strange dream.” He sold his memories to spirits for gold and silver coins. He said it didn’t make sense. Why would anyone sell his memories? I said, “Jared, don’t you understand? The coins in the dream are the coins you collect on the street. The ‘spirits’ are the spirits you drink, rum, whiskey, vodka. You have been selling your memories to those spirits all along. This is your life! I think the dream is telling you to keep your memories for yourself. Don’t
sell them to those demon spirits.”
He was like, “Huh? What do you mean?” Before I could explain it again, he said his famous catch line, “I don’t wanna talk about it anymore.” Anytime the subject got around to his drinking, he was a brick wall.
I had visited him in the hospital maybe a year before this one. He’d gone in that time with a 0.43 blood-alcohol level. He had the worst case of DTs I’d ever seen. It was a seven-day detox, and on the seventh day he was still blowing numbers and shaking. At one point, he tried to drink his urine. His sick brain thought it had alcohol in it.
This time, like that time, he was just not the Jared who I had thought of as my brother. I brought him a cross, prayer beads, and the New Testament. Just hoping there was a spark of faith in him, that in his desperation he might cling to a spark of the light, that he didn’t necessarily need to have faith in some mystical character that died two thousand or eight hundred or five thousand years ago, or some man in the sky with a white beard and flowing robe. The God he needed, the faith he needed, was in himself. And I don’t think he had that. Life was a fucked-up struggle for everybody, and he figured that if normal people struggled with it, how was he going to do it?
So I laid the things on his lap. He looked at them, all confused, and he said, “What are those?” I said, “I thought you may want to try to talk to God about your life while you’re laid up.”
He picked up the beads like they were something filthy and dropped them onto the bedside table. “No, thank you, no,” he said. I said, “Why not?” and he snapped, “Look, what’s up? Do you want something?”
I said, “Yeah, Jared, I want to bring you some stuff. I brought a pack of new socks and a pair of Carhartt bibs. And some money. I sat it over there by the window.”