It’s been more than seven years since he said those words to me. He looked up from his beer and with watery, sunken eyes cried them out.
He was an old friend. We’d met in college 23 years earlier. He was my English professor and I was his student and we took a liking to one another. He liked to play the guitar and I played the mandolin and I would go to his house every so often and we’d have a jam session. He liked to smoke pot and he introduced me to it. He was funny, he was smart and I looked up to him.
He abruptly quit his teaching job one spring and I didn’t hear from him for a couple years. Then one night I got a phone call. He found my number in the phone book and we picked up where we left off.
We resumed our music playing. While drinking from his huge bottle of vodka, he’d talk some about his leaving teaching and about the novel he was writing. He had given up smoking pot. Now he was drunk most of the time and his wife was paying the bills.
Our pattern was to hook up for awhile and then go our separate ways. He was a good person with a good heart and I always looked for that in him; but a lot of the time, his drinking got in the way. When he was drunk, he could become mean and abusive and so often it became difficult to be his friend.
But I tried again seven years ago. In early May, I got another phone call from him. His wife was kicking him out and he told me his marriage was over. He needed a place to stay for a few days and wondered if I could put him up. When I said yes, he told me his car was in the shop and would need a ride to get to my apartment.
When he got in my car, the first thing he wanted to do was stop at a liquor store. He bought two bottles of vodka. When we got to my place, he sat down at the dining room table while I got him a glass. I watched his hands shake as he tried to steady them while pouring the vodka into the glass. It was sad and I felt sorry for him.
The next morning when I got up, my old friend was still at the dining room table. The two bottles of vodka were empty and he asked me if I could go back to the liquor store and get a couple more. I said no. I told him he could stay with me for a while but there wasn’t to be any out-of-control drinking in my place. He seemed to respect that.
In the days to come, he sobered up. I would watch his hands shake and watch him sweat while talking about how things had gotten so out of control and about what a mess he had made of his life. I told him the goal was to now get things back in control and to take charge of his own well-being.
For the next three months, he did that. He got his car out of the shop and started driving again. He found a teaching job at a small junior college in the area. He told me he was working on his novel again. He started talking to and seeing his wife and we agreed to share my apartment until she took him back. I thought my friend had turned the corner.
But looking back seven years later, there were signs that he hadn’t really changed at all. Despite the fact he was now working again, he never had any money for the rent. He called in sick to his teaching job a lot. When I would come home, I would usually find him at that dining room table drinking a Coke, but so often thought I could smell alcohol on his breath.
The game was over on the first day of August. He was out the night before, a sleepover at his wife’s place that apparently ended badly. He walked through the door that morning with a 12-pack of Milwaukee’s Best and an attitude. He told me it was finally over with his wife and that he didn’t want to see the bitch again.
I took some comfort in the fact he was only drinking beer and not the hard stuff. I sat with him that morning trying to calm him down and to just listen to what he needed to say.
But that was probably the wrong thing to do, because an audience is what he wanted. For the next three days, I became that for him. He told me why it was necessary to quit his teaching job — it was interfering with finishing his novel. He told me he was going to sue his wife for divorce and get all the money he had coming to him. He told me he was an artist, a writer, and that was what he was going to do with his life.
When I decided to stop being his audience, things got progressively worse. He would still sit at the table morning until night drinking beer, but now he was becoming angry with me when I had other matters to attend to. One night he set a wastebasket on fire by throwing cigarette butts into it. One evening there was a knock on the door. A young girl and a man stood in front of me and the girl wanted to see my friend. He had called an escort service from an ad found in Everybody’s News and the young girl walked back to his room while I nervously talked to her bodyguard for half an hour. My friend was out of control.
I confronted him about it told him this was not how I was going to live. With this, he became enraged and said I was trying to control his life, just like his wife. He took a swing at me, missing badly because he was so drunk. After this, any talking to him was over. I wanted him out of my apartment.
I called the police to see if they could remove him. They said it was a civil matter, not criminal and that I had “invited” him in. I called his wife but she wanted no part of him or me. Feeling frustrated, I remembered back to what I had told my friend when he first moved in with me — that he needed to take control of his life. Now he was controlling mine.
On the eighth morning of the madness, I sat with him at the dining room table and drank beer. He liked that — I was talking and drinking with him again. He told me how his novel was coming along and how good it felt to be starting a new life. He told me he wanted to buy dinner for me that night — Chinese. He loved Chinese food. We made plans to go out.
He started to feel sleepy and wanted to retire to his bedroom. But before doing so, he looked up at me and said those words — those words I can still hear.
“Don’t give up on me.”
I smiled and said I wouldn’t, but I was lying.
After I thought he was asleep, I went into his room and found his keychain on the nightstand. I removed the keys to my apartment and to his car.
With the help of a neighbor upstairs, we waited at the dining room table for my friend to wake up and join us. When he did, events happened quickly.
My neighbor stayed with him at the table while I went into this room and took garbage bags and emptied the dresser drawers of all his clothes. My neighbor called a taxi service. I put the garbage bags in the trunk of my friend’s car.
The taxi arrived. My neighbor and I helped my drunken friend walk out to it. I handed him his car keys, told him to come back for the car when he was sober. I handed the taxi driver two $20 bills and told him to take my friend to wherever he wanted to go.
Maybe all of this took a total of 10 minutes. My friend never said a word during any of it and I haven’t seen or heard from him since.
The next day while cleaning out his room, I found all the empty vodka bottles he had been hiding from me. I didn’t find his novel. I guess it never existed.
I still think of him from time to time. I wonder if he’s alive. Sometimes I think of the good times we had together and think about looking for him. I still hear those final words he said to me — “Don’t give up on me” — and some guilt will come into my mind. But for the most part I’ve let all of it go. I don’t know what I could have done differently. Maybe I closed the door on him, but my old friend is the one who locked it shut forever, because of the excessive drinking.
It was sad to give up on him. It was even sadder to see him give up on himself.
This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2005.