Leave Out the Tragic Parts by Dave Kindred

Author:Dave Kindred [Kindred, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2021-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Jared had slogged through Hurricane Irene the year before. Now, in late October 2012, he and Maggie arrived in Philadelphia as Hurricane Sandy neared landfall on the New Jersey coast. One night they took shelter in a honeycombed concrete wall. Jared entertained Maggie with stories about World War II. She said, “Four hours, nonstop, off the damn History Channel! Nazis! Panzer tanks! Eisenhower, D-Day. I thought that war would never end.”

He had his own war going on. He called later with that story. “We stopped at a Wawa gas station. I wanted a Gatorade, thought that might help. My chest hurt really, really, really bad. I didn’t know what it was, what was wrong, it just hurt really, really, really bad. For some magical reason, an ambulance was at the Wawa too. I knocked on the window and asked them to take me to a hospital.”

A heart attack? His family had a history of heart troubles. My father’s father died of heart disease. I have coronary artery disease. My son has atrial fibrillation. Jared had been diagnosed with tachycardia, a condition that causes the heart to race, sometimes at two hundred beats a minute, less a rhythmic beating than a high-rev thrum. Was it a heart attack, or was Jared about to have a seizure? Maggie had seen seizures happen: “He’d get that blank stare. He knew it was coming. Just staring. I yelled, ‘Goblin!’ He wouldn’t even blink. Like he didn’t hear nothing. ‘Goblin, Goblin, look at me!’ Nothing. And he’d start shaking, these really hard full-body twitches. And he’d be making really weird noises. And then he’d fall over. Out of it. That’s when we called 911.”

As he did with increasing regularity, Jared called me. He said doctors at Nazareth Hospital “gave me a little white pill, a muscle-relaxer or something, I don’t know what the hell they gave me. They said I should stay for three or four days, to detox and get into rehab.”

I asked, “Are you still in the hospital?”

“Fuck no. I already checked myself out.”

He said it hard and fast, as if it were the only possible answer, as if that magical ambulance had delivered him into enemy territory, as if he had to get out of there as fast as damn possible.

I said, “Jared, what are you thinking? You gotta get back in that hospital. You can’t be on the street now.”

“Grandpa, I ain’t doin’ no detox,” he said.

I shut up about the hospital. There is no talking to an addict, even your grandson, once he’s made up his mind to keep being an addict. I said, “Just call me when you get somewhere safe.”

Again he had checked out AMA. As he had left Dr. Holoshitz in Ann Arbor, now he left Nazareth. Again, a hospital had given him what he needed, immediate relief from withdrawal. This time he rejected detoxification and rehabilitation so adamantly that he walked out without his clothes, which hospital staff had taken because they were covered with lice. He left in a hospital-issue wraparound gown and socks.

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