A Wasted Life

I invariably inhale lightly and shake my head in true regret for Jim when I drive past his old house, now rotting from years of vacancy and neglect. It's difficult to categorize Jim's story. "Lost Friends" is certainly appropriate but does not fully compartmentalize Jim, a late friend whose story leading to his death is more likely a story of one person's struggle with his sexuality or a drinking addiction he could never overcome.

I met Jim, only a couple of weeks younger than I, through an acquaintance, not a friend who I learned later was gay. He and Jim, who I also didn't know was gay until he hit on me, actually became lovers and lived together. But the relationship was not conventional in a few respects: Jim's wife, after she decided to divorce him, found an apartment and paid the security deposit for her husband and his new lover. But the relationship was doomed by Jim's heavy drinking and, I suspect, his disgust with himself because of his sexuality. The first time I met him, Jim locked his eyes on me so long and uncomfortably that I asked, "What?" "You have the bluest eyes I've ever seen," I remember Jim answering word-for-word after more than 20 years. Later, although he was married, Jim continued to try and seduce me although I refused him every time. Based on what Jim said, I figured he had not acknowledged his gay side until after he married and himself struggled for self-acceptance. Although I tried to help him accept and deal effectively with his sexuality, I started to help Jim with another struggle that quickly came to light - alcoholism. While I'd been blessed with the gift of sobriety for some years, Jim struggled hard but could never quite find his own Program of recovery - and it's doubtful he had any quality sobriety when he died.

Jim was the classic Jekyll-Hyde alcoholic, a truly kind and gentle man when he wasn't drinking but frighteningly mean - and lethally violent, if police are to be believed - when he was drunk. And Jim was drunk a lot. Jim's wife, Penny, who I befriended during the couple's divorce, told me that Jim would call and check on her after they separated and, if she might mention she was having a problem with whoever she was dating, Jim, when drunk, would ask if she wanted him to "kick (the boyfriend's) ass." A couple of times, when he was with me, drunk, Jim wanted to have sex. Tactfully declining because sex with someone drunk is about as erotic as a glass of homogenized milk, Jim got clearly angry and said something that he was "still a man" even if he was "a fag."

Dwelling on his life after he died, I wanted to understand what it was about Jim that he could never accept or overcome. Eventually, I concluded that Jim's drinking was fueled by a sexual identity that he initially rejected and even found disgusting but, when he "came out," he empowered that identity so strongly that he let it be his only defining characteristic. After Jim acknowledged his gay side, I often heard him say of strangers driving or walking by and whom he suspected of being gay, "F**kin' faggots."

I never heard how Jim's wife, Penny, learned that her husband was gay - important to note that she told me Jim proclaimed himself to her as gay, not bisexual - and that he wanted to leave her for the man who first introduced me to Jim. Nor did I ask why Penny was helping her soon-to-be ex set up her husband's gay living arrangement with his new lover. I tend to think that, Penny, to her immense compassion and based on her subsequent comments to me, wanted only for Jim to quit drinking - it would kill him someday, she said repeatedly - and was willing to sacrifice even her marriage if she thought it would help him.

I tried a few times to help Jim with his drinking and even managed to drag him to a couple of meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Jim had gone to countless meetings and was well known to group members. It would be inappropriate for me to comment on my observations of Jim inasmuch as his AA program went; that would be taking his "moral inventory," as the program calls it. I would only say Jim talked the talk but never walked the walk.

I sometimes dropped in on Penny after Jim left her to see how she was doing; she never stopped talking to him. She'd tell me occasionally that Jim was in jail again, not unusual since he was known to police who picked him up a few times for public intoxication or pulled his car aside and hauled him in for driving under the influence or driving with a suspended license. One night, however, Penny informed me that Jim was in jail in a county north of the city and I asked her, "Again? Same old, same old?" Not quite, Penny said. Driving drunk, Jim ran down a 30-something-year-old mother who was riding a bike. She died, and Jim was charged with a Class C felony of driving intoxicated resulting in death. In Indiana, that meant a maximum sentence on conviction of eight years, four of which would be served by way of the state's "good-time" policy that gave inmates two days of time served for every day without a disciplinary write-ups.

As expected, Jim pleaded as charged and got the maximum eight years and served four. Apparently Jim was a model prisoner; he had not one disciplinary write-up. I did not know Jim had been paroled until I ran into him at a service station. By then, he was unrecognizable to me and, in fact, I didn't even know him until he identified himself. Jim looked good and healthy, I thought, even though he had clearly lost substantial weight in prison. Always a hefty man, maybe slightly obese, Jim then looked slim and trim but somewhat gaunt in the face. Jim said he was living then with some guy I'd never heard of other than by reputation. The man who introduced me to Jim and became his lover had left Jim long before the fatal drunk driving accident because, according to Jim's ex, he couldn't "handle Jim's drinking anymore". Jim and I exchanged pleasantries the day we ran into each other after he was paroled and left with the promise that we'd get together someday. I never saw him again.

One night, on my way home from a job interview after graduating from college, I dropped in on Penny. We sat down and I started babbling the usual, but Penny just sat looking at me, never blinking until she finally spoke up. "Do you know about Jim?" she asked. I answered with the question if he was in jail again and what he'd done "now." "He's dead," she answered flatly. It was my turn then to sit and stare without blinking. "I didn't think you knew," Penny said to break the silence. Apparently Jim was asked to house-sit for a sister while she and her husband went out of state for a week-long vacation. When they returned home, they found Jim dead slumped against a wall in the garage, the butt of a long-extinguished cigarette still on his lips. Jim, according to the coroner, likely died of carbon monoxide poisoning the very day his sister and her husband left the house. The ignition in the car in the garage was on, and there was no fuel in the car. Jim's body set undiscovered the entire week, a week that had one of the Midwest's notorious heatwaves. That week, the daily average mean temperature in Indiana was 97 degrees. Jim's body, then, needless to say, was badly decomposed, enough that he couldn't be viewed at the mortuary. Instead, a framed picture of Jim taken in prison set on his casket. The funeral was a "welfare" one. Jim, because of his drinking, had lost relatively good-paying job after job, had no resources or insurance and was buried by the township trustee. That meant a casket that was little more than reinforced cardboard, literally, and a service without any "frills."

When Penny told me Jim had died, I didn't ask what she meant about some odd references she made to police speculating that Jim committed suicide to avoid going back to prison and that he really died of a heart attack. I understood just two weeks later what Penny meant when Jim, posthumously, made the front page of the city's afternoon newspaper. The story said police had closed their probe of the city's latest unsolved homicide. Citing police and county prosecutors, the newspaper reported that Jim got drunk and picked up a trick, a young man who took Jim back to his apartment for sex. A woman who lived with the man who took Jim home found her roommate dead in his room the next morning, presumably beaten to death by a blood-soaked barbell laying next to the bed. The newspaper story said Jim's fingerprints were lifted from the barbell and, two days before his death, police informed Jim they had enough to charge him with murder. Police concluded Jim's death, after they got the autopsy report, was suicide, and so it was written on the death certificate. Jim's family, according to Penny, rejected the finding and said the cause of death was a heart attack. They also said police "planted" Jim's fingerprints that were lifted from the murder weapon.

I still occasionally pass the house where Jim lived with his wife. Penny, who kept the house after Jim left, also subsequently abandoned the house and married a man with a physical disability. Penny herself later became disabled by a muscular degenerative disease. Although I was asked a couple of times by acquaintances of Jim's for my private opinion about the cause of his death, I never answered. And I never will. But I think to myself, every time I drive past the ruins of the house where Jim and Penny lived, that Jim's life, just 30 years long, sadly, was a total waste.