Turn the Page

Jay Brakefield

ellum1@aol.com

I cringe whenever I hear a news report about a family seeking “closure” in the wake of a loved one’s death. Life is messier than that. But there are moments that seem to end a period in one’s life.

I learned the other day that our friend David Wenzel was dead. We met David after I was downsized out of my last newspaper job a decade ago, ending a 40-year journalism career. Though I wasn’t crazy about the job and had been thinking about retirement, my mind swirled as I carried the obligatory cardboard box of office stuff to my car. My wife, Shirley, was angry, but I was thinking about what to do next. I had retirement income and a pretty decent severance package, but what was I going to do with myself? The answer, as it turns out, was a lot. I filed for Social Security and Medicare, helped Shirley with her paper route, delivering the paper for which I had recently worked as a copy editor. She’d taken the route after failing to crack the Aggie good-ol’-boy network, though she’d worked as a Realtor in Dallas for decades. I worked from home as a fact checker for a Dallas-based magazine and did a bit of freelance writing and editing. I continued hosting my blues show on community radio station KEOS in Bryan, Texas, “An Exuberant Melancholy,” a title I borrowed from the African-American novelist Richard Wright. I worked for the 2010 census. I had a couple of strange car wrecks that involved blackouts caused by stress and lack of sleep. I served on a fake jury, did phone surveys (ugh!), read, drank beer, hung out.

Tragedy struck when Shirley’s son Kris was killed in a car crash. It wasn’t an accident; he committed suicide after being falsely accused of sexually abusing his teenage daughter by a district attorney’s office headed by a ham-fisted prosecutor who later bungled a case involving a biker shootout and left office under a cloud. Shirley had been very close to Kris; they had talked almost daily. She was shattered.

I had signed on to deliver phone books, a job that proved to be overwhelming, if done right, taking the books to the front door, which is why most people just threw them in the driveway. I had stacks of books in our pickup truck and a spare room at the house. I decided to seek help from a group of guys who hung out behind the Carnegie Library in Bryan, giving them a place to sleep, beer and spending money. In return, they’d help with deliveries and making repairs around the house. Matthew was a short, heavyset former Hell’s Angel who had been living on a friend’s couch. Another guy, whom I’ll call Bill, was a homeless drunk. Through them I met David, another homeless drunk. He was a warmhearted guy who’d had a terrible life, raised by abusive foster parents, living on the streets of Austin and Bryan for years, sleeping on the street or in abandoned houses.

We soon got rid of Bill, who was lazy and preferred to read and drink till he passed out. Matthew, a former speed cook and convict known as Fat Rat in the biker world, was a worker and a good companion, and we became brothers. To say that he had health problems would be an understatement: PTSD from Vietnam, congestive heart trouble, a bad back aggravated by working in the oilfields and falling off a couple of roofs. His dad had undiagnosed PTSD from serving in the Pacific during World War II. Matthew hated green peas and always rolled them under the refrigerator, which worked fine till they got a new one, which prompted another tongue-lashing from the old man.

David, who rode a bicycle around town and hustled scrap metal and odd jobs, stayed with us off and on and sometimes slept on the floor of a shed on our rural property because he was more comfortable sleeping rough, as the Brits would say. When we went into town, David would go with us and stock up on cheap wine or vodka. Once when we returned home, he opened a car door and fell out, unconscious. I couldn’t rouse or lift him, so we left his there. Hours later he walked into the house as if nothing had happened.

David was usually the most peaceful of people, but once, after trying unsuccessfully to control the TV with his mind, he attacked Matthew for no reason we could figure. David was childlike and may have had an attack of jealousy because we were paying more attention to Matthew. I wrestled David into the truck and took him into town. He asked to be dropped off at a house occupied by a bunch of drinkers and hard-core drug users. His residency there ended when the owner, as David said, “crossed the line.” How did he do that, I inquired. “He came after me with an ax,” came the reply. Yeah, that crossed the line, I agreed.

It became increasingly difficult for David to work as he deteriorated physically. When I saw him downtown one day, he was unable to raise his right arm because he had broken a collarbone and it hadn’t been set properly.

Through this motley crew we met an array of drunks, pillheads and tweakers who made us feel normal by comparison. Skinny Bob lived in a trailer with no electricity and walked into town on his “snipe hunts,” scanning the ground for cigarette butts to smoke. After we evicted Bill, he lived on the street or with a Dickensian bunch in a nasty house by a railroad track with scruffy dogs chained up out front. Another guy, whom I’ll call Joe, was a colorblind, alcoholic house painter who had lost his truck and lived outdoors, hustling work as he was able with no transportation or equipment. He’s now in an apartment and seems happier, I’m happy to report.

Matthew went to Waco to stay with relatives. We told him he could come back anytime. He called one day and asked if he could come home to get away from the drug use and constant turmoil. Shirley went and got him.  He was sinking fast; in addition to all his other problems, he had cancer. One day when I was at work at the boiler room, doing those horrid surveys, Shirley found him unresponsive and called 911. He was choppered to a hospital. Turns out he had tried to kill himself with an overdose of Seroquel, a powerful antipsychotic drug. He hadn’t announced his intention; if he had, we would have let him go. He’d suffered enough. From the hospital he went to a nursing home a few miles up the road in Franklin. After visiting him one day, Shirley hit a wild hog on the way back. The air bags went off. Covered with airbag discharge, she emerged from the car. Another car appeared, moving fast, and knocked the open door off the wrecked car. She jumped out of the way. The driver of the attack vehicle stopped a ways down the road, walked around his car and drove off. We filed claims for two accidents that happened seconds apart.

Matthew died in the nursing home. His family didn’t have enough money to place an obit in the paper, and friends and relatives called asking about his effects: “Still got those boots?” I felt sick.

Matthew’s wife lived in public housing in Franklin after they separated. They’d had a rocky relationship aggravated by drug use. He’d gotten regular calls from the supermarket where they shopped: “Hey, Matt, your wife’s stuck again She’s on aisle 4.” She would freeze while contemplating the meat or canned vegetables, and her husband would have to get her unstuck. They had lived on a road so remote that the only traffic was a preacher who passed by twice a day, going to and from work. She’d managed to back out and collide with him once. Soon, she died, too.

The last time we saw David, he was in terrible shape in a hospital in Houston after being run over by a motorist while driving a tractor down a highway at dusk, with no lights other than a mechanic’s headlamp. It was a wonder that he survived; metal had pierced his body. He had moved down to Angleton, where for a time he lived with a troubled lesbian couple. Then he found a friend who hired him for odd jobs and let him live in a mobile home.

We sold our place in the country and bought an RV. That’s another story for another time. We lost track of David and moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi. Recently I found a phone number for David’s friend and employer, who sadly told me that David had died from his injuries. He said, though, that the last couple years of his life were happy, with a place to live and friends to talk to and cook out with. It was good to hear that.

Closure? Of a sort.

enough