I’m not going to shy away from my rampant drug use over the years. And I will use the word “use” and not “abuse” because abusing drugs is simply a waste of good drugs. The reality is that I didn’t start drinking until I was 21, and didn’t do a single drug until I was 23. So by the time any of the fun stuff entered my life and I was mentally able to handle some adventure, but i was tethered to a weekday routine that I would stick to since I had bills to pay and a job I loved. I didn’t want to be a junkie… my life on a daily bases was pretty good, I had nothing I really wanted to escape from. That was my salvation.
However…
… in my first year out in Austin I was a mess. Alcohol was always my worst drug, but my best friend at the time, Conrad, had taught me everything else I needed to know. He was a nerdy geek who was brilliant and experimental, a combination which would later lead to his own demise the very next year. I was not so anxious to trumpet in this path, so I took everything rather slow. But whatever condition I came home in Jeb was always there with the appropriate remedy and to listen to the laughter. This was me… this was my “wild phase”. I was released from the religious chains that had held me for 23 years and finally I could just… DO. Of course, the worry wart that I was, “doing” was often layered over with the “well, let’s be careful about this, we have to be at work on Monday” voice of an adult omnipresent mother. I was a good person to party with on day one. By day two I was a buzz kill. “If we are going to be doing good drugs, we might as well do something productive.”
And to this day, my bathrooms have never been as spotless.
But it was more than just a wild man let loose for two days. I was trying to find my balance between the strong arm of the religious gluttons with bellies stuffed with guilt and hate and the ‘everything goes’ freedom of the hedonistic orgy of a gay Dionysus. It was not a very easy middle ground to achieve and through that year I stumbled many times, but recovery and balance was only due to another who had taken his journey years before.
Jeb was experienced in everything, and for that I looked up to him as we both garnered creative inspiration from whatever drugs we did. We would sit and tell stories to each other for hours. Mine were days old, if that. His were years old. The comfort is that we made the same mistakes, and found the same humor in many of the same circumstances. This provided a bases of trust that… to this day… is difficult to achieve without years of honest conversation. Jeb liked what I did with my inspiration creatively, and sometimes when he got home from work he would sneak into my room and see what new painting I thought up after a night of psychedelic mayhem.
For the years spanning my exit from Austin until my move back, I would visit and check on my friend. Inevitably we would do a little acid and talk for 12 hours straight. We would lie on the couch and laugh, we would take out the folding chairs and sit in the back yard staring at the stars until the sun decided to wake. Our favorite late night past time was watching infomercials and buckling over until we were hoarse with laughter.
One would think that two mental patients of this caliber under the same roof would make for a messy living situation at the asylum, but it oddly did not. In fact, the opposite was true. We worked as a balance for each other. While I was a raging mess, Jeb was always the calm caretaker and vice versa.
With this trust established, time brought various information about Jeb. Thanksgiving 1998 was approaching and it was at that time I learned of the absolute disgust for the holiday that Jeb held. I’m sure somewhere in our history he revealed the origin of this but as of not I cannot recall the specifics due to everything I just wrote at the beginning of this chapter. I was not going to be deterred by his negativity. This was going to be my first Thanksgiving as Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate the holiday and as a newly orphaned gay male, I was going to do it as if Martha Stewart herself was presenting it to the Queen.
Jeb was amused at my venture. In fact, with most things regarding me Jeb would sit back and watch as if to say, “I just kinda want to see where this is going.” I think that was the true beauty of our relationship… we simply amused each other. For the actual Thanksgiving Day, Jeb and Brian went to visit relatives. I cooked an unnecessarily large turkey, stuffing, artichoke dip, mashed potatoes, green beans, and an assortment of other forgotten side dishes and desserts… all from scratch, and all for myself.
If you are thinking that is a lot of food for one person… well, so was everyone else at the time. I finally broke down and invited various employees from Midtowne Spa to come by and partake in my expansive spread. One by one they would drop by the house to literally ‘dine and dash’ as they were still working and only on their lunch break. This also meant that with each visitor I become more and more drunk as I was the only person consuming wine. Anthony was the first to taste my palatable masterpiece, so he witnessed my first ceremonial ‘cutting of the turkey’. I stood over my conquered feat with a large knife in hand looking like a serial killer with my blue spiked hair, eyeliner, and chipped black fingernail polish smiling from ear to ear. I was mad with accomplishment.
“Do you remember my first Thanksgiving?” I asked Jeb one day in 2007 as the holiday was approaching once again.
“I remember the artichoke dip,” he laughed.
It is true, upon their return home the day after Thanksgiving, Jeb tasted everything but the turkey and finally settled into the artichoke dip. First he used bread, then various vegetables, and finally just shoveled it in his mouth with a spoon… and then his fingers. It was damn good dip.
I was trying my hardest to remember what Jeb did for Thanksgiving 2007, but I cannot remember the specifics. That was a theme of Jeb’s: “I’m going to do what I fucking want by myself. Talk to you later.” For anyone who knows Jeb who may have unanswered questions about why he did this or that, just repeat that phrase to yourself. Jeb’s skin was made of iron, and rarely could anyone break him of his path or guilt him into doing something he didn’t want to do. He did not do turkey. I’m pretty sure he spent the evening DJing at the bar. At that time he was rarely anywhere else but between the DJ booth or my living room floor.
The days between Halloween and Thanksgiving were pretty routine for us. The morphine was settling in nicely after two immediate increases. Years before Jeb had given up pot. On occasion he would use cocaine as a helper to his non-existent energy levels. By the time he entered Hospice, he was pretty much clean except for alcohol, although a few Hospice helpers suggested to perhaps maybe think about if he wanted to conceivably consider the idea of possibly partaking in minimal pot use to help with everything he had wrong, including nausea and appetite. Jeb never did.
Once the morphine balanced out, Jeb became a new man. He was able to eat solid food, his drinking was less manic, and he was able to move about like a human being instead of like an ape who had a dagger stuck into his side. His Staph infection was under control, his temperature regulated, and his thinking was clearer. For the first time in years, I was comfortable with him driving.
That lasted for about three weeks. Then there was a turn. It wasn’t anything drastic or surprising, but a subtle fog creeping in from the periphery. Jeb would sleep longer hours, it took more effort for him to get ready for work. His night sweats returned little by little. In general, his body began to show signs of failing again. This time may have been a swifter and gentler decline, but it was a decline nonetheless and it was happening before my eyes.
A few weeks before Thanksgiving Jeb had started a cathartic cleansing of his life. Trash bags filled with clothes and boxes filled with papers began to flood my living room. We would sit and he would show me every item of clothing that had a story to it. He would shuffle through papers and pull out an old essay with the enthusiasm of a child getting the perfect Christmas present.
“Okay! Listen to this!” He would then read some off-the-wall insanity that was hilarious to me, but probably frustrated whichever small-town-in-Texas teacher who had to grade such a creative work of art. Genius or mad man? It really could go either way if you didn’t know Jeb. It was if he came out of the womb on LSD and as a person of similar mindset, I could appreciate the little Seuss-esque worlds he created.
As suddenly as they arrived, the bags of stories and the boxes of forgotten memories would disappear. In some ways I felt guilty for not stealing some of these writings or not trying to preserve the creative oddities, but at the same time I wasn’t thinking about me or Jeb’s future as Jeb had no future… there was only the now, and the Jeb now would be irritated at me trying to take something of his. In fact, I think that was one of Jeb’s greatest gifts to me: “Here, you are a warped mind… let’s share.” And then it was gone. It was his version of Jimi Hendrix burning the guitar on stage, but for an audience of just me and all I have left is the memory of the scene, the emotion of the room, and the smile it left behind.
I had abandoned drugs years before when my father passed away. Again, I did drugs because they are fun, not out of depression or escape and my father’s passing had me depressed for a long time. For the record, Jeb never shared any of his morphine – I never asked and he never offered. As his body began to fail more and more, I found it hard just took keep a monotone conversation going. Hunter, the happy hour bartender at the bar who worked while Jeb DJed became a fueling station for me. His nerdy cuteness and twisted mind made him a perfect source of positive energy for me to siphon from while I was watching Jeb’s deterioration. He was also one of the four people that Jeb actually liked and appreciated – so the three of us spent our happy hours together, sometimes joined by Anthony who would round out the group.
Thanksgiving was finally upon us. I had two dinners planned. The first was Thanksgiving Day with Jeb’s ex Brian and his partner Ed at their house by the lake. It was a place where Jeb would go to mentally recover as its scenery was spectacular and the wine was always flowing. It was also the place we had discussed as the last place Jeb would like to move to when the time came. The dinner was small and quiet, and conversation was mainly about Jeb and his condition. The next day there were loads of Christmas decorations to go up and tons of leftovers to be eaten.
The second Thanksgiving was on Sunday with Anthony and his partner Dan since Anthony had to work on Thanksgiving. On Sunday I left Brian and Ed’s and stopped by the house to prep myself for the next meal. Jeb was fast asleep in his bed. I took off and thought nothing of it. The meal was a bountiful dinner with plenty of laughter. I made it home stuffed and in a good mood. I realized that I had consumed more food in 4 days then Jeb has in the past year.
I came home to find Jeb still sleeping, sweating, and running a very high temperature as his forehead felt like it was on fire. I wasn’t scared at first. I had seen him bad, but not this bad and I had absolutely no clue exactly how long he had been asleep. He wouldn’t wake up, and halfway in my trying to rouse him I realize that for some reason I didn’t want him to wake up. His body obviously needed to be still.
Monday came and he was still asleep. I sat on the floor next to him and grabbed his hand and stared at him for what seemed like hours. I didn’t know what to think. The only thought that kept surfacing through the muddy pool was “is this it?” It would be the first of many of those moments. Questions would then light up and spin around my head like flies on fire, impossible to swat away, then disappear, only to have the one question stand alone in the emptiness… “is this it?”
Jeb eventually woke up while I was watching television. Thank goodness.
“You need to eat something.”
“I’m fine, I’m just thirsty.”
Those two lines of dialogue will be repeated many times over the next few months.
For this evening, I was relieved and thought a mild celebratory meal was in order. I retrieved steak fingers from Dairy Queen. Jeb wanted to know if they still tasted like he remembered. They did not. In reality, nothing really tasted the same to him anymore.
I changed the sheets of his bed and he went back to bed. I called the Hospice nurse once he was out and told her what happened. She informed me that this may be happening more and more, and I was to let her know when it happens again… as it will happen again.
Jeb slept until Tuesday happy hour. It took him two hours to get ready for work.
Things were changing, we could both tell it. Nether wanted to talk about it. We were both uncharacteristically frightened and unsure how to digest it properly. We would figure it out on our own, separately before any communal thoughts were released into the air. To talk about it would be admittance, and neither of us wanted to admit the obvious: the tide had officially changed for the worse.
Jeb took off to work and left me in the living room, staring at the closed door. Here I was celebrating Thanksgiving, and the one thing I’m truly thankful for was right here. I wasn’t thankful, I was honored. At that moment, the honest moment of loss began to nestle in and become comfortable in the middle part of my brain. This was going to happen, and it was going to happen soon.
I gave a big smile to myself. The reality was sad… but this is Jeb, and I was having my very own ‘I just kinda want to see where this is going’ episode.
“Well,” I said to myself, “I guess it’s time to get this show on the road.”
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