Billy Coffey

storyteller

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Starting over

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

I last saw Joey five years ago, just before he started over. He was a mess back then. Thin and shaky and unkempt. A shadow of the man who was once a boy I called a friend. He was still sick. Still “fighting the bear,” as he called it. He was in the pit, yes. But at least he was looking up toward the light. For the first time in nearly ten years, he was smiling.

His life had followed the same downward spiral that more and more people in this area had taken before him. Booze had turned to pills and pills to meth. He had no idea that the foggy paradise he thought he’d found was in reality a grave that was being dug around him. I’m not sure what finally managed to take hold of him as he tottered on the edge of an eventual overdose, whether it was his wife and kids finally leaving him or getting fired from his job. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was God. Whatever it was, it worked. That Something grabbed hold of Joey and refused to let go.

He entered counseling. AA and NA and nearly every other A you could imagine. Joey made his peace and asked for forgiveness and learned to rely on a Higher Power. The road to healing was a slow process and a brutal one, but then the road to all good things usually is.

“I need to start over,” he told me that day.

He was moving. Away from the temptations that had nearly killed him and had cost him so much. West. Colorado maybe, or maybe Montana. Joey had always loved the mountains, and the Rockies seemed the place to go.

“You know how the mountains here are smooth?” he asked me. “It’s because they’re old. They’ve been worn down by time. The Rockies aren’t like that. They’re still sharp. I’m tired of feeling worn. I want to be sharp again.”

So he left, taking that winding path West that so many once trod in search of freedom and a better life. I understood. We all needed to start over sometimes. And we all yearned for a new place to do it, a place where our sins wouldn’t follow and we could be judged by who we’ve become rather than who we once were.

I told him to keep in touch and he did. There were emails and phone calls and even an old fashioned letter or two. Doing good, he said. Weather’s perfect, he said. Joey found work and a home and bought a dog to keep him company, a Siberian husky with one blue eye and one brown one. He named him Crackhead.

The Rockies soon lost their appeal, though. As it turned out, there was just as much temptation out West as there had been down South. Joey wrote to say he was heading for Alaska to find work on a fishing boat. He’d always wanted to do that.

The years went on. Emails and phone calls stopped. I thought nothing of it. Time and life often get in the way of friendships like currents that push ships apart and send them on separate courses upon the same ocean. I was here and he was there, and somehow that knowing alone made things okay.

I was catching up with an old friend last week when Joey’s name came up. I wondered aloud whatever had happened to him.

“You didn’t hear?” my friend asked. “Joey died a year ago.”

I didn’t want to believe it, but it was true. He’d heard the news from Joey’s mother just after it had happened. They’d found him in his apartment. The needle was still in his arm.

I thought about Joey today. No reason, really. Sometimes things just pop into your head, memories that you haven’t quite sorted out and found reason in yet.

All Joey wanted was a chance to start over. To leave his problems behind. Most addicts are like that, I think. They’re prisoners unto themselves, chained by a desire that goes beyond want and straight into need. They hate what they do as much as the people who love them hate it. They hate it more.

But there is a catch to starting over, and it’s this—no matter where we go, we always take ourselves with us. And not just our hopes and our dreams. Our frailties and our wounds, too.

Books and their covers

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 6.25.57 PMI see him there just down the street. See the ratty jeans that are too small and the jacket that may have fit once but is now too big. See the hat pulled down over his bushy hair and his empty eyes. And the sign—HOMELESS PLEASE GIVE—that is propped against his left leg.

A few who pass offer him quarters and dollar bills. One brings a cup of coffee. Another a candy bar. He takes them with a nod, but no words. One woman offers him both money and a sandwich from the 7-11 down the road. As she walks away, he stares at her backside and smiles.

The patch on his right sleeve is the eagle of the 101st Airborne. Army. A veteran. But then he turns and I see above his left pocket the globe and anchor of the Marine Corps.

I rub my chin. Something’s wrong here.

Another dollar from another woman, which brings another nod and another leer as she walks away. He tips his cap in salute of her appearance. As he does, he exposes the gold watch on his wrist.

I rub my chin again.

Then I begin to understand.

Such sights are more common than we would like to admit—people who pretend to be homeless, penniless, and hopeless but who in fact are none of the above. They spend their days playing to the sympathies of the public and spend their nights in their own homes mocking those good deeds.

And this, I think to myself, is one of those people.

I remain where I am and study his technique. He’s had practice, this man. He knows how to look and act his part, though the gold watch on his wrist and the conflicting patches on his jacket tell me he hasn’t been at this little charade long.

But his silence more than makes up for his lapses. Silence conveys a sense of brokenness, and he has to act broken. The leering at the women, though, is trouble. He’ll have to work on that if he wants to stay in character.

He tips his cap again to another passerby. I notice more this time. His hand is shaking in an almost violent spasm. He’s sniffing, too. Not a big deal in the winter, but this is a warm spring day.

I think I know where all the money he collects out here goes.

Right up his nose.

The cycle of addiction brings out the worst in people. It’s a reality of desperation and wasting away that is only slightly masked by a false and fleeting bliss. It cradles and chokes you at the same time.

He’s rocking back and forth now. I’m not sure if that’s part of the act of it he just needs to move. Or maybe the drugs are wearing off.

He’s decided to use the shakes to his advantage, drawing people to his decay by holding the sign in his trembling hand. It works. Five out of the next twenty people stop to donate. This time there’s much more green than silver.

What should I do with this man? Pity him? Scorn him? Call him unfortunate or lost? Call him worse? I’m not sure. But I know he’s not what he pretends to be, and I know I can’t stand here and watch him any longer.

As he stands between me and my truck, I have to walk past him. Each step brings a little more pity for the addiction choking him and a little less anger for the lie he’s living. I decide this is a test. Give to the poor, Jesus said. Do good. Whatever bad he does with what I give him is his choice, not my consequence.

I reach into my pocket. As I pass, I put the dollar in his hand.

He says, “Thanks, you stupid redneck.”

He shoves my dollar into his pocket before I could snatch it back. I stare at him, fuming.

I spend my ride home enjoying neither sights nor music. I can’t speak, can’t concentrate, can barely think. Anger consumes me.

Not because he took my gift. Not even because he called me a name.

But because he dared to judge me by appearance alone.

Picking your poison

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

I was fifteen when I took my first dip of snuff behind the dugout of the high school baseball field. It was during the bottom of the third inning, I remember that. And I remember I was due up second and the other team’s pitcher could hum a fastball. He would nod a yes to the catcher and begin a windup so slow it would almost put you to sleep, and then there was a blur from his arm and the ball was on you. It was on you and you knew if you blinked, you’d miss it. I hadn’t missed it the first time, I’d grounded out to third. That was pure luck—truth was, I never saw the ball. I swung at air and just happened to connect.

So my buddy said, “Try a dip. It’ll relax you.” And me, being fifteen and therefore almost completely a man, said yes. Because where I come from, men dip snuff.

I won’t say the habit started because I hit a double into the gap my next time at the plate. And honestly, sunflower seeds seemed to relax me more than Skoal. But I had another one after the game on the ride home—the same buddy who got me dipping also got me listening to Whitesnake and Motley Crue, but that habit, thankfully, has since been broken. I took two more the next day during practice. Then we stopped by the 7-11 on the way home and I bought my own can.

You couldn’t buy tobacco unless you were sixteen by then, but the guy behind the counter seemed more concerned with the sad state of his life than whether I was old enough to dip.

And that’s how it’s been for pretty much the last twenty-four years. Every couple days I’m back down at that very same 7-11 to sustain my habit. The only difference is that now there’s a lady behind the counter.

I come from a long line of tobacco users. Dad’s been chewing tobacco since he was eight years old. Not kidding. I’m not saying it was inevitable that I start too, but I think it’s in my blood. Much like some are born with hankering for whiskey. I will say my Skoal has seen me through my fair share of trouble. Somehow, someway, things are just better handled with a dip in your mouth. I don’t expect you to understand how that is, but it’s the truth.

It took two kids to make me realize how much of a hold tobacco had on my life. You want to be a role model for your children. You want them to understand that while you’re not perfect, you’re always trying to be better. And it was hard for me to tell them to trust in God to see them through when I was really trusting in tobacco to see me through—“Trust in,” I’d say, then I’d spit and finish, “God.”

When your kids ask you why you do the things you do and why those things are so important even if they could kill you one day, you start to think. You start to think long and hard.

So I quit. Did it last week. Six days of nightmares and shakes, ten bags of sunflower seeds, twelve packs of gum, and seventy-nine toothpicks later, I’m still here. Barely, but here. It’s scary. I don’t mind saying that.

But here’s what I’ve learned by talking to people about this—we’re all imprisoned by something. Whether it’s tobacco or alcohol or shopping, food or work or regret, we all stand in some short of shadow. And while that shadow is comfortable and familiar, while it even offers some sort of strength, we’re not meant to dwell in darkness. We were all made for the light.

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