I looked up this morning and it has been 25 years since I had to identify Joe’s body, then knock on his ex-wife’s door to tell his nine year old son his father was dead.
I knew something was wrong when Joe didn’t show up at my house. Things had gone wrong before. I didn’t know HOW wrong it would be.
Instead of picking up his son to stay at our house with him for his weekend pass from the re-hab center, he checked out with some other patients, they got some dope and a motel room and he OD’d.
His friends panicked, left him in the motel room and snuck back in to the rehab in the middle of the night. Apparently one of them had a guilty moment over his oatmeal in the morning and called in an anonymous tip. The police found my phone number in his wallet, the only contact information on his body.
I confess I only really know this date because John Denver died that day too and John Denver is commemorated every year. Joe… Well, I think it’s me, my family and my kids who remember him. Most of the contractors and clients who met him (if they are still alive and don’t have dementia) might remember “that funny guy who worked for Steve”. But they didn’t live with him like we did. They didn’t love him like I do, still.
I know his son remembers him. I think perhaps his son may now think kindly (or at least compassionately) back on whatever he can remember of his childhood with his Father. Joe truly loved his son in spite of whatever it was in him, natural or created by his life’s tragedies, that loved vodka and heroin more than his son and his own life. I never saw his son, Johnny, again after the funeral. Johnny found my email address somehow about eight years ago and asked me if I had any pictures of his Dad that I could send him. I scanned what I had and sent them to him. He didn’t say why he wanted them, nor thank you. I’ve not heard from him since.
I hope Johnny remembers the fishing expeditions, the vacations, the garage sales, and has forgotten the times we went to his Dad’s apartment to get his clothes and toys to take back to his Mom’s place because Joe was on a binge. We would walk over Joe on the floor because he was too drunk to get off it. He reeked of urine, sweat, vodka and cigarettes. He would reach up, his hand shaking, and slur out, “Come give me a hug Johnny…. I love you! I love you!”….
Johnny would look at me, perhaps looking for permission to react honestly, or just to avoid looking at his Father. But, in the next couple months Joe would be committed, out of detox, in a half-way house or back in my basement, and clean for about four or five months.
Then the cycle would repeat until he was dead.
The hagiography of how I met Joe is HERE. It is the story of how he hated Christians after being adopted by a preacher after his father stabbed his mother to death in front of him, then was sexually abused by just about everyone in his adoptive family and became a male prostitute in Hollywood. It’s also the tale of how he became a Christian with a shotgun to his head during a drug deal gone south… I won’t repeat all of that in this post. Click the link if you want to hear the story.
Anyway, Joe was spiritual long before he was a Christian. He told me he once was in bed and suddenly he was enveloped by light and transported to somewhere, and in an instance he “knew EVERYTHING”, and everything was good and it ALL worked together… but then he forgot it all. He “knew it” but couldn’t remember how it came together, just that it did. And that became his obsession, to get that knowledge back or find the place where he got it.
But the other thing the experience did was calibrate his “spiritual BS meter” to an Nth degree, to a degree that, to most people, seemed doubting, sacreligious, irreverent, cynical, iconoclastic and heretical. He dabbled in all “spiritualities” and sniffed at them with an equally keen nose for bullshit.
He was once invited to a New Age gathering in which a “guru” personality would be leading a guided spiritual encounter group. The person who invited him told him that the woman leading the encounter was the most open, sharing, compassionate, inclusive human being she’d ever known. Joe came home early and I asked him how it went. He said, “Well… the most sharing, caring human being on earth asked me to leave the session because I was fucking up the energy in the room. Not much of a goddess, if you ask me…”
At that time we were part of an Episcopal church and the priest was really into the Vineyard healing ministry and Francis McNutt, who he invited, along with some Vineyard personalities, to do a healing service at our parish. Joe (who was a Christian by that time) said, “Hell… why not… if a miracle happens and I stay sober, whatever works, works.”
During one of the sessions certain people were brought up on “stage” and the “Healing Ministers” laid hands on them while praying in tongues. A very nervous man with a very bad skin condition was led up and sat in a chair. Several people gathered around him and put their hands on him (but conspicuously, as Joe noted, NOT on his skin). Behind him was a very well endowed woman whose breasts pressed against the back of his head and she put her hands on his chest from behind him while she earnestly prayed in tongues above his head.
At one point Francis McNutt asked the man, “Do you feel the Spirit moving in you?” and the man replied, “Yes…. I think so…..”
We were sitting in a mid-church pew. Joe whispered (in a stage whisper), “If her tits were on the back of my head I’d be feeling the spirit moving in me too….” We didn’t go back for the rest of the sessions.
So, no… Joe never found the right crystal, energy frequency, nor a moving of the Spirit that would save him or give him the acceptance or peace he was looking for. All he knew was that there was a God who was all that Whom he had encountered once then disappeared and perhaps the only way to find Him again was to die.
And I think that is what Joe did. In desperation he reached out to a luminous hem that was merely a dim recollection of a peace he knew in an experience outside of this body addicted to dissolution and futility.
Joe died when I was 45. I’m 70 now. Joe and I used to listen to mix tapes I made while we worked on my construction jobs. One song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Old Friends”. We used to talk about being 65, retired and sitting on a park bench, or the shore of Saguaro Lake, with fishing poles, and watching the sun set, wordlessly, but in love with each other.
He abandoned me. I know he loved me. But I know Who he loved more.
It’s the same Person I love more too… and in Whom we will be re-united some day.
Memory eternal, my friend and brother. I hope you found your peace.
Pray for me that I may find mine.
"Joe died when I was 45. I’m 70 now. Joe and I used to listen to mix tapes I made while we worked on my construction jobs. One song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Old Friends”. We used to talk about being 65, retired and sitting on a park bench, or the shore of Saguaro Lake, with fishing poles, and watching the sun set, wordlessly, but in love with each other.
He abandoned me. I know he loved me. But I know Who he loved more."
I could substitute "Jeff" for "Joe" and "71" for "70", the names of the songs on the mixed tapes, and sitting on a porch in rocking chairs for sitting on a park bench or with fishing poles. Those last paragraphs are about my brother and me. He died from too much alcohol used to dull the pain inside from things that happened in his adult life.
We were 10 years apart in age and I looked forward to a time when he would retire at 65 and we could celebrate my 75th birthday together because then he could come to my party. I no longer want a party. But I do expect to see him again because I know he loved me and God, who is infinite unbounded Love, will not allow the love that exists between his creatures to perish.
Sad and beautiful—two things that often go together. I grew up in the Charismatic Movement and sat through several of those healing services in the 1980s. I’m not cynical and know most of those involved were earnest, but little of it seemed as advertised.