Lefty's Story--complete

During the course of our lives, we make a few friends that know us to the soul. If we’re lucky, we get to keep them, but sometimes fate is unkind. Fate sometimes takes them away, or robs them of the spark that made them indispensable to us.

I first met Lefty when I was 24, and he was about 30. I was beginning my teaching career in a junior high school where he had been a teacher since college. We had a lot in common--we both took pride in our Irish origins, we both were competitive, we both had a sometimes dangerous facility with words, and we both loved the music of singer-songwriters like Dylan, Neil Young, Kris Kristofferson, and Van Morrison. Lefty had a wife, a son, and a daughter; so would I. Both marriages would last more than 20 years, and then end.

But there was a big difference between the two of us. Lefty carried scars of which I was unaware, scars that were invisible ugly gashes across his psyche. He’d grown up in the poorest part of the city, raised by parents who grew to hate the sight of one another. It was a baseball scholarship that had enabled him to escape and educate himself.

We’d been friends for a few years when Lefty called me to tell me his mother had died. I went to see him that evening. I remember his telling me, “I didn’t think this would get to me. But there’s a price to be paid. She was still my mother.” A few nights later, he approached me at the wake. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, “but she was a soo-ee.”

“A what?”

“A suicide.”

Over the course of the next few years, Lefty was constantly checking on his father, an alcoholic who was living in a nearby assisted living complex. On one of his visits, Lefty found his father’s legs protruding from a closet. He was dead. Lefty seemed to handle these situations with his typical aplomb. He expressed relief that his parents would no longer burden themselves and others with their troubled lives. He spoke of them with regret, but never melancholia. He seemed to be over it, or so I thought. But I was fooled.

For years, Lefty and I had great times as best friends; in fact, I’ve never had better times. We had Celtics season tickets when the Celtics fielded a frontcourt of Larry Bird, Robert Parish, and Kevin McHale. We played basketball with a group of guys after work on Mondays and with another group before work on Thursdays. Lefty had a bad knee, but he could shoot…he could really shoot.

He liked to host “Van Morrison Night”, when a bunch of us would gather together, drink beer, and listen to the Bard of Belfast. We’d spend hours debating the relative merits of Astral Weeks and His Band and Street Choir, but I noticed that Lefty seemed drawn to lesser known, darker works, like T. B. Sheets and Veedon Fleece. Lefty worked on weekends as a bartender, and a drink he created, the “Buca Bird” (Sambuca and Wild Turkey), became the nightcap of choice on these occasions.

Of course, eventually we drew our families together. My kids were frequent guests at his pool, and we’d go to dinner at the Foxglove Restaurant, where his wife worked as a hostess. One night, we played Trivial Pursuit at my house, husbands against wives. It was a mistake. Two men used to trash-talking and bravado were not the most gallant of winners, especially when most of a quart of Bombay Sapphire disappeared during the evening. Lefty’s wife turned to mine and said, “I feel sorry for you. You’re not used to this like I am.”

Nevertheless, the connection between the two families flourished. Lefty and his wife bought a cottage in Brewster on the Cape, and my family was always welcome there. I’d been a Falmouth guy growing up, but with a home base in Brewster, I soon succumbed to the charms of the mid-Cape: cycling on the Rail Trail, body-surfing at Nauset Beach, canoeing the Nauset inlet, reggae and steamers at Rock Harbor, cioppino at the Barley Neck Inn. Each April, when my wife took the kids to Florida to visit their grandparents, I took a few days alone--to fish for trout in Sheep’s Pond, to order the schrod special at the bar in the Chatham Squire, and to listen to local musicians at the Woodshed Tavern—especially my favorites, The Preacher, the Judge, and Panama Red.

Lefty had a favorite waitress who worked at both the Squire in Chatham and the Brewster Chowderhouse. He favored her with large tips on account of both her attentiveness and her natural endowments. His infatuation was harmless and not hidden from his wife; in fact, she found it humorous and took to calling the waitress “the big-titted woman.” After a while, we began to refer to trips to Brewster as quests for the BTW, and we referred to our tennis matches as “The BTW Invitational.” It was all in good fun, and we certainly meant no disrespect to the waitress, who had no idea she had become an idol.

Brewster was a place to soothe your soul. It seemed to me that it was impossible to be unhappy there. I should not have been as surprised as I was when Lefty’s wife called me one day to tell me that Lefty had been arrested for OUI and had spent the night in the Brewster lock-up.

To this day, I question why I didn’t recognize my best friend’s dissipation sooner than I did. I let him explain away that first arrest--a martini, wine with dinner, the car skidding on sand in the road--despite his wife’s clear-eyed version of events. Lefty, always brimming with confidence and joie de vivre, was easy to believe.

However, a second incident came hard on the heels of the first. He was driving home from work. There was a fender-bender, and Lefty had been sipping from an open bottle of vodka as he drove. His explanation, that he had merely been thirsty, was the slap in the face I needed to realize what was happening. Suddenly, it all made sense. This man, the son of alcoholic parents, who wrote songs about whiskey and who referred to bottles of beer as “darlin’s,” was not the confident rascal he had seemed to be. The second incident meant the loss of his license for a year, and this was still only the beginning.

A while later, Lefty was attending a wedding. He was being driven by his son. According to Lefty's version, his son got drunk at the reception, and Lefty was forced to drive, and--wouldn’t you know--he got pulled over for no reason at all. This third incident would mean incarceration, tremendous financial hardship, and a rent in the fabric of what had not so long ago been a strong, close family. A 10-year odyssey of pain and isolation was underway.

Lefty was the troubadour of his own demise. He was not a musician, but he’d always written songs, and now the songs chronicled his descent into alcoholism and the loss of everything that should have mattered in his life. It was astounding to me that he could see it all so clearly and write about it it so poignantly, but lack the will to stop it. He recorded these songs, sitting alone, singing in a whiskey baritone into a cheap cassette recorder. I have the tape. No one else has ever heard them. The songs have an eerily haunting quality about them, sung as they are by an untrained, unaccompanied voice, a voice putting desperation to music. The first song on the tape is aptly named “Once Things Start to Slip They’ll Likely Go”. Here are some of the lyrics:

I’ll take only what is mine
My whiskey, my dogs, my stereo
You won’t have to tell me twice
"Boy, I think it’s time for you to go."
I’ve seen the writing on the wall
I can hear the curtain call
I remember when we had it all
But once things start to slip they’ll likely go.

Lefty’s first incarceration was a weekend at the county house of correction. At the time he seemed to be taking it lightly: A good-timin’ man they’d somehow mixed up with real drug abusers and alcoholics. He’d later confess to me that when the cell door shut behind him he cried like a little boy.

It was about this time I met with Lefty’s wife. She was also my close friend (I just don’t feel right about using her name here), and I remember her hands trembling in mine as she recounted their difficulties. She told me, “I’ll always love the man I married,” but we both knew that the man she married was disappearing before our eyes. I told her to call me whenever she couldn’t cope, and she promised she would.

Their daughter’s wedding was approaching. I knew that both mother and daughter feared that the extra stress would result in a binge, so I offered to spend the day with Lefty, returning him home with just enough time to put on his tux and head for the church. I picked him up at eight in the morning and took him to breakfast at the marina where I kept my boat.

He told me, “I know you’re babysitting me.”

“What? A guy can’t take his best friend to breakfast on his daughter’s wedding day?”

But he was right, of course, and a virtual prisoner as I took him to the Cape to “check on the Brewster house.” I got him back just as the rest of the wedding party was finishing their preparations. Lefty got to give away his lovely daughter proud and sober, a one day respite from his drinking and his demons.

It didn’t last. Lefty had taken to going for walks in a cemetery during his free periods at the high school where he now taught social studies. Rumors reached me that he was drinking during these walks, and masking the alcohol on his breath with chewing gum. I went to see him and confronted him about it. He denied the drinking, but I noticed a large package of Big Red chewing gum on his desk.

The school had an excellent psychologist whom I knew well. I explained the situation, and she decided to go to his room at the start of his free period to try to discuss the matter. Lefty, with four or five nips in his pocket, wanted only to get to that cemetery. He brushed aside her concerns as nonsense and skirted past her and out the door.However, his “walk” time had been cut in half, and the stress made him drink more in less time. He returned to his classroom, chewing a telltale wad of Big Red, and collapsed in the middle of taking attendance.

"What's in the Father" by Lefty

Alone in a barroom
An old man sat thinking
And drinking his sorrows away
In the mirror he saw me
Our eyes, they met softly
He brushed a small tear away

He beckoned me over
He bought me a beer
He said, “Listen to what I have to say
Life can be good, son,
Life can be full
Or as empty as mine is today

The collapse at work resulted in an ambulance ride to the emergency room and a stint in a detox unit. Lefty’s marriage, career, even the love and trust of his son and daughter would be threatened again and again over the next few years.

Lefty’s wife met each challenge courageously. Occasionally, as I had made her promise, she would call me when she couldn’t face one more ER, one more detox, one more group home or halfway-house. I remember those occasions vividly.

I saw him in the Brockton Hospital Emergency Room, sitting in shit-stained briefs and a filthy t-shirt. Not realizing he was still drunk, he told me that his problem was that he “thinks too much about things.”

I saw him in a dry house on Moscow Street in Quincy. He confided in me that every one of the men living there was sneaking alcohol, himself included.

I saw him in a group home in Hull. I brought chicken dinners for each of the residents, and watched as they fell upon the food like wolves. I had some hope for the Hull placement--he was writing songs and talking about going back to work--but a few days later he was caught drinking and sent away.

The therapists and counselors loved Lefty. When sober, he was charming and glib. He had actually taught about alcohol abuse in his social studies classes, and he knew all the answers. Every time he started a twelve-step program, they would choose him to moderate the groups and counsel other clients. I have no idea how many he helped in these sessions, but I’ll bet the number is considerable. He just couldn’t help himself. The step requiring the acknowledgment of a supreme being was a frequent falling-off point for him.

Eventually, Lefty got his hands on the keys to a car and the Brewster house. His plan was to live in the house with his two West Highland terriers, Kilty and Conor, drink moderately, walk everywhere, read, and write.

One late afternoon on an Easter Sunday, I suddenly got an odd feeling about him. The family observations were over, so I excused myself and drove an hour to Brewster. I found Lefty in full-blown DT’s. He’d bought a bottle to get him through Sunday, but had drunk it up on Saturday. He’d driven to a nearby bar, but his hands had shaken the whiskey out of the glass. I wanted to take him to the hospital, but he refused.

A few days later, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Lefty was sent to Bridgewater.

Bridgewater. In 1967, a documentary called The Titicut Follies changed mental health care in the United States. The documentary, which detailed the inhumane, even sadistic treatment of inmates, was filmed at The Bridgewater Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Renamed Bridgewater State Hospital, the facility remains a repository for the lost, the desperate, the hopeless, and the evil.

Lefty had found bottom. Here, at Bridgewater, among the screaming and the naked and the violent, he had an epiphany that allowed him to leap the spiritual hurdle that had tripped him up for so long.

From “What’s in the Father” by Lefty (cont.)

Life’s what you make it
There’s no way to fake it
If you blow it like I did
You’re sure bound to pay
I lost everything
That I ever loved
A fool watched his family
Drift slowly away

And now my son’s wife
And two little children
He’s lost in the same foolish way

Two years ago, Lefty received his 10-year alcohol-free pin from AA. I hope that he doesn’t mind that I’ve written his story, but it was something I needed to do. In fact, the denouement is not yet complete.

Lefty’s attempt to return to work was short-lived. His fall from grace had been too public, and the memories of cruel people are long. He was forced into early retirement, but before he left, he saved the life of a student who had put his arm through safety glass in a school door and severed an artery.

Lefty and his wife are still legally married, but she lives with another man now, a man she met at a support group. They remain friends, and she manages his money for him. Lefty’s relationships with his son and daughter seem to be completely repaired. His daughter now has two beautiful children, and Lefty has grown to cherish the role of grandfather. It is the most important thing in his life.

Alcohol left my friend damaged. He has had serious medical problems involving his heart, his kidneys, and his liver. He had a knee replaced. He takes medication for depression. He still wears his hair cropped short, the way it was cut when he was admitted to Bridgewater State Hospital.

He likes to live quietly. Most weekends, he goes to Brewster with his Westies. He has breakfast every morning at the Homeport Restaurant, where he knows all the waitresses by name. He rents movies and does a lot of reading. Dinner is usually take-out from Laurino’s Restaurant, known for its flock of plastic pink flamingos. He drinks Beck's alcohol-free beer by the case, but never seems tempted to revert back to his old ways.

When I visit, we talk about the good times before all the troubles. I can sometimes talk him into going out to the Chatham Squire for dinner. One evening we got talking to Otis, the manager, and told him the story of Lefty’s fascination with the big-bosomed waitress so many years earlier.

Otis said, “That sounds like Laura. If it is, she’s still here.”

He summoned a middle-aged woman, and Lefty sat stunned. It was her, the BTW, a bit worse for wear, but still attractive and still classy. She remembered him immediately, and, according to Otis, she was available. The four of us chatted for a few minutes, and it was clear that Laura would be receptive to Lefty’s attentions.

Back at the house, I was pumped. “You’ve got some time to follow up on this,” I told him, “but you have to make a move.”

‘I can’t,” he said. “I wish I could, but I can’t do it.” He looked at me. “You always had that confidence,” he said.

It’s funny. Before things all fell apart, I’d thought he was the confident one.

"What's in the Father" by Lefty (cont.)

His words finally hit me
I sagged on my barstool
I said, “Old man, I do understand”
What’s in the father
Lives on in the son
He reminded me of my old man
What’s in the father
Lives on in the son
He reminded me of my old man.