I am getting old I guess. I go drive 500 miles and I want to go to bed and sleep ten hours. Used to be, I would be excited and need to drink beer and smoke cigarettes and talk shit for hours.
What I'm getting is that life is kind of hard and aging is very hard and people die from grieving their youth.
I picked up this 52 year old woman from the hospital, far away. Her grown kids were there. Her daughter told me, "Watch her. She's really fuckin' sneaky".
The woman was in the hospital because she had been trying to drink without a stomach. She had an ulcer and it tore open and ripped her stomach in two. Blood was pouring out her ass and she was drinking vodka. She couldn't get drunk because the vodka was just pouring into her abdominal cavity but she was trying.
That's how her daughter found her. She went to the hospital and they sewed her back together and when she was well enough I got called to come bring her so we could fix her up. Yeah right.
I liked her. She was an old lesbian with lots of piercings and tattoos. She rode a big motorcycle. She must have been the terror of the town.
She complained for weeks because she didn't like the clothes her daughter packed for her. I asked her what her daughter did with her bed and her carpets, now that they were blood soaked bio hazards. She said her daughter got rid of them somehow. Then I told her she looked swell.
A year ago I drove in a drunk, retired business guy. He'd been a big shot. Hadn't had drink in 20 years Then he retired and sat on the couch. After a while he figured the couch by itself wasn't much consolation. He started drinking for something to do.
He was a mess and I brought him in and they sobered him up and I drove him home and it was all smiles. A year later, there I was again. This time he smelled really bad and his wife had dropped the brave and dutiful face.
He was kind of incoherent and after a while I asked him when he'd last eaten something. He didn't remember. I stopped in a rest area and ran and got cookies and orange juice. When I got back he was lying in the parking lot. I'm a big guy and he is 5 inches taller and 50 pounds heavier than me. I got him to his feet and carried him to the car. He drank the juice and ate some cookies. After a while he perked up a little so I didn't call an ambulance. He ended up leaning on two of us but we got him into the office.
A couple of days later he said he didn't feel good and he wanted to go home. They talked him out of that but it looks like he plans to die, alone and drunk. Sometime soon.
Speaking of dying. I drove up the coast to my favorite town. When I was 10 miles away, I stopped to get coffee. I called the client and said I'd be there soon. She said she had a quart of rum in front of her and she'd had a few beers. I told her to hold on and I'd be there in ten minutes.
Ten minutes later, I walked into her apartment. The bottle of rum was almost empty. She hadn't packed. At first she was walking and talking just fine. I tried to help her pack but pretty quickly she got to where she couldn't stand up. Then she couldn't sit up. Then she almost fell through a glass topped table so I let her stay on the floor and called an ambulance. When the ambulance arrived it turned out the cops and EMT's all knew her. One cop told me he'd had 4 or 5 calls on her in the past month. I found her keys, poured out all the liquor locked up her apartment and gave the keys to one of the EMT's.
I drove home alone. We never heard back from her. I kind of figure she's dead.
I picked up another returnee at a hospital way up in the mountains. I picked him up and took him home before. The hospital had him so tranked up he didn't recognize his own name. Later he told me that the last time I dropped him off he was drinking as I pulled out of his driveway. This time he told me it was going to be all different. Christ, I hope so.
There've been others. Lonely people in their 50's and 60's who just couldn't bring themselves to commit old fashioned suicide.
You know, I'm 60. I'm tired. Sitting alone on that couch seems like a good idea. I don't want to drink but sometimes it's hard, letting go of my youth. I spend a lot of time grieving my youth. I don't want it back but it's sad to see it go. The future used to go on forever and the possibilities were limitless.
I'm writing on a bad day. Tomorrow will probably be different. Sometimes this job is the best thing that's ever happened to me. Other days I wish I could quit. I figure I'll give it another year.
