In my lifetime I’ve known two people
who took their own life. Two good and honorable men who, at either their
darkest or most liberating of moments, decided they had had enough of this
world and chose to leave it all behind. Now, I never cared to do any statistical
research on the subject, but I daresay this puts me in a regrettably exclusive club.
Suicide is one of the last taboos in our enlightened world and happens more
than we realize, just not to someone we know. Let alone two people.
One was a childhood friend who lived
across the street when I was growing up. It wasn’t until years later, long after
I lost touch with him, that I heard he was found dead in his basement, leaving
behind a young, though apparently estranged wife. That’s really all I know
there.
The other was one of the funniest and
most innately intelligent men I’ve ever known. He and I came to be good buddies
when I was a writing student living in Chicago. That came to an end in the early
morning hours of April 4, 1989, a Tuesday, when he was found lying in the alley
outside his apartment with the gun still in his hand. Some said later he had
tried to make it look like a burglary attempt gone bad. All I know is that I had
stopped over to see him only two nights earlier and we went out to get
something to eat; nothing at all seemed out of the ordinary. He was
thirty-six-years-old.
Why bring this up now?
Sooner or later – if we’re honest
with ourselves – we all go through times, long or fleeting, when we feel lost
in our purpose. While I’ve never been in crisis to the point of contemplating
suicide for even a moment, there have been times when I felt discouraged and
uncertain enough about my professional future, and I’ll leave it at that.
There’s an old adage that says you
first must lose yourself before you can find your true self, the real you. Thinking
back to these two lost friends, especially my Chicago buddy, I’m reminded of
the power of this proverb. The good news people will tell you that everyone finds
their way again. The bad news folks will say…ain’t necessarily so.
Back in 1984, after graduating from college,
I didn’t have a damn clue what to do next so I moved down to Chicago, thinking
possibly about Graduate School and definitely about the chance to see what it
would be like living in such a famed city. Needing work quickly I took a job as
a busboy at a health and fitness club that happened to serve its membership
with a fully-stocked bar and restaurant. Soon enough I got the chance to do some
bartending, and that’s when Jim Vavrinchik came into the picture. Head bartender
at the aforementioned Lakeshore Athletic Club, he became my de facto boss.
I can’t say we became friends right away. Like
I said, he was my boss. He was also a first-rate bartender who could be a
gracious gentleman or a no-nonsense presence, depending on the customers and
situation at hand. One night I was closing up the bar and the phone rang. It
was Jim. My first thought was that he was calling to remind me to do something
or other, when in fact he was inviting me to join him after work for a beer at
a neighborhood watering hole called Quenchers. That turned out to be a fateful
night for me. In time I met some of his friends and started to feel more at
home in Chicago. But I was just as grateful to spend late nights sitting side
by side with him at Quenchers or some other such tavern.
Looking back on it now, there was
always a sense about him that he was living more for today than tomorrow. He was
overweight. He chain-smoked. And he could outdrink anybody all night long if
and when he wanted to. (I know for a fact that when you went out drinking with
Jim Vavrinchik you never ended the night early.) He never talked about his
past, and I never asked – probably one of the things he liked best about me. We
never talked about current events or politics or women. No, our conversation
lent itself more to baseball, old Brando movies and whatever other bullshit
popped into our heads at two in the morning. And I loved it.
He even taught me the words to the
theme song of “Have Gun, Will Travel,” a TV Western from the early Sixties that
was a favorite memory of his youth. At the end of a particularly “relaxing”
night, I’d sit in my car outside his apartment, waiting for Jim to get out, but
I knew what was coming. He’d start singing quietly and before long I’d be
joining in a terrible two-part harmony:
“Paladin, Paladin where
do you roam?
Paladin, Paladin far,
far from home.
‘Have Gun, Will Travel’
reads the card of a man…
A knight without armor
in a savage land.
His fast gun for hire
heeds the calling wind…
A soldier of fortune is
the man called Paladin.”
(Maybe it doesn’t sound funny now,
but…well, you had to be there.)
Jim never married - his preference
and lifestyle wouldn’t allow it. But it wasn’t until after his death that I
learned he had a young daughter living with her mother in New Orleans. Maybe
therein was a reason for his ultimate decision, but…who the hell knows? I
heard, too, that he had been enrolled in a nursing training program at the time
but quietly dropped out without telling a soul. One of the sadder aspects of
the whole thing was that Jim did have so many friends, any one of whom would
have done anything to help him out.
But, as they say, that’s all in the
past now – twenty-seven years ago as I write this. When enough time goes by, so
does much of the sadness. But not the mystery.
Still, it’s a fanciful thought that I
could sit down at a nearly empty bar late at night and have another beer or two
with Jim now. It would be fun to reminisce and do some catching up, that’s for
sure. I’d want to have a serious conversation with him about our younger selves
and the hopes and expectations we secretly carried with us. But I know we’d just
end up bullshitting like we used to do – probably minus the singing this time.
When I think of Jim these days I am reminded
that deep inside we all have a bit of a restless soul that longs for
something more. And while I've always been leery of writing a tribute
to him and having it turn into some maudlin, clichéd sermon about
overcoming life's tough turns - no way he would have wanted that - it is
impossible for me to tell this little tale without acknowledging that I, too,
have had my own private fears and doubts to fight. And that’s okay. When it
comes to that we’re all in good company.
“Not
till we are lost, in
other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.”
-
Henry David Thoreau
 |
| Chicago, 1986 |
“Not
till we are lost, in
other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.”
-
Henry David Thoreau
