Last Call

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