Travels With Cleo #9 Getting Closer
It’s looking more and more like this thing is going to happen. This getting married thing. Cleo and I were doing just fine, and Karen loved her.
It’s going to be a medium sized wedding. 3 attendants. So I’ve got to find some players for my team. Damn, that was a train wreck, I’m glad it wasn’t a BIG wedding.
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OK, I have three slots to fill. Gunner is automatic, he’s going to be the best man. He scheduled leave months in advance to make sure he’d be part of it. It just couldn’t be anybody else. He came from his duty section in Guam. In his words “It’s the worst duty station in the Navy that doesn’t float. But it’s better than ANY of them that do float.”
Randy. My brother. We have always been pretty close and he’d just graduated from High School so he was in.
I need one more. I had more than a couple of friends that could be candidates, but I asked Jack. His name was Jack, none of that my name is John but you can call me Jack for him and his parents, he was the youngest son of a pretty big farmer in the area and had been our left handed pitcher on the baseball team.
Jack had gone to WSU on a baseball tryout. If he made the team he got a scholarship. He told me that he’d done fall training and winter work and was throwing as well as he ever had. In an indoor practice early in the season Bobo Brayton told him to throw batting practice. He stepped in and threw some gopher balls. WSU had some serious players as seniors that year. Two would end up in the Majors and one was a #1 pick that never played. There will be more about that guy, he ended up being Cleo’s vet. I think he still holds the WSU home run record.
Anyway, Jack got his juices flowing a little and decided to feed that guy a curveball. He watched the first one, but raised a finger. Jack threw his very best curve and it disappeared. He said Marv Chamberlain hit that ball so hard it was wrecked. He decided then and there that he wasn’t going to cut it as a pitcher in the Pac 10.
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Jack left the team and the University. He ended up enrolling at EWC (now EWSU) where I was and it wasn’t long until we hooked back up and became roommates. Even after I dropped out and started working we lived together in Spokane. Jack commuted, and we had a big house with a good address on the south hill. Life was good.
We’d done some drinking together in HS so we picked right back up on it with no parental interference. We soon became daily communicants. It was 1971 and the trend was establishing itself as a lifestyle. I had no idea how dark that street would become.
I guess this might be the bio of Jack so I’ll go on. We stayed in close touch for several years, seeing each other often. His father died when we were about 25 and his mother moved to Spokane so he had no particular reason to come back to Odessa and we drifted apart. He was really drinking hard, as I was trying to moderate. He’d gone to work for Chevron and was managing smaller stations with the chance to move up the corporate ladder. He got the station in Othello, Wa so we’d meet once in a while in Moses Lake to drink and reminisce. It always turned into a complete guzbuck. I got my first DWI. His oldest brother was my attorney. He got it reduced to negligent driving I was completely in the clear. I had my first state sponsored alcohol assessment and learned how to game the system.
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Jack got fired by Chevron out of his drinking and moved to Spokane with his mother. He started a series of dead end jobs and lost them all to the bottle. I spent a serious amount of time trying to learn how to live life with heavy alcohol consumption. Jack skipped that step. He just drank.
Spoiler alert: I sobered up when I was 38. I’m still alive so if you knew me then you would know that in order to make it to today I had to have sobered up. I made contact with Jack and tried to tell him how much better I was doing. He told me in no uncertain terms to F off. Forever.
Jack drank himself completely to death in his very early 50s. Though it made me deeply sad I didn’t even attend his funeral.
But he was the 4th musketeer when it came time to get married. We had a lot of stories together and it was good. The team was set and the game was about to begin. For right now, the team includes Jack, Gunner, Randy and I. The wheel of time was turning and I was in for the ride.
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All words in this post are mine. For better or worse
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Alcohol abuse can destroy lives, good on you for not letting it take control of your life!
I know of a guy who was a professional land surveyor but ended up on the streets due to alcoholism, it was so sad seeing that. I don't know what happened to him in the end, but he really had everything going for him but lost it all to the bottle!
Looking forward to the next chapter :)
It's a powerful addiction, just no doubt of it. Logic and emotion just don't play a part of it. I don't know what the alcoholism rate is, but I know that the recovery rate hovers around 10%.
I do know that I am, and the world is, much better when I don't drink. That is enough for me.
Thanks for sharing this. That is really sad. It is a horrible addiction that can cause so many problems. Glad to hear you were able to get things turned around relatively early in the grand scheme of things.
It's insidious. You take such little bitty steps to the bottom that for a long time it's impossible to see where it's taking you. At this point in my life I had no clue, and not even any good symptoms to point to. I just know looking back that the darkness had started to settle into my life.
thank you for sharing this with us Tom, I'm sure it wasn't easy to do.
My uncle died before he was 50 from alcoholism too. I will tell you the whole long story in private some time.
💜hugs
It's always sad. ALWAYS. I don't want this to define me, it doesn't. But it is certainly part of the story.
Everybody thinks this is so sad, I actually think it is great. Jack got what he wanted in the end and that was to put an end to misery. You got sobered up and cleaned up your act and are able live and tell the story, so I contend it is great.
Lots of young sports players with big dreams have them crushed just like that batter did to Jack's pitch, and some never to come out of the depression of having their dreams crushed.
I may sound like am a cold bastard when it comes to Jack, but that is just the way I see it.
Good for you and the 29 years of being sober and drug free.
I think it's a sad story. But I don't think you are cold about it at all. I tried to imply without saying that I didn't go to his funeral because he made his choice and it lead where it leads. Besides, he wasn't going to go to mine :)
I got to know Marv pretty well later in life. He has a huge part in Cleo's story, he was her Vet. He didn't remember it at all, didn't remember Jack. It was just another pitch that he got all of.
Which is not to say that swing caused Jack to drink himself to death. It didn't. It wasn't even a particularly good excuse for a one day bender in the course of life.
I agree with you. Jack got precisely what he wanted. Away.
Thanks, man. It just kind of struck me that way.
Yes it is very sad and difficult, a member of my in-law family died of alcohol poisoning, it was not nice. He was 30-ish.
And it always seems so un necessary. Looking from the outside it's impossible to understand that spiral the drunk (or junkie) is on. Most families have been touched one way or the other.
Always good to see you aschatria!
I like to have a drink in the evening, maybe 2 or 3 times per week at the most. I constantly warn myself about drinking more frequently and becoming an alcoholic, as I've had a couple of them close to me in my life. Then there are times I will go months without having a drink. I've always been cautious with it, mainly due to those close to me whose lives were damaged by it.
I didn't take that 'drink in the evening' step. I basically went from experimental to drink to oblivion every day. It is not pretty and there is nothing good to say about it. Except that a precious few of us get away. It seems like almost every family is touched to some extent. I know I had 3 'black sheep uncles' (that I loved). 2 died out of it, one didn't.
Such a sad story today :( I feel almost as if you were trying to give him a second chance at life, but he decided otherwise. Such a waste of life. I am glad you got sober though and it makes me happy that you are here to tale your tales :)
BB <3
No, I don't have that power to give second chances. All I can do is share my story, and if somebody is interested, tell 'em how I did it.
Jack made his choices, and I respect them. The sadness comes from losing a friend.
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