SGN Page 47

Friday
June 15, 2007
Vol 35 Issue 24

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Wednesday, Oct 08, 2008

Tour De Life by Beau Burriola

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Tour de Life: Eight hours, six months by Beau Burriola - SGN Contributing Writer 7:30 Monday morning Where are you? You should be here by now. Nearly every other week for three years I've gotten that nervous feeling in my stomach when you haven't shown up to work on Monday morning because you've had another party weekend. This Monday, just like so many Mondays before, you're too cracked out, tired and twitchy to come in to work. I don't even have to call you to find out-- I know you won't answer the phone. Don't judge, I remind myself, just be supportive. "They should have fired me long ago," even you have said many times. Amazingly you've kept your job even while hardworking people all around you have been laid off and phased out. Another Monday morning comes and goes and you're off flying somewhere on crystal wings. 10:30 Monday morning I always try to make coming to work feel good for you, giving you a big hug when you make it in. I tell you how glad I am you're here. I try to remind you why you come at all. Sometimes it feels weird trying to tell a grown man why he should come to work. Of course you always remind me you're an adult and you don't want someone else to tell you how you should walk your path, live your life, or do your work. You're a grown man, you remind me. A grown, pseudo-functioning meth user. Don't judge, I remind myself, just be supportive. I try to call you, but you don't answer. You only want my help when it works with your schedule and mood. 2:45 Monday afternoon I try to call again. Voicemail again. This time I leave a message. Call me. Let me know you're okay. You might or might not. My worry is starting to turn into a slow, simmering anger. Why the hell should I care about you if you don't give a damn about yourself? It's a question I've asked over and over in my mind. I've tried to be there for you, provide support for you and always be an ear, but for some reason you won't change. You're still hanging around the same Tina boys, refusing to kick your crackhead roommate out, and you've been close to losing your job for months. Like a lot of gay guys in Seattle you stand on the edge of your adult life with one foot in your functioning, kinda-normal, depressed and unhappy sober life and the other foot in a world of confidence where you feel invincible, but numb; flying and floating somewhere just above any of your real problems. Don't judge, I remind myself, just be supportive. Who can blame you for preferring a world where self-esteem is assumed and not built, where challenges are forgotten and where those things that hold us back in life aren't there? In Methworld happiness justisand each rising high helps you forget that you ever have to come back down. 7:30 Tuesday morning The daylight comes and goes, then comes again. Tuesday morning I sit working away to the sound of a CD you made for me. That same feeling begins to creep up into my stomach when you aren't here. I pick up the phone and start to call, but stop midway through dialing. I can't call right now. I'm too angry to call right now. I'm not sure what I'd say. I hang up. Don't judge, I remind myself, just be supportive. Instead I send along a text message: "Thinkin bout ya. Come back soon." On days like today I wonder where you are, somewhere up above the world flying and floating on your crystal wings. Three years is a long time. You've got to come downtown sometime. When you do, what then? 7:51 Wednesday Morning, six months later In an e-mail from someone else after a long, painful silence, I learned you got ten years in federal prison. I never knew how deep in you were or how involved it got - I didn't want to know - but now I know and I wonder what more I could have done. "In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr. Beau Burriola is a local writer with a community still facing the same old problems that won't go away. E-mail him at beaubrent@gmail.com.
visit Beau at www.beaubrent.com

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