Draxil on 16/8/2020 at 13:57
I'm so very sorry for your loss, Tocky. His death was a beautiful example of sacrifice and fatherly love--I can only imagine the fear he must have felt watching his child in the waves, and the courage it took to go in after him. God rest his beautiful soul, and grant his family the peace they so richly deserve.
Tocky on 17/8/2020 at 04:33
Thanks Draxil. I think every father does that in their head when they hear of something like this. You see yourself in that place and hope to hell you will never have to be. Forrest was a great guy. I never feel I really appreciate exactly how great some folks are until they are gone. I just take for granted they are always going to be there and then when they are gone I see the size of the hole they leave in life and kick myself for not checking in on them more. It would have been nice to go on another fishing trip together and catch up. It's selfish I guess because it's not mourning for them as much as it is mourning for your own life without them. There are a lot of great people in life.
I'll tell a story I've told elsewhere about one of my best old buds dad since I'm here. Riley was just a big old farmer and you rarely saw him in anything but overalls and straw hat. He was always feeding cows or doing something on his Ford 8N tractor. A fair number of times me and Richard would pitch in bailing hay or shucking corn in our teens but it's like with all your friends dads they are just sort of background. Later he worked at the mall as their plant guy, a sort of green house on the concourse thing and he and my wife made friends talking every day because she also worked there at a drug store. Just a big old friendly guy. Only... there was this picture in their house of him in the Marines. He was sitting position with a big water cooled Browning machine gun he was holding onto and smiling. A posed shot I figured lots of GI's did. I didn't think much of it.
Then one day he died. A heart defect he had lived with a long while finally got him. I went to be there for Richard and they had a 21 gun salute at the grave site. I had never asked Riley what he did in WWII. Never even considered any stories he might have to tell. I asked Richard about all the military pomp and he said "well you know he did get the silver star". No. I didn't. How? You recall that picture of him with his machine gun right? Well that was his gun as they pushed the Germans across Europe. Him and another guy took turns with it because it was so heavy. One would start out way ahead of the rest of the battalion and fall back with it until they had made it all the way back through the pack and the other machine gunner at the rear would take it and run way out ahead again until he gradually fell back to the one who was rested. A water cooled Browning is a heavy son of a bitch. Just carrying it wears you down.
Well Riley had just taken it and run way ahead of the rest of the guys along a dirt road and into a copse of wood. He jogged right over a hill and right into a camp site of Germans. There were four Panzer tanks parked in the road. The soldiers had leaned their rifles against the tanks and were warming over fires and eating a bite. They were quite surprised to see him burst on the scene. He was just as surprised. Several of them started for the guns left against the tank fenders and he stitched a line of bullets between them and their weapons. That stopped them in their tracks. Doubtless some of the officers had side arms but 600 rounds a minute gives one pause. Normally it has a team to feed it a long belt as it sits on a tripod but Riley just shot it from the hip tearing up leaves and soil then brought it to bear on the men and waited. I like to picture him standing there. This big farm boy with that monster propped on his hip waiting. All the hands went up. One nineteen year old kid captured four tanks and crews by himself. The best part, Richard said, was he did it without killing a single person.
Tocky on 6/11/2020 at 07:13
I've been arguing with someone. I didn't mean to. I meant to reach out. I just wanted to let a stranger know. But it always causes friction between the one who nurses a fetish for suicide and the one who hates it. Life is hard. Depression is different for every person. It's personalized torture one does to oneself. But truth is truth. It does not matter how you feel about it. I was honest about how it hurts the ones who love them for the rest of their lives. Oh I was casting guilt they said. No. It just is. It is it is it is. I don't know how to say I was not saying anything but the truth. Your loved ones will hurt the rest of their lives. Just a fact. If you want lies go to somebody else.
I tried telling them if they feel the urge to call a friend. Hell, call me. If you just want to argue even. I don't care. As long as it keeps your finger off the trigger or your neck from the noose. Call somebody. Anybody. Have a friend remind you of old times or laugh about new ones or ponder the mysteries of the universe. They would likely cut off their arm just to have the other to hug you with because you are here. You are here. You are not in a silent cemetery forever. Time stretches forever in both directions from now. We only have this small sliver between the two. This life is all we have and it is ineffably precious. Today may be bad but tomorrow may be better. We do not know what is around the corner. Forever we are dead. Forever. Don't go. Don't go away. How do I say it so you understand? It isn't blessed peace for you. It is nothing. Nothing. Life is everything. And for those you leave behind it is so not peace. It is hard. On top of every hard thing they have to face every day they have that. That hurt. That pain that never fully goes away. And they have to look in the eyes of those they love and know they feel the same pain. How do you convey that?
Feel guilty? FINE. Just don't go. Talk to somebody. Anybody. You are already contemplating suicide. I'm making it worse by making you see what you will do? Oh boo hoo you have to hold on for others? Tough. What am I doing right now? I'm up at night drinking alone with my wife in bed asleep while crying and typing because I can't forget. I can't show weakness because I'm the rock to lean on. But I'm here. I'm holding on for those I love. It isn't easy. I know that. But how you feel now may not be how you feel tomorrow. Hold on. What can you lose by doing that? Pain? Life is pain. It's pain and wonder and worry and wonderful. Bad shit happens. Awful shit. Ungodly bad. You suffer through and hope. And then one day someone smiles at you and you know it was worth it to hold on. All your life crashes in on you and you know. That love, that hand held, that hug, that laugh, you know then it was worth it.
Such a short time we live. Some of us have mansions and some of us shacks. All that means nothing. The time. That is what is important. That we had the time of our lives. That we used it all. It was all we had. That and the people who we love. That we fought for. That we got up every day and went to jobs that sucked and dealt with people who sucked but came home to those we loved. We don't do life for ourselves mostly. We do it for those we care for. What self indulgence we do is more guilt than any we feel for having held on for others. Suicide is self indulgence. Only once it happens it can't be undone. You hurt. We all hurt. Share it. We understand. We all fight depression. If you are losing reach out. The hand that grabs yours knows. How arrogant to think only you feel the pain of living.
But because the truth is hard when you feel vulnerable and want to just throw in the towel makes it no less the truth. The people you care for will hurt. They will imagine how you would have been were you here. How would you be at this age? Would you have children? Would you still have the same humor or sharp observation? Would you come see me and play chess again? I haven't been able to play since you are gone. I can't. I've tried. I can't. I will miss you forever.
I don't know how to say any of that but I tried. I don't think I got through.
zacharias on 6/11/2020 at 12:37
Very powerful Tocky. I salute you.
Tocky on 7/11/2020 at 05:11
Thanks zacharias. Honestly I am a little ashamed I get drunk and have these crying jags. I must need them though. How is your health these days? No recurrence of the cancer?
zacharias on 7/11/2020 at 10:58
Oh I guess you mean Zaccheus, I believe he did pass away unfortunately. My father also got cancer and died this last January. A bugger of a disease. Anyway, fingers crossed I don’t have it yet :p
Time stretches forever in both directions from now. A simple enough line, but I really dug it. You should get drunk more often. All the best.
Tocky on 8/11/2020 at 06:10
Oh hell, that's right. Well shit. I was happy to think he had beaten it. Sorry to hear about both deaths. Go have the colonoscopy. Get those polyps. Check out the funny bump. Do the cat scan or x ray. Get the buggers before they get you.
Yeahhhhh I kind of drink too much. Normally I'm a happy drunk but I have a sore emotional spot. It's not my liver just yet though. Ha ha! Fuck you death! Go get your own liver.
Tocky on 20/3/2021 at 05:23
Tomorrow we get the grandkids and go do stuff in Tupelo. Likely we will go by the mall and let them ride the carousel. We've done that many times when they were younger. Then we will go by the book store and discuss books. We are just old grandparents now and nobody would ever suspect what a drug addled hedonist lunatic Papaw once was. I didn't really mean to be. It wasn't something I set out to be. It was partly the times I grew up in and partly my personality. Easy Rider was my hero movie. Fonda said most folks would be scared to death of actual freedom. Total freedom. What a temptation that was. Yeah. We were all sort of pushing for that back then. Even on an Air Force base.
I had long hair a few times before I entered service. High school had a dress code but I grew it as long as I could during the summers before school started again. It grew quick then. There is a picture of me in the local paper coming back from an FFA leadership camp with hair on my shoulders. Just cocky as hell propped on a brick structure outside the federal building. I never was afraid of the law or "authority". I just always felt the law was bullshit. Somebody else's idea of what should be against the law wasn't my idea. When our car got rear ended at the mall parking lot early in my marriage as we watched a movie inside we got an announcement over the loud speaker about it and we had to go down to the police station to make out a report. When we entered they had a display case with captured bongs and other paraphernalia. I laughed and pointed at one and said I knew where that one came from. It was funny to me. Still is really. Fuck those stern guys. The police guy taking the report didn't find it amusing. How? It's funny.
Oh I guess fooling around with buddies on drugs is not the ideal way to deal with an invasion by a hostile foreign power. We had drills in England called alerts where we suited up in our chemical suits and built field hospitals and sweated until the water came up to nose level in those gas masks and we had to burp them though of course that meant any nerve agents would invade and we would have to atropine ourselves if it had been real. A slap on the thigh with a spring loaded injection and you would be able to live. But who is better to deal with the hallucinogenic effects of atropine than someone used to tripping? At that point the Russians would have slaughtered most of us with the nerve agent because that shit takes effect in about ten seconds and the Aardvark F111's would be in the air with the nukes anyway. Sure I could be at the hospital dealing with puking twitching people while Russians tried to kill us but it's about as useful as hiding under desks during a nuclear shelling which would likely be next anyway. They took that shit serious though.
It's not that I couldn't take shit serious. I could. I was damn serious about my job. I wanted to be able to fix people. Got a hole in you? I'm your man. Want someone to be all regs and rules off duty? Fuck you. Not my job. That was party time. So when Tony asked did I want to pitch in for an ounce of weed I was in. He had a local Britt who was going to come through for him. Only he didn't. He brought him an ounce of dried mushrooms instead.
My buddy Tony took shit about as serious as I did though. He was a medic like me. When we were on duty we were straight and narrow. When we were off we were way off. He hated to tell me we were stiffed on the weed though. He brought the bag over and suggested we do them. Sure, what the hell, we had a few days off after a nine day period on. We weren't strangers to shrooms. This could be fun. The thing is you have to know your mind all the way down to the id. Any insecurities or mental quirks will surface. But Tony was a cool guy. He was into Floyd and played guitar and had brought some tunes over. In retrospect partying in my room when I lived in the Security Police barracks and roomed with a security police may not have been the most well thought out thing to do.
It was an ounce of dried shrooms to replace the ounce of weed the guy didn't have but we didn't know how much to do. We just split it and swallowed it down with some cheap whisky. We should have given it some thought. If three or four regular shrooms make you trip then when they are dried it would take maybe forty to make an ounce and you can see where there might be a problem just splitting a bag. Ordinarily they would begin to take effect from forty minutes to an hour after taking them. Longer for the fewer you take. These started at five minutes. I knew that was wrong. I knew we had messed up. We discussed it with him being in denial and me wanting to be but unable. Maybe it won't be so bad. No. It was surging. Colors and emotions like waves. I had to turn the Black Sabbath off. Too much dark energy when I needed lightness and comfort. I could nearly see the very atoms of things crackle with energy. Too much. I knew this was a wash. It would have to be slept off. Had we been camping, sitting around a fire in the middle of nowhere, that would be one thing, but here the negative variables were overwhelming.
I apologized. There would have to be another time for something like this. This one was going to have to be slept off. I knew it with every fiber of my being. I could get him my sleeping bag and he could stay but there was no couch. He still clung to the idea of having just a regular trip. I was freaking. I admit that. He was still trying to be on an even keel. Bless his stupid heart. After a fair bit of discussion where he was all optimism and light and I was all disaster and shameful court marshal about the situation he decided to leave. I made him promise to go to his room and not leave. Just promise me. Don't go out. Weather it. Hold on till morning.
He left. I lay there seeing everything like a newborn babe. I felt the objects of the room like each thing was connected to a deep seated memory. I saw everything. You don't want to see everything. You think you do but a lot of it is the bad you want to ignore. You DO ignore. We all do. You just don't realize how much we ignore. You can't ignore anything on half a bag of mushrooms. Everything is glowing neon in your face. I lived a million possible lifetimes before he came back. It was an electrical shock when he opened the door and yet inevitable and natural. It had to happen. It always had in every lifetime. He could not find his way back to his dorm. We had the same low key argument about the possibility of just ignoring we were beyond any possible reconciliation with reality. We could not act normal. We were in the spirit world. He had to stay over. He wouldn't. Okay. I would have to help. I'm staunch. I know real. I can fake it. I always have. How hard can this be? I do it every day. I have in my head exactly where his room is. The visual is a flaming path with a chattering herd of chipmunks pointing the way. I even know that is wrong to think in those terms with full visuals of the thought. See? I'm okay.
The hallway is yellow. Not a normal yellow. A radioactive sickly yellow stretching for a mile. Walking is a series of muscle impulses moving bone like a stick figure yanking itself along. Other times it is floating. It's this head with camera capability recording the disembodied balloon wandering. As we pass under the fluorescents I become a collection of electrical impulses moving not from pole to pole but universe to universe only the other universe is totally foreign and unknowable in totality and smallest part. He needs to use the restroom. Okay. I could go too. It's midway of the hall though it seems eons of time in getting there. Inside is beyond bright. It's electric and shimmering. Millions of tiny tiles of grey and white painstakingly fitted together in a futility of sameness. A wall of urinals and sinks with mirrors over them. I don't want to contemplate mirrors just now. Farther back is showers. My bare feet in wetness at the mere thought. We pee. A release. Liquid pouring golden wetness into a porcelain chamber from my body warm and natural into a thing I could not fathom creating. Someone comes in. Loud and drunk. It is Saturday night. Tony is rocking his head as if to a silent hard rock beat. He sees me staring and says "hell yeah". We move to the sinks and water is a strange crawling clear thing. We don't look at the guy who came in. He says something about a sports team winning. Tony says hell yeah again and the guy says hell yeah. He laughs. We laugh. We are laughing about different things but laughing is universal. I was right about the mirror. The plastic thing in it is too knowing so I turn away without drying my hands.
The rest of the trip down the hall is less unnerving. We survived the mind stabbing brightness of the bathroom and the world is fine. The metal door is impossibly heavy and angular. Outside the cold is biting. Waking to a harsh and less insulated fourth floor world our breath becomes ghostly clouds from astonished and nervous laughs with instant shivers. And yet it is freeing. The world has opened up though night has swallowed most of it. Islands of blue lit parking lots and buildings of yellow squares of light stretch to the NCO club. Tony thinks we ought to go there. I don't think we could handle it and remind him he could not find his way to his room. Yeah he says then hell yeah and we laugh about that. On the way down from the top of this outside stair case he points to as far as he had gotten before and there is puke. I ask if he is okay now. Yeah. Hell yeah I ask? Hell yeah. Our footsteps echo of concrete openings. Our voices are things which find surfaces like bats with echo location and come back quickly but a little foreign. We make it to the bottom. It had come a blanketing frost.
I can't describe how beautiful it was. Perhaps it had been a foggy freeze. Billions of tiny prisms on every surface. It was astonishing. We marveled at this wonderland. The most ordinary things, cars, grass, lamp posts, were made things of incredible beauty. To this day it remains one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. The world made over in micro rainbows. Wow. Are you seeing this? The detail is fantastic. Look closely at this flag pole. It's like a lace of little snowflakes. No don't stick your tongue to it. I have no idea if the old saying is true but I don't want to find out tonight. We have to get you home. One building over from this next one is yours. Room 19 third floor. It was a magical walk.
We got him inside. He was hungry. All I could find was a half box of King Vitamin cereal. No milk. He began to crunch on it. He put on music too loud. I turned it to halfway. We talked for a bit while the shrooms seemed to find another gear. He wanted to play cards. We busted a pack and he insisted we play for match sticks. Buck a match? No, just the sticks. Uh... okay. Despite the cards being incredibly slick I managed to shuffle and deal for five card draw. The colors on the cards were outstandingly garish and the stylized characters comical. The game seemed to have no meaning. We were easily distracted. On his shuffle when I cut the cards he took half the deck and fanned it face down telling me to pick a card and place it back anywhere. I did and he closed the fan and immediately reopened it. He took his other hand and as he touched each card fell away like petals of a flower till there was one left. When he turned it up it was my card. Not magic he said. When I reinserted the card he could feel it more keenly between his fingers and kept track of it with just feel. Looked like magic to me. How do you keep up with one card out of over twenty by the feel of it on your finger tip?
Then he got his acoustic guitar and played stairway to heaven. That also looked like magic to me but he said he kept hitting flat notes and was dissatisfied. I didn't hear a single flat note. It was perfect. We talked about home and what we had left behind there. We talked about girls and I showed him a picture of Michelle Clifton who had taken to writing me from my little home town. I felt deep and sudden homesickness for the place that had nurtured me and all the people I hadn't appreciated when I was there. He asked could he keep the picture. Hell no. Just for a few days. Until he got tired of beating off to it. Oh sure in that case... fuck no! Beat off to page three of the Sun like everybody else. As much as he made me laugh the hair on my scalp was crawling back and forth like it was trying to escape and I wanted to go back to my own room and sleep this off. There hadn't been any sort of peak to it yet. Normally you get to a plateau to catch your bearings and regroup but this kept coming on harder and I was afraid I was going to become confused and do something stupid. I've heard guys say, "look from here on it's the shrooms talking and not me" before and that troubled me. How could you ever become anything not you? I didn't want to find out. I told Tony I had to go while I still could.
He said he understood and saw me to the door. I told him to resist turning the music up all the way because he didn't understand how loud that Akai system was. He told me it was Saturday night. True enough. Maybe he was being the reasonable one and I was just a nervous Nelly. I couldn't tell. Okay. Just stay in your room and don't go anywhere. Okay, mom. Yeah yeah. I left him with a feeling of good will and trust. The last thing I said to him was that my scalp was trying to crawl off my head and he said me too and scratched his head like crazy so I did too and we laughed as the door shut.
I passed folks in the hall but I was a ghost and nobody looked at me. The parking lot was still a spectacular light show and I stood a long time admiring it. Nobody stirred in all the time I stood there. I felt alone on the earth. I remembered to avoid the puke on the stairs. In my room at last I lay on the bed and made the bebudabee noise drumming my fingers on my lips and laughed. My lips were rubber. I turned the light off and even fell asleep. Some time later I dreamed I was looking at myself sitting in a chair across the room. That me had advice. It's all a game he said. Maybe I said. Everything is a game he said. Not everything I said. Maybe he said. I woke. There were flashing blue lights on my ceiling. I could hear voices in the parking lot outside. The shrooms had calmed from a ripping guitar solo to just a calm steady beat but I still wondered if I was really seeing SP's arrest someone outside my window. Then I had the irrational fear they would see me watching and someone would point and say there he is and come get me from my fourth floor bed so I lay down again and listened to them. One seemed to be teaching the new one proper procedure for arresting drunks. I felt very world weary. Then just weary and drifted off to sleep, mostly to strange dreams I can't recall, and slept till morning when I woke normal again.
Then I was ravenously hungry and headed to the chow hall for one of those western omelettes the size of a cat. On the way I ran into Tony. The first thing he said was that he was never doing shrooms ever again. I thought that was funny and laughed in a knowing way but he was dead serious. Oh crap. You didn't stay in your room did you? No. Then he told me this story.
He had gotten hungry again and the cereal wasn't cutting it. So he did what anyone would do who was tripping and went door to door in an Air Force dorm in his underwear knocking and saying he was tripping balls and needed something to eat. Please I've eaten some bad mushrooms and I'm really freaking out hungry. Finally one guy ushered him in and told him to be quiet and not everyone was his friend about this kind of shit. He made him some tuna fish sandwiches. Sated but still on a one track about bad shrooms he thanked the guy and wandered down the hall until he entered the showers and turned the hot water on him full force. He said it was like thousands of tiny demons screaming at him. Well shit. Were they screaming get the fuck out from under scalding water maybe? He said he wasn't really thinking about that. His grandmother had died recently and he was all down about it. He just knew that he too was going to die. That night. The shrooms were bad and were going to kill him. Jesus man, tell me you went to your room and tried to regroup. No. After shouting in the hallway about bad shrooms he did something else.
What he did was walk in his wet underwear through an Air Force base on a Saturday night when it's likely most busy down streets in the middle of an English winter to the emergency room where we both worked and tell them he had eaten bad shrooms and was going to die. He needed a Catholic priest right away to give him last rights... and your face is melting. But he is probably the most lucky bastard other than myself alive. Nobody called the SP's. It was so late no officer was on duty. The ones who were there were all our friends. They tried to calm him as they let him know you can't be yelling so loud about faces melting. He begged for a priest and alternately laughed. They laughed too but still held him down. No but I'm dying! Laugh. I really am. The mushrooms were poison! Oh Christ who painted this room? I need last rights! I'm nearly dead already! Everybody has too many hands! Where is the priest? The lights are bubbling! I can feel my heart slowing down! Hurry! A priest! I'm seeing angels already! Oh god the things he told me he said. He told me in a look of wonder and wince.
They had him on a gurney trying to calm him or at least shut him up but they had to take it somewhat serious as well. It's their job to do so. They had to go wake the doc. Lucky for him it was that old Vietnam doc I was so fond of. He was pissed at being wakened at three in the morning. He listened to him babble about poison mushrooms, ran a blood test, looked in his eyes, and asked had he been drinking. He asked had he thrown up. Luckily the answer to both was yes but I can tell you he didn't feel those few drinks at all. Doc diagnosed him with drunk and dysentery and after telling the folks in ER to watch him for a couple hours to let him go sleep it off and not to wake him unless his blood pressure dropped or spiked or he had seizures or more vomiting. Doc let him know he wasn't happy and to shut up about a damn priest.
Holy crap man. We ate our huge breakfast and I felt bad I hadn't stayed with him. I said as much. He just said I warned him and there was nothing I could have done anyway. We talked about past trips and the power of emotion to make you go bonkers. We had a laugh or two at his trip and talked a bit about his grandma. He even waffled on doing them again by the end of the meal. But no time soon. Hell no. By lunch he asked me if I wanted to go in with him should the guy have some more shrooms. I laughed. The universe takes care of fools if your heart is right. No that isn't quite right. People take care of you if you are a good person. I still have a picture of him sitting on his bed playing guitar beneath the pyramid poster that came with the Dark Side of the Moon album. It makes me wish we had kept in touch after Heyford. I hope folks continued to look out for him. He was the sort you liked immediately.
Tocky on 19/6/2021 at 06:18
My best friend Richard Smith is gone now. The cancer got him. I had so hoped to go on a road trip when he felt up to it but he never did. We had been good buddies since the 6th grade when he, Kevin Baxter, Roger Nicholas, and me formed the four leaf clover club at eleven. I still have my card. We spent the night at each others house on the weekend, we played with GI Joe, we swam in every pond and creek, we climbed fire towers, we built mud cities on creekbanks, shot BB guns, had corn cob fights, dirt clod fights, pine cone fights, bottle rocket fights, even cow patty fights. We braved each others driving. I don't know how he lived smashing into that stand of pines that time. We threw fire crackers on the constables car and ran. We peed on an electric fence. He let go when he was jumping over a few of us on my mini bike and the rear tire burned a black mark on his chest. We were in Air Force tech school together. I'm sure I've told stories of him here.
So much of my life is tied up with him. He was there when I married and there for my son and daughter and later grand children when we came to visit and fish his lake. He came to Thanksgivings and Christmases and Birthdays. He taught my daughter to drive a stick. He was always a hermit but for me and mine he relented. He has always been the best of friends. I'm going to miss him terribly. I'm going to miss coming by his place and discussing life. He had a great philosophy and was one of the most unique people you could ever meet. In nearly every picture of him that I have he is laughing and everyone around him is as well. I have been so truly blessed to have known him. He left a hole that just can't be filled in my life. My daughter too. We sat looking over old photos of him this evening. I've already called or been called by his friends and family and they want me to say a few words. We lower him into a hole beside his dad this Monday. I have been asked to carry him that last short trip. It's not the trip I hoped to take him but it will be my honor to do so. He said he had lived the life he wanted and had no regrets. I have no reason to doubt that. Goodbye you fantastic colorful bastard. You made life better. You were a true and lifelong friend.
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Pyrian on 19/6/2021 at 15:21
:( Rest in peace.