When the Smoke Clears

In some traditions, a red-tailed hawk is a vision, perhaps a warning, that change was coming, massive changes from unexpected directions, sometimes good, sometimes bad. A spring not too many years ago I remembered seeing these hawks everywhere for about a week, even though I was living in a city.

Then a small fist pounded at my door.

This was on a Saturday afternoon as I sat in my room, hanging out with a friend playing videogames. It was a long week, my roommate, his girlfriend and I had almost settled into our new apartment, though he still had unpacked boxes in the dining area. He had been working over 70 hours for the last few weeks and looked very tired the night before. Even Nik, my dog, could sense he was exhausted and didn’t encourage him to play when he came in, just sat next to his chair, waiting for him to settle down.

“Are you in there? Can I come in?” I heard her ask, but before I could respond she was already standing in the doorway. “Come here, please,” she begged. “Something’s wrong.”

I got up reluctantly. She was always being very dramatic. He had tried to dump her several times, and I wasn’t quite sure what she held over him, but he wasn’t happy and yet couldn’t get her to move out. He almost never said a kind word to her and to be honest, I had more pity for him than her. It wasn’t for me to pry.

“Jake went to the bathroom a long time ago. Now he won’t open the door.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know. A few hours?”

“Is he snoring?” I asked as we walked to their side of the apartment. I knew he hadn’t tried to run away, either. Jake was a big man. He wouldn’t have been able to fit through the tiny bathroom window.

I knocked on the door, called out to him. No answer. I knocked harder. As I pressed my ear to the door there were no sounds, but at odd smell. His scent, and something else. His girlfriend had a screwdriver but I just leaned hard, slightly twisted the doorknob and forced my way in. The door made it partway open before snagging on his bare foot.

“Go call 911,” I told her gently but with no room for debate.

On the floor, lying on his side, was Jake. It was the first time in five years of knowing him and two years of living in the same place I had ever seen him naked, but I knew from the red patches on the bottoms of his arms and along the side of his chest and hip that this was one of the last times I would ever look at him.

My friend came to investigate the noise. Jake had become a friend to him as well, but my friend was not someone as familiar as I with death and dying. He was shaken up. I told him to help me roll Jake onto his back. It was a heavy job. Then I told him to go check on whether she made the phone call. He seemed grateful for the chance to be gone from here. For some reason I snatched a towel and laid it over his hips, puritanism rising up when it comes to someone I care for.

Jake’s eyes stared past me. “Please don’t do this to me,” I whispered selfishly, the two of us alone. Leaning in to run through the basics of checking vital signs I knew would be useless, I actually felt cheated. Jake and I had become friends recently. Many of our mutual friends thought a major explosion would hit when the two of us ended up becoming roommates. We didn’t like each other at first. It was bad.

He wasn’t breathing. He had no pulse. I knew he wasn’t coming back, but EMTs are trained to go through the motions, even when we know better. In a sudden death the families often need to see something is being done, if only to give them the chance to start to come to terms with the death. Luckily our training does usually take over even if it is someone close to us we are working on. But my mind was remembering.

…Jake liked that he was a big, intimidating man. He flaunted it. We both ran with a large circle of friends at the time and ended up meeting. I was thin, wiry, obnoxious, and not in the least bit intimidated, except deep down where I still held my fear of large men. He didn’t like my arrogance, I didn’t like his, but fortunes threw us together. Eight of us ended up having some tough times and we eventually all lived in a three bedroom apartment, two per bedroom and two in the dining room. I worked night shifts so the guy I roomed with and I rarely saw each other. Jake and I ended up having similar schedules so we would do our best to avoid each other…

So much avoidance and five years later I found myself blowing air into his lifeless lungs, angry and hurt. I worked on his chest. His girlfriend came back in and looked for a minute then ran out to the phone to call others.

…Jake and I ended up in several bull-headed face-offs in those early years but it never degenerated to violence, just violent stares. I was able to move out after a few more months but we still ran into each other at times. We avoided looking at each other…

Air blew back out at me from his lungs, empty, stained. I knew it would be a while for EMS to arrive. I was resolved to go through the routine, to beg God for a miracle I knew could not come. I’ve seen people come back. It wasn’t going to happen here.

…A few years after I moved out Jake still had a lease on that large apartment but everyone else had moved as well. I needed a place to stay, my lease was up and I couldn’t afford my place on my own anymore. It was just the two of us plus my dog. I accepted that he truly cared for Nik, sitting up with him at night, those two howling at each other in excited “conversations.” Jake also took great care of Nik. There was a bridge to me.

“You need a roommate, I need a place to stay and you know my sense of honor. I’ll always pay the rent. If it doesn’t work out, no big deal, I’m not on the lease, you can kick me out.”

He stared at me, blue eyes trying to penetrate what was behind my own eyes. “Fair enough, but I get to take Nik out with me sometimes too…”

Now I was over his chest, compressing hard, muttering, “Why now? Why couldn’t you have waited a while longer?”

…During our time in the old apartment, we started interacting with each other more. We started talking to each other, without the audience around. Conversations at first were the rudimentary, eventually evolving into something deeper. He did dislike me for my arrogance, and I for his. But I also made him feel small, he said. This hard drinking viking with rebel flags, tattoos up and down his arms, felt I belittled him. This hard-drinking viking with rebel flags, tattoos up and down his arms felt helpless a few years ago. His best friend was a waif of a man, gentle in presence, one of the eight of us and almost a complete opposite to Jake. This man and his boyfriend lived in the back bedroom. Jake was prejudiced, occasionally overtly racist, but never homophobic.

However, his best friend came to me with a medical question one day. I looked him over and asked a few questions and my instincts told me he would need to go to the doctor. Tomorrow. Over the next six months Jake and I saw his best friend deteriorate, eventually dying from lymphatic cancer. I had the skills Jake did not. I could help his best friend with his daily shots. I helped his best friend’s boyfriend keep him clean when the chemotherapy so exhausted him he couldn’t take care of himself…

Years later I felt useless working on Jake’s lifeless body. I can understand the pain of not being able to help someone you care about so much.

…During one of our conversations after his best friend died surrounded by his real family of friends, much of his biological family having rejected him for being gay, he told me he really, genuinely hated me for being around and knowing what to do over those months, but he was thankful for it too. It explained many things. We grew from all of that, and those who knew us both still do not understand how we became so close.

Jake cared enough to once in a while call “Kidnap” on me. It was a house rule. Once a month you could call “Kidnap” on one roommate if you were bored or he or she looked like they needed to get away. When Kidnap was called, your plans for the day or evening were cancelled (unless it was work and usually Kidnap was only called on someone hiding in a bedroom) You would set the agenda. Jake would see me stressed from work and trying return to introversion. Next thing I know we’d be out riding around grabbing chinese food, going to a movie, or one thing he loved to do: going to an old guy gay bar and just drinking like crazy, but he’d always take me along as his monogamous partner. Why a gay bar? Because, he explained, the drinks are a lot larger, stronger and cheaper and once in a while someone would pay for his anyway. And with Big Daddy Jake as my s.o., no one would risk trying to pick me up. I’d still tense when he tried to stand really close to me, but we had talked about it. He understood why and said he wished it weren’t so…

All this went through my head as the paramedics arrived. I wanted to call Kidnap and make him stop lying there and be forced to go out with me. He had no choice, he made that rule in the first place. He’d have had to get up.

They pulled out their drug box, intubation kit, defibrillator, etc. Four came in. We moved Jake out of the bathroom so they could have more room and I gave them report, but I knew what was going on. If there were any hope, he’d already have been on a backboard, on a stretcher, and out the door. This was a chance for a trainee to get practice. As I saw my friend and Jake’s girlfriend circling, almost falling apart, I leaned over to the supervisor to ask a few minutes later to package him and do the practice back in the ER. I knew it wasn’t often one could practice on a 33-year-old with all the parts still in place. He looked at me, recognized that I understood the situation and followed my request.

The next week I spent packing away his personal items and protecting his assets from his girlfriend. Her first words to me when we got back from the hospital that night were, “You know where he keeps his money, right?” Indeed I did. He trusted me. Jake always kept several thousand in cash around for dire emergencies. “I sure do,” I told her. “And I knew you’d be concerned so I’ve already secured it so we can make sure his mother gets it. Don’t worry about that.” Brothers who hadn’t spoken to him in years showed up, too. “Jake still working on that baseball card collection? I bet there’s some stuff in there that must be worth a fortune, knowing him. Know much about it?”

I felt disgusted. With the exception of his mother, all the people ostensibly close to Jake just wanted his money or property. It was our circle of friends who were grieving, as was Nik, who would wander over to Jake’s chair and sniff it many times a day and look at me, tail drooping.

In that circle of friends, we bury our own. Jake was my third roommate to die. He was the sixth in that group to die in 4 years. What started as a moment of grief so long ago became a routine many of the over 200 people at the funeral did not understand. We took off our jackets, ladies laid down their purses and as others walked to their cars, we shoveled the dirt, no token handful. We would work for the next hour, taking turns on the spades. We had a phrase we started using before then considering all that happened and how much it wore us down. Everyone said it that day, a glance into another’s eyes, tears threatening but never showing. Fucking straws.

Jake and I still talk on occasion. When I sleep I normally dream, but there are times when it is something that can only be described as different. It’s me and someone who died speaking, no special environment, nothing crazy going on in the background, just two people on the ground talking. Several times right after he died he asked me to do some things for him, seek out some things he had hidden from his girlfriend and get them to people. I found every one of those items.

A week before he died, Jake gave me a pair of Doc Martin boots. In one of those conversations he warned me to keep them clean, just joking with me. Long ago, when we disliked each other, he would try petty torments. Knowing my anal-retentive nature, he would tilt pictures on the wall to see how long I’d let it go. Ever since Jake died, no matter where I live if those boots get dusty, ALL the pictures in my house are tilted the exact same amount in the exact same direction. I can straighten them but they’ll be right back to the same position within a couple of hours until the boots are clean. That bastard.

He taught me to go beyond my first impressions and that even someone perceived as an enemy can become a true friend over time. It has been five years this week since that Saturday when the hawks circled so heavily and Jake’s heart stopped beating. Take care of Nik until I can catch up, my friend.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS