The Life

The Life                                                                                                March, 2013

“She’s divorcing me.” He said, referring to a wife who is now a stranger. Someone he still loves who no longer loved him.

That was all he had to say. His eyes were welling up with tears, for me, a stranger having to hear such a thing; and for the fact that I was there and he was there and him unable to pay for a room for the night. He was contrite and so was I; we were both hoping something could be worked out by the desk clerk, but no, it was not going to be.

I could see the story unfold. He showed me the email from a friend in Baltimore who said, “…see you have been floundering in jail in New Orleans.” And, “I’m praying for you!” So far his friend’s prayers have only gotten him as far as Mobile.

A group of his friends had come to New Orleans and gotten him out of jail, he told us. And what happened after that? I remember thinking.

Baltimore’s Ravens had won the Super Bowl. The party after that at the Super Dome was only the beginning. He never said it, but what I saw before me was a Super Bowl remnant caught up in the revelry of victory and Mardi gras. And that was it; he was lost in New Orleans and locked up for having too much fun. It did not matter, at that point, how many Ph.Ds. or how heads he had shrunk at Johns Hopkins. To NOPD you are just a case file, paper work, a part of the demographic.

“Maybe I’ll walk back to the bus station.” I remember he said as he walked away, out the front door, across the courtyard, on to Royal Street and into the only open bar in town. Not the place I was hoping he would go.

It was the only place that was not going to remind him of her. Not like the loneliness of the bus station inhabited by lost, transient souls trying to forget someone. He had to seek solace in the spirits he trusted. They, he believes, have become his only friend.

She had divorced me too; way back in 1989, and afterward, I was on the same road. A road I struggled along for a long while. A many years struggle that I survived when I decided I had had enough of the wallowing and self pity.