Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-02-08- 9:47 p.m.

Yizkor

This is the story of how I killed my best friend.
In November of 1997, I was nearing the end of the first semester of my senior year in college. Around that time, I first started really becoming friends with Wee. SHG and I were still inseparable, Lynn and I were deeply in love, and more so than at any other time in my life that I can recall, things were good.
Wee had been making money by tending bar at a Chinese restaurant in a nearby town. But in November, he lost his job, not for incompetence or anything, but simply because the restaurant wasn’t doing so well. And like everyone else, he needed money. And he had a plan. He called up Jacques, a screw-up who used to go to school with us, and bought an ounce of cocaine. Wee decided he could make some easy money dealing blow.
Only neither of them had the slightest idea what the fuck they were doing. Which, as it turns out, is sort of important when you decide to go into business dealing narcotics. Jacques had picked up nine ounces, and then cut it. All at once. And didn’t bother doing much mixing. So, what happened was that Wee ended up with an ounce of a little cocaine and a lot of baby powder. Which he proceeded to sell, without testing it, for eighty dollars a gram.
Needless to say, spending twenty dollars for a quarter gram of Johnson’s & Johnson’s didn’t exactly result in warm fuzzy feelings towards Wee from the people who bought from him. And this wasn’t the South Bronx; Wee wasn’t out on a street corner selling, he was selling to people he knew. He was selling to his friends, and to their friends. And everything went to hell for Wee, and it went there faster than the Concorde.
Wee called Jacques, pissed as hell, and Jacques, feeling like the idiot he knew he was, made it right by giving Wee two more ounces for $100, so that Wee could just give everyone so much blow for their money that they’d relax. But not before something else went wrong. This little fucker Isaac, who hadn’t even bought from Wee, but rather was just friends with some people who had, made a big scene about it with Wee. In the on-campus dining hall. In front of a lot of ears.
We were popular kids in college, but it would be generous to say that the same wasn’t true in the eyes of the administration. Wee knew he was in trouble. He knew the administration would love to kick him out; hell, they’d expelled our friend Sean twice.
So I stepped in.
I offered to let him stash the coke at my apartment. There were a lot of reasons for this. First of all, at the time, I was rather famously at such a hippie school for being anti-drug. I would be a lousy suspect. Second, I lived off-campus, so to search my apartment, the administration would have to call the local police, which was very contrary to their nature. And it wasn’t as if Wee had to worry that I would do the blow myself.
I still can’t believe how fucking stupid I was.
I knew that SHG was an alcoholic and a cocaine addict. I knew he’d spent time in juvie, knew he was a year older than me because he’d spent a year in rehab before college. I knew these things. But I never fucking thought about it. It was never an issue. He’d come out with us every night to the bar, and he’d sit there and smoke a cigar and drink a club soda with lime. Hell, he and I were famous. Our school had a three week seminar every August for incoming freshman, which for some reason, SHG and I were always around for. So we’d make a deal out of every night, getting three cases of Bud, and going to a different dorm to let the freshman have their first away-from-home drunk. It got so that the RA’s would tell the kids we’d be coming. But he never drank, never even seemed tempted.
So, I let Wee stash three ounces of cocaine in my apartment. The same apartment SHG had his own keys to, the same apartment he spent almost all his time out of classes or rugby practice in. I let Wee come and go, taking eight balls and quarter grams out of the hiding place right in front of SHG. And I didn’t think, I didn’t see how seeing everyone we knew in front of piles of dirt-cheap blow every night, and knowing exactly where literal ounces lay, ripe for the taking, how all that would eat SHG’s mind alive.
Lynn had graduated the year before and moved to Manhattan, and she and I made a point of visiting each other every weekend. We would shut the world out, and try to spend a week of being together in two short days. One Friday, the first weekend in December, I left the apartment to go pick her up at the train station. We got home, and spent the weekend together. We didn’t speak to a soul for the next two days.
On Sunday afternoon, I found out what had happened.
When I left the apartment, SHG couldn’t take it anymore. He raided the stash, went back to his room, and got lit. He ended up practically destroying the entire floor of his dorm. Sean and another friend of ours, Roy, restrained him finally. SHG slept most of Saturday, then Sunday morning, he went back to Providence and checked himself into rehab. He didn’t tell a soul before he left. He just left his Playstation on the bed, along with a note for me.
In his note, he said over and over to me how sorry he was. How bad he felt for letting me down.
I would only ever see him alive one more time after that.

previous |next |archives

If you want to make me
famous or just complain: Jay Elias -
jelias@diaryland.com

Older

Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

Diaryland

join my Notify List and get email when I update
my
site:

email: