Just Another Goodbye Story

I was talking on here last night to exhausted, and mentioned that one of my neighbors had killed himself. I was the last person to see him alive. We all called him Bailey.

 

Bailey was a Vietnam vet, a “catch-up hippie” who never got to be part of the hippie movement but who embraced the ideals behind it with a passion once he got back from the war. I don’t know that much about his youth, but I do know who he became, and what he meant to all of us. Its kind of ironic, but Bailey was the hero of our little circle of friends, and I really don’t think he ever knew.

 

I suppose I should explain our little circle, first.

 

I can’t really say there was ever a definate head count done on us, but there were about fifty of us. We all used to hang out together at this awful greasy spoon on campus. Our group consisted of students, computer geeks, history buffs, pot heads, Goths, hippies, stuffed shirts and closet crazies.  Some of us were accidental members of the group-we just kinda wandered in and never left-while others were drawn in by other people. Some were just part of the place, like furniture. But we were all friends, and we all looked out for one another. It was always fun to watch new people walk in and see something like a cop hanging out with a Goth and a hippie potsmoker, or a preacher and a porn star fussing over someone’s new baby. You could usually tell a lot by their reactions; some people actually recoiled in disgust, while others (myself included) just started grinning this relieved grin like they had come home from ten years in hell.

 

Bailey was one of the “old” crew-he’d been there forever, knew everyone, knew their stories. When I first got to town, he was one of the first people in the crew to talk to me. He saw me scraping together change for some pancakes to take home to Dad, and told me to go buy a pack of cigarettes instead, he’d get the pancakes. Ten minutes later, he bummed a smoke from me-he’d put the pancakes on his tab, lol. I thought it was funny as hell.

 

Over the next eight years, I lived in this strange, surreal little world that had somehow formed on campus. Bailey was always there, hanging around, going to the house parties and baby showers and barbecues, hanging out at the library, getting trashed at the little Irish pub we all went to, hitching rides with the “good” cops. We ended up living in the same apartment building. Some of us went to this little church ran by a biker, and Bailey went there, too. He quit drinking.

 

My best friend’s daughter was kidnapped when she was two. Bailey tracked her down, drove 800 miles in a beat up old rustbucket, broke out the bay window of the house she was in, and kidnapped her back. That was Bailey. He was awesome.

 

Awesome people seem to attract a particular type of asshole, though, and Bailey was no exception. His asshole was one of our neighbors from across the street, who I’ll call Mark. Mark despised Bailey, hated him with every ounce of his being, and targeted him for destruction.  You’d think the sonofabitch had done it before, he was so smooth. I’m sure he’d done it before.

 

Mark befriended Bailey, dug up dirt on him (he smoked pot, he was divorced and had a kid he hadn’t seen in years, etc, etc), and then found Bailey’s weakness: Bailey was lonely, and still had PTSD. He was on meds for it, but they weren’t really doing much good. Bailey surrounded himself with people to remind himself that he was still not dead.

 

Mark took that information and ran with it. He tried chipping away at Bailey’s support-first just a few friends on the edges of our group, then family members, then close friends. Some people fell for it, others told Mark to go fuck himself, but the damage was done-Bailey knew he’d been betrayed.

 

Gradually, Bailey’s world shrank to just a few people from the church and maybe five from the  campus crowd, and his dog. He started drinking again, and the guilt from that made him withdraw even more. He eventually ended up homebound. He would come down and hang out on the front porch sometimes, but he never had a lot to say. His excuse for cutting ties with everyone was that he was trying to get closer to God. We all worried and speculated that maybe he was dying-we knew cancer ran bad in his family, and he was a lifelong smoker-but any time any of us asked, he would say he was fine. He lost weight, and my husband and I started taking him meals and kinda-sorta-casually sticking around until we saw him eat something. I’m sure he knew we were watching. I’m equally sure his dog ate an awful lot of pot roasts and meatloaf and fried chicken.

 

The final blow came out of the blue one day. Bailey had to be gone all day, and so he tied his dog up outside. He left food and water for the dog-I know he did, I saw him take it out there-and there was shade and shelter in case the weather turned.

 

We had to go out, too. It was a short trip, only about an hour, but when we came back, the dog’s food and water were gone, and so was the dog. We assumed that Bailey’s roomie had came home early and taken the dog inside. What really happened, we found out too late-Mark had came over, taken the dog’s bowls, and called Animal Control to report the dog as “abandoned.” Animal Control came out and took the dog.

 

Bailey was shattered.

 

I know you can only take so much shit out of life before you lose it, and sometimes its the littlest things that set you off and send you over. That night, Bailey’s fridge quit working. Our landlord told him he would get him one the next day, and sure enough, the next day, our landlord sends me up to Bailey’s to measure his fridge so we could get a replacement. I noticed that Bailey’s apartment was very neat. He’d cut his hair, and left the braid lined up on his coffee table along with a library book, some cigarettes, a tie, and a few other things. I asked if he was going to a job interview, and he said, he was going to talk to a judge. I assumed it was about his dog, and told him good luck, I’d back him if he needed me to. He gave me a hug, offered me a cigarette, and told me he loved me before shooing me out of his house. He was smiling.

 

The next time I saw Bailey, he was dead. He hung himself in the stairwell. Probably the last thing he saw was a painting I’d done of my daughter’s hand reaching for the sun. That drove me crazy for weeks.

 

Over 200 people turned out for Bailey’s funeral, but his real memorial service lasted for months, on the street, in the pub, in our living rooms and at the parks. One of the hippie kids found Bailey’s dog at the pound and adopted him. Some of the Goths and Wiccans held a circle for him. The Old Farts of the Apocalypse gazed deeply into their beer glasses and dredged up memories of Bailey’s youth. Whether those stories were true or not is somewhat questionable, but they were good stories, and told with kindness.  Bailey was our friend, our hero, our brother, our teacher. He was rarely in the limelight, because he was too busy getting everyone else to step on stage to sing. He never asked for much, but he was always willing to give everything. Maybe he finally gave too much.

 

The night after Bailey’s funeral, I left my husband at home with my daughter and the preacher, and went to get drunk with this Irish kid Bailey and I hung out with. We ended up walking home at three in the morning, utterly obliterated. Walking over the bridge, we were both struck by how silent it was that night-no traffic, no house parties, not even a cop car in sight. Just us and the wind and the streetlights casting that ugly orange glow across the pavement and painting our faces with the color of old, stale piss. We could have been the last people on Earth. It was terrifying. It was lonely.

 

The wind picked up, pushing leaves and gutter junk down the sidewalk. A flier skittered to rest against David’s shoe, and he managed to bend over and pick it up. It was an advertisement for a band or something-I don’t know, all I saw was the name of the group: “The Lost Soul’s Review.” David and I stared at each other for a minute, then started laughing. I don’t know what was so damn funny about that, it should have been spooky as hell, but it wasn’t. It felt like a joke. David held the flier up over his head, threw his head back, and yelled, “A’right, ye damn ghoulish bastard, follow us home!”

 

We all sort of drifted apart after Bailey died. I can’t say he was the glue that held us together, not by any means, but he was one of the people who made us all get along. Without him, there was a hole in the close knit of our little community, and no one else who came along could fill it. Some of the Old Farts died. David moved back to Ireland. We all scattered. Sometimes, we run into each other-at a school play with our kids, at the grocery store, just walking down the street. Sometimes, Bailey is brought up. A lot of times, the building where we all lived is mentioned, with the inevitable knowing chuckle and, “Oh, yeah, it’s still haunted.” I’ve gone by the house a few times, went up to Bailey’s old apartment, hoping for…what? Something.

 

The last time I saw Bailey’s apartment, it was empty. That damn painting was still on the wall, though. Whoever had lived there after Bailey had trashed the place, let mold grow on the walls and grease soak into the cabinets, but they left that fucking picture. It was creepy. It was sad. It was just an empty space where someone we loved used to be.

 

When I left, I took the picture with me. I threw it out by the railroad tracks, and followed the rails home.

 

Goodbye, Bailey.