Hearing his adventure stories as a child, I pictured him as the hero in one of the Westerns he loved so much-his John Wayne impression was spot on-but placing this one in the context of his grief over the death of his first love, he no longer sounded like a cowboy but like a sad, lost boy. And waking up in the morning, baking in the sun, his mouth as dried out as the sand, his pockets looted, the memory of the news he’d gotten the day before as harsh as the morning sun.
I pictured him, sitting in the sand on an empty beach in jeans and a flannel shirt, staring out at the moonlight reflecting on dark waves, wondering what he could have done differently to save her, taking big swigs straight from a bottle of tequila. And then boom.ĭid he fall to his knees on the street in whatever Mexican town he was in? Did he yell “no” over and over again, like I did? Did he think maybe he had misheard, that maybe he could go back and hear it differently? Nobody was there with him, and Bud couldn’t remember who’d actually broken the news, so I’ll never know how he responded.īut I do know that he got drunk and passed out on the beach, and got robbed of everything he had with him-it was a story I’d heard him tell, but without the context of why he’d gotten so drunk on that particular night. Stubble on his face, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. I imagined him, a young man out adventuring, skin tanned and clothes dirty. I wondered how he handled that blow when it came for him. I thought immediately of the moment I found out my father was dead, how all light and sound collapsed in around me. Bud, one of the guys who lived there, told me decades later that they’d been waiting for his call so they could tell him that Cathy had overdosed and died.
He’d been gone about a month when he called the apartment he shared with a bunch of friends in New Haven, to say hi and see how everyone was doing. In the summer of 1981, about a year after he left his first love, Cathy, because she wouldn’t stop doing heroin, my father hitchhiked through Mexico.
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