Adam, I’m in trouble.

Contents of my backpack today:

A chess board, a colourful Mexican blanket, four squash balls, a lot of dirty and crumpled bits of paper, an elegant little notebook I will probably never inscribe with anything.

Thoughts after Tatamagushe:

There is an ambulance idling outside the open window and across the street. The street level door of the apartment directly across from me is open and paramedics and various other people are coming in and out the door. The ambulance has been there for almost thirty-five minutes now and the grinding of its engine is impossible to ignore. I hate it.

This, moreover, is the second time in as many weeks that an ambulance has stopped in this spot. I watched for a minute or so to see what was happening, but after this I lost interest and decided to sit down and type this message to you.

I’ve been thinking today a little about my old friend JV, because when he and I lived together the ambulance always used to stop at our house. I remember one night particularly; I was asleep in my bed and it was well into the middle of the night. JV, I think, must have come in from the bar and, as he was preparing to get into bed, he began to realise how sick he was feeling.

Adam, he called out to me, pulling me up out of my sleep, Adam, I’m in trouble.

And with this I came down the stairs and I think probably I was angry at him, rather than concerned, if you can imagine; not just because he had woken me but because I had been telling him for months and years that I wanted him to stop…or maybe I hadn’t told him enough…and I had visited him in the hospital the last time he drank himself there. Maybe my sympathy had dried up.

It was obvious even then that when the people who loved him, in whatever circle he was running, began to realise just what his intentions were, and when they began to refuse to follow him down the path he wanted to go, then he would simply drift until he found a new circle and a new circle and finally he fell in with a crowd that didn’t ask any questions and that had so little love for itself that any one of its members could live or die on a given day and the rest would simply go on oblivious. But I don’t want to judge him. If I were to offer any epitaph at all it would be that he was a man who lived life exactly the way he wanted to and let everyone know that his decisions were his own. I would tell people if I could that he was an easy person to love and nearly every person who met him loved him. I was his best friend and in a lot of ways I would say that I was his worst friend.

When I came down to the living room he was sitting there in the old green felt armchair with the brown translucent cover that popped right off that record player that he carted around with him every time he moved in order to listen again and again to his Floyd records and his Metallica records forever living and dying by their lyrics and riffs. He was holding the record cover upside-down in his lap and retching into it; long gargling plumes of beer vomit and foam spraying down and swishing about in the plastic tub. I called 911 and I probably smoked one of his cigarettes to calm my nerves a little because it was going to be another night that I would be up and not sleep and be late for work and all of those things that seem irrelevant now that this night so long ago now lies buried under so many other strata of bullshit.

That night the swirling cherry lights and the grinding engine of the ambulance were outside our house and no doubt the neighbours all peeped round their curtains wondering what the hell it could be with us this time…every time it was something with us. They put JV up in the stretcher and carried him down the steps and away to the hospital. He was gone for more than a month and during this time I called him and told him that I wanted him to move out. When he came back he wanted to negotiate with me and I refused. I told him that I didn’t want to be the one to find his body dead in the living room one morning. I even went so far as to hire movers for him and had them take him and his stuff to anyplace he wanted to go.

It was the last time I ever saw him alive. Later, two years later, when my father called me to say JV was dead, when I was driving across the country and was in Edmonton at my aunt’s house, I took the call without the slightest reaction while my aunt and Anthony stood there beside me in the kitchen, oblivious. I sat down and had breakfast with them as though nothing had happened. We talked mundanely about our further travel plans Later that day, Anthony and I stopped in the badlands and I climbed up a hoodoo and while Anthony appeared to me as a tiny speck at the bottom of the hill I looked out over the world and began to scream at the top of my lungs.

Then, for two days, I said nearly nothing while we crossed the prairies and by the time we reached the Lakehead and by the time the beloved pink and jagged rocks of Ontario began to break up out of the flat turf of Manitoba I was fine. I think I was fine.

I could tell you so much more of this and I could tell you how it relates to the things that have just passed, the things that have just passed in the last five, in the last ten days, the things that have just passed in the last ten weeks. I feel right now like I’ve tamed a dragon…but I’m afraid that this is a story for another time.