Slice of Good Ol Boy Life

“All I saw was blood…blood everywhere. On the ground, all over my clothes. It was gushing out of my nose,” he said.

River’s nose had puffed up to clown size and purple bruises surrounded his left eye. He never saw it coming — walking home, listening to music with his headphones on and suddenly out of nowhere:

Shabam!

The stick smacked him across the face, knocking him to the ground and busting his nose wide open. The culprit was gone before he knew what hit him.

And yet somehow, River mustered the courage to come to work that week and clean trains in horrible pain with a fractured nose. I felt a tremendous amount of sympathy for him, knowing full well that could have been me.

But why would someone do that?

Despite my insistence, River refused to seek medical attention or file a police report. As I was quickly discovering, he seemed to detest health screenings and absolutely did not trust the police.

The attack drew me closer to River. I wanted to be there for him and I told this to Stanley, my next door neighbor psychiatrist. Stanley reminded me that I was supposed to be seeking more joy in my life and yet here I was trying to play a rescuer role.

“You can’t ‘save’ someone who does not want to be saved or feel there is a problem,” Stanley reminded me.

River liked to party and at his age who could blame him. He was quite the playboy, handsome and confident. Going out with him felt like riding shotgun with a celebrity because every bar we entered, someone there knew River.

While I reserved social outings for the weekend, River was going out nearly every night. I tried to sound the alarm about work, but he didn’t seem to care.

The job may stink now, I told him, but there were many paths within the organization that would lead to secure livability.

“You’re wasting your breath,” Stanley told me.

Stanley had been in this situation before and knew the ending.

“Why are you attracted to him?” he asked.

That was the billion dollar question.

Aside from having a savior complex, I saw a lot of my old self in River. Two decades earlier, I left my job as a sportswriter in Alabama to move to Houston, Texas to be with my first lover, Dennis.

I have never written about this time in my life. I did some things that I am not proud of. Things I wish that I had never done.

Dennis introduced me to a completely different lifestyle. A lifestyle of endless nightclub parties, rampant drug use and survival sex work.

Unpacking and acknowledging this time is important and so too is letting it go.

I saw River as a shot at redemption. He was living the same life I did and I wanted desperately to lift him out of it.

“You’re going to get hurt,” Stanley warned.