Fire Lake (3 page)

We talked about it a lot, Lonnie and I--the drugs. I
thought they were bad. He thought they were good. That was what it
came down to. And since I was a minority of one and since
experimenting with drugs was in the air, like the music and the sex,
both of which I did enjoy, I felt too much like my own father,
harping on it for very long. I just let it be, like one of those
family disputes that sits on the table every night along with the
silverware.

I thought later that I had been wrong not to look
after him more carefully. But in those days, I didn't believe men
were supposed to look after one another, except on the battlefield. I
think I thought that's what it meant to be a man--to look after
yourself and not to ask jack shit from anyone else. I was forgetting,
of course, the charity Lonnie had shown me, when I first met him. And
just not seeing or not accepting the communal spirit that was alive
all around me. But when you're trying to get stronger, your vision
narrows. You overlook certain things. Maybe you have to overlook them
to get stronger.

In the early fall of 1968, expense money started to
dry up. Money we kept in a kitty, for meals and beer and grass.
Lonnie's rent money. I fronted him some, and after a time it got to
be a pretty large tab. I don't know what I told myself--that he was
buying equipment for his band, maybe. I had some explanation that I
half believed in or wanted to believe in.

Then one night in August, Lonnie brought some friends
home with him, and I couldn't tell myself those lies anymore. They
were from Miami, his friends. And they weren't kids, although they
were dressed like kids. They were grown men. On their way to
Cleveland, looking for a place to crash. They never stopped talking,
these men. When the second one interrupted the first one, the first
one's jaws kept working, like a ventriloquist's dummy. They crashed
with Lonnie that night. And that night, for the first time since I'd
come back from 'Nam, I unwrapped the government-issue Colt I kept in
my closet, loaded it, and slept with it in my hand.

They left at first light--Lonnie driving them to the
bus station in his old Ford van. When they were gone, I turned over
Lonnie's room and found works and crystal meth under the mattress. I
thought about leaving them out in the open, where he could see that
I'd seen them. But after a while, I put them back and put the room
right. When he came home again that night, I told him that I knew
what he was doing and that if our friendship meant anything to him,
he'd stop, because I wasn't going to sit around and watch him turn
into a speed freak.

I thought of that moment again as I drove through the
December sleet toward home. It was one of those scenes that you know
at the time is a turning point. I looked at him in the rearview
mirror, slumped unconscious on the backseat, and thought of how he'd
looked then--when I'd told him I was going to move out if he didn't
quit shooting up. He'd cried. Not in front of me, but in his room,
with the door shut. Then he'd shouted, cursed. Then he'd shot himself
up and gone out, leaving the works where I could see them on his bed.

We kept rooming together until the end of September,
because that's when the lease was up. We didn't talk much, except for
polite talk about how I was doing with my summer courses and how his
gigs were going. I think we both wanted to reconcile, to forget the
whole thing. But we'd said too much, gone too far in our
posturing--me as the big brother he was mourning, Lonnie as the true
child of the sixties I could never become. Neither one of us had
enough sense to back down and start over.

The last time I saw him was on the last day of
September, 1968. He'd played at the Black Dome that night. I'd gone
to hear him, for old times' sake. He brought a woman back to the
apartment with him. I had a girl of my own by then--a beautiful
black-haired English major named Linda. The four of us shared a
bottle of wine in my room, listened to some Jimi Hendrix, and talked
about old times. There were no hard feelings that night--I think that
was the point we were both trying to make. We shook hands warmly,
told each other we'd stay in touch, and went to bed.

We saw each other on the street a few times after
that, and I went to hear him play at the Dome again. Then the fall
term started for me, and I lost touch with him. I heard he went to
L.A. and New York. Several years after that, someone told me they'd
heard him play at the Winterland in San Francisco.

And now, eighteen years later, he was back. Still
trying to kill himself. I stared in the rearview mirror and wondered
what I was going to do with him--this time. Wondered if I could
help--this time. Or if anyone could.
 

4

It was almost five A.M, when I got Lonnie to the
Delores. I half carried him to the apartment-through the parking lot
and up the back stairs. Once I got him inside, I stripped off his
filthy clothes and threw him into the tub. I left him soaking in a
couple of inches of tepid water while I called Ron Fegley--a doctor
friend.

"Jesus Christ," Ron said when I told him
how many pills Lonnie had apparently swallowed, "he must have a
hell of a tolerance for drugs."

"I think he's had his share," I said.

"He probably vomited up most of them earlier
tonight. And it has been better than eight hours since he swallowed
them. But if I were you, I'd take him to the emergency room-pronto.
That's my advice."

"I don't think I can do that," I said.
"Attempted suicide means psychiatric confinement and, possibly,
a police report. I don't know what kind of criminal record Lonnie
might have, but I don't want to put him in jail or in Longview.
Besides, he said he didn't want to go to the hospital."

"He's in great condition to decide for himself,"
Ron said acidly. "Did it occur to you that he might be better
off in jail or in some detox center."

"I'm not going to make that choice for him. At
least, not while he's in this kind of shape."

"Then keep him warm and keep an eye on him. If
he starts looking shocky or goes into convulsions-call an ambulance.
And I mean quick. You know you're going to have a lot of explaining
to do if he dies on you."

I thought it over and said, "I'll just have to
take that chance."

"It's your life," Ron said. "And his."

After hanging up on Ron, I pulled Lonnie out of the
tub and dried him off. With the dirt and blood washed off him, he
looked a lot better than he had in the Encantada Motel--like a
haggard, graying version of the kid I remembered. His face was
bruised; but the split lip wasn't serious, and although the black eye
was mousing up, it wasn't a bad injury either. I took a look at his
arms, expecting to find needle tracks. To my surprise he didn't show
any. What he did have was an oval twelve-inch scar on his right side
that pinched the flesh between his hip and his rib cage, exactly as
if some animal had taken a bite out of him. It looked like a gunshot
wound, although it was awfully large for that. I noticed that his
fingertips were heavily callused, which meant he hadn't lost touch
with his music--whatever else he might have lost.

Hoisting him up over my shoulder, I carried Lonnie
into the bedroom and lowered him onto the bed. He groaned as I
covered him with blankets.

"Where am l?" he said groggily.

"You're at my place."

He nodded and smiled, as if that were good news. Then
he fell back to sleep.

After putting Lonnie to bed, I took some fresh
bedclothes out of the hall closet and made the living room sofa up
for myself. It wasn't until I actually sat down on the couch that I
realized how cold, wet, and tired I was. I stripped off my clothes,
curled up on the cushions, and listened to the December storm tapping
its nails against the living room window. In the bedroom I could hear
Lonnie snoring evenly. I closed my eves, telling myself that I'd just
doze off for a few moments, and immediately fell asleep.

I woke up around one o'clock that Friday afternoon,
and the first things I heard were the measured sound of Lonnie's
snoring and the patter of the icy rain on the living room window. I
walked down the hall and took a look at him in the gray afternoon
light. The color had returned to his face and he seemed to be
sleeping soundly. I thought about trying to wake him, then thought
better of it. The fact that he hadn't died on me in the night was a
relief. But I knew that Lonnie wouldn't see it that way. Junkies have
a saying: "Dying is easy." I let him sleep.

After fixing some coffee in the kitchenette, I
gathered Lonnie's clothes together and went through them, looking for
some clues to his recent past. I found a slip of paper in his shirt
pocket with a local phone number penciled on it. When I dialed it, it
turned out to be the office of the Encantada Motel. Claude Jenkins
answered in a cranky voice. I hung up before he'd finished saying
hello.

In Lonnie's pants pockets I found a dog-eared social
security card, an expired Missouri driver's license, and a snapshot
of a brown-haired woman and two smiling children, posing in front of
a Christmas tree. The photograph had a date printed on its
back--December 25, 1984 . The woman was very beautiful; so were the
children. It didn't seem possible that it was a picture of Lonnie's
own family. Arid yet I couldn't think of a better reason for him to
have kept the photo on him. There was an address on the expired
license--Klotter Road, University City, Missouri.

n his parka, I found a crumpled pack of Camels, a
ticket stub from the Bijou--a theater here in town--and a round-trip
Greyhound bus ticket, to Cincinnati from St. Louis and back. I also
found a page that had been ripped out of a Cincinnati phone book and
folded into a square. I unfolded it, knowing already that it was the
page with my name and number on it. I was right. My name had been
circled in pen and a little note was scribbled beside the listing.
Sorry, Harry
.

I stared at the note for a second and wondered if
he'd written it before or after he'd taken the pills. Either way, it
was the closest thing to a suicide note he'd left.
Sorry,
Harry
.

I folded the note back up and stuck it in my desk
drawer. I piled the rest of his belongings on the coffee table. The
parka could be cleaned; the rest of the stuff was hopeless. Bundling
up his clothes, I threw them in a plastic trash bag. I figured he
could wear some of my things until he could buy some new ones. Or
until I could buy new ones for him.

I'd have to do the buying, because I hadn't found one
dollar in his clothes. Not even a few pennies of change. He was flat
broke. Except for the return bus ticket, he'd had nothing on him of
value. He must have spent his last few dollars on the Bijou ticket,
the motel room, and the drinks he'd had at the Encantada's bar. Maybe
he'd spent all his money deliberately--squandering his cash before
killing himself. But if that was the case, I didn't understand why
he'd kept the bus ticket, instead of turning it in at the terminal.
Which suggested another possibility--that he'd been robbed. By the
bikers he'd had the fight with. Or by someone at the motel. Judging
from Claude Jenkins, I figured that the Encantada's staff wasn't
above fleecing one of their guests--especially if he was out cold
because of a drug overdose.

Speculating about Lonnie's attempted suicide on the
basis of a few shreds of circumstantial evidence made me feel too
much like a detective and too little like a friend. And Lonnie
apparently still regarded me as a friend. There was no other way to
explain why he'd picked me out of the phone book. Even after eighteen
years, there must have been a dozen other names he could have
chosen--musicians, ex-girlfriends, other roommates. But he'd picked
me. And before he tried to kill himself, he'd left me that little
apology.
Sorry, Harry
.
It was an unsettling thought--to imagine that I'd been on his mind
before he'd swallowed the pills--because the truth was that up until
about three that morning, I hadn't thought of him in better than
sixteen years.

That fact bore the truth in on me forcefully. And the
truth was that, old friend or not, Lonnie was a stranger. And until I
could talk to him or to someone who knew him, I wasn't doing him any
favors by reading a lifetime into his last few acts. What I should
have been doing was trying to locate someone who could tell me who
Lonnie Jackowski was now.

I glanced at the driver's license again, picked up
the phone, dialed the operator, and asked for University City,
Missouri, information.

University City information didn't have a listing for
Lonnie Jackowski. But there was a listing for a Karen Jackowski at
the address on the expired license. I wrote the number down on a
piece of scrap and hung up. I stared at the number for a long time,
before dialing it. It wasn't just a question of breaking the news,
if, indeed, there was someone to break the news to. Lonnie hadn't
come all this way without a reason. If he'd left someone behind, he'd
left them for a reason too.

I made the call anyway. A child answered the phone--a
little girl.

"Yes?" she said in a tiny, tentative voice.

"Honey, is your mom home?" I asked. "I
dunno," she said flatly.