Eulogy

What do you say to a good friend who is drinking himself to death? I feel like I should write an eulogy and he isn't even close to dead. It is such a stubborn task to find a quest, a purpose, in the golden swill that is a 'High Energy 40' and a 750 ml bottle of Seagrams 7, especially at 10 in the morning. I know the feeling I get when I have a beer or a cocktail in the middle of the afternoon--maybe it's football Sunday, maybe I just graduated college--and I'm passed out by 5 p.m., ready to have at it again at 10 the same night. There are occasions, I'll admit, where drinking myself stupid is permissible, if not made enjoyable by my peers. I would never do this alone.

Somewhere in the abysmal pit that is my temporary roommate's darkness is a small glow of hope. Very small. So small, it might be lost in the piles of clothes and empty bottles that litter my former room's floor. The same place where I entered my own darkness, unrelated to alcohol, but connected through the same thread of anxiety that my friend harbors.

Let me catch you up.

Kit is my friend from the days of hanging out with Outback kids. Prior to that, I met him through his cousin, Sean, who is still one of my closest friends. As Sean entered married life shortly after I entered single freedom, I relied on Kit to keep me into the party scene where I could expand my acquaintances. It worked out for a few years. I met a few girls I eventually had one-night stands with, perhaps even a weekly fling or two. I met a handful of friends I still talk to even six years after, including my current roommate, Christine, who brought Kit with her when moving in.

I knew immediately accepting her bid to take over my second bedroom that I was trading a set of roommates with bad habits for another. The first week I thought nothing of how bad their drinking addiction had become. I ignored it, mostly. I shut myself up in my newly acquired master bedroom surrounded by plenty of fresh hobbies. Next door, though, a monster lingers - a monster I feel partly responsible for. You see, Christine has been providing money, alcohol, food and transportation for Kit--from what I can tell--for the last twelve months. She enables him. I provide a shelter for it. My responsibility for my own friend's demise is tied to this series of events.

What does a good friend do? I've always respected Kit. He was always a man's man, but charming nonetheless in his own right. His quick wit, love for guitar, and video games gives us enough in common to hang out and converse or interact for hours. Besides that, he is just a good friend. Now I sit ten feet from his bloated liver sleeping in the next room; a piss-drunk boy crashing after one final sip of his forty only to rise and continue the quest, skipping a beat to drunkenly dream of anything else. One good friend--shit, is it me?--has to have the ability to wake him from his world of ruin. To blow on his dimming ember of hope to keep him alive. Fuck, his mother is as messed up as he is. His extended family wants to get involved, but where are his brothers? His father? Have they left their poor brother and son, their service industry and college dropout, to suffer this terrible fate of alcoholism? Maybe somewhere someone feels that he deserves this, but I bet it's painful to bear in their heart, and only half as hard on their liver.