The last time I saw you alive was on the corner of 16th and Mission begging for money which I knew was for drugs. And I thought about the time when we were around 12 or 13 and cooked some hot dogs in my backyard using Kleenex tissues for the fire and wire hangers to hold the hot dogs, but didn’t realize that sparks had caught the fence so that when we returned, the firemen were there, and the only thing that kept us from going to juvenile hall was my grandmother assuring them that our parents would deal with us severely. And I remember that I was grounded for weeks and lost my allowance for months to help pay for the fence.
You pretty much got the same, plus a good beating from your father. I remember we weren’t such good friends after that, and pretty much lost contact after I went away to college, but I heard about your hard times periodically from another friend on the block with whom I kept in touch, who one day called to tell me you finally od’d at your parents’ house in the suburbs, and I could only imagine what it must have been like for your mother to find you lying there like that, still a relatively young man, but looking so much older from all the abuse and hard living.