Below The Fold

Leaving Las Vegas…

*Mark is drinking himself to death.

The only friend I still talk to with any regularity from college, Mark also, until his recent termination, wrote for a major metropolitan daily newspaper.

Mark is a drunk.

He’s been a drunk since we were in college, so functional that I never had a clue just how intoxicated he always was. I learned as we grew closer over the years, what a raging demon alcoholism was for him, and he’s been struggling with it for the better part of half his life.

Mark’s an award-winning writer, several times over. He’s fast, he’s smart and his talent is unmatched from anyone I’ve ever met. Mark was hired onto this major metropolitan daily straight from college, easily a full decade ahead of the “curve.”

Mark’s was married to another writer, a talented girl that we worked with on the college newspaper. Our other close friend, Chad, also worked on the paper with us. Chad covered a very famous murder case for a mid-sized daily newspaper, where he was the police beat reporter. Chad was killed a couple years ago. While walking on the beach with his fiancee in Florida on a cloudless day, he was struck in the head by lightning. Mark’s marriage ended shortly thereafter.

Mark had been sober for a while, and suffered a backslide not long after his marriage ended. The paper fired him. Then, the paper won several awards for his writing, and offered to bring him back on a probationary status. Mark was transferred from the sports beat, where he covered a top-tier market basketball team, to the city desk, where he labored in obscurity, working his way back into the paper’s good graces.

Eventually, Mark worked his way back to the sports desk, and back to his old gig.

And he lost it again. This time, for good.

I’d been trying to reach Mark for the last couple of weeks, to catch up. He always provides me with an honest, critical assessment of my writing, and I try to connect with him at least once or twice every couple of months. It’s hard for our paths to cross in person — during the day we’re both working, and at nights I’m covering bars, making me a bit of a pariah for an alcoholic’s company. I finally got ahold of him a little while ago. and he told me what’s been going on.

Mark’s been on a bender, non-stop, since Thanksgiving, when he locked himself inside his apartment with a couple cases of whisky and beer. His speech was horribly slurred, something which I’d never heard before, even when he was his most hammered back in college.

Mark’s teetering. He said he’s got an appointment tomorrow with a therapist that he met on his last rehab effort, which was part of the condition for his return to the paper. He said the therapist was the only person he’d talked to who wasn’t a monkey.

He said he was a, “big, black Motherfucker, who knew his shit, and I was completely blown away by what he had to say.” Mark said this therapist was his last hope.

“Otherwise, I’m-a take effrey shingle penny I got outtada bank and go to Lash Vegash, live it up, pish it all away on gambling and beautiful hookersh and then throw myshelf offa build’n,” he added.

His cell phone rang then, and he told me he had to go, but he promised he’d call me after his first appointment with the therapist.

And then he hung up.

*Names have been changed.