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The drunken savior
As a young boy growing up in the hills of Virginia there really wasn’t much to do or many people to look up to. Yes there were the usual people like the police, fire fighters, school teachers, parents, local sports heroes but none of these were my hero. These people would never do as a hero for a young boy that was deep into troubling thing that no boy should ever know of.
I can honestly say that my hero saved my life even though at the time I did not understand or know the total impact on my life. Who could predict that a man who stayed drunk from one day to the next and was considered to be a worthless bum by everyone in my small town of less than four thousand people.
There were two men in my hometown that were considered to be the town drunks and bums. All most every mother and father forbid their children form going near either of the two men. However troubled boys like me found that we could give either man the money for beer, wine or liquor and a few bucks for him to get himself some cheap wine and they were all too happy to go into the a store and buy us what we wanted.
One of these men would become my Hero. Wright Collins was his name, a once great educator at a southern college had become a broke man. His story is that of love, love for a woman that broke his heart and left him a shattered man. This man that once taught math to young men and women with open end egger minds, minds like sponges ready to absorb all the knowledge Wright had to offer.
I could go on and tell you the reader of this man’s life and how he was utterly destroyed by love, but that would not make him a hero. No this is the tale of how a drunken broken man with what seemed to be nothing to offer would become the saviour of on young boy. I was this boy.
I was a boy of thirteen when I started my encounters with Wright Collins and I was deep into things I should not have been into. Drugs and alcohol were already a major part of my life and the road I was traveling would have surely lead me to prison if it were not for what I learned from Wright Collins.
That’s correct a lowly town drunk would teach me more than any school could ever do. I use to skip school two or three times a week and it was one of those days where I met Wright and started to hang around him and enjoy a good day of drinking and listening to him ramble on about those day when he taught students algebra, geometry, calculus and how the best of those students went on to become great business men and women, engineers, lawyers and doctors.
Wright never once tried to make me go to school or explain to me how much I would benefit from a good education. No he just sat there reminiscing about past glories and how all that was ripped from him when the one thing, the one person he loved more than life it’s self betrayed him and left him the wreck that he now was.
As those days pasted by me like wind through a tree I would have never believed how much Wright was teaching me. It would be years after I was grown and he had passed away before I would learn the real things Wright taught me and that had stuck with me throughout me life. Wright always said that a person must have something to believe in or what was the point in living. One hot summer day he asked me what I believed in and I responded I don’t know. Maybe GOD I finally replied.
GOD, he asked. He then asked me why. I could not answer him then and still today I am not sure I could answer his question. He looked at and said “no I don’t think you believe in anything, not even yourself. And that was a shame.” That statement would haunt me from time to time but when he died they haunted me no more.
While I was still young Wright told me everyone needed to believe in something even him. So I asked him what he believed and he told me his-self and the philosophies he lived his life by or at least tried to. I asked him what those were and he refused to tell me. He said I was to young to understand them so it would be a waste of time to explain them to at that moment. I dropped the subject for the moment but I would later ask for this information. Until then I would continue down the same path I was traveling until I needed him to tell me of his philosophies, philosophies that would later save me.
I went to Wright one day when I was about sixteen and I wanted him to buy me some whiskey and I would in turn give him enough money to buy himself two bottles of his favorite wine. He took the money and I waited in his one room shack he had built from old pallets, bits of wood and tin. It was far from the grand house he used to live in when he was teaching. Most of us would not even allow a dog to sleep in this shack but Wright was happy he had four walls and a roof to keep the water out when it rained. The walls were lined with old newspapers, magazine, and pages torn from Sear and Roebucks catalog. This was the only insulation between him and the cold of the night’s air.
This was the place Wright spent most of his days and nights when he wasn’t in town looking for someone to be kind enough to buy him a bottle. If he found someone that kind he would drink every drop and stagger to the local jail and they would put him in a cell to sleep it off and the next morning give him a meal and a few dollars. Those few dollars would of course be spent on more wine.
In his shack he had a metal box with a piece of stove pipe he had found and this he used to heat the room and heat up a can of soup, beans, or some other little something he would live off of. Live off of, yeah if that is what you want to call it. If he eat something two or three times a week he was doing good. Day after day the only thing he put into his body was that cheap wine. You know the wine I’m talking about the stuff that today might cost $4.00 back then cost $1 at best. Most of us would not dare drink something as bad as what Wright drank and lived off of.
How many of you would bath in a river, eat spoiled meat. I know I wouldn’t but Wright did this daily. Well enough of the backtracking. I was sixteen and a girl broke my heart. I went to Wright crying and half stoned out of my mind, ready to do something really stupid. Wright asked if I had any money for liquor or beer. Like usual I had a few bucks on me and I gave it to Wright. He asked me to walk with him down to the store and then we would go have a drink and get nice and drunk and talk. So I went with him to store and we came back to his shack where I proceeded to down a 5th of jack. You might look down on someone buying alcohol for a minor as I do today, but that day Wright saw I needed something and he needed something so we filled each other’s needs for a while.
As I sat there drinking my jack Wright started telling me of his philosophies and if I was smart I would find something to guide my life or I would someday not have one at all. Wright went on to explain how his philosophies help him make from day to day. I knew was trying to get me to ask so I did. “What are these philosophies you keep talking about?”
Well he said, their mine not yours. However maybe mine can help you find yours. Number one is “Have fun with life, don’t let life have fun with you.” He said that meant life will always throw you a curve ball from time to time and try to get you off your game. If you realize that you know that life is funny and should be fun. Find ways to live your life so that you can get the most amount of fun and enjoyment from it.
Number two: You are the best you you can be. There is only one me and only one you so we have to be the best one there is. We have to be the prettiest, ugliest, smartest, dumbest, because there is only one of us. We are all this each and every day of our lives weather or not we want to be. So why not except this fact and be the best us we can be.
Number Three: Do what feels good. As long as it doesn’t hurt yourself or others do what feels good. As long as you do that you can never go wrong.
Well I didn’t take much stoke in his words that day and I continued down the same path I had been going down. But that night I was supposed to go out with some friends but I stayed with Wright and got stinking drunk instead. The friends did go out without me and they got into some real trouble and ended up going to jail for drug possession. If I had not have went to Wright’s that day I too would have been sitting behind bars that night. But this wasn’t how he saved me.
Well one night after I had grown up and had my first child (at 19) I read the tragic end to Wright’s life. It was a bitter cold winter night and Wright had been in town and scrapped up enough money to get real drunk on that cheap wine. He did like he always had and went to the town jail so he could sleep it off like he had done hundreds of times before. That night he was met with a young officer telling him that he had to go home. It seems that there were no rooms at the jail and Wright would have no choice but to go home.
Well Wright was too drunk to walk that distance and he knew it. He walked around the building and found an open window leading down to the basement of the jail. He climbed in where he was sure he would be safe and warm and fell asleep. It was two weeks before someone went down to that basement and found Wright laying there dead. The night Wright climb into the basement the temperature had dropped to below zero. My friend, my teacher, a man the town knew as a bum, but a man I knew to be my salvation had frozen to death.
There was but a small paragraph in the paper describing how Wright died. That’s all the town seemed to think his death was worth. The county buried him in a poppers grave with no stone or marker that showed anyone who laid there beneath their feet. He died much like he lived, drunk and only warmed by the alcohol he consumed. It did nothing to help him live but did everything to cause his death.
A few years later I was unemployed and doing what I ever I could find to earn money to feed and house my wife and children. I had stolen food from people’s gardens and I was getting very disparate. I was starting to think about getting back into something that I had not done in a long time. I was thinking of asking a few people I knew from the old days to set me up with something. I had to find a way to feed my kids.
Almost ready to get back into something that could have been more divesting to my family than anything else ever could. I was out scrapping, that’s looking for things that can be sold to junk yards or today recycling places, and found myself in what looked like a cemetery. I looked around for anything I could sell when I found a small metal plate on the ground. It read Wright Collins.
After all this time I never knew where they had lain him to rest I would find him in what was looking like my moment of desperation. I knelt down beside the grave and started pulling the weeds from around the metal plate when I asked Wright what should I do. I’m not sure why I would ask a dead man that, like he could answer me. Would he speak beyond the grave and give me some bit of wisdom that would help me.
Well to my surprise that’s what happened in a way. I sat there for a few minutes when I started to cry. I looked around to make sure no one was around and wiped my eyes with my jacket sleeve. I asked myself what I was doing, crying over a man that had been dead for years and asking him for help. I must have lost my mind.
Then it hit me, those words he kept telling me over and over again. A man has to believe in something, a man needs something to live his life by or why live it at all. His philosophies started ringing in my ears. I shook my head as if to tell Wright I understood. I finally understood what he had desperately tried to teach me.
It only took his death, me finding him in my moment of need to get through to me, but through to me it did. Wright’s words had gotten through to me. When I needed him the most he was there for me even after death he was there.
I never did call the people I knew from the old days. I continued to struggle trying to feed my family as best I could. However I never went backwards, I never went back to doing those things I did as a young boy. Thanks to Wright I was able to move past that and find other ways to make ends meet.
Well I went on to becoming the man Wright knew I could be. Loving fathers doing whatever he can to ensure his children are cared for. I went back to school and had a great life. Living it by the philosophies a drunken bum, if not for Wright I would have went the wrong way. He saved me that day and I guess it’s true the dead can talk if we listen to them. This is why I say Wright Collins is my Superhero and always will be. I hope you find someone in your life that can become your hero if you do not have one. Maybe one day their words or actions will help you in ways you yet to know.
In loving memory of my Hero Wright Collins.

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 10.05.2012

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