A Cautionary FAIL

Had a brush with mortality today. Fortunately not my own, but it still gives one pause.

I’m talking about a guy I used to work with; I never could pronounce or spell his name correctly so I always just called him Steve Bitchin’, because it was close enough, and it amused me.

Thanks to my work-from-home status, I never reported directly to him or had to share office space with him. By all accounts, this was a blessing for both of us, not to mention the rest of the office.

Because one of my core weaknesses is, I do not suffer fools gladly. And I don’t know if the Lord ever put a more oblivious, self-righteous fool on this earth than Steve Bitchin’. If He did, I don’t reckon I’ve met the number one fool yet, and I’ve met a lot of fools.

Not that Steve was all bad. He could do shtick. Whenever I’d call up, he’d answer the phone with the name of the company and I’d ask, “Who is this?” He’d say, “Steve,” and I’d reply “Bitchin’!” I’d laugh to myself at the Cheech and Chong reference that just sailed over his head—again—then he’d get all excited and tell me about the latest long-ass car drive he undertook to see some eminently forgettable, forgotten 90s MOR band; Collective Soul and Soul Asylum being the examples that come immediately to mind, and I’d feel sorry for him in spite of myself, the same way I always do for people with pedestrian taste in music.

Additionally, I understand some considered him quite easy on the eyes. But those are the only laudable qualities that come to mind off the top of my head.

See, Steve was angry and short-tempered, and he didn’t have a lot of facts in hand to back up his ill-humor. He was just pissed at the world and being pissed was plenty good enough for him. The few actual conversations I had with him were intense, loopy things—imagine the smoke monster from LOST chasing, and eating, its own tail. That’s what talking to Steve was like—that left me alternately bemused and frustrated.

He was also one of My Guys, with a monkey on his back the size of the Empire State Building. I tried to use that as a door into liking the guy, but he was one of those obnoxious 12-steppers who went to meetings (then didn’t, to catastrophic results) and liked to prosthelytize about the program he adhered to at best occasionally. But that’s okay. He’s the kind of guy The Program was built for; there’s always a failure rate built into expectations and he never failed to fill that requirement.

More importantly for me though—because in the end, a person’s sobriety status is their own damn business if it doesn’t affect their ability to do their job—he was ethically indifferent. And that’s being polite, respectful of the circumstances.

Here’s the worst thing he did, category: journalism, and it’s why I’m co conflicted today. While he was editor of the weekly newspaper I still work for from afar, our mainstay columnist died of old age. It was very sad. He’d written his travel column for us for years and before that, he was a local celebrity for decades with the town’s big daily paper. He was a Name Around Town and we had his last ten years’ worth of columns. I thought we’d do something special for the guy; instead Steve copied and pasted his obit from the daily paper’s website and then ran it as our obit. With a fraudulent in-house byline. Complete with the same misquote from one of our current columnists. It was a textbook example of indisputable plagiarism.

A Faithful Reader pointed it out to me and I lost my shit. I wanted him fired. I’d had his predecessor sacked for plagiarism and had no qualms about doing the same to him. To steal your own columnist’s obit and call it your own? Well, there were no words.

In the end, cooler heads prevailed. For all his shortcomings, Steve ran a quiet, relaxed office and his co-workers promised to keep a closer eye on him and I chose to keep my mouth shut. I used to work in that office and respected the value they attached to maintaining a harmonious work environment. I forget whether or not the corporate office was made aware of his unforgivable ethical lapse, but if they were, it wasn’t by me.

Why am I talking about Steve Bitchin’ in the past tense? I got an email last week, titled “Steve Update” from a friend who still works at the office. I expected the usual hilarity of his latest misadventures, instead I got this:

Thought I’d let you know that Steve is in a coma and on life support -- apparently he wrecked his car on Saturday. His mom just called and it’s not looking good at all. I guess he checked himself out of the hospital after the wreck against doctor’s advice. His dad and daughter found him at his place on Sunday morning and called 911. They didn’t even  know he’d been in a car accident. Not sure if this has to do with drug overdose, head trauma or both.

I immediately felt like a dick. I’ve always treated this guy like shit. If you told me W dropped dead tomorrow, I’d feel like an asshole for all the awful things I’ve said about him over the years. It’s just the Catholic Way: Sin, repent, repeat.

I called up and spoke to the office manager, who said the story he’d been told was that Steve got quite wasted on something and went for a drive. He hit a tree and rolled his car, gravely injuring himself. Somehow he ended up at the hospital but checked himself out, then (somehow) got home and was found ten hours later, by his poor father and daughter, unresponsive.

The fella I spoke to said Steve’s family was obviously devastated, but he got the sense from talking to the parents that they’d been girding for this day for a long time. As I alluded to earlier, this wasn’t Steve’s first trip to the rodeo.

Later in the day, another guy I work with, from another paper, called up to tell me he wouldn’t be coming into work that day; he was sick as shit, he had to pick his girlfriend up at the airport but the car battery died along the way and he had to remove the battery and lug it in his formerly-nice backpack, sick, six blocks in the rain to buy a replacement that was four times what he expected it would cost. That was the point that I got ahold of him. And he told me his story and being the dick that I am, in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “Well, that means an awesome day for me today but a nightmare of a day tomorrow,” when our paper is due on the presses.

As he began to run out of steam, I jumped in and started to tell him the story of Steve Bitchin’ (we all work for the same parent company). See, the guy who’s sick and having a bad day? He’s another one of Us. Over time I’ve kind of become his unofficial sponsor. Or at least I was near the top of his drunk-dial list when he used to do that. Anyway, I can tell when a case for falling off the wagon is being built and, since I was handed the opportunity, I decided to try to nip it in the bud.

So I told my friend the whole sad Steve Bitchin’ story, including speculation and details which I have chosen to leave out of this accounting. It remains to be seen whether or not it had the sobering effect I was going for, at least for my friend. But it sure has for me. I didn’t even like Steve very much and only met him maybe a dozen times and I’ve been under a cloud since I got the news.

I mean, he was an otherwise healthy guy; he just turned 45 but I had him pegged for his mid-30s. He’s got an ex-wife who maybe hates his guts, but two young daughters who almost certainly don’t. Parents to grieve for him—no parent should ever have to bury their child. And the mood around the office, I’m told, could be best described as funereal.

And then I get mad at the guy. This is a long post, representing a good chunk of time I could have spent doing something considerably more productive than writing up the depressing, unnecessary loss of a colleague to substance abuse. His family doesn’t have to be gathered at the hospital, making end-of-life decisions for their troubled, grown-up son. His little girls shouldn’t have to learn about the inevitable finality of mortality at this young an age, at the expense of their daddy.

It’s horrible and it’s fucked up. It seems incomprehensible. Putting the substance abuse and the car crash aside, by checking himself out of the hospital—going home when the hospital staff should have been performing life-saving procedures on him—he took a dangerous situation and made it a deadly one. And I don’t even know if that was the drugs doing the deciding or Steve; I have no idea how sober he was or wasn’t the few times I met him to form a baseline by which to measure his state of mind. I always just thought he came off as crazy and uninformed. A fellow best kept at a cordial, courteous arms’ length. The phrase “Let the Wookie win” always crossed my mind when I was visiting him in his office.

But every account puts his decision-making at the epicenter of the cascading series of misfortunes that left him comatose and on life support.

It’s been a week now since I heard the news. He’s had no brain activity since he was brought in and his organs are shutting down; his family took him off life support yesterday.

He died this morning.

What can you say? What lesson is there to be learned? Some people are just hard-wired for self-destruction. It seems like every close call just emboldens them to try something crazier the next time. Eventually, their luck plain runs out. Maybe their guardian angel was caught looking the other way. It’s hard to say, at 45, that his number was up though. This was operator error, plain and simple. It was completely avoidable at any number of steps along the way. I sincerely urge all the friends and loved ones who tried to help him screw his head on straight over the years to not blame themselves tonight. Guys like Steve—and me, and my buddy with the dead car battery in the rain for that matter—are time-bombs waiting to go off. Every day we don’t is a mitzvah.

And Steve’s untimely passing reminds us that some of us make it out alive and some don’t. There’s no getting by on good looks, no grading curve—it’s strictly a pass/fail proposition.

Instead of the snide riposte I had planned to end this sad report with (back when I was more angry with Steve than sad about him), instead I’ll close with lyrics from “Perfect Day,” by his much-loved Collective Soul:

There he stumbles
Falling to his knees
I think he tripped on reality

I have witnessed
Tragic comedies
That’s the world in which he leads

May whatever world Steve’s journey takes him to next be kind to him, and grade him on a generous curve.