Scott turned to me and explained that Rich suffered from chronic colds, depression, and a sort of dementia that required that he and his wife constantly care for him. They served him hot chicken soup, baby food, and a special mush preparation they fortified with vitamins and minerals. They swathed him in blankets when he was overcome by chills. And they ordered him Beatles memorabilia from around-the-clock shopping channels to brighten his days. During the summers when he felt less sickly, Rich would sometimes emerge from the cottage when Scott and his wife were having back-yard barbecues and, trying to recapture the glory of his past, he’d do a feeble Beatles performance on a little stage Scott had built for him. The stage had a concrete scallop backdrop. Rich would dress in a black velveteen vest, a billowing white shirt, tattered black slacks, and wear cowboy boots or hole-ridden black slippers. Squinting his eyes in the glaring sunlight, he’d hobble toward the stage. Arthritis had turned his hands into gnarled claws and he struggled in vain to strum his electric guitar while Beatles music blared over loud speakers.
“It’s almost too unbearable to watch him up there,” Scott said. “But it’s good for him. It keeps his spirits up, you know?”
“I can’t take this anymore,” Scott’s wife said. “Can we go now?”
I thanked Scott for telling me the story and thanked him again for taking care of Rich. It really meant a lot to me. Scott shook my hand and said he and his wife had had enough of the reunion. It seemed he had been looking for someone—perhaps me in particular—to tell this story to and that once he had told the sad tale he felt free to leave the party, which, based on the expressions of him and his wife, had been a source of great displeasure for both of them.
I, too, felt no more reason to be at the gathering. Unnoticed, I exited the clubhouse and drove home to my lonely apartment. Getting out of my car in the dark subterranean parking lot, I contemplated the fate of Rich Drakos. I imagined him, a hunch-backed, sun-dried homunculus, doing his unconvincing Beatles act for Scott’s uncomfortable party guests before retiring back to his cottage where one of his caretakers spoon-fed him a bowl of fortified mush. Rich’s life was almost too pitiful to contemplate. But my pity wasn’t so much for him; it was for me. I was a fool and a madman who had wasted so many years envying the great Rich Drakos, the man who had been the measure of my own failed greatness, now lost forever.
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