Mourning David

 

I got to know David when his family moved to Malden from California.  Our mothers had been close in their youth and still were at that time…or thought they were anyway.  Although he was considerably older than me, we got along fine.  In those days of flat top haircuts and before the Beatles invaded the U.S., David was cool, to me at least.

We went into his bedroom to talk.

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At this point you are probably expecting to hear a sordid tale about how I was molested or worse, but that’s not what I’m going to tell you because nothing like that happened.  David was a good kid.

We talked much like we were the same age.  Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t retarded, or even “slow”.  No, he was a normal, intelligent, perhaps even above average in intelligence, young man.  He was big and kind and patient with a kid like me.  Kind of like a big brother should be.

So nothing sordid happened.  First we sat on the floor and he told me tales of the great state of California and all the fun he’d had there.  He missed the state and he really missed his friends there.  Malden was “backwards”, even more then than now, and he just didn’t fit in.

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We were sitting on the floor talking when I noticed something hanging from his ceiling and I asked him about it.  We climbed onto his bed and lay there as he told me about the feather hanging by a thread.  I really don’t remember what kind of feather it was but something tells me it was from a seagull or maybe a pigeon.  Like I said, I don’t really remember.  What I do recall is lying there as he pulled his old Daisy BB gun out from under his bed and cocked it.  He held the cocked but unloaded weapon at arm’s length and pulled the trigger.

The burst of air caused the feather to dance, perhaps like it would on a warm California breeze.  We laughed to see the plume fluttering on the end of its tether for a few seconds before settling down.  As it slowed its movement, David cocked the rifle and fired again.  It wasn’t so funny this time and, as it stopped swinging, my friend let the BB gun drop to lie on the bed.

He sighed and told me how much he missed California.  He said he was determined to get back to his favorite state.  Things would be better there.

My family’s only move up to that point had been across town so I didn’t understand and I told him so.

I don’t know if he thought it would help clarify the feelings he had but he rolled over and reached under the bed again.  This time he pulled out a paper bag that looked like it was inflated and tied shut.  I was still perplexed but my friend started to untie the binding as he explained.  Before they’d left California he had filled the bag with air and bound it.  Now, whenever he got really homesick, he’d stick his nose in the bag and breathe some California air.

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Now, I may have been young, but I wasn’t dumb.  I knew that any California air had been exhausted from the bag long ago.  I’m sure David knew that too, but I understood that the bag wasn’t about the air anyway.  It was about a tie with the place where he was happiest.  It was a reminder that California was still there.  It was still reachable, if he could just find a way to get back.

In the few years David’s family lived in Malden, we didn’t get together very often…less and less as the time passed.

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David did make some friends, but they weren’t good people.  He found himself involved in some negative activities.  He got into some trouble.  My friend got arrested for breaking into a man’s house and stealing some collectibles, among other things.  The court sent him away for a while, to a reformatory or whatever they were called in those days.

Not too long after he was released from the youth facility his family did move back to California.  David had gotten his wish.  He was back in the state he loved.

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The rest of David’s story I learned after the fact.  I heard it from Mom who got it from David’s aunt in California, so the main facts are correct and verifiable.

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Unfortunately, David’s negative activities increased when he got back to his home state.  He joined a motorcycle gang in those days of the Hell’s Angels, when there were no well-known positive biker gangs.  They got into more trouble and things were looking bleak for my friend.  I hoped he would get a grip on life and things would go well.

David moved out of the city he loved and out into the wilderness.  This was in the midst of the back-to-the-land movement when hippies abandoned society and lived fairly innocuously off-grid.  I saw the change as an effort by him to get straight and live softly on the earth.  I thought he was finished with his life of crime.

Not my friend.  He sold drugs to generate an income.

I didn’t know all this at the time.  I found out about it after the police did.  They were investigating a death…David’s.

He had passed away in his cabin in the woods after living there, and selling drugs out of it, for a while.  His wife had long ago grown tired of trying to save him and ended their marriage.  She had taken their daughter when she left.  All alone, David had suffered a massive heart attack and died out there.  His body wasn’t discovered for some time.  By then, the coroner’s job was made even more unpleasant than normal.

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I mourned my friend but had followed his illegal activities from a distance and he had long been beyond my ability to help.

I later learned that, while he had lived in Malden, his father had been molesting David’s older sister.  I remembered her as a beautiful, slender blonde who had been as friendly to me as David had.  Eventually their dad had started sending her to an area bar to turn tricks and bring the money back to the family.

I found myself wondering if he had also sent David out to steal things to help support the family.

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I don’t know and I doubt I ever will, but I like to think all of my friend’s pain is gone now.

I wish you peace, my friend.  May your troubles be gone like a feather drifting on a warm California breeze.

 

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