tough week

I've been recovering all week from a cold that hung over me like fog in San Francisco. It's mostly gone, though I still have a coughing fit here and there. Bouncing around from work to errands to sleep while in a constant sickly-daze takes a lot out of you, and after work yesterday I came home and went to bed at 3:30 in the afternoon.

I woke up about five hours later and got burritos with my roommate. As we walked back in, my phone rang.

My best friend delivered the news that his ex, Manny, had died the night before. I wish I could say it was a shocking thing, but honestly, it wasn't. Manny had been slowly committing suicide for the past two years.

As a teenager, he developed a rather nasty drug and alcohol habit and essentially tore his insides to shreds. After one night too many in an ER, he pulled himself together and learned about the miracle of moderation. He dropped the hard stuff entirely and learned how to limit himself on the legal stuff. It was quite impressive, considering his chosen career as a sommelier. I met him a few weeks after N started dating him, and instantly liked the guy. As time went by, he became an extension of my best friend -- teaching me all about wine, meeting up for dinner, and being an all-around supportive, caring person.

Shortly after I left town, it started to go downhill. He had left his stable job to work at a posh private club that was just opening. After a disastrous start the club, bleeding money, let Manny go since they couldn't afford his paycheck. And that's where it began. His moderation went out the window. Certain forbidden items suddenly sprang up again.

He returned to some level of stability when he landed a new job, but six months later he was caught stealing from the wine cellar. It just got worse from there, until he was quaffing two liters of vodka a day, bouncing from job to job... including one for Gordon Ramsay. Gordon shoved him out the door after three days.

N couldn't take it anymore. He was paying the rent, the bills, and Manny was doing nothing but slowly self-destructing. Finally, after supporting him for six months like this, N presented an ultimatum... which was not met, and decided to break the lease.

The last time I saw Manny was shortly after this. He had dried blood around his nostrils and white powder in his nose. He was angry at N, and made a clumsy pass at me in his inebriated state. Two weeks later, he left New York and moved back in with his mother in Las Vegas.

Every once in a while we'd hear updates about how he was doing... it was always a roller coaster, and he never quite got it back together. The last two years were punctuated by hospital visits as one by one his internal organs signaled distress until this week when, finally, his liver and kidneys gave out for good. He passed away on Friday night.

I've been dealing with this through stunned silence. Perhaps it is that I have been mourning the loss of my friend for the past two years, and a sense of finality is more of a relief than anything else. I miss my friend a lot though, and I choose to remember the supportive, funny, goofy spirit I met at first rather than the broken and weak man he became.

Goodbye, Manny. I hope you have found peace again.