See here for Part 1
... When Vietnam had done filling him up with long-term poisons, Dave Ambrose came home to own and run a rock-and-roll bar, or rather, it owned and ran him. Hideous hours and the rewards of an overdraft drove him to a ski instructor job on what the Northeasters call mountains. Once in the pro-ski network, he sussed out a Western village that needed instructors but actively punished anyone who wanted basic government or even essential amenities. Six different jobs on the mountain, a failed restaurant and dozens of friends later, he woke up pulling wire in a crawl space under a log home. “I saw God,” he told me, “And God help me, He was number 12 Romex!”
The last time I saw Dave Ambrose, he dragged a transparent tube around his cabin-like home, with a couple of tiny pipes stuck up his nose that wheezed in oxygen. They had cut out one of his lungs. He dressed in pajamas that for some unfathomable reason had little blue Saturns with gold rings around them, house slippers and a moth-eaten old robe, the right pocket ripped out. My wife and I had driven over to deliver a casserole that should carry him through a couple of days before he had to be driven back down to the VA Hospital. He growled out that we should come in. We gingerly sank into a couch that had books about Tommy Jefferson piled up along with the Lewis and Clark Expedition and a polemic on FDR. “Can I getcha anything? Coffee? Margarita? Course I can't have neither. Coffee makes me pee myself and the drugs don't like the tequila. No? Then I got cake. Joe brought some over yesterday. I don't know who he's shtooping now, but she's a great cook. No, I lie. I know it's cake from Bessie Castillo at the Bakery.”
He fell into a stuffed chair like an oak tree hitting the ground. “So, tell me, how ya been? How's the writing going?” He nods to my wife. “How's the singing gig?” The cancer left him alone for another half year, before it crept into his second lung. We got word he was in hospice in his mother's house back East. Dead six months later. I know I was a bastard for not visiting him or calling – others could and did. I couldn't watch a demi-God waste away.
So long, Dave. We barely knew you.
Nice job. I think I have something in my eye. That was our Dave.
Too sad.
Such is how many go. Sometimes it's just to much to experience. How great that you remember and share. Recalling those who've passed we enliven the living. Excellent. Thanks!
I wanted more on every level. So good and sad and good.
Great story.