A Better Time

Mitchell Becker had lived an interesting life.  At the age of nine, he had conspired with his best friend Roger.  They had quietly slipped down to Mickey’s basement one cold December day with a bottle of scotch his friend had stolen from his parents’ liquor cabinet.  Together, they had tried their first drink.  Roger had gone home with a headache.  Mickey decided he loved the stuff.  By the time he graduated from high school, Mickey was a raging alcoholic.  His attempt at the college experience had provided him with a wide range of other drug opportunities that did not enhance higher learning.  The added combination of cocaine and sedatives in his freshman year resulted in the end of Mickey’s college experience and a complete break from his family.  After spending nineteen years looking the other way, Mickey’s out of control lifestyle had become impossible to ignore and they wanted nothing more to do with him.

     Aside from being an addict, Mickey was also a kind and generous soul.  Even in the midst of a drunken stupor laced with a cocaine high, his strong sense of humanity shined through.  It was easy to like him and, in fact, very difficult to hate him.  So when he met Jodi Easton in what would have been his sophomore year, she had no choice but to be drawn to him.  He was so sweet and so broken down.  He only needed someone to rescue him.  Jodi was up to the challenge.

     They were married one year later, Jodi working at a telecommunications company as an installer, Mickey recovering from the previous night of celebration.  She had been sure that the marriage would settle him down and make him want to re-prioritize his life.  After five years of promises and subsequent relapses, Jodi finally packed Mickey’s few belongings and set them out on the front lawn.  At three AM, he had arrived back at home.  He never gained access back inside the house or Jodi’s life.

     The final day of the marriage was the beginning of the end for Mickey.  There was no one there to rescue him from himself now.  Both his family and his wife had had enough.  He had no money to survive on his own and would sleep on sofas or floors, usually under the roof of where ever the party had ended the night before.

     The mornings were the worst time of all.  Usually he had to struggle to remember what had happened the previous evening and would shudder with disgust when he did remember.  By the afternoon, those memories were replaced with a temporary sense of drug-induced well being.  Mickey was able to sustain this lifestyle for ten years.      

     The final day of Mickey’s drug use landed him in the emergency room at Piedmont Hospital.  He had been found lying unconscious on the bathroom floor of an abandoned house, where apparently he had also been abandoned by his ‘friends.’  Perhaps they had been unaware of Mickey’s condition, or unable to provide a fair analysis due to their own state, but had it not been for a few children that had taken to the old house and adopted it as their daytime club house, Mickey would have never seen the light of day again.

     When Mickey awoke three days later, he took a long hard look at himself in the mirror.  He was thirty-five years old and had been found on a bathroom floor soaked in his own bodily fluids.  He had a choice.  He could return to the streets and die, or he could change his life.  No other options remained.