Andrew
Growing and watching others do it too.
Yesterday, I had a long conversation with a man I always avoided.
Andrew was a ghetto rat. I was a self-righteous prick. We could tolerate one another, but like oil and water, never occupy the same space without effort.
I knew him as a small boy: sweet and quiet. A child of potential, like all children.
I moved away in 1996. When I returned twenty years later he was gone from everyone’s life. I would ask after him but his father and brother were always very tight-lipped.
I then lived here for a decade and Andrew reappeared in everyone’s life. At first it was as peripheral trouble for a young nephew who was trying to burn down his own life.
By then, Andrew was a scary-looking man. Dark and reserved. I should have reached out. I should have tried to reconnect with that little boy.
But I knew he had a hand in my nephew’s erosion and collapse. I was bitter about it. The less I had to do with him, the better.
He would come and go. Not consistently. Months would go by, sometimes years. Every time he reappeared, he had another child. At last count he had 5-6 from 4 different women.
Wrong Turns
He brought a girlfriend to our house of worship. She was a beautiful young woman, a complete mismatch to this man’s skeletal and scarred appearance.
She began to study the Bible and made progress, taking steps to turn her life around and raise her children to love and fear God.
He endorsed the effort at first, but in short order gave up. She did not.
After 18 months, he convinced her to go out to a club on a Saturday night. The place is called Haystack. I’ve never been. They don’t serve my kind there, and it looks like the sort of place where you could get tetanus walking through the door.
That night, two birthday parties got loud, then hostile.
Someone brought a gun.
Of course someone brings a f$@#ing gun. To a birthday party.
Once one weapon appeared, eight more came out.
So Haystack is apparently bad for tetanus and lead poisoning.
A fight broke out. Shots were fired.
Andrew’s girlfriend saw her cousin being threatened, picked up a gun that had fallen loose, and, according to the police report, fired toward the floor to scare off his attacker.
But between the muzzle and the floor was a man’s femoral artery.
Three minutes later he was unconscious.
After six, he was dead.
She is now serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison.
U-Turns
So, my self-righteousness isn’t completely without justification. Andrew was not a great person. In fact, he reminded me a great deal of my own cousins and uncles who were all drugs and violence.
He is now approaching 40.
I learn this as we converse and connect over his alcoholism. He is attending AA and working to stay sober. He hasn’t had a drink in 6 months.
I commend him on this and confess my own grandfather and mother were and are alcoholics. I share what I know of AA as seen through my mother’s eyes and my own time in Al-Anon (the twelve-step fellowship for those of us affected by someone else’s drinking).
It seems to warm him up that I am perhaps not the self-righteous prude I once was.
I don’t just understand addiction in the abstract. Andrew certainly has an intimate relationship with addiction. And it occurs to me how glibly I’ve seen and heard other men talk about those with addictions. As if with God’s help it is somehow easy. Which it can never be. With God, I would say ‘less hard’, but never easy.
Never.
Parallel Lanes
Andrew tells me of his probation, being arrested, and their effect on his family. With a 17-year-old, it has finally dawned on him how poor of an example he has been. His seven-year-old watches me as I speak with his father at length.
It is a moment of time travel. Andrew is both this aging man and the little boy. And it dawns on me that I am both versions of myself as well. Regardless of how rugged or smirched we become, the tiny canvas of when we were new never leaves.
Our older selves can comfort and reassure the person we once were, while that younger, unsullied version of us can remind us of all the hope we once carried. Some hopes were fulfilled, some remain ahead of us, and others became things we never could have imagined.
And yet, here we are.
Will this turn, which can never come too late, be soon enough to save any of his children from making the same mistakes?
Only time will tell.
Horizons
He is becoming a man who can help others. He has been to the pit, looked in the face of despair, and still found a reason to get up and smile.
Yes, he made genuinely bad choices; no, those choices do not exhaust what he is. It is very human to ignore that and label someone as “bad.” Approving or disapproving of someone’s actions is not the same thing as declaring a soul lost or found.
Besides, none of us were fingered as judges by God. Last time I checked, that is Jesus’ job.
Jehovah doesn’t do for us what we can do for ourselves. I am thankful to God that humans like Andrew can quit punishing themselves and accept that they are children of God as are we all. That he has value for being who he is, even if the rest of us didn’t always accept that person.
For certain, he is helping me to learn that my judgment and superiority likely did more harm than good. And maybe in the future, when I am tempted to be dogmatic and look down, I can instead be sympathetic and understanding. To help men and women like him feel not belittled and judged, but loved and seen.