(Note: This story contains an account of suicide -- the national suicide hotline is 988 and is staffed 24/7 with people who can help, among other resources. Names of people and places have been altered.)
The Dixie Tavern is a venerable old dive in the Midwest city of Rustown with $2 margaritas, red padded leather around the bar, and nary a hint that its name will ever change. Graced by a men's-room sign that reads This is a bathroom, not an internet cafe. S__ and Git!, it functioned as the scene of a wake we attended last year for a friend named Flattop. Flattop had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in September. The room felt like it was wrapping you in a warm embrace. Caterers came, longnecks were nursed, and for that afternoon, the gritty establishment served the sacred function of a house of mourning. As I rested my elbows over the leather padding at the edge of the old rustbelt bar with Flattop's friends, a fraternity that grief alone can forge, I couldn't help thinking about the roughneck patrons, southern emigres most likely fresh from some woebegone factory floor, who might have wound up bloodied and concussed in some shot-soaked altercation were it not for the bar's prescient, upholstered design.
You could do worse for a wake than this place.
Denise and I didn't know at the time how Flattop had died – only that he'd been having a lot of health issues, was in some physical pain and had been mourning the loss of his 30-year-old son to opioids.
There had been a late night text from Flattop a few days earlier:
I responded this way initially, right back via text message:
The following day, when I finally got him on the phone, we were on the way to do a show in Norwich, New York. By then, Flattop was almost jubilant. His doctor had adjusted his iron levels and he was 100% better. But, apparently, sometime during our show the following evening, he passed.
