I remember when I was eleven years old, I overheard a private conversation between them. My father’s business partner, Jerry, had been stealing assets from the company. This business partner was supposedly one of my father’s closest friends. My father had helped him at a time when his own family had thrown him to the streets. He was a recovering alcoholic with no work experience and a work ethic that had been crippled by his family’s wealth. His money was his identity. His trust-fund was his ticket out of dealing with any consequences. My dad actually met the guy outside a phone-booth somewhere in Europe. He needed to make a call but had run out of pocket change. A few months later, my dad was financing Jerry’s stint in rehab. And a few years later, my dad was signing him onto be a co-owner of Elixir Enterprise. Over the span of five or six years, their small-town company transformed into an internationally-competitive machine. During those years, we saw so much of Jerry that he was practically my second dad. He had his own seat at our dinner table. He spent the holidays with us. It was Jerry who drove me on my first day of kindergarten. He taught me the letters of the alphabet and how to tie my first pair of sneakers.
I knew that Jerry liked his coffee black. That his favorite drink was a whiskey sour. That his shoe size was 11.5. And I knew that I was never supposed to ask Jerry about his “party days”. Eavesdropping on enough of my mother’s phone calls let me know why discussing Jerry’s party days was so taboo. He had lost his one true love in a horrible drunk-driving accident. The car veered off the road and into a tree. Jerry was driving and Haley, his fiancée, was in the passenger seat. Though he was at fault, Jerry was not charged. He was allowed to go on as if nothing had happened. But something had happened...he had lost Haley. The one person who had “understood” him for who he was. Brought up in a lifestyle identical to Jerry’s – Haley shared his jaded sentiments. It was as if the two of them had been cursed with an awareness. An awareness of a void that could not be filled by “things.” No matter how much they indulged, their appetite remained insatiable. And until they met each other, the only happiness they could feel was a counterfeit, contrived happiness they had learned from the people around them.
She was the one woman who had been able to calm him down with a simple touch, who had been willing to stay with him through the drunken nights when he was vomiting his insides out…crying about his high-society problems, begging to be saved from the torture. To have been responsible for losing Haley…to have nobody to blame but himself…to not be able to write a check and bring her back….it was an unbearable misery that was too real for Jerry. He described it to my father as “the sensation of being torched alive, slowly, without mercy, an agonizing pain worse than anything he’s ever felt.”
It was the wake-up call he needed. He was ready to be sober…but the months following the accident, Jerry struggled to maintain his sobriety. Each relapse was more reckless than the last until eventually his family cut him off financially…leaving him with just under fifty grand. It took Jerry six days to blow the last of his money. Suddenly, he was dirt poor without a single friend who gave a shit. Without money to cushion his fall, without alcohol to numb his pain, without Haley to heal his wounds…Jerry found himself stranded in an unfamiliar part of Switzerland, standing outside a phone booth, begging for coins. He had called his parents in New York, his cousin in Chicago, his brother in DC…nobody had picked up. He tried his parents again, shrieking loudly as he heard his mother’s voice on the other line “Sorry, we can’t come to the phone right now…”
He was all out of coins and all out of hope. Desperate and alone, Jerry told himself he would ask one more stranger for help...and if unsuccessful he would jump in front of one of the trains across the street. The thought of suicide was oddly comforting.
It was August 1992. My dad was in Zurich for some annual work-related conference. He was about to catch a train to the airport when a disheveled man standing outside the phone booth asked him if he could spare some change…
I've asked my dad countless times...what made him stop in that moment. Why didn’t he just keep walking...wasn’t he going to miss his train? My dad’s answer has always been the same: he could feel the desperation in Jerry’s eyes, he could feel the hopelessness....and to help another man in his time of greatest need – without expecting anything in return – well, that is the essence of humanity…without it, our lives are meaningless.
Despite all the love my parents had shown him, Jerry betrayed them in a way nobody deserves.
