As my funny little relationship with Brian started to get tiresome, I began spending more time with Job. He was this goofy Tlingit boy with a heart of gold. He was funny and kind and is still the best guitar player I have ever known. At the age of 12, he could hear a song once, learn it and then adjust it to make it his own. We both fell in love with Metallica and began to quickly fall in love with each other. It was puppy love at its finest.
The defining moment in our experience with each other was after we had been circling around each other for about a month in our group of friends. I was still with Brian and he had increased his bullying beyond private bashing and began to embarrass me publicly. I was the angry girl but I was still the sad, scared and shy little girl so I never stood up for myself.
One day after school, I went over to Cameron's to meet Brian there. He flaked on me. After waiting on Brian for a bit, I went next door to Job's house. He was home playing guitar. He saw that I looked down and asked if I was ok. I started crying and telling him about how Brian had flaked on me and how he had been treating me poorly. He listened intently and calmly but there was a fire behind his eyes as he listened. After I had finished my monologue, he said "hey, I need to run up to the gas station on the corner will you wait here for me? I'll be right back." I was a little put off because I had heightened anxiety about being left alone again by a boy twice in one day. But I relunctantly agreed, too tired to say otherwise.
My fears were quieted however when he came back ten minutes later with a single red rose that he had bought from the gas station. He handed it to me and said "you deserve for someone to buy you flowers."
After that, Brian faded away quickly and Job and I became super friends. We spent day after day together making prank calls, smoking weed and listening to music. I continued to marvel at how he seemed to grow into his guitar by the minute. As the violence and alcoholism raged on at home, I began to leave in the middle of the night when the fights between my parents would get bad and run in the dark to Job's house. It was about twenty minutes away on foot but I always got there faster. I would knock on his window in the middle of the night and he'd help me climb through the window. I would tell him about what was happening at home. Or I wouldnt, he knew. We would then listen to music all night until we fell asleep on the floor of his room next to the radio.
We didn't have sex until we had been spending time together for a solid year. It was another night that I had run to his house for peace. We were smoking Marlboro menthols that he had stolen from somehwere, one after one. He kissed me, in a shy and non-assumptive way. We had sex that night and, since we couldn't find a condom, used a plastic bag from Safeway. Even though it was a pretty derlict excuse for a condom, he was undoubtedly the most respectful person I have ever been with as far as safe sex went.
About a month after we had sex, I left my family home for good. I turned my stepfather in for abuse then started the year-long journey of couch surfing, sleeping outside and staying in the youth shelter downtown. The stress of leaving was overwhelming and, as it was the days before cell phones and Facebook, Job and I lost track of each other. After a whirlwind year of homelessness, I was on a plane to California just days before my fourteenth birthday.
Job and I saw each other once after that. It was 2003, I was twenty-one and on my own in California. I made a trip to Alaska to stay with my grandparents and looked Job up in the phone book. He was shocked to hear from me but remembered me vividly. We spent the rest of my trip together. Job had changed since I last saw him. He was still an amazing guitar player; the years of practice and love of music had turned him into some sort of prodigious musician. His life circumstances and journey had given him nowhere to outlet this talent. He was living with his older brother in a run-down trailer park near the old neighborhood and had developed a very heavy drinking habit. He had gained quite a bit of weight because of his alcohol use and had lost interest in things like basic hygiene. His eyes were still warm and full of life and we spent the first few days of my trip happy to be back in each others' company. He gave me a small diamond ring that he had been saving.
By the third day, things had started to deteriorate. He had been on a two-day bender at that point, which culminated in him taking an axe to his brother's dining table and chairs. I had a conversation with him on the stairs of that dumpy trailer, encouraging him to get help for his addiction. He refused. We did not speak again and I wouldn't return to Alaska until the winter of 2017.
About eight years later, I reconnected on Facebook with an old friend from Alaska who had also known Job. He said that Job had fallen very deep into alcoholism and was now homeless. He had a daughter somewhere that he never got to see. His mother had died and he didn't know. I cried, long and deep for Job that day, knowing that he was gone.
In January 2017, I was in downtown Anchorage, presenting at a Health Summit. I was walking downtown, soaking in my old hometown and internally remarking about how much and how little Anchorage had changed in the fourteen years that had passed since I last set foot in Alaska. I walked past the downtown bus depot and looked up to see a man my age in an oversized coat, staring off into space. He was very much intoxicated, exhibiting that wobbly stance that alcoholics have. I locked eyes with him, merely because of the movement of another person in my line of vision. The connection was brief and I didn't miss a step in my movement forward. A few seconds later, something hit me about that man and I realized that I knew him. I turned around to get a second look at it registered in my head and heart that this was Job. I stumbled a little in my walk forward, conflicted on whether or not I was really seeing what I was seeing and conflicted on whether or not I should turn back around and find out. I was still mid-decision when I turned around and he was gone.
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