Oh Dave, Where Are You?

My friend won a trip to London and came down with schizophrenia

If you are one of those people who plan their lives down to the finest detail, I bid you step back from that view for a moment and hear the story of my friend Dave, who had no time to prepare.

Dave was impossible to miss. His skin was the color of buttermilk. He had bright orange hair and a heavily freckled face, and, at a skinny six-foot-one, moved effortlessly and with a surprising grace. At 23, he was comfortable in a suit and tie. And though he could not get a date to save his life, he would describe his married life to-be to me in fine detail in the breakroom at Simmons Burke Office Machines, as we ate donuts and slurped coffee that tasted like mud.

Dave would sit quietly at the long conference table at the Monday morning sales meetings as the golden boys hatched their plans for market domination. Dave was a natural born salesman, though not “one of the guys.” With virtually no effort at all, he could sell the hell out of photocopiers and office machines.

As the company’s customer trainer, I would often tail him around Denver in my clunky old Toyota, often getting lost, circling blocks endlessly before finally locating our customer companies. There were times, when Dave would allow himself a break in his endless sales calls, that we would meet for lunch. I learned that he had a very specific plan for his life. He was saving up to buy a house for a family that would surely be there some day, and investing his sizable paychecks in the stock market.

Dave had it all figured out.

At Christmas that year, I received as a year-end bonus a Gwaltney 10-pound bone-in ham. Dave won Salesman of the Year — and an all-expense-paid trip to London for two.

A few days later, he waved me into the breakroom and under the glare of the fluorescents, lamented the lack of a woman in his life. Someone he might woo with a trip to England. Then he got an altogether different idea.

“Why don’t you come with me?” he asked. I was his best friend — something I didn’t even know.

“Hell, yeah,” I said without pause.

My excitement lit up the subsequent days. I spent two weeks actually enjoying the job. Everything just glowed.

But I never made it to London. And neither did Dave.

He didn’t show up at work — for a week. My phone calls were all met with no response. Erma, the beehive dooed VP of Human Resources, would only say that Dave was ill. I knew little about his family and I wasn’t sure who his other friends were. One night, I went over to his house and rapped on the doors and windows, but to no response.

Dave was gone.

The weeks ticked on. The calendar pages flipped up and whooshed off into the distance. Tumbleweeds blew across Dave’s desk (well, it caught some dust). In time I got on with the task of being undirected, at which I excelled, as thoughts of Dave receded. Every so often I lamented the trip that was not to be.

Months passed.

Years.

A decade.

I moved around the country —to the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston — working mainly for high tech companies.

A few years ago, I found myself back in Denver to visit family. On this one cold March afternoon, I buttoned up my coat against the wind and marched into the public library, settled into a chair and picked up the book on the table in front of me, a photo essay of the Caribbean.

A homeless man shuffled by in ripped jeans and old Reeboks, cocooned in a massive balloon-like coat, and straining under the weight of a huge backpack slung over his shoulder.

I recognized Dave immediately.

His trademark orange hair had become gray and wild, though still flecked with color. His face was cracked granite and white-whiskered, the irises of his eyes tinged in the corners in yellow. His body was still slender.

I stared at him, flummoxed. He drifted right by me, toting the big pack, which was filled to capacity, maybe with all those plans and dreams that he’d hatched and nursed long ago — the family, the house, the stock portfolio — buried down among the cans and bottles and who knew what else that was in there. I imagined his other future, the unlived one, pressed tightly into some inner pocket, pulsing with latent energy, threatening to blow the bag to pieces.

When he saw me I smiled and offered my warmest hello. He squinted uncomprehendingly, staring.

“Dave?” I said quietly.

He didn’t respond or even look at me.

“Dave? Do you remember me? Lev? From Simmons Burke?”

His head slowly turned my way as he considered this stranger before him. He hesitated for a moment, thinking. Then he gathered himself up nervously and hurried away to the far side of the room.

I went over to the librarian and asked about him. She nodded. “My guess is schizophrenia,” she said. “He’s been coming here for years. Poor guy.”

“Jesus, man.” I couldn’t believe it.

Apparently, back in the almost-London days, Dave’s genes had tripped a time bomb that was planted in him. That Dave, the one that I’d known, was gone. The illness, I knew, could hit perfectly healthy people in the prime of their lives, in their teens and twenties.

I stared at my old orange friend as I felt a gust of cold reality blast through the London-shaped hole in me, the one I’d forgotten about until now, obliterating the warm feel of the library. My mind flitted back to the trip that was not to be, the mystery solved after 25 years.

To me, London will always be a ruined place, a city that will forever be tinged by nature’s injustice. That sad story was written as plain as day on the face of the man huddled over by the wall.

Dave was squatted down, examining something on the ground. Watching him, I wondered if he still occasionally thought about London, if he remembered being Salesman of the Year, or that he had once been a young man with a very bright future.

There is a scene at the end of the movie Saving Private Ryan where we learn that many soldiers have given their lives to save a single man. The captain of the rescue team, about to die himself, whispers his last words to Ryan, the man who will return safely home to lead a normal life.

“Earn this,” the captain says. “Earn it.”

Sitting there in the library, I imagined the old — or rather, the young — Dave, standing beside me, drawing a breath just like the captain had, saying those same words to me.

Stories and essays by Lev Metropol

unGlommed by Lev Metropol