An Absence of Principal by Jimmy Patterson Read Free Book Online

years earlier. “Booze and cocaine all night, all day, from a Friday till sometime after midnight Sunday. I’d just lost my job. I remember I got in a fight, and I finally passed out in a field next to the garage where I had worked until they fired me for coming in too drunk one too many times. It was a blur then and still is now,” Tony said. “But it was just the one time.”
    Garrison remembered the week Tony came in to fess up to him and apologize for any wrong he had done him. He couldn’t understand why Tony had come to him at that time since he hadn’t seen him in so long, until he realized it was one of the Twelve Steps. He was coming to apologize, even though he hadn’t directly hurt Garrison.
    Tony had landed in plenty of trouble without jail during that time. He spent probably three good years of his life messed up on cocaine and whiskey, although he proved to be a high-functioning addict. After another weekend-long coke and booze binge he woke up in a gutter in West Odessa and was staring at a man who pulled him up, brushed him off and told him about the healing and saving power of God. Tony never strayed again. For hundreds of thousands of people messed up on the sauce and the dope, it can take a lifetime for that message to click. For Tony, he only had to hear it once. That weekend would be his last visit to rock bottom.
    “When I woke up I was looking at a man I didn’t know. He told me God loved me and wanted me to take charge of my life. And since that day I have. I haven’t strayed since, not once. That was eighteen years ago. I may still be a little unsure about how I got so bad that weekend but I do know for sure I have walked straight ever since. To think anyone would believe I killed someone, I’m sick about it.”
    Garrison had seen dope take down the strongest people. He remembered seeing a colleague, a healthy 50-year-old man, shaking uncontrollably one Saturday afternoon sitting in his BMW while his 10-year-old daughter played soccer 100 feet away. Garrison remembered the man, an engineer he went to church with, blamed his tremors on a flu vaccine. Three months later, the man was dead, hanging in his closet, unable to overcome his addiction.
    He remembered a good friend’s son, a student at Texas Tech who carried a 4.95 grade point average in grad school. The kid had gone out one night, drank a six pack of cheap beer and followed it with a couple of hits of cocaine – the first time he had ever touched either – and drove his car at 80 mph into a cement embankment. The kid lost his way home and ended up in the middle of the South Plains of West Texas. The cops say he never even knew the embankment was there, probably passed out at the wheel while going at a high rate of speed. He was dead instantly.
    And then he remembered his best friend’s 13-year-old daughter walking to the grocery store in Big Spring one afternoon, a walk she made every day at two o’clock during the summer break to get herself an ice cream sandwich. She had her iPod on, listening to Jody Nix. She never heard the pickup truck. When it hit her, it threw her forty yards before she landed. Every bone in her body was shattered. Dead at the scene. The driver of the truck was arrested for driving under the influence. He was a regular resident of the Howard County Jail and the state pen in Colorado City. Multiple offenses for cocaine possession, DWI and intent to deliver. And seven DWIs.
    Now he watched as his lifelong friend sat next to him and told him he had successfully kicked what so many people are never able to. And Trask believed him. He remembered when the two were younger and both were on the debate team at Alamo Junior High School. Trask remembered the tone and conviction in his friend’s voice when he argued a case. That same steadfastness was in his voice today.
    “I know you made a few mistakes,” Garrison said. “But you don’t have it in you to kill a man. We’ll work on this together. I’ll bring