Eddie
I met Eddie through Jack when I was 16 or 17. I didn’t like him much at first. He was cocky and pretty obnoxious. He was also a bad-ass, two time welter weight Golden Glove champion in Memphis. Despite of very different personalities, in a relatively short time we became good friends. He could be an asshole, but he really wasn’t a bad guy, at least not back then.
He, Jack, and I smoked pot, drank beer, and hopped bars together. At one point, when I was 18, we all worked at the same store in the mall. When I had my motorcycle accident outside that mall, Eddie and Jack rode to first one hospital, then another (when they decided, because of my head injury, I needed to be at the main one instead of a satellite).
When I was working at Shelby County Government, during my initial cocaine phase, Eddie and his girlfriend moved to an apartment just up the street. He’d usually end up moving to the area I’d move to a few weeks or months after I did. He used to hide out with me to escape his old lady. He never really got away from her though, and it got him killed.
When I went into business with Eddie and Jack, Eddie was the responsible one. (Jack was brilliant and had most of the ideas.) He’d run the office while Jack and I were off doing crazy shit like smoking crack for days at a time. He even managed to show up and take care of business, at least a little, after he started his relationship with the pipe.
While I was never quite as close to Eddie and I was to Jack or Rudy, we were very close friends. We had a falling out after I got sober, the second time in 1995. I only saw him once after that, and never spoke to him again. Several times I thought about picking up the phone and patching things up between us. I always thought better of it, usually because I wasn’t doing well in some area of my life, and didn’t want him to know. Is that not crazy?
Eddie’s wife blew him away in early October 2007. Since we’d parted company, their stormy relationship got much worse. According to the local paper, the cops, even the swat team, were summoned to Eddie’s fairly frequently because of domestic violence. I refuse to keep up with the aftermath of that event, but I can’t imagine any charges being brought against her. Eddie picked up the wife-beating thing from his father and it got him killed, almost certainly after a major dope binge of the crack or crystal variety.
