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| (photo: Vicki Taufer) | |
Dave Kindred is a recipient of the PEN America ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, the Red Smith Award and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He has worked for numerous publications, including the Washington Post,the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the National Sports Daily. He is the author of several books, including Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship, a biography of the friendship between Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell. In Leave Out the Tragic Parts: A Grandfather's Search for a Boy Lost to Addiction (PublicAffairs, February 2, 2021), Kindred pieces together his late grandson's life as a train-hopper battling alcoholism.
Writing this book was a difficult process--one that took six years. How did you manage your grief while keeping the wound of losing Jared open?
The wound was never going to be closed. There would be healing but not forgetting. The process was interrupted midway by my wife's catastrophic stroke that left her an invalid who cannot communicate. So the grieving was overlapping, and I always dealt with it best by escaping into the work that kept them both alive in my mind and heart.
Though it might be easy to imagine a "happy ending" for Jared--a family life with Maggie--it seems his heart wanted a wanderer's life. How much of this do you think was influenced by alcohol?
Whatever resistance he had to a "normal" life was the result of a dysfunctional early family life and was exacerbated by the alcohol. I'm told by the experts that alcoholics drink to "change the way they feel." That, Jared did.
The book's title is in part a nod to how addicts and their loved ones tell themselves the story they'd rather hear. Yet you've shared difficult truths from Jared's friends--road dogs--who were, perhaps, closest to him. Why were their perspectives not as rose-colored?
They knew the tragic parts because they had lived them, and they knew there was no escaping them. They had lived a life on the road that was unforgiving. They had seen dozens of friends die out there. They had seen death up close, and they knew it was coming for them.
The beach scene when Jared writes BOOZE in the sand for the water to wash away as his one regret seems the loudest cry for help he gave. Yet even then, it seemed he knew it would be impossible to escape alcohol's hold. What do you hope this scene accomplishes for readers who love someone battling addiction?
I knew about this only after his death (as is true of many scenes in the book). What I hope a reader takes away is recognition that, absolutely, such a moment is a cry for help that must be answered and not allowed to dissipate in the next wave of life. Instead of walking off the beach, talk to him, tell him what the moment is saying, take him to help.
Your research into addiction taught you that "Jared didn't choose addiction; addiction chose Jared."
Not for a minute, ever, did I think that Jared wanted to be an alcoholic. That BOOZE moment shows that. He was a happy, joyful child, always with a hand out to people who needed help. Research has shown that some brains are more susceptible to addiction than others; Jared, it seems, was easily addicted because alcohol "chose" him.
Jared had his family's support while on the road, and you note, "if sending money made me an enabler, so be it." What would you say to someone who would hold your family accountable for not forcing Jared into rehab?
I would say, if there comes a time when you think you must force a person into rehab, it is already too late. The addict must choose to help himself. You must be alert to the early signs; they are always there, and you must act on them immediately.
Seeing Jared as a high school senior with his multicolored mohawk, you felt you didn't know this "flamboyant" Jared, yet you considered him "extraordinary." Why did you view this new Jared positively instead of thinking the worst?
As a grandfather seeing Jared only occasionally and at a distance in his high school years (because of his parents' divorce), I didn't recognize his alcoholism. I counted him as another teenager learning to live--the usual teenage experiments and rebellions. His life as Goblin was almost completely unknown to me until it was irreversible.
What you write about Jared and his road dogs is in part an effort to humanize a community--to make readers consider the human being beneath the dirt and grime of homelessness. Why did you focus on this?
My best friend in life had never met Jared, had only seen pictures. Yet he said if he saw Jared coming toward him on a sidewalk, he'd cross the street to get away from him. He judged him to be a threat from afar, knowing only his appearance, reacting to a stereotype.
But Jared was a sweetheart, open to all comers and generous in spirit. He wanted to share the joy he felt with others of his kind--with other wanderers looking for the soft places in life. Oh, he could be belligerent, as my reporting showed, but almost always, his anger was directed in defense of friends.
By rendering Jared and his road dogs as human beings with a full range of emotions and values, I hope that some readers, on meeting a "Jared" figure, will stand and talk with him a while, maybe learn from him.
What would you say to someone considering a life as a train-hopper?
A friend once asked me to talk to his son about train-hopping. He wanted me to scare the boy straight. That, of course, is easily done. A travelin' kid's life is 0.01% "freedom" and "romance," and the rest is dangerous in ways incomprehensible to most of us. And the understood dangers--of drugs and violence and simple neglect of your body--are compounded by the unforgiving dangers involved in catching a freight train. I met a guy named Dice. He'd lost an arm trying to rescue his dog from under the wheel of a train. As I was writing Jared's story, word came that Dice had lost a leg under another train. I told my friend's son, "However dangerous you think riding a freight train is, multiply by a thousand."
Why should fans of your sports writing read this story?
Anyone who has read my stuff on sports knows it's more about the people and their ideas, ambitions and values than it is about the games. This book is a story about people I have loved in ways I never imagined loving anyone. Whatever readers may have liked in my reporting and writing on, say, Muhammad Ali, they will find in Jared's story, only written from my heart, not my notebook. --Samantha Zaboski