My Friend Sam

 I helped clean out my friend Sam's apartment yesterday. To say that the cleaning was profoundly sad is to overstate nearly everything. The apartment was a terrible mess. The grief that I felt for Sam was muted by the appalling mess in the apartment. Our Man just never threw away anything, including the hairs that he shed. We found enough to make a wig.

Sam was from Eastern Kentucky. We are taught to not wish for much in Kentucky. Don't aim high; aim low so that you can at least hit the ground. Nobody says that, but that's the motto. 

Sam was gay. He had to leave Eastern Kentucky because of that. He was nearly beaten to death on a couple of occasions by law enforcement. I pretty sure that he sustained brain damage from the beatings.

He was a manager at a restaurant in North Carolina. I never got the story of how he got there or why he left; Sam was a stoner. Time, if he wasn't going to work, wasn't a consideration for him.

Sam told one of our friends that the 35 years that he lived in Nashville were the happiest of his life. I found that appalling because Nashville is a horrible, crass town. I guess that if you have been beaten almost to the point of death, that crassness really doesn't bother you.

Sam lived in a barebones apartment in Antioch, which is a suburb of Nashville on its southeastern side, where Davidson County borders Rutherford County. It started out as Priest Lake Apartments and ended up as Noah's Landing. In the beginning the place was full of singles in college or just out of college and young married couples, and a pretty white place. It was dead quiet at night in that apartment  complex. Nashville was and is an early morning town. Everyone gets up early and goes to work. Sam had a bedroom suit. He had one plate, one glass and a few plastic tumblers. He bought a TV. He traded a case of beer for a couch and he was all set.  

We found out interesting things about Sam: He had told us that he grew up in Eastern Kentucky. He didn't specify things but casually left us to believe that he would hop off the porch of the log house on the edge of a ravine and shoot a squirrel for breakfast. He talked knowledgeably of making hominy. 

As I found out, that was all an invention. Some of his family was from the hills and hollers of Kentucky but Sam grew up in a small town outside of Knoxville and graduated from its high school. He attended the local community college and took courses in computer science. He became a manager at Shoney's in North Carolina. When he came to Nashville he started out at Pizza Hut because it was a mile from his apartment and he had no car. Then he worked at different places in Nashville, waiting tables. I think he liked the loosey-goosey nature of restaurant work, the repartee and chitchat, the coming and going and the chance to work with young people.

When he got off work he had no one to bother him. He would go home, lock the door, get a beer, roll a smoke, turn on the TV and be up there with the ISS.