Jean

I’d swear that’s my brother Greg’s thermos, but I guess there were a million, so who can say for sure. It sure looks like the one I bought him for a joke back in the late 70s. I smoked Marlboros—still do. Greg smoked Winstons. He used to fill that thermos with coffee when we were working construction, back in one of Wyoming’s boom times, when we were pretty sure we could make a go of it. We didn’t say it out loud, but we wanted to please the old man--probably why we went into construction. It was close enough to architecture, what he for a living, but just enough different to piss him off. He always thought contractors were low rent architects.###I slid into bad habits back then. Followed some friends to Seattle and got hooked on smack. Greg took time off from the business to help me quit. Climbed into his old F150 and drove straight from Wyoming and stayed with me during the worst of it. Greg and I drank coffee from that thermos, waiting it out. When I got so I could get through the day without feeling like I wanted to die, we headed back to Cheyenne.###Greg pretty much willed me to live. He kept talking about the future. What we could do with the business. He really wanted to impress the old man. But here’s the thing. Greg had this love affair with death. He courted it with more fire than any woman I ever saw him with, even the mother of his kids. That thermos? He started filling it with more whisky than coffee. The economy tanked, we lost the business. Greg lost his wife and kids too. And the old man died. After that there wasn’t much that kept Greg from his dance with death. I always thought he’d swerve his truck into a car on a two lane highway, taking him and some other poor schmuck out in one bad decision. And then, when he was living on the street in Denver, that he’d die in a drunken knife fight. But he died in Cheyenne in the rental our mom let him live in. Died of drink. Found in his own blood. When I went to clean out the place afterwards, I saw the notes he’d stuck on his bathroom mirror—the ones with 12 step sayings he handwrote in small letters. I guess he hoped they’d keep him going. It made me ashamed. I couldn’t save him like he’d saved me. I saw the thermos on his table. I expected it to smell like whisky, but it didn’t. It didn’t smell like anything.