All-American Boy

All-American Boy

In high school Preston had the world by the balls--quarterback of the team went to the finals. Something about that loss; they said he never got over it. He tried State U, but dropped out after couple of years of putzing around. Then to Nashville trying to make it in the biz, but there are lots of good guitar players and five years later he was back in class.

Preston graduated finally at 29, fluent in Spanish and Business. I met him last Thanksgiving after his mother married my brother. Nice, clean-cut looking guy, but a little jittery, on edge. He said he was going to South America to teach English.

That lasted two weeks. When he reported his passport missing to the U.S. Embassy, he was so high they put him on a plane out of the country the next day. The DEA ransacked his room, found his passport among the empty pill bottles, and mailed it back to his home of record.

He spent 28 days in rehab; then a staph infection sent him to the hospital. They filled him full of antibiotics, hung his arm in the air and drained it for a week. The docs gave him prescriptions for pain and released him to his granddaddy, who locked up the pills. But of course the old man was no match for Preston's determination. He was found next morning in his boxer shorts and socks, dead on the floor.

Preston might have been nothing but a fuckup of his own doing, but of course that is too hard for his mother to accept. She insists on an autopsy and waits impatiently for them to tell her none of it was her fault.

--Barry Basden edits Camroc Press Review.