Songs that She Sang in the Shower

Jason Isbell

And in the car
Headed home
She asked if I had considered the prospect of living alone

With a stake 
Held to my eye
I had to summon the confidence needed to hear her goodbye
And another brief chapter without any answers blew by

And the songs that she sang in the shower
Are stuck in my head
Like Bring Out The Dead
Breakfast In Bed

And experience robs me of hope
That she’ll make it back home
So I’m stuck on my own
I’m stuck on my own

In a room
By myself
Looks like I’m here with a guy that I judge worse than anyone else

So I pace
And I pray
And I repeat the mantra’s that might keep me clean for the day

And the songs that she sang in the shower all ring in my ear
Like Wish You Were Here
How I wish you were here.

On the Summer of '13 Slipping Away

I've been keeping myself busy with my books and with my tapes

Every day's been much better since I've slowed my drinking pace

There's no swimming in the bottle it's just some place we all drown

I lost myself in sorrow, lost my confidence in doubt

- Gin Blossoms

It's that time of year again. The dog days of summer have set in. The back to school supplies are in at the grocery store and the college football previews are making their rounds before autumnal tailgates. There's a rustling of autumn winds, carrying with it a whispering breath of departed revelry.

I think back now on the summer almost past. I graduated law school. I embarked upon the first real relationship since the one that devastated me two summers ago. I put the past behind me. I read some good books, but no great ones (possibly the Hemingway biography and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel). I visited the schoolhouse in Canada and felt the cool waters of Lake Huron and the sandy beaches of Grand Bend, Ontario. I saw Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Goonies at the old Penn theater in downtown Plymouth. I went to the Toledo Zoo and Cedar Point in Ohio.  I was sober for virtually the entire summer, which is a long way away from where I was just a couple months prior. It was a good summer, but not a great one; not the '97 summer of innocence when the Wings won that first Cup, not the Indian summer in the Petoskey woods of '10, but also not the misery of last summer when memories past and whiskey hangovers haunted me.

I can't help but be nostalgic for the end of something. It's not just the end of summer for me. It's the end of something more. As a nine-to-five job awaits me in the Fall, it's the end of the hectic yet free lifestyle of a student. So I want to savor every moment of it. Make the best of it. The to-do list for the last couple weeks of summer:

• Tigers game. Hard to believe this one hasn't happened yet this summer, but two games are on the menu for the next week: Wed v. Minnesota and Tues. v. Oakland. Watching Miguel Cabrera alone has been a reason to remember this summer.
• Listen to a Tigers game on the radio in the backyard under the moonlight and with a bonfire. 
• Hike to Newburgh Lake. I used to go here on Monday's last summer when I was hungover, oftentimes avoiding work. It feels like something I need to do, go back and retrieve those memories long gone.
• Walk around Ann Arbor to all the places I lived during college. While depressed, I used to do this what felt like every Sunday while I lived in the apartment that I want to forget forever; it was by far the darkest period of my life. This is something else from my past, though, that I want to go back and retrieve, maybe change the way I remember those walks.
• Wish my baby sister off to college, at Michigan State no less.
• Get to Beaver Creek, the restaraunt my buddies and I have gone to over the summer, one last time. Though those dinners don't often seem like much, it's stuff like that you look back on and remember as the good times later on.
• Michigan football: Michigan Stadium August, 31st.
• Plymouth HS football v. Churchill, September, 13th. Friday Night Lights watching my cousin play to close out the summer.

Goose Loonies (Visions of Yzerman)

“It’s a chicken and egg thing. How your team plays echoes your innermost feelings, what you already “know” – but what you feel and know to a large extent comes from your team, because how they do is if nothing else a weird running pantomime of a fan’s life. Their play is in your earliest memories and reflections; it challenges how you look at things. Your team’s play stimulates imagination and creativity, engagement and communication between them, the game, and you. It offers something by which to imagine your life.”

Kent Russell, “The Nontraditional Fans of Hockey,” Grantland.com

SAWCHUK

1

_________

My old man used to say that the March 24 tilt against Hartford was the only game he failed to watch during the 1987-88 Red Wings season. “Even though we lost, it was the best game of the season,” he explained to me during Wings games, his voice buoyed by Labatt’s, “because it was the night you were born.” It was always through sports that he told me he loved me.

Ostensibly, it was an unremarkable regular season loss. Detroit had already clinched the Norris Division, making it a late-season throwaway game. The box score in the Hockey Reference archive indicates that Hartford won 3-2 in a heavily penalized game at Joe Louis Arena. The Whalers got two goals from Stew Gavin and one from Landon Ferraro. Petr Klima and Gilbert Delorme scored the goals for Detroit. Bob Probert notched an assist, John Chabot tallied two, and Joey Kocur amassed twelve penalty minutes — ten for fighting, two for slashing. The box score revealed little else of note. What it failed to suggest was that, underneath the surface, the gears of fate were turning deep within the Motor City hockey machine. 

Objectively, as opposed to my dad’s biased perspective, the night the Wings clinched the Norris Division title qualified as the best game of the season, for it was Detroit’s first division championship in twenty-three years. Symbolically, the division title represented the fruit of a long rebuild, a turning point in a revolution that saw the organization rise from the depths of “Dead Wings” era dormancy to serious contention in the late eighties. 

Steve Yzerman, who had been named the youngest captain in Red Wings history a season prior, deserved the lion’s share of the credit for that turnaround, perhaps, but Petr Klima and Bob Probert played pivotal supporting roles in it. Both selected behind Yzerman in the 1983 Draft, Probert and Klima posted career years during the 1987-88 campaign. Three years removed from the Eastern Bloc, Klima scored a career-high 37 goals that season; sporting a diamond earring and blond streaks in his hair as expressions of his newfound independence, he finished behind only Yzerman (50) for the team lead. Fresh out of his third addiction treatment facility and prescribed Antabuse, an emetic medication activated by alcohol, Bob Probert made the 1988 All-Star team en route to posting his own career highs with 29 goals and 33 assists. 

Klima and Probert’s banner years suggested that the duo — who had developed reputations as hard-partying troublemakers — had finally matured. Publicly, Probert professed his demons were behind him, but even one drink can be the unraveling of a recovering alcoholic. The son of an abusive alcoholic, himself, Red Wings coach Jacques Demers had prophetically recognized the warning signs exhibited by both Klima and Probert early on. “When you start winning with a bunch of kids,” Demers recalled of coaching the wild young Wings of the eighties, “you start playing father and you start playing doctor. They were just troubled kids. We knew we were always in a [ticking] time bomb with a couple of those guys.”

The proverbial time bomb exploded in the 1988 Campbell Conference Final, or rather, thereafter, depending on how you look at it. It obfuscated all that Detroit had accomplished theretofore, including the division title and the banner years posted by Klima and Probert. 

Detroit played well in the opening rounds of the 1988 Stanley Cup Playoffs. They dispatched Toronto in six games in the first round, then defeated St. Louis in five to advance to the Conference Final against the juggernaut Edmonton Oilers. En route to their fourth Stanley Cup in five years, Edmonton eliminated Detroit in short order, with a decisive Game Five taking place in Edmonton, Alberta on May 11, 1988. Had it all ended at that, it would have been a terrific year for the Red Wings. 

Alas, a column titled “Wings Lost Much More than a Game” appeared in the sports section of The Detroit Free Press the morning after Game 5. The column’s author, a young Mitch Albom, detailed a late-night drinking scandal that stained the Red Wings’ postseason exit and their season at large. Albom alleged that, on the eve of Game Five, six Red Wings players had gone out drinking at an Edmonton nightclub called Goose Loonies. The story posited that Red Wings assistant coach Colin Campbell had performed a routine curfew check at the team hotel. Incredulously, he found the hotel rooms of Klima and Probert empty. Campbell put on his jacket and went looking for the missing players in the city lights of downtown Edmonton. To aid in the search, he enlisted front office assistant Neil Smith, who recalled: “Probert had alcohol issues and Klima had a track record of running wild. So Colin and I went out to try and find them.”

Detroit’s third goalie, Darren Eliot — who turned out to be one of the guilty parties present — put it more bluntly: “Neil Smith and Colin Campbell were looking for Probert. In a hockey town like Edmonton, the word was out that Probert was on the streets and going crazy.” 

Campbell and Smith’s search led them to the nightclub called Goose Loonies. “I waited outside and Colin went in and found not only Klima and Probert but four or five others,” Smith remembered. What a buzzkill it must have been for the players when, to their great infamy, Campbell showed up at Goose Loonies. Six Red Wings caught red-handed.

Probert, the was recovering alcoholic, later admitted he’d been swapping ibuprofen for his Antabuse pills under his coaches’ noses. Other guilty parties included Joe Kocur, Darren Eliot, Darren Veitch, and John Chabot, yet the media lumped most of the blame on Probert and Klima. They were the big names present; they had histories of alcohol-related problems. Á la Shoeless Joe Jackson and Chicago’s Black Sox, Klima and Probert became forevermore associated with the scandal. It damned them like scarlet letters.

A surely hungover Probert dressed for Game Five anyways; he led the team in postseason points, and with Yzerman injured the Wings couldn’t afford to sit him. He accumulated a tell-tale minus-three rating in a lopsided 8-4 loss. DeMers called Probert’s performance “god-awful.” Albom described it as “sluggish.” That Edmonton team was loaded. Craig Simpson scored two in the rout, Mark Messier contributed a goal and three assists, and Wayne Gretzky, Canada’s soon-to-be departed Great One, added two assists and an empty-netter for the Oil. 

Albom’s story precipitated a media firestorm in Detroit. Upon their return from Edmonton, the Red Wings staged an impromptu press conference to address the incident. The proverbial last straw broken, Jacques Demers stood at a podium inside Joe Louis Arena and issued a heartfelt apology to Detroit fans. Fighting back tears, he called the Goose Loonies incident his “biggest disappointment since coming to Detroit.” Steve Yzerman called it a “black cloud on the season.”

A big storyline that offseason, Goose Loonies became a household name throughout metro Detroit in the following days, weeks, and months. Even now, twenty-seven years later, I still come across references to it in the sports section of the Detroit newspapers, usually around its anniversary.  

DeMers’ public apology, while dramatic, belied more volatile currents running through Detroit’s front offices. Behind closed doors, the organization’s big-wigs again discussed treatment options for Probert while debating the termination of some of the other perpetrators’ contracts. The fault lines beneath Hockeytown were shifting. The turn of the decade fast-approaching, Detroit’s brain trust wanted to put an end to the “Dead Wings” era, for good.

🏒🏒🏒

Twenty-four years later, while vacationing in Ontario with some of the guys I grew up with, I read Probert’s tongue-in-cheek version of the Goose Loonies incident in his autobiography, Tough Guy: My Life on the Edge, over some breakfast beers. We had driven up to Jim Racine’s schoolhouse cottage near Grand Bend for the weekend, primarily to attend Game 5 of the OHL Championship in London, Ontario. It was early spring. The corn stalks planted in rows behind the schoolhouse had barely peeked out of the dormant brown soil, and the north country air still retained some of winter’s frigidity as morning dawned.

Hungover and jittery – unable to sleep – I retrieved my paperback copy of Tough Guy from my duffel bag and tried not to make any noise as I snuck a handful of beer bottles out of the refrigerator. My friends Bryan and Adam slept on an adjacent floor beneath a long blackboard. I watched their sleeping bags to see that neither stirred. Although I often drank in the morning with my college buddies, these were the guys I grew up with, and they were much less further gone than I was at the time. As the eldest of our friend group, a role model to those guys, I didn’t want them to catch me drinking so early. 

The wood floorboards creaked in the morning chill as I tiptoed through the dining room and into the front hall. I sidestepped the rope hanging from the school bell and slipped out the front door, closing it gently. The sun was bright but the air was cold. I crept around the side of the schoolhouse through the shadows of birch trees, then found a chair on the back deck, which faced the cornstalk horizon. I uncapped my first beer bottle and took a swig, swallowing it like medicine. Soggy playing cards, beer bottle caps, cigarette butts, and various cans and bottles littered the glass table and the wooden deck on which it stood, relics of the previous night. We had gone pretty hard – cracked our first beers in the car as soon as we entered rural Ontario – and, in the pale light of sunrise, I felt nostalgic for childhood summers at the schoolhouse for the first time since our arrival.

From 1898 through 1969, the property served as a school and boarding house in Hay Township, Ontario. The Racine’s grandfather, Dick Ewasek, bought it shortly after it closed publicly. He and his wife used it as a summer house for decades, and my family joined Mrs. Ewasek and the Racines there two or three times per summer for most of my childhood. Factoring customs at the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, it was about a four-hour drive from metro Detroit, with much of the latter half affording views of Lake Huron’s eastern shore and the bent red pines that lined it. From the Bluewater Highway, it was just a short drive north past the beach town of Grand Bend. 

Maintained in its original layout and decor, with the antiquated schoolmaster rules still nailed to the walls, the interior of the schoolhouse resembled an historical site. On the main floor, the front end featured a dining room table and chairs, a china and liquor cabinet, a kitchen, and a modern bathroom addition. In the back end, chalkboards still lined the wall, and a wood stove provided the only source of heat in colder weather. There was a separate mudroom entrance at the front where the rope to the school bell dangled temptingly; we rang it as frequently as we had as children, its magnificent gong-like chimes echoing into the Ontario days and nights – we must have annoyed the neighboring farmhouses to no end.

A metal spiral staircase with wood steps led upstairs to an overhead wood-floor balcony. Bookshelves that held musty classics and elementary school readers lined the wall on the balcony. An open doorway from the balcony led to the sleeping quarters, which included a schoolmaster’s bedroom and a separate, open sleeping room with three beds, some end tables, and an old billiards table that squeaked with the floorboards. A wood ladder in the main boarding room led up to a small loft that looked out of the crow’s nest window above the school bell tower, making it an ideal place to sleep when it was not inhabited by bats or bees.

Despite many family vacations with the Rivards and the Racines, who were more like aunts, uncles, and cousins in practice and in spirit than close family friends – trips to Hilton Head, Disney World, and Virginia Beach, where Mr. Rivard was stationed at a naval base – the schoolhouse remained my favorite vacation spot throughout my adolescent years and into the young adult ones. A relic of a forgotten time, its sepia photographs and science artifacts told stories of long-lost Canadian yesteryears. Outside, the cornstalks swayed breezily and the adjacent creek meandered lazily, as if at a slower pace of life. In that sense, a trip to the schoolhouse offered more than a mere escape in destination; it was an escape to the past.

Taking another swig of beer to steady my hands, I opened Probert’s book and started reading at the page marked by my bookmark. As I discovered in the pages of that book and in subsequent research, Goose Loonies was only the beginning of a downward spiral for Probert and others present that fateful night. Probert had been in treatment for alcoholism three times by that point, after all, and he joked about his issues with an aplomb known only by seasoned addicts. In Tough Guy, Probert downplays his whole role in the affair, then channels Jeff Spicoli in recalling the summer that followed: “after the Goose Loonies incident, the team was telling me I had to go into rehab again. I told them, ‘No way. I just got a boat and a new car and I’ve been in rehab three summers in a row!’” 

Just as nonchalantly, Probert describes how he and Klima began using cocaine that offseason. That habit soon landed them in more trouble with the team:

In September 1988, Petr Klima and I got suspended. I’d been sent down to Adirondack and fined $200 a couple days before because we had missed a team bus and a flight from Chicago to Detroit for a game. Petr and I were at my house the night before, and we were supposed to report the next day by 11 A.M. We stayed up late, so we called up and postponed our flight. It was time to leave for the second one, but we postponed it again. We headed out to catch the [third one], but got held up at the titty bar near the airport. We finally got on the last plane, but didn’t get in until about 12:30 A.M., so the team left us a message on our phones, saying, ‘Don’t bother staying. You’re suspended.’

According to the team’s account, Klima and Probert skipped practice before missing their flight to Glen Falls, New York, where they were supposed to report to the Adirondack Red Wings. At any rate, Probert soon landed back in rehab. Amidst pressure from the Red Wings, he entered treatment for the fourth time in October 1988.

Goose Loonies must have seemed like small potatoes to him, indeed, when he got arrested in March of 1989 for attempting to cross the Windsor-Detroit border with more than fourteen grams of cocaine. Border agents found a cocaine mill in his leather jacket and a bag of cocaine in his underwear. Probert faced serious felony charges and ultimately pled guilty pursuant to a plea agreement. To his credit, he served three months in federal prison, earned an early release therefrom, and found his way back onto the ice for Detroit — later finding a successful career with the Chicago Black Hawks — but his personal demons were forever linked to his name, fairly or unfairly.

On July 5, 2010, Probert suffered a massive sudden heart attack while boating on Lake St. Clair with his children and in-laws. Emergency crews rushed him to Windsor Regional, where doctors pronounced him dead. He was 45 years old. Probert died just a couple chapters shy of finishing his autobiography, and Helene St. James, a local hockey columnist who co-wrote the book, had to ghost write its final pages. She revealed that Probert was using large quantities of OxyContin daily at the time of his death. It was hard not to speculate that his early demise was somehow loosely connected to that fateful night at Goose Loonies. Only two years had passed since his death, and the wound of his passing was reopened as I voraciously consumed his roller coaster of a life story.

Petr Klima also continued to struggle with alcohol after the Goose Loonies incident — even in the absence of his sidekick. While Probert was at the Betty Ford Center in October of 1988, police busted Klima for drunk driving after he backed his car into a parked vehicle outside of The Jukebox, a Royal Oak, Michigan bar. The arrest put him in violation of his probation terms for a previous drunk driving violation. In late May of 1989 — not to be outdone by Probert’s March cocaine bust — Klima was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol for the third time in two years, this time in Bloomfield Hills, and this time for the last time with Detroit. The Wings dealt him to Edmonton in a six-player deal later that summer. Between Edmonton, the minors, and several other NHL franchises, Klima bounced around from team to team throughout the remainder of his career, even winning a Stanley Cup in 1990 with the Oilers – perhaps fitting that he won there – but he never quite lived up to the hype he generated during his first three seasons with Detroit.

Steve Chiasson, a longtime Red Wings defenseman, never got caught at Goose Loonies, but later admitted to having been present there. Chiasson struggled mightily with alcohol abuse, too. In August of 1989, a little over a year after the Goose Loonies incident, Oakland County deputies busted Chiasson for driving under the influence of alcohol in Farmington Hills; his blood alcohol content was .13. He played in Detroit through the 1994 season, then played with Calgary, Hartford, and Carolina. Following elimination at the hands of the Boston Bruins in the 1999 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Chiasson joined several Hurricanes teammates for an impromptu end-of-season bash in suburban North Carolina. He died later that night after rolling his pickup truck in a single-car drunk driving wreck.

Laying Probert’s book on the glass, leaf-printed deck table — folded text down — I sipped my beer and stared out to the cornfield stretched out below the schoolhouse deck, feeling the pleasant buzz of a liquid breakfast. Rolled out across the shell-pink horizon was Canadian farmland as far as the eye could see, the fields broken only by a distant tree line. The brown earth glowed golden under the early morning sun. Hawks circled overhead; blackbirds cawed from the telephone wires. 

Probert’s struggles with cocaine and booze captivated me. I was reading a lot of books about the dark side of alcohol at the time — memoirs of battles with the bottle — probably on some subconscious level knowing that my own toe-to-toe fight was looming right around the bend.

But all that was still in the stars.

The Dark Side of Hemingway's Drinking

There is a fine line between hard-drinking and alcoholic. I should know. I spent the better part of the last decade flirting with that line, at times swaying into both camps. When it comes to pop culture, the hard-drinking writer is something of a folk hero, often a legendary figure of mythical proportions (see: Hunter S. Thompson, Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Bukowski, Hemingway). The hard-drinker is to be admired. Step over that fine line into the alcoholic territory, though, and you've suddenly found yourself in taboo waters.

The popular conception of Hemingway is that he was a hard-drinking, hard-living portrait of masculinity, surely a drinker to be admired. A quick google search will reveal a plethora of sites encouraging you to "Drink like Hemingway". Kenny Chesney even recently released an album entitled "Hemingway's Whiskey," glorifying the writer's life-long infatuation with the bottle.

In pop culture, it's not hard to see why the hard-drinking days of such writers are glorified. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous book? The Great Gatsby. Jack Kerouac? On the Road. Jack London? The Call of the Wild. The literary realm remembers the glory days of such writers, not the darker counterparts to the heroic drinking days. In the midst of the recent release of Gatsby the movie, most of American society would probably picture Fitzgerald a colorful, hard-partying figure of the roaring twenties. Lost in popular culture, however, is the fact that Scott Fitzgerald had such a problem with morning drinking - drinking away alcohol withdrawals from the night before - that Hemingway(!) of all people often cringed at his friend's embarassing public antics, to the point where Fitzgerald had to be avoided during some of the worst drinking spells. Few people know that Kerouac wrote perhaps the quintessential novel on delirium tremens - the final, dark stages of alcoholism - in Big Sur, or that Kerouac spent his finals years walking around his hometown in New England, bloated by alcohol, in a stupor that earned him town-wide pity. Fewer would probably know that Jack London wrote an account of his own alcoholism in John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs. As for Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson, these folk heroes are lauded as the testament to towing the line between hard-drinking and alcoholism successfully, perhaps the most laudable drinkers in literary pop culture. What we don't see is the final years of Thompson and Hemingway's drinking, when the ravages of liquor began to gnaw away at their brains and their livers, leading both ominously down a path of fate involving a shotgun and their own hands.

And this is unfortunate. I've always sought after the darker tales of battles with the bottle. Any hack writer can put heavy-drinking tales to paper, but it takes true literary genius to account for those harrowing dark days when you come face to face with the devil himself in the midst of delirium tremens, as Kerouac did in Big Sur, or to account for a losing battle with the bottle when you can't put down the mescal despite your best intentions, as Malcolm Lowry achieved in Under the Volcano.

I'm somewhat of a self-proclaimed Hemingway afficionado. The deeper I delve into the Hemingway catalogue, the deeper my primary critique of his work gets - that he was unable to ever account for his experiences with alcoholism. This summer I read one of Hemingway's final novels in Across the River and Into the Trees, which is in essence a retrospective piece on his life as he approached the half-century mark of his life. Given the retrospective quality of the novel, it had the potential to be a masterpiece of nostalgia and regret - and Hemingway indeed thought it would earn masterpiece status in the way that The Old Man and the Sea would turn out to be years later. From booze to war to lost love (three failed marriages at this point in his life), Hemingway had a breadth of life experiences from which he could have worked. Instead, we get tidbits of war flashbacks that do not come close to achieving the war-ravaged emotions of "Big Two-Hearted River". Unfortunately, this novel aims low rather than reaching for the stars. In part, I blame this on Hemingway's unwillingness to address the role of alcohol in his life, which he continuously refused to do in any honest way throughout the course of his life.

Hemingway deserves as much blame as pop culture for his image as a hard-drinking folk hero rather than an alcoholic, though. For as much as pop culture perpetuated the myth of Hemingway the hard-drinking, hard-living icon, Hemingway himself was never capable of recognizing his drinking for what it ultimately became: a dark problem. While Hemingway had no problem calling out Fitzgerald for his drinking and recognizing that for Fitzgerald, pouring out the liquor cabinet was essential, he had quite the problem admitting his own demons. This denial, of course, is one of the underlying symptoms of addiction.

I'm currently about 500 pages deep into the 600 page tell-all Hemingway biography, written by Carlos Baker. This means I am starting to get into the dark side of Hemingway's drinking years, when the act of drinking was no longer a social outlet amongst expatriates in Paris or a military coping mechanism amongst his comrades in arms. In reality, alcohol had destroyed a lot in his life. The latter two of his first three wives both left him in part due to his reluctance to accept a sense of domesticity, opting instead to retain the late-night drinking sprees of his twenties well after he had grown old. Moreover, Hemingway suffered a number of injuries from automobile acts resulting from drinking and driving, some leaving him with concussions that further inhibited his alcohol-deteriorated brain. Further revealing is the fact that, after being wounded in the first great war, Hemingway's nurses were perturbed to find hidden bottles of cognac stashed away in his hospital room. But perhaps most revealing is that, when suffering from kidney problems and told by doctors to abstain from drinking, and finally in his late years when family and friends pleaded with him to put down the bottle, Hemingway was either unwilling or unable to follow doctors' or friends' orders.

Whether or not Hemingway suffered from alcohol dependence - the crucial turning point in any story of alcoholism - is disputed. In his later years, Hemingway is said to have drank a quart of whiskey per day. Though he set rules for himself to try and limit his drinking, he often was unable to abstain from the elixir past lunchtime. Ultimately, the alcohol began to rot Hemingway's brain - as it has been wont to do for so many illustrious writers. Self-medicating with alcohol in his final years led to a deep-seated depression, climactically resulting in that tragic day with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. Though he called his own father a coward for committing suicide, Ernest was unable to escape the same fate, the terrors of alcohol and depression weighing like a black cloud over his soul.

I don't mean to critique Hemingway for his drinking. Someone in my shoes is certainly in no place to do so. Rather, I can only lament that the tragic story of the dark side of the bottle never found its way into Hemingway's writing. As is evident from Kerouac's Big Sur and Lowry's Under the Volcano, these types of tragic tales can result in some truly meaningful literature. It's a tragedy in itself that we never got to see what the master of American literature could do with similar material. All that's left is the mistaken perception in popular culture of a hard-drinking, hard-living man, an entirely incomplete portrait of the legendary Hemingway, and the wonder of what could have been.