The Dick Spivey Story
Hello it's a me, Matt! So this little diddie was sitting in the dark corner of my computer. It is technically a fan fiction! This was an extra credit assignment I did for the short story "The Optimists". I advise you to look it up as it was a really good read. Now since this is a year old story, it is really not up to my current level of quality. Still I think it is enjoyable so go crazy.
My name is Richard 'Dick' Spivey, I'm fifty five years old and have never married. I was born in War, West Virginia during a coal boom. My parents were good folk, my father worked in the mines as a mechanist and my mother helped run the local store. It was a happy life. By the time I had turned eighteen however I had grown tired of my quaint mountain town. I knew the coal wouldn't last forever, so I left and joined the army. I had been inspired by the stories veterans would tell, I wanted to become a hero of war as well.
War is hell. There is no poetic justice in in it. Its not shooting some far off bad guy and coming home with your buddies and wearing some shiny medal. I saw men have their limbs blown off with grenades, watching as the blood mixed in with the rice patties. I saw children holding machine guns, ready to die for a system they didn't even understand. Friends crippled, whole towns burned to the ground, Senseless violence for stupid ideals. The men in Washington or Moscow didn't care about us, out there you survive. Lives ruined, and for what? Money? Power? Greed, or just so that our leader could prove to one another that they could indeed burn the earth. I killed fifty men, got promoted to Sergeant 2nd Class and received a medal for it. I killed fifty men, some of them children, and they give me a damn medal. But I pay for my crimes, you can believe it. Those angry ghost always remind of that in my dreams.
After the war I drifted, moving from city to city doing whatever I could to survive. When I was twenty five I discovered drinking, it was a magic cure all. When I was drunk there were no flashbacks, no voices nagging at me for having nothing to show for my life. My friend the drink soothed me, like a mother's lullaby. When I was thirty-five I floated into Colorado. Worked at a local coal company, the irony not lost on me. I had traveled half way a cross the world only to end up back where I started.
I had held the job for five years, a personal best. It was by that time that my casual drinking had become a real problem. The Devil's Water was unshakable, it complied me on a self destructive path. One day I had walked into work, drunk. I couldn't control myself, I caused a cave in, foolish. No one had been hurt, or worse but it was enough to have me fired. So I returned to my life of drifting, a life of no purpose yet again.
When I finally reached Montana I was determined to do good. I stayed sober for a year, even had a nice job working at the YWCA. That when I met her, Dorothy. She was older than I was, by at least ten years. She never said her age, I never asked. She approached me one day and invited me to drinks. Hesitantly I said yes, what was one drink?
At the bar we shared our stories. I told her about the war, she her ex husband. Our friends tequila, Jack Daniels, and Captain Morgan help push a bond onto us. We went back to her place, and I felt feeling I had not felt since my youth. Was it love? No, not love. When your in love you don't have to reach for the vodka to look at your face in the mirror. It wasn't love, it was ignorance, I told my self lies. It was all that I could do.
I met her son one chilly day in 1987. He and her exchanged a few words, and then we left. They seemed so distant, like there was a chasm between them. I asked her what was wrong, she said it was personal. That was fine with me, the past stay in the past. I wouldn't hurt the only woman who could care for me. I wouldn't do that.
My name is Richard Spivey, but now I go by Dick. Only Dick, Dick Spivey. I burned my bridges a long time ago. Me and Dorothy could both say that, that's what keeps us together. So I raise my glass to Richard, he is a far off memory. More of a dream, a dream taken by war a liquor. Richard was an optimist, but there was no room in Dick's life for an optimist. The world is cold, like a winter's grasp, it will swallow you if you let it. I'm now Dick Spivey, a fifty-five year old alcoholic who lives with an older female alcoholic. Its not a perfect life, but it is my life.