Andrew Bradshaw
“Hello?”
“Is this still X?”, the voice on the other end of the line asked me. It was Andrew Bradshaw’s little brother, Bill. I was checking my texts simultaneously while having the conversation. Tanya, their mother, had texted me “Pls call it’s urgent.” Not good. Hadn’t seen Tanya nearly a decade save for a chance encounter at HEB.
“He dead?” I asked.
“Yeah.” There was a long silence- split only by me exhaling through my teeth.
“How?”
“We don’t really know, but it happened, it’s real, I’ve seen him.” For a moment, the redundant reassurances made me second-guess whether they were reality. I remembered his mom texted me though… and Andrew wouldn’t gain anything from a fake death except getting out of a few warrants and parking tickets.
“Was it alcohol?”
“I don’t know, we think he either just died from withdrawals or he took something. But he’s gone. He’s really gone.” Bill’s voice cracked a bit. “They’re carrying him out of the house now.”
Donnie popped up as calling me on my phone. Hadn’t heard from him in months.
“You tell Donnie?”
“Yeah, I called him first.”
“When’s the funeral?”
“I don’t even know… I-I haven’t even uhh…. thought about that stuff yet”; another silence split by my exhale.
“Well, don’t fucking overpay those bastards at the funeral home. He would come back and kick all of our asses if you did.” Bill hung up as Tanya could be heard crying in the background.
I raised up the phone to call Donnie, but he was calling again. I pressed speakerphone and placed the phone down to start cleaning my ears with Q-tips- needing a task to occupy my mind.
“Did you hear yet?” he asked.
“Yeah, just got off the phone with Bill.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“So what’s up man?” I was getting irritable. The constant repetition of death was enough to drive a tardigrade postal.
“Fucking crazy… I can’t believe he’s gone”- a perusal perfunctorily pondered airily; like he hadn’t placed a thought towards the probability.
“I can. He lived hard.”
“Yeah but like, he was only 30.”
“That’s about 5 years longer than anyone gave him.” I said, irreverently.
“True that.”
“How’s your pops?”, I asked. Donnie’s dad was a surrogate father to many of us, Andrew included. He taught us all how to build fires, fish, pilot boats, get your truck unstuck from the mud, fight, grill/smoke/cook, treat everybody equal, shoot guns, raise pets (including chickens), be men and how to drink like you’re putting out the flames of the deepest kind of pain. All one needed was a few sixes of some Mickey’s hand grenades and a lifetime of not understanding your emotions… a boy’s rite of passage to manhood, one could say.
“Same as always. Got a second place out near San Antonio nowadays, he’s bout ready to quit the department.” His dad had been a policeman for nearly 30 years. “Hey so we’re actually going to all be getting together at his place after the funeral or sometime this weekend, if you’re down.”
I threw the Q-tips in the trash and cut on the shower cold as it could go.
“Yeah, I’ll see what’s up for sure, that’d be cool. Hey man I gotta go, I’m bout to hop into the shower.”
“Cool bro, good talking to you again.”
“You too.” End call. Breathe. Breathe again. I had been rotating between holding and taking in breaths, laboriously and in desperation, as if sleep apnea suddenly had forced itself upon me while I was awake.
I lied. I had no intention of going anywhere and seeing anyone. Hell, I hadn’t even had time to consider whether or not I was going to be able to stomach the funeral, much less the excuse for getting piss-drunk arranged afterwards with people I didn’t care to see. A text came in from Tanya: “Will you please come to the funeral? He would have wanted it that way.”
“Of course.” I typed back. Fuck it.
The cold water hit my skin and reminded me to breathe again. I tapped my nose and winced with the pain of a recent surgery fixing a long-time break… Matter of fact, Andrew was the reason I’d needed surgery. I chuckled at the memory; one so deep it was surrounded by others. I drifted off into my ego’s wonderland.
Andrew was a wild boy in a man’s body. He liked to fight, drink, take an occasional pill and fight once that wore off. Grizzly wintergreen was his favorite brand of dip growing up, but he’d take a Skoal if you had one… Copenhagen was for the rich boys.
He taught me how to dip on the way to our first varsity football game.
He loved music, especially Red Dirt Texas Country.
Andrew took me to my first Casey Donahew concert. We spent the night in College Station afterwards, fighting off about 10 college kids at a party because we drank all the beer and hadn’t brought any. We were just looking To Beat the Devil.
From eating Lane’s chicken in College Station, to Puffy Tacos in San Antonio after bailing out Donny for the 4th time, to dine and dashing the Denny’s in Austin, we learned how to eat on a dime- whether we had a dime or not. Andrew used to eat Huevos Rancheros using just his hands. He was a caveman sometimes.
He could shoot a snot rocket further than anyone in our group of boys and was crazier than all of us combined to boot.
Most of all though, Andrew cared about his little nephew. When that nephew’s daddy walked out, Andrew filled in the role. For that boy, Andrew the alcoholic became a selfless saint. He wanted to be there for him forever. I reckon he still will be.
There are many other stories I could tell about the wildness of our time spent together, but it’s best to let those go to rest along with his soul. Enough negativity was said about him during the viewing by people that called themselves his friends. Those same friends went out to eat instead of driving the hour away to see the funeral. Convenience might just be the death of us, or a reason not to live anyways.
At the funeral, I grabbed his sobbing nephew and stuck a crisp $20 in his hand. “What’s this for?” he asked. “I lost a bet,” I smiled back, a few tears streaking down. It was $80 less than the original bet, but Andrew died owing me money so I reckon we’re square.
I stole a final glance at his face. The undertaker must not have had to do much work: It looked like he was smirking the same smirk we all knew him for, right before he was about to do something wild. As if he finally got the last laugh on all of us.
“Goodbye you silly bastard.” I whispered to him. “Godspeed, wherever ya are. We’ll miss ya.”
I stopped short of wishing he was still around… his life was a rough one. He was too concerned with being tough that he forgot how to let himself be loved.
Now I like to think he’s on the Southside of Heaven, still trying To Beat the Devil. Whenever I think of Cheap Bourbon Whiskey, Pearl Snap Shirts, My Texas… I think of Losing a Friend.
So Goodbye Andrew Bradshaw, and Goodbye Austin.
