Part 20
"The Night Before"

The days had flown by. A couple of weeks ago I had just met Dr. Froines, now it was November 9, 1998. Tomorrow I would be having surgery and the biggest test of my life was about to take place. The days before today were really weird. That last Friday I had my big Roof & Doof’s concert. That night I played with the fire and emotion that “this might be the last time I will ever play jazz again.” If it was going to be the last time, I wanted to go out in a bang. Quite a few people showed up that night. It was a fun time. After the gig was over and the band was paid, I packed my equipment and said my “farewells” to the band. The band knew what was going on with me and I could tell that they were a little uncomfortable about this night. I shook each of their hands and said, “well, this might be it. If anything happens to me, I just want to tell you that it’s been fun.” They agreed, and with that, I was gone.

Since it was my last day before my surgery, my mother wanted me to do something special, like go to some church meeting. I didn’t want to. For the past 4-5 months I had kept a “non-shala” attitude about the whole thing, and this night was going to be no exception. I wanted to do the same thing tonight that I did every Monday night, watch WWF Raw is War!

I had become a huge wrestling fan in the past few years. I guess my brothers turned me on to the whole thing, but I had taken it now as a part of my image. Everyone at PLU knew that I was a wrestling fan, and most of them thought it was pretty cool. I usually watched the show with just “the guys”. The party would usually consist of me, my day, my friend Kelly, my brothers, and my brother’s friends. This night a couple of my buds from PLU also came, Kevin Freitas and Dale Comer. They were fairly new to the whole wrestling scene so we had to guide them along. I think they enjoyed the show and I am eternally grateful that they came to spend time with me. Again, I asked myself the question, “where are all my friends at?” I didn’t receive any good luck calls. I didn’t get to say goodbye to them. I was heartbroken that it didn’t matter to them if I lived or died tomorrow. But hey, they were busy right?

I didn’t want to go out like this. My life was still incomplete. I had not done everything I wanted to do. I wanted to get married. I wanted to have kids and teach them how to throw a baseball. I wanted to have my own house and have my own garden. I wanted to finish school and get a good job. I wanted to someday play on The Tonight Show. And yeah, I wanted to “get some”. Wouldn’t that suck if I was up in heaven and knew that my buddy Moses had gotten more action than I had? Hey, I’m young! My life couldn’t end like this. These and much more things ran through my head all night. Watching wrestling helped numb these thoughts, but I would have loved to sit there with all of my friends and let them know that “they were the best friends a guy could have.”

Instead, after wrestling was finished, I gave a hug to Kelly and Kevin Freitas, shook Dale’s hand, and told them “goodbye”. I could tell that they had all sorts of thing running through their heads, and I could especially tell that Kelly was really shook up by the whole thing. In the past year she had grown to become my best friend. She was one of the first ones I had told about my cancer, way back on July 25, 1998. Now I had to look her in the eyes and tell my best friend, “goodbye”. That was hard, but not as hard as the “good-bye’s” I would be saying tomorrow.

I had trouble sleeping that night.

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