Last Days
In November 2017, about six months after John had come back from Spain, I moved to New Braunfels. Leslie had inherited her parents' house and we were essentially turning the Austin house over to John and his sister Anna temporarily until they got established. Anna was working at Starbucks and John's jobs are described below. Leslie was working short weeks and commuting back and forth. She moved into a tiny bedroom that she used the 3 nights she spent in Austin each week. John got the back of the house, Anna the front, where there were larger bedrooms. Eventually, Leslie moved to New Braunfels in Ocotober 2018.
Work
John came home from Spain after three years in May 2017. When I asked him why he came back (I thought he should stay in Europe), he said it was because he missed his "American amigos". He returned penniless which was really not a problem as we could help him out and he still had money leftover in a college fund established by his grandmother Forbis. But he wanted to save that and he wanted to be self-supporting.
In the three years he was in Spain, other than the cost of travel, he never asked us for money.
Within a week, he walked out ther door one day and came back with a job (starting that day) as a night dishwasher at Chez Nous restaurant on Burnet Road. He worked there several months, working from 5 p.m. until sometimes 2 a.m. I remember he told me that whenever he went to a restaurant in the future, he was going to order a beer for the dishwasher first thing and if the waiter said they couldn't do that, he would walk out.
John wanted to use his Spanish, so he next worked for a private company that enrolled Texas families in the CHIP program. He worked in the section for callers who spoke only Spanish. During his time there John was reprimanded for being too friendly to a co-worker. He was at a desk adjacent to John. He refused to socialize at all, and John became angry that he would not even say hello. So he began a campaign to force the guy to speak to him.
He left after several months, tired of office life. He went through a series of part-time jobs, working at a dog day care place, as a dog walker, as a paid campaign worker for a local judge and as a waiter at a French restaurant.
Finally he decided he wanted to be a paralegal specializing in Immigration Law. He started taking paralegal classes at Austin Community College, but then landed a job at a single person law firm that did immigration work. However, this had an unhappy result. The lawyer provided zero training and threw John into work that was way above his experience level. John was in charge of cases where the client had been arrested. There was no support and no documentation on how to handle these cases in a timely manner (arrested "illegals" get deported much quicker than others). He was fired for not keeping up with the work.
He then went to the University of Texas' Paralegal Certificate Program, graduated in October 2018 and got another paralegal job. However this one turned out to be another mistake, as the solo lawyer was (according to John) incompetent and blamed her employees for her own mistakes. John wanted to quit after a few days, but a co-worker begged him to stay. He did, she left for another job, and after a month, soon John found himself discharged again. He admitted he had made mistakes but felt the lawyer had been unfair.
To be fair, John had become a pretty argumentative person who sometimes seemed to take contrary views just to argue. Not something you want to do with the people who supervise you.
After that he worked for Natural Foods in a temporary job setting up a new store. Around this time he texted "I've been wondering if I should leave Austin....too much history here and not enough future". After that he started his last job, as a seasonal worker unloading trucks at The Natural Gardener. John loved nature, so in some ways (other than the very low pay), it was a perfect job for him.
Romance or the Lack Thereof
Probably the less said about this, the better, right? Let's just say John was unlucky in love. He very much yearned for a female companion. But he seemed drawn to women who simply were not that interested in him. His last relationship was as a senior in college. There were no happy ones back in Austin.
What were you doing when you were 27?
John asked me this at lunch one day when I came to Austin to visit. I don't remember if he had turned 27 yet. I think not.
I told him the truth. From age 22 (when my father died) until I met Leslie around age 29, I was pretty much getting stoned every day and working as a clerk in the UT Austin library system (in that order). Things were easier back then. Austin was not the capitalistic greed hive it has since become and most jobs were either with the state government or the university. Marijuana was cheap but it was also not as addictive, since it was not the greenhouse grown, genetically altered stuff of today. I was a wannabe poet. I had zero ambition otherwise. I had the same luck with women that John was having in 2018, so I guess that at least has not changed.
What John was doing when he was 27.
To be honest, I seemed to lose contact with John once I moved to New Braunfels in November 2017. I would get occaisional reports from his mom when she was in town staying at the house 3 nights per week. I made trips to Austin about once a month, and might have lunch with him if he wasn't working. I got a rare text message now and then, usually a cryptic question. We both worried about him because he seemed to go through a lot of jobs, to often be financially stressed, and didn't seem to know what he wanted to do. Some weeks he fell out of love with Austin, but the next week he never wanted to leave. The paralegal career crashed about the same time as his initial romance in 2018.
His OCD had "shape-shifted" (his words) to haunt his new interest in gardening which had replaced the idea of being a paralegal. This manifested itself in an exaggerated fear of contamination of the soil, and a general fear of toxins in the environment. We knew (and his texts later showed) that John was smoking marijuana in an effort to self-medicate, to relieve his anxieties about jobs, money, OCD, and his embarrassment to still be dependent on his parents. But nothing indicates he was using harder drugs at this time.
In the early 1970s, John's grandfather Jack Prather bought 42 acres of the Conrad Ranch, 6 miles northwest of Lometa in North Central Texas, which rwas being parceled into smaller sections and sold off to city people. In June 2019 John texted a friend that he was going to start a goat ranch there. Although I had been going up to Lometa since we moved back to Austin, cutting cedar away from the many escarpment Oaks on the property and keeping the cabin and utilites operating, John showed little interest in going with me.
The cabin at Lometa
Homemade map of Lometa at time John started going up with me.
John had made the rare trip with me ( I was also going less because of the additional distance from New Braunfels) since coming back from Spain, usually to collect bones for his art works.
But then in November 2019 we began to go together every weekend. Initially I spent the time mowing the grass which had gone crazy because I hadn't been keeping it cut. John started planting various types of plants (yucca in particular, because a lot of things could be made from it apparently) and digging up others (algarita, for example) that he hoped to sell. Except for a period in January after I injured my hand working on a lawnmower, we made these trips almost weekly until John's death. After I finished cutting back the grass, John helped me clear a grove of old oaks of cedar. It had been the first one I cleared in 1997 because the oldest oak on the place was a part of the grove, but the cedar had slowly started to come back.
Oldest oak at Lometa (it is alive; it had just lost its leaves for the year.)
I bought a wood chipper because John also wanted to make mulch out of all the cedar we were cutting instead of burning it which made sense. Burning was bad for the enivornment and dangerous to boot.
John also began making charcoal because of an idea he'd heard about "biochar".
And so it continued, probably the best times I ever spent with John, talking over his ideas and everything else under the sun on the 90 minute drives to and from Austin to Lometa, working with him, being with him.
We had a trip planned for April 12.
En medio del viaje de mi vida, volvi a mi mismo, en un bosque oscuro.........
For the last six weeks I've studied the texts on John's phone, examined my memories of his behavior, questioned friends, and tried to understand how my son, the same man who wrote beautiful poems, created beautiful art, and worked as hard as a Mexican (that is not a racist statement; ask anyone who has worked construction or landscaping with a Latino) could have ended up dead of a drug overdose.
From what I can tell, until January of 2020, John's main drugs were "caffeine and weed". But beginning in January, for reasons only John could tell us, he began to toy with painkillers: percodan, xanax, and oxycodone. No doubt he had tried all these before, but it was not until 2020 that it became a frequent habit. We still do not have the final report from the Medical Examiner, but the police have more or less told us that he purchased oxycodone laced with fetanyl, which is a terribly dangerous drug. He was aware of the risk. But he did it anyway.
At the beginning of April, he got laid off of the Natural Gardener because of the Covid pandemic. Since he was a seasonal worker, he could not apply for unemployment. In a text to Leslie on April 4 he wrote "I've decided before I give up on the city I will take another stab at the paralegal field, even if it's a personal injury place. I just need to get in the loop. Being a criminal defense pararalegal, used to not be interested in that but now I am more. It's cool to defend people even if they made a mistake." On April 7 he wrote a friend: "I applied for a couple of jobs...I deserve to get ducked."
On April 10 he was dead.
Was John arrogant? Self-destructive? Depressed? Celebrating? Addicted? I don't know. All I know is that he was my son and now he is gone forever. I will never again see him, talk to him, laugh with him. There is no greater sadness left for the Fates to inflict on me.
And you lost sight on me
Whilst the wind it blows so holy
As if I disappeared
To thin, breathless air,
Drinking, bittersweet
And sometimes it seems
That you lost sight on me
And don't lead me on
And don't break my heart
You know it's breakable
You know it's sweet
And what shall I do
When it finally crumbles away
Pick up all these years
That I seen myself throw away
To where I know it will be safe
From all your broke
All your broken hearts
Micah P Hinson
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