I wrote about my old friend Eric here: Spending Warm Sunny Days Indoors
In short, after the demise of his band Life Sentence Eric was living on the streets of Chicago and struggling with a heroin addiction. I found this out in the summer of 2005 and every time I made a trip home to Chicago I spent some time trying to find him, searching the halfway houses and places he'd been spotted panhandling. Trying to find him seemed hopeless and I had no idea how I was going to help him if I did find him but still I couldn't bear the thought of not trying.
As it turns out, Eric has cleaned himself up, gotten off the streets and is doing well. I don't have any more details but for now that's good enough news for me.
One interesting thing I found out about Eric is that he was an excellent swimmer, swam competitively for some team (I think college) and was good enough to consider qualifying for the Olympics. As I was dragging my ass through the pool at masters tonight I was thinking what a great swim coach he'd be. If anyone was capable of teaching me how to do a freakin' flip turn it'd be Eric.
And lord love the internet, here are some videos of Life Sentence from 1986 (Eric is the guitar player with the blond spiky hair):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjPpgMaOWGA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTY3nWVMIrI
The quality is appallingly bad but hey, that's punk rock.
Good for you for trying. It's hard to climb out of one's comfortable world and risk inserting one's self into something much more scary.
ReplyDelete-ellen
Well, Eric was a great friend to me back in the day, it was the least I could do to try to find him.
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