I Should Have Known

It was Monday the 28th, although the majority of the world was enjoying the freshness of winter, the little snowflakes decorating their kitchen windows, the weather was somewhat different down in California. There really wasn't much of a difference between summer and winter when you're living in Huntington Beach. He was perfectly alone in the large house he usually called his home but lately it was anything else but his home. They say that distance grows the heart fonder but that wasn't always the case. There were days when he preferred to be on the road, tour the world with his best friends and just forget the mundane day-to-day life that usually awaited him once the touring was done with.

Out of the blue his cellphone went off, forcing him to get out of his comfortable chair and lean over, trying to figure out who was calling him at such an early hour – 4PM was always an early hour if you wasted the night hanging out with your friends, drinking and discussing the adventures from the recent tour.

“Yeah, ‘sup?” he finally picked the phone up and answered, only to get greeted by a small smile on the other side and an old familiar voice, “You fucker bailed out on us yesterday, why did you go home so early?”

A small smile crawled on his face as well, as he leaned back against the chair, looking up at the ceiling and then back at the coffee table in front of him, going through a few of the magazines that were lying around. “I figured it was time to go when Johnny got his old cowboy hat on and started showing off his cowboy moves.” The whole conversation shifted to them just laughing like in good old times, not worrying about the world and just living in the moment. A few moments passed them, they briefly went over the New Year’s plans to which Jimmy agreed to attend with a simple “Sure, you know I’ll come if Shads won’t forget to pick me up again” – Brian, who was on the other side of the line just laughed and reassured Jimmy that something like that won’t happen again.

Besides the drugs and alcohol, Jimmy was also on prescribed medication for various health problems that plagued him; probably as a side-effect of the reckless life he’s been living for the past ten years, but who knows. Who really knows when you’re time is to go and why it cuts all the ties that you nourished through the years, with such an ease. He had the same song on repeat, blasting it at a comfortable level, leaving him enough space in mind to contemplate everything that went through that headspace of his.



Singing along a few lines of the song usually made him feel better but today was just, such a weird day. There was no other way to put it. So what better way to deal with loneliness than to pour a glass or two of the cheapest champagne you can find in your fridge? Nothing, absolutely nothing. With a heavy sigh he finally got out of the chair and walked towards the kitchen, aiming for the fridge and slowly opening it, checking if there’s any sign of a possible champagne bottle not opened looking back at him. “Why hello there!” he said cheerfully before reaching inside the fridge and pulling out the champagne bottle, popping it open and pouring it in the nearest glass his hand could grab.

One drink quickly turned into two, two turned into three and before he knew it, he was finishing the third bottle of the champagne, lying on the living room sofa and looking up at the ceiling. His phone wouldn’t stop ringing for some weird reason and every time he reached for it, he managed to push it only further away from his reach. Finally fed up with the annoying ringtone, Jimmy attempted to get off the sofa, somehow, and finally answer the call. After a few attempts, his feet finally started obeying him again as he walked very slowly towards the cellphone lying on the floor, Jack Sparrow style.

“H-Hello? Yeah? Who’s this -- ?” although he was probably stuttering like crazy by now, because in all honesty, it felt more difficult to articulate words than to actually walk back and forth.

“Jimmy? Haha, dude, did you start the party all on your own again? That shouldn’t have surprised me though.”

“Y-Yeah!” Jimmy started laughing as loud and obnoxious as one can laugh, before he slowly sat down on the floor and slowly laid on his back, finding the room to be moving far too quick for him right now.

“Well, should I come over and keep you company? Everyone’s busy planning for the New Year’s party, so – ” Brian asked while laughing a bit, waiting for Jimmy to find the appropriate words to answer the question while stumbling over more curse words than any rapper could ever put together in one song.

“Look, give me a good hour and I’ll be there, okay? Just don’t do anything crazy in the meanwhile, you hear me!” Jimmy just nodded and continued to lie on the floor, trying to stop the room from spinning like crazy.

After about half an hour or so, the room calmed down so Jimmy decided it was a good time to actually open the fourth champagne bottle and toast to the life he was living. “I’m one lucky motherfucker, that’s for sure.” He said more to himself than anyone else – since, he was basically all alone in the big house anyways, completely forgetting by now, that his medicine shouldn’t have been mixed with any kind of alcohol let alone any drugs.

It didn’t take long for his body to finally protest against the alcohol consummation that was going on and the pain started to form in his chest area. At first it felt like a heart attack but somehow he still made it to the sofa with little baby steps, cussing along the way like a sailor. “The fuck … shit.” Desperately trying to reach for his phone but it was way out of his reach, so he just collapsed down besides the sofa, clinching on his shirt, trying to somehow mend the chest pain.

You know how the say that before you die, your entire life flashes before your eyes? And you know just how calm you feel at a certain point of your life when no matter what would happen, you’d still be happy? Even if you died at that very point, you’d die with a smile on your face? He panicked at first, everything was going way too fast for him, he couldn’t calm his body down anymore, it felt like something was tearing his insides apart and the whole technique of beating them up like an old Nintendo system, didn’t seem to do its usually magic now. He recalled everything – from being a fucking homeless person living day to day, from the first gigs he performed as part of Pinkly Smooth, to the area filling concerts his band Avenged Sevenfold eventually got to perform.



If there was ever a moment where he wished that someone would have walked through the door, this was certainly one of those. Eventually the room stopped spinning completely, his chest stopped rising and lowering itself as a quiet, almost serene sigh walked across his lips – it was the sweetest death kiss. Slowly, the hand clinching on his shirt slid down his shirt, finding its place by his side, resting there forever.

It was maybe what, twenty or twenty-five minutes after the event when someone knocked on the door. Several times. Eventually Brian tried to peek inside the house and even shouted “Jimmy!” a few times, as well as tried to reach him via his cellphone. The tall guitarist with the hair not spiked up this time smiled while walking all the way around the house to the backyard entrance, figuring that Jimmy just passed out from drinking too much – it wouldn’t be the first time nor the last, right? The same old song was still on repeat, filling the room with an almost melancholic driven feeling.

“Jimmy, man, where the fuck are you?” Brian laughed a bit after shouting that question, closing the backyard door behind him as he entered Jimmy’s house. He walked pass the kitchen and saw the four almost empty champagne bottles just laying all over the counter – so putting one and one together, he got a pretty clear picture of what was going on. His brown eyes gazed at the sofa and saw the tall drummer lying on the floor, figuring that he just passed out there or even fell off the sofa while trying to sleep or something.

“Dude, Jimmy, seriously, at least you could have passed out in the bathroom and make this easier on me, you know?” Brian said again, smirking a bit, while walking towards Jimmy, leaning over to him and trying to pull him up on the sofa, just in case there would be an urgency of throwing up. But something didn’t feel quite as usual – something didn’t feel right at all. Quickly, Brian set Jimmy’s body up straight against the sofa, started slapping him, fearing it was a drug overdose that kicked his best friend unconscious. But after numerous attempts, he finally realized it. The world just got a little bit colder and a piece of him died along with Jimmy on that day.



“Dad … he’s gone. He’s gone dad – dad he’s fucking gone!” finally Brian broke down, shouting into the phone, unable to process whatever was going on. They had to deal with drug overdose before even death, but no, it was never one of them. Ever. Just an hour ago, they laughed on the phone – just an hour ago, everything was okay. That Monday turned out to be anything else but ordinary. That Monday marked the lives of many forever.