If this helps and you need to have a chat when you can PM me i will send my phone number
Mods: This is posted with Sarge's full knowledge and permission. If it is too long or you think it is inappropriate, please delete it. It just demonstrates that no matter how low you get, there's always hope as long as you don't take the selfish option.
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Sarge moved to Thailand thirteen years ago, retiring at age fifty. His Thai wife of fifteen years stayed in England, supposedly to wrap things up. He lived here for two years with a mae bahn. He was pissed most nights and barfined two or three girls a week. When it became clear his wife was never going to move to Thailand, they divorced. He was not wealthy but had a large enough pension to live comfortably. He took his mae bahn as his girlfriend, quit screwing around, 'adopted' her son, and settled down to live a quiet life.
That's when the trouble started. Sarge never cared about money and never paid attention to money. “As long as me food's on the table, the expenses are handled, and I can play a round of golf now and then, I couldn't give a rat's tit what's in the bank at the end of the month.” He turned the family finances over to his girlfriend.
She liked to gamble. “We'd go out occasionally to the illegal casinos. I'd set a limit, maybe 500 or 1000 baht. If we lost that, it was time to go home.” He saw gambling as a lark, no different than a night out for a few beers with the mates or a round of golf. He was paying for entertainment and thought nothing of it. His girlfriend was getting addicted. She started going out on her own. There was never any money left at the end of the month, but Sarge was getting fed and playing the occasional round of golf, so he didn't worry about it.
The next thing Sarge knew, she'd run up 440,000 baht of debts to the local loan sharks. He made a big mistake. He paid off her loans and let her stay. She promised never to gamble again and life was very pleasant for a few years. His food was on the table, he played a couple of rounds of golf each week, and lived a pleasant relaxed life with his girlfriend and her son. Life was good until the heart attacks started.
It was the third heart attack that sent him back to England. He went to get an angiogram. The prognosis was not good. “The quack pointed to a section of my heart and said, 'See that? No blood's getting there. It's dead.' It meant me heart was f*cked. The quack said they couldn't operate because I was so unhealthy the chances of my dying during the operation far outweighed the potential benefits of surgery. I was f*cked, so I went back to Thailand to die.”
That was four years ago. In the six weeks he'd been gone, his girlfriend had started gambling again. The debts started coming in. As fast as he could pay them off, she built up new ones. His life began to spiral downward.
When I met Sarge two years ago he seemed a man near the end of his rope. I felt sorry for him. He had obviously been a strong vigorous man whose life and health had gone to hell. After one of the heart attacks he'd married his long time girlfriend so she would get his pension. He'd bought a house in her name. He had tried ensure that she and her son would be provided for when he died, and she was destroying everything. He was discouraged, depressed, frustrated, and angry. Although I never felt personally threatened by his anger, it was always near the surface and would become visible in any conversation at any time.
I became good friends with Sarge. Best mates, the Brits would say, though we are vastly different people. His bluster and loudness didn't really bother me. I grew up in Texas, where bluster and loudness are the norm. I could see through the anger and see a very decent man trying to live by the moral code he'd lived by his entire life. Whatever problems he was facing, he wasn't a hypocrite and he wasn't a liar. Someone once wrote, “Choose your friends here very carefully.” I'd rather have a friend I can trust than one I can't, and this was someone I could trust.
As far as I could tell, he would probably be dead soon from a heart attack or suicide. He told me one day, “Mate, I'm just waiting to die, and at the moment death looks pretty good.” He drank too much and smoked too much, but how could I blame him? He wasn't going to live much longer and felt he had nothing to live for anyway.
About a year ago he came over to help a friend and me with a minor project. All he had to do was get on the ground and stand up two times. The second time he stood up he was white as a sheet and gasping for breath. I really thought I'd have to call an ambulance. He was a sick man.
A month after that incident he had an arrhythmia. At the hospital he was assigned a new heart specialist and the very first seeds of change were planted. I had to spend June working in the USA and when I returned in July, he'd bought a bicycle. His new doctor had a totally different attitude and wanted to help him live the best life he could with as little medicine as possible. The doctor said a bicycle would be good for his health. By this time he could barely walk fifty meters.
He rode the bicycle to my house a few times. It's a three kilometer ride. He'd arrive exhausted and sweating, and need at least thirty minutes to recover.
Life with his wife continued to deteriorate. Every time he thought he had a way to pay off the debts, new ones popped up. He tried everything to help – and that was his attitude – to help. This was his wife who was going through a terrible problem and he wanted to fix it and get their lives back to normal. When he tried to learn the truth, all he got was stonewalling and lies. His depression, frustration and anger continued to grow. The debts continued to mount, and she even sold the house out from under him. He stopped riding his bicycle and went back to thinking he would just die.
The end came in late October last year. She stayed out all night. When she came back the next day he told her to leave – he wouldn't even let her in the house to use the bathroom. They were finished. He'd done what he could and there was no way he could pay her debts faster than she could make them.
When he came over to tell me he'd kicked her out, all I could think was, “Good, now maybe you'll have a life again.” We talked then about the need to hold firm and not let her back in.
The absolute bottom came ten days later when he lost his wallet. He had no cash stashed in the house, and his only ATM card was in his wallet, along with eight thousand baht. It would take a couple of weeks for him to get a new card from England. He was destitute.
He was as low as he'd ever been in his life. He knew he couldn't live with her and felt he couldn't live without her. She'd been part of his life life ever since he came to live in Thailand. He was suicidal to the point that we began a daily ritual – he would call me each morning just to let me know he was still alive. During the first few weeks we spent many hours together as he began to try to sort out his life. He had to see his Doctor quite often, too. He was losing weight, mostly because he was depressed and didn't eat.
Sarge's heart attack four years before had left him impotent. He felt that he could not have another woman because he couldn't make her happy. He kept thinking about how to save enough money to bring his wife back. He didn't really want her but felt he had no alternative. He talked about this with his doctor quite often. He had been told he couldn't take Viagra after the heart attacks. Finally his doctor said, “Give me weight loss and I'll give you Viagra.”
His doctor and I said the same thing, “Get on your bicycle and ride.” Our motivations were different. The doctor wanted him to improve his health. I knew the exercise would help his depression.
He got on his bicycle and rode. Five kilometers at first, then ten, fifteen, twenty. He was still depressed, especially at night, but I began to see the change. We rode together often during that time and he was determined to get fit. His weight was dropping. He did everything for himself around the house. He began to regain his confidence. Each day he looked at the two Viagra on his table and thought, “I can have a life again.”
He cleaned out his house, boxing all of his wife's and her son's things. He stored it, knowing he'd give it to her if she gave him a divorce. He only kept one picture. It wasn't of his wife or her son.
He started to pull out of it. I knew things would be different the day we took a fifty kilometer ride together. We were almost home when he began to sing, “I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike!”, from the old Queen song. This was a man who'd barely been able to ride three kilometers a few months before.
It had been one hell of a rough time. He later told me he'd tried to overdose on his sleeping pills four times in the first couple of months. Many days he had sat on my front porch and cried. The morning ritual was no joke. I knew that if he didn't call by noon and wouldn't answer my calls, it would be my responsibility to go check and then call in the police.
So... where is he now?
Sarge stopped drinking beer the day after he kicked out his wife. He didn't trust himself not to get drunk and go bring her back. He began to cook and take care of the house and himself. He lost 28 kilos and he lost the anger and the obsession with his wife. She gave him a divorce and he cleaned all her belongings out of his house. He learned how cheap it is to live in Thailand and now saves half his pension each month. His doctor kept checking his heart and said that although the original prognosis was not wrong, there may have been a problem with the dye used, and that perhaps the arteries hadn't been completely blocked. He's regained seventy percent of the function in that area of his heart. His medications have been reduced by eighty to ninety percent. His heart is fine. He reduced his smoking dramatically. He became healthy and wealthy enough that he was able to get a hernia operation that he had needed for years.
The kicker happened at the end of January.
Before the heart attacks Sarge had almost always played the same golf course because he had a lifetime membership there. He always used the same caddy. They were attracted to each other, but he was a faithful husband and nothing ever developed. In late January he went to coach a friend who was playing that course. He only went because his membership card had been lost with his wallet, and he needed a new one. He was healthy enough to walk around the course and thought he'd like to start playing again in a few months. While there, he asked after his old caddy. He was told she had left, so he shrugged his shoulders, and thought, “Oh well. I would have loved to seen he.”
Three days later his caddy arrived at his house. She had come up from Phuket and traced him by knowing his wife's name and her business. It took her two days of walking around town to find him. The mutual attraction was still there.
Now he has an absolutely stunning thirty year old girlfriend who sure seems to love him. He's crazy about her, but keeping his eyes open. And he's no longer impotent. “If she leaves tomorrow it doesn't matter. She's been the best therapy I could ever have. She restored my manhood. I thought I could never have another woman and now I don't give the ex a thought...”
Oh, that one picture he'd saved? It was a picture of his caddy.
