THE SHORT LIFE OF MIKE "SPIKEHORN" TRENCH

"A friend is the gift we give ourselves"

Once again fall has taken the leaves from the trees, the nights have grown colder and I’m spending a lot of time in my hunting stands reflecting on times gone by. More and more as I’ve grown older, I find myself thinking about the friends that I’ve lost. It’s now almost a year to the day since I lost my “Accidental Friend” Brian. I’m not really sure why it is, but for my relatively young age I’ve lost nearly every friend I ever had. Of the dozen of so people that I used to walk to Emerson Jr. High with every morning, only me and one other friend are left. Drugs killed a lot of them, the rest died of accidents related to drugs or diseases that are linked to that sort of lifestyle. Make no mistake about it, if you chose that lifestyle, your life will be much shorter. So it was with Michael “Spikehorn” Trench.

I met Mike in my first year at Emerson. (For more info on what that was like, read my column “Black and White”). Mike was the brother of one of my older brother’s friends so I sort of knew who he was, but I had never actually met him. To say Mike was a character would be an understatement, he was one of the funniest people I have ever known. Mike was small built, short in stature, and almost feminine in appearance. He had hair so straight that he used to stick his head out a car window at my urging and then shake it to demonstrate how it would fall right back into place, a fascinating feat to someone like me with frizzy hair that would turn into a rat’s nest at the slightest wind. He was horrible at any sport he played, but what he lacked in ability, he made up for in sheer guts. Once, in a pick-up game of football, Mike played for over an hour with a broken collarbone, and he was getting creamed by everybody. Mike was always picked dead last by anyone but me. I would always pick Mike early. The smile that would come over his face as he would trot over to my side was always worth more to me than winning. He was my best friend and I like to think I was his. Once, after I received a particularly bad beating at the hands of about 30 local hoods, Mike came running to my aid. After viewing the damage to my face, Mike doubled up his fists and ran down my perpetrators. He got the living shit kicked out of him. It was the stupidest and the most amazing thing anyone had ever done for me. Through whatever we faced, Mike covered my back and I covered his.

Mike loved drugs. For whatever reason, God had put into Mike that need to escape and the inability to stop. My inclination was more toward Marijuana or alcohol and I was never cursed with having an addiction. While I was content to be “buzzed”, Mike always wanted to be a little higher, almost as if he wanted to see if there was a plain where the troubles of living could not reach him.

Every fall, me, Mike, and several of our friends would make our way to Northern Michigan (referred to by us Lower Michiganders as “up north”) to hunt deer. We stayed at my Step-Father’s deer camp which was nothing more than a shack made out of quarter-rounds (the part left over from a log when you square it up) and whatever wood they could scrounge. It had no running water, so we had to get our water from a well pump that produced water so cold it was surprising that it wasn’t froze solid. Needless to say, washing up produced screams that are probably still confused with Bigfoot. Heat came from an old wood burner that took forever to start and then would cook you out of there. Animals lived in every part of the cabin and it wasn’t uncommon to wake up and see chipmunks running for cover when you turned on the lights. As primitive as it was, this old city boy loved going “up north” every chance he got and Mike was my constant sidekick.

The adventures we had up there would fill a book, but one thing stood out more than all my other memories, the day Mike shot a buck. As you might suspect, since we went on our yearly hunting trip more to party than to actually get a deer, deer were rare on our buck pole. In fact, in the six or seven years that we went up to my step father’s cabin we had collected only two legal bucks excluding Mike’s. I had shot one barely legal buck that was so close to the 3" antler limit we hid it our trunk rather than risk a fine (it turned out it was in fact legal) and my mom had hit one with her car. It would be accurate to say that we weren’t much of a threat to the deer population. I always pictured the deer up there in a thicket laughing at us as we wandered into the woods way passed daylight, hung-over and making more noise than bus load of elementary school kids on a day hike. Despite our obvious inabilities, we still made our attempts at bagging a buck, and all of us dreamed of that glorious ride home down I-75 with our buck straddled across the trunk of our car with all the other returning hunters craning their necks to look at what we had got. It seems strange in today’s climate, but back then it was a right of passage, and only “real men” could bag an elusive whitetail. Certainly none of us thought that man would be Mike Trench.

Mike and me would always venture out together into the vast northern woods and hunt within earshot of each other, and so it was on that day. I was nursing a hangover and had almost fallen asleep as the daylight was slowly fading into dark. The sound of Mike’s shot damn near gave me a heart attack, and my first thought was that Mike had somehow shot himself. I gathered myself and ran as fast as I could over the ridge that had separated us, fully expecting to see Mike wounded. What I found instead was Mike standing over a nice spikehorn deer, cleanly killed with a shot through the heart. I couldn’t believe my eyes! We danced and whooped for a good five minutes. When we finally settled down, we set about the task of cleaning the deer and then dragging him out of the woods. Back at camp our other hunting comrades ran out of the cabin at the site of Mike’s deer. We hoisted him up onto the buck pole and began a long night of celebrating. Mike was the star of the show, a man’s man, a hero, and the ride home had us all beaming at the other hunter’s envious looks. Mike was so proud he took the horns and tied them to the front of his car where they remained for years. From that day forward Mike was known as “Spikehorn Trench” to all of us.

Years came and went as they will, I got married and started having kids and Mike’s lifestyle and mine could no longer be the same. I cleaned up my act and Mike slipped further into the world of drugs. I could no longer hang out with my friend and we drifted further and further apart. But I would still bump into him every now and then and always hoped that one day he would save himself and we could be the friends we once were. One day shortly after Mike’s 30th birthday, I saw Spikehorn walking down the street and stopped to chat for a moment. He said he had been reflecting on his life and where he wanted to go with it. His 30th birthday, he said, had made him realize he had wasted his life, so he had quit all drugs and was going to start anew. He gave me his phone number and said to call him, maybe we could even go hunting, like we used to do. I told him I would like that very much. It never happened.

Two weeks later, Mike “Spikehorn” Trench was found in an abandoned house, dead from a drug overdose. His current “friends” had dumped him there when it became obvious he had done too much. When they returned to check on him, he was dead, so they did what any “friends” would do, they emptied his pockets and left him there to rot. At his funeral, I cried harder than I have ever cried in my life.

The lesson here my friends is this, there can only be one end to a life of drugs; death, and a host of “friends” who will turn their backs and leave you when you need them most. I live every day of my life wishing that I could go back and somehow save Mike from his fate, this is my burden. It's a burden I share with his family. For all of you I have this piece of sage advice. Always remember that moderation is the key to living a good life, nothing in excess. If you must do something to escape, smoke pot, or drink a little, but above all else avoid drugs and the lifestyle that surrounds it. There is no wasted life, we all are here for a reason, even if only to show us what not to do. Let Mike’s life be that lesson for you. H.C.