He wore a tie stamped over and over with a tiny golf club and had a mop of hair that looked heavy from having soaked a chestnut spill. In a first betrayal of my low-bred worldview, for which I’d later learn to nurture a healthy insecurity, I ridiculed him and said he looked like a nerd. In my defense, the swoop had yet to sweep its way westward from Georgia to Texas in 2001. He’s moderately gray and taking hair dye salon recommendations from me now.
He was one of those peripheral friends, a pledge brother from out of state who was a token Jew and who liked to drink whiskey, maybe. That was what I knew of him in 2002.
In 2003 we took a trip to Mexico, having liked a previous Bordertown jaunt with the gang so much. While messaging a girl (who is now his wife) with one of those archaic devices with T9 predictive texts, he looked up late and had to swerve to miss a glacier of retread sitting in the middle of the lane on a dusty stretch of highway. My sprite and whisky moved in a big wave but largely stayed contained, save for the spill on my hand which I lapped up, lips full and wet like a lover’s passion. The cop who pulled us over didn’t seem to appreciate the smell that results and lingers when whiskey and sprite cohabit, and I only remember of her a curled, snarly lip. Though I’d later learn that the inhabitants of a vehicle are accustomed to the reek—literally having given birth to the slow and overarching stench that hangs, with the heaviest of the air molecules hovering above the steering wheel—I think the policewoman was a lesbian. I cracked my door and rolled my plastic bottle of brown sprite under the vehicle and after twenty or thirty minutes I was given the permission to drive the car.
He went to jail for some reason. I’m not a lawyer so it strikes me as reckless to speculate as to why. Maybe I’m just old school and journalistic like that.
Keys in hand, I drove to Mexico alone. He would have wanted that.
I drank alone in a cut-off shirt and later slept in the front seat, across the border and next to a shuttered textile factory in a fashion I would describe as “with one eye open”, but to this day I could swear I got a good five hours complete with some REM. That’s not bad, considering.
On the way back to school I figured I’d stop and see what’s what at the jail—I had his car, after all, and if it wasn’t too big a pain in the ass it was probably the least I could do.
It was noon.
They told me to wait so I tried to lie down in the lobby. The plastic molds of the seats were too hard and unaccommodating and the criminal justice staffers kept looking at me funny. I yelled a lot and acted crazy. I thought it was quite natural that a severely hungover idiot would be the one tasked to pick up a jailed driver, the next morning. I’m still not sure how that didn’t occur to them or how that doesn’t logically follow, but I’ve since learned to pick my philosophical battles more practically.
I ate Sonic and remember, this was back before the Sonic boom ((no pun intended)) of the mid-2000’s which saw a sleepy Oklahoma-based quick service restaurant grow to a respectable national brand, so that’s saying something. I even spent, like, a dozen dollars on magazines at a grocery store—isn’t that ridiculous? I don’t think I’ve done that since. The last dead cat bounce of Print Media, Inc.
Six or Seven hours later, he was released and we drove back to town. Thoroughly exhausted from the travails, I assumed it was an understood fact of life that we would be forgoing the boozy concert scheduled that night. He assumed the opposite which, upon our reactions, made for a mirroring effect despite our two faces being so structurally different. That was the day that I knew this guy had the chin of an Irish boxer and I accepted that he would always be a hardier specimen of human, than me. As he dropped me off I turned to him and would utter what would later become both a running joke and the cornerstone of a deep and honest friendship: “That was the hardest night of my life.”
I didn’t understand how the guy who had just gotten out of jail and had (what was at the time for such young, privileged men) an impossible weight of misdeed and misfortune hanging over his head could have riposted “The hardest night of YOUR life? You asshole”. Hadn’t I explained about the delay and the chairs that didn’t allow for me to lay flat?
From that moment on, however, we were inseparable. We had a bond like I imagine bank robbers or soldiers had and grew to be the best kind of kindred spirits. That is to say, best friends whose forays into life’s dark dangers will die with us, not out of shame but rather out of respect that we should not cause undue stress and worry to our loved one’s regarding events whose statute of limitations have long since expired anyhow (R.I.P. N. Holloway).
When he moved to Dallas, I’d already been here for two months. He picked up my bed and a few other things and drove them to me. In the last fifteen years, outside of those two months, he’s always been no more than two miles away should I need help; a couch to sleep on, a short-term loan to bail out my alcoholic and irresponsible ways, a lawyer to bail me out of jail, a friend with which to share a meal.
The Godfather of one of my children,
The guy whom my parents think is weird,
The smartest person I know (and I know them all),
My financier,
My attorney,
My enabler,
My best friend*.
Fare thee well.
*Submissions re-open again in August. Contact for guidelines.
