Scott

It's funny to think that I lived over a decade until I had a friend who was just mine.  Just my friend.  I have a little brother who was born in the same year as I was - me in January, him in December - & we were constantly together for the first ten or so years of our lives.  But we weren't very much alike.  & for reasons that are too complicated to explain here, we were never actually friends - we treated each other more like rivals.  & no one can be friends with one's rivals, especially if the goal - whatever one is supposed to be winning - is more important than anything else.

So it was natural that when I began making friends of my own, my little brother dismissed them, derided them.  He would often say, "You just want to be like them," as if suddenly discovering you have something in common with someone was an attempt at imitation.  When I was in eighth grade, I became friends with a newcomer named Scott, & despite my own fucked-upness, we rekindled that friendship in my ninth grade year.  In the first half of 1983, I imagined he & I would be friends forever.

It's no stretch to say he was my first best friend, & maybe my easiest.  The remarkable thing is that he wanted to be friends with me.  It would be fun to go back & see us interact, to see what he liked about me.  I just don't know.

At the end of our freshman year at South Garland High School, we had a conversation which affected my life in ways I had never experienced.  We were talking on the phone near the end or after the end of the school year, & he told me his mother & stepfather were getting a divorce, & he & his mother & his little brother were moving back to Illinois, where he was from.  I remember the conversation, on a phone attached to a wall in a tiny kitchen, talking to him until it got dark out.  No one else was home, my mother was working at the convenience store, The Time Saver, which her boyfriend owned, & my little brother was - I don't know where.  I was wounded.  I didn't know what I would do without him.  It's very safe to say my life would have turned out differently if we had been best friends all through high school.  But we weren't.  He went away.

He confessed lots of things to me that night.  He told me about difficult situations with his family.  He told me about guilt with friends.  I don't think I want to share those things here.  I just want to note it was the first time he really opened up to me - the first time we talked about something other than comics or sci-fi or television or D&D or the many things we loved that we shared with one another.  & I was deeply affected by it.  I can safely say that I had never been truly real with anyone until that day.  My family, most of the people at school, most people I interacted with, they were basically all facades, pretending to be who they thought they should be.  I was no different.  Scott let me in by basically becoming vulnerable.  It was extraordinary, & it affected me like every act of honesty has affected me in my life: it transformed me.

We made plans.  I tried to send him comic books for a while, but even though he paid me, it was too much trouble & cost more money than I thought.  We talked on the phone when we could but in those days a thirty minute phone call could be as much as ten, fifteen, twenty dollars - money I definitely didn't have.

He visited me, something I never did for him: he came to visit when I was in eleventh grade, & then brought his fiancee (later his wife) after my first year of college.  I wasn't as deeply into sci-fi or such things then, & we had a hard time relating.  We lost touch.  But I thought about him a lot.  Last year, when I wrote about him, I sent him a message on Facebook, linking to the post, but either he didn't read it or, you know, he didn't give a shit, so he didn't comment to me about it.  Fair enough.

But yeah, we did find each other on Facebook, & we talked one night, ten years ago now I guess, when I first moved to West Virginia.  His son was with him, he loves his son so much, it was so nice to hear him talk about his son despite the problems he was having with the boy's mother.  A few years after that, my wife & I visited Chicago & he met us at a vegan restaurant & reluctantly took a few bites from a mushroom burger while we chatted.  My vegetarianism was probably baffling for him, & the last time we talked, he worked for a place that did animal experimentation.  In a sad bit of irony, they mostly experimented on beagles, the dogs I love the most.

Worse than all that, his experiences had turned him more & more conservative.  I can't be sure if he's a Trump supporter but I wouldn't be surprised.  I visited Chicago last summer & chose not to look him up, which I justified by remember that I found out he visited areas close to Austin in the early oughts to sky-dive (a hobby of his) but didn't look me up.  We just weren't friends like that anymore.

But I am a sentimental old fluff & hope he knows how much he meant to me back then.  He seemed to readjust to life in Illinois with his characteristic cockiness & confidence & I remember being amazed & jealous when he told me, in a phone conversation after he'd moved, that he had a girlfriend.  What the fuck?  In my sad, envious way, I tried to lie about sexual experiences but the truth is I couldn't even imagine them, so I sounded dumb & obvious & pathetic.

He never called me out on it.  He was too good a friend for that.