I was thinking about a friend of mine the other day. Well… I once had this friend.
This is a story.
In high school, I had some weird social shifts, the first being my friends getting “too cool” for me, then my friends getting into relationships and being too all about the ladies for me. That landed me with a group of friends a year older than me, mostly running as a two man path of academic destruction with my friend Rod. Seinfeld wouldn’t come until later, but Rod was Bizarro-me. Chubby, socially anxious, a math whiz who was almost emotionless other than when he’d laugh at the jokes I made (he rarely joked himself unless he was calling back one of my jokes). He came from a super-stable sitcom like family with a mother and father who made a steady income and who, as best we could all tell, never fought. He loved cats but was afraid of dogs. His favorite color was orange.
We became friends through the academic competition team at our high school. I was the captain of said team the only time my high school ever won a state championship in anything. Rod was my right-hand man. We ran the school’s art club. I was on the math academic team Rod captained because they needed a fourth member to compete. We played video games every day after school. We played D&D in Rod’s basement. We were really close in spite of being from radically different worlds, like two sides of the same coin.
Rod and I had a parting of ways when I had to leave IU (which I had chosen to attend because he was already there). He felt I was throwing my life away. I don’t think he ever understood that I couldn’t pay to stay and that my family needed me back home. But he told me he didn’t want to see me again, and so it went. 21 years have passed since that day.
But I want to share five little stories… little Rod anecdotes.
- One night sitting in the park, on the swings, illegally in the park way after dark (no one worried about us being out late because we literally weren’t capable of doing anything wrong), Rod had one of his most inspired ideas ever. He wanted to open a diner called Greasy Sticky’s. The menu would just be the logo on a sheet of paper. You would order a drink, then you would be brought something that was both greasy and sticky at the cook’s convenience. Years later we’d both eat together, more than once, in a place that was literally a culinary student’s living room. You’d go in, and he’d walk to the fridge, get you a drink, and suggest things he could make from what was there. He made the best nachos. They were greasy and sticky.
- One night we had to stage as massive, massive all-nighter working on a monster project (it was a Rube Goldberg machine– we made three of them in our time in high school. I forget which this was). After trying unsuccessfully to get a motorized tetherball made of metal to connect to a magnetic circuit for hours, we made it work. When it worked, Rod stared at me in amazement and I screamed “Subway for everyone!” He would repeat this mantra no less than 1000 times in subsequent years.
- One day I was reading Merlin and the Crystal Cave for my English class. Rod asked to see my book, and he noticed that the last person to have it had written “the vile bucket, still half filled with vomit” (a line from the book) on the first page. but it was super sloppy and looked like “The vile pocket still have filled with vomit.” Rod would refer to almost everything after that as “the vile pocket” then pause, then cackle and say “still have filled with vomit.”
- On an overnight drive home from St. Louis, we hit a dragonfly and it smeared on the windshield. This led a sleep-deprived and cola-overloaded Rod to devise a system of government where anyone who was under a 90 IQ would be strapped to a rocket and launched into a gigantic translucent wall for the amusement of the rest of us, all of them branded with the word “dumbo” on their foreheads. It was totally not-PC and super-dark, but he ended up using the idea for a philosophy paper at IU and received the most amazing comments. The instructor gave him an A but urged him to seek counseling for his anger issues. This was a kid who couldn’t do anger.
- My most vivid memory of Rod is a totally strange one, but it was part of why I loved the dude. The day before he took off for college (I had a year to go in high school), we were on the swings, again, really late, in the park, just staring at the stars and talking about life. I told him about how much I would miss him, how I’d miss our talks and our adventures and how I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with high school without him around. It was a somber moment. I think I even cried a little. Rod, though, in his classic way, said the strangest thing, something I’ve never forgotten. He told me, hand on my shoulder, “if you died, I’d bury you with an elaborate headstone, and I’d pay tribute to you and remember you fondly, but I wouldn’t cry, and I wouldn’t miss you.” Then he looked away and resumed swinging.
Goodbye, my evil twin. It took me 21 years to realize it, but we broke at just the right time. I remember you fondly as the enigmatic math-loving me, and we never had to deal with your conservatism causing you to hate the radical in me. We never had to deal with you watching me continue to struggle like crazy to succeed when it was coming so easy for you. We never had to have the talk where you wouldn’t have understood me going to graduate school and entering the academy, even though it’s the only place either of us ever belonged.
I miss you.
But I hope you remember us as we were, two over-thinking-it overachievers who were going to take the world on. I think of you every time I look at my Ren and Stimpy Pops. Every time I roll a 1.
Years later I made another friend who was the second Bizarro me, my less evil twin. He quit speaking to me when I told him he had to trust me as a WoW tank and not second-guess me mid-pull. I don’t remember him as fondly, but man, the stories I could tell about my adventures with him.
I guess what I’m saying is I’ve seen some shit. And in the end, it’s like that Ben Folds song, “Smoke.” If you don’t burn the books, you always have the stories. In my mind, both of these friends are frozen in time just as I remember them, in a state where they can’t possibly exist anymore. The only way they were ever real to me. And I’m a ghost haunting the edges of their lives, a dissolving shadow just off the horizon, a giggle echoing down an empty hallway.
We’re all stories.
In the end, that might be all we are.
So what’s your story?