I made a post a while back about an old friend named Rod. I was thinking today about another friend that I lost track of in an interesting way. This one’s name was Will. Let me tell you a bit about Willy.
We met in the sixth grade. We were close all through junior high and our freshman years of high school. Other than the difference in our physical size (I was huge and he was tiny), we were very similar dudes. We liked the same video games and music. We both were in honors classes but were from poor families. We liked our pizzas with pepperoni AND mushrooms, and we were both really, desperately searching for a friend.
I remember Will now not as a fully realized person: the last state of our friendship was him becoming part of some odd cult, worshipping a donut shaped rock he wore around his neck, and him making his girlfriend bow down in front of me any time we saw each other (she once kissed my Air Force Ones). He also sent me a forged letter from a US Congressman about a fake award hoping he could embarrass me. He apologized for that, after he got caught, and he told me he did it because he thought I’d abandoned him even though it was he who grew distant then moved away.
But there are some great memories of Will.
We used to play this Sega Genesis robot football game called Cyberball together. It wasn’t a two player game, but we made it collaborative by being “coordinators” for each other (one would call the play and the other would input). Our “star” player was a plastic robotic quarterback we nicknamed DuPont. We made drawings and sculptures of DuPont in our art classes. We wrote raps about him. DuPont was the truth.
We both got into gangster rap at the same time, and we were so bored by our education that we created a little two man Illuminati of fictional rappers who traded notes by leaving them in various places around the school campus. I was The Reverend Cube, Philosopher of the Beats, and he was DeeJay, which he felt was highly original and I never questioned it because you don’t question your friend’s Illuminati name. It’s like the first rule of that other club I can’t talk about.
He would call me, regularly, and leave a Too $hort lyric on my answering machine. Not a random lyric, but the same one. It was “Rappers get head, DJs too.” I don’t think he knew, at the age he was doing it, what getting head was. Rappers do, in fact, get head, though. Too $hort never lied about that.
Once as chem lab partners, we were too bold to admit that even as honors students we were totally and utterly lost on an experiment. Will demanded that I “go for it” as I stared at a bottle of silver nitrate. Which exploded. And got in his blonde hair. Then the sun hit it. And he looked like someone busted an ink pen over his head. Later in that same lab, with my good friend Amy, I would cause a second, much larger explosion and shatter a $30 stopcock. I was forced to pay for it, so I wore it as a necklace for a week. After that they let me take AP Bio like I asked. But yes, I am still known as “the dude who turned his friend’s hair into a salt and pepper nightmare then got glass to ignite.” Apparently glass tubes aren’t supposed to combust.
No one ever knew this, I don’t think, except Will, myself, and the two bullies, but at a French Club retreat, two of the older kids tried to throw a blindfolded Will into the river as an initiation, and I may or may not have hit one of them so hard in the knee with a croquet mallet that he rolled down the hill into the river himself while his friend and conspirator screamed “oh shit, you pussy! You fucked it all up!”
Will and I won the only state title our high school ever won. Rod was there, too. I think I mentioned that in my remembrance of him.
Will watched in horror as I bought the Body Count “Cop Killer” cassette tape, the only copy in our little town, from a shop we knew was owned by an old racist dude.
My favorite memory of Will is of one of the most simple moments, but for some reason it stands out the most vividly. One snow day, we met up to figure out what to do with our “freedom” from school. The only thing walking distance was the bowling alley. So we went, and we played Pit Fighter (anyone else remember that video game) Spy Hunter (also a classic) and bowled for like eight hours. The juke box had a 45 single of Smells like Teen Spirit in it. The B-side of that single was a song called “Even in his Youth.” I played it 10 dollars of quarters that day, in a row, so I could memorize it as we bowled. At 6 plays for a dollar, that’s 60 plays. I can still taste grape soda and smell the faintly bleached away cigarette stench of the bowling alley any time I hear that song.
Even in his youth, even in his youth, even in his youth he was nothing.
If he’s like most of the people I knew then, he does a work-a-day job that is salt-of-the-earthy and he has two or three kids that he coaches in youth league these days. A quick creep on Facebook didn’t yield any results. Nor did a deeper Google. Will might be gone.
I got the chorus lyrics of the Nirvana song wrong that day, and even though I know the right lyric now, I still sing it wrong and think of the old days.
One more time/before you’re through/I’ve got nothing left to lose/but if I die before I wake/I hope I don’t come back the same.
the actual lyric is “leave this one/for your brew/I’ve got nothing left to prove/if I die before I wake/I hope I don’t come back a slave. ”
If you ever happen upon this memory, Will, all I have to say to you after all these years is “I’m the house, y’all. Lean like Pisa y’all. Rat heads get nothing but cheese y’all.”