"The Long Goodbye"

“THE LONG GOODBYE- PART ONE”

His hands tremble and he shuffles rather than walks. He remembers events from thirty-five years ago almost seamlessly, yet he claws desperately at recent memories. He has not been able to drive a car for some time. He no longer can manage his cell phone. He can no longer even live on his own. I now have to help him negotiate his seat belt. He lives in a nursing home.

He is sixteen days older than me.

He is my best friend.

            You see, my best friend is sick, very sick, and has been for some time. The doctors are now calling it dementia with Lewy bodies, but in truth they don’t really know what the hell it is.

For almost forty years, there has not been a significant event in our lives that we were not standing side by side. 

I was there when he got the news his father had died. I was there the morning he met his future wife. I stood best man at his wedding and him at mine. He is my son’s godfather and my wife is his son’s godmother. My mother calls him her fourth son. He drove all night to be with me the day we buried my father.

Now when he first sees me, there is a dark uncertainty in his eyes and the recognition comes slowly, a faint echo off some distant wall.

He is the most magnificent bastard I have ever known. Tall, dark and good looking, he had a devilish twinkle in his eyes said to be irresistible to the ladies. A spectacular vocal mimic, he was capable of bursting into a serviceable Sinatra medley at any given moment and could imitate the rhythm and cadence of almost anyone’s voice to great effect. He had great comedic timing and an edgy, razor-like wit, against which there was no known demurrer.

He was the top fraternity rushee in the state in the summer of 1978 and quite literally could have walked into any house on the University of Texas campus and gotten a bid. He became our fraternity State Rush Captain, overseeing a summer budget of almost $50,000.00. He was “tapped-in” as one of our representatives to the Silver Spurs service organization, a much-coveted honor. He once made an A in an upper division German class which I knew he had never actually attended, except for the spare forty-five minutes it took him to blitzkrieg the final exam. He helped elect a governor, was a real estate guy in 1980’s Dallas, and worked for one of the largest and most prestigious law firms in the state. With the possible exception of his seemingly genetic inability to shoot or dribble a basketball, I have never known anything that he couldn’t do.

He made a rather remarkable entrance into my life, not unlike a prison break or a South American soccer riot. In fact, he did not so much enter my life as I was swept up into his, a maelstrom of drunkenness, spontaneity, and hilarity which has lasted the better part of five decades and which has seen us through his father’s early death, college, law school, careers, wives, ex-wives, children, and now… this.

My first image of him was prone on his back beneath a stripper, a dollar bill folded long-ways and jutting upward as she gyrated above him while seventy-five fraternity boys and would-be fraternity boys whooped and hollered as only fraternity boys and would-be fraternity boys can.

He was wearing the most perfectly wrinkled blue oxford cloth button-down shirt I had ever seen, one which had never seen anything resembling an iron and which strongly suggested he may have slept in it. His sleeves were rolled up in the most elegantly haphazard manner possible, portraying that elusive go-to hell attitude I so greatly admired. His enviable military –grade khakis were not only baggy but slightly pegged at the cuffed and frayed bottom and were a trifle short, displaying lots of ankle and a pair of a splendidly worn Sperry Topsiders.

He was also wearing a Vantage Blue in his right hand and a longneck Budweiser in his left, balancing it all – as ever- in a sort of perfect disharmony which was already something of a trademark and which had already made him, even at eighteen, something of a legend.

That first night, as he charmed the pants off the stripper and everyone else in that room at the Albert Pick Motel in Houston, he was everything I aspired to be: independent, carefree, cocksure, and, I would learn, utterly brilliant, with a genuine intellectual pedigree which consisted of, among others, a firebrand civil rights lawyer, a University of Texas department chair, the Dean of the U.T. Liberal Arts school, and the first female member of the Wisconsin Bar Association.

I found it inconceivable that all these disparate elements could be amalgamated into one actual person. To combine them with a debonair style was beyond my ability to comprehend.

The truth was I was almost afraid to talk to him, fearful my own anemic credentials could never pass close scrutiny in such a world.

I had never met a boy my own age who intimidated me- the mere thought of such an admission could send one tumbling precariously down the Darwinian ladder of locker rooms and fraternity houses. On that first night, I simply assumed he was already an active member of the fraternity.  When I realized he was a mere rushee, I was all the more intimidated.

But my best friend has never been “mere” in his entire life. Hell, his fears, insecurities, and failures are large enough to put most people’s lives in.

The following morning we were both on a bus from Houston to New Orleans for the annual New Orleans State Rush Party, an event which often determined the fate of guys whose brothers had not been back- to -back state rush captains, as mine had. If one emerged unscathed from the Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s, the rather shopworn strippers, or the lure of the more forbidden delights of side- street hookers, one just might be asked to pledge. Ironically, it is sometimes the more calamitous behavior of some rushees which actually guaranteed their place in the pledge class, as the trip is the stuff of which legends are made.

In retrospect, it seems improbable if not downright suicidal that I would be reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World on a bus full of drunk frat boys rambling toward New Orleans, but that was precisely what I was doing. It was not that I was not against drunk fraternity boys nor morning drinking- it was simply that I did not drink beer, an admission I disliked making to anyone because it made me seem weird and unmanly, as if the whole reading- Aldous Huxley -on -a -bus -full – of - drunk -frat -rats thing hadn’t already sealed that particular deal.

Shockingly enough, the seat next to me on the bus was open, allowing me to read and smoke in peace. He appeared out of the void, plopping down luxuriously onto the seat beside me, bumming the first of thousands of cigarettes and giving me a graduate –level synopsis of the book and of many others. I learned that day that he could ad-lib with actual and presumed authority on almost any topic.

We talked all the way to New Orleans from Houston and discovered in due course that we both were life-long Democrats, that we were both to be liberal arts majors, and that our greatest aspiration in life was to be burnt –out trial lawyers, fighting the good fight to the bitter end, at which point we would die early in a blaze of glory, having thrown ourselves unflinchingly at the injustices which only we, in our infinite wisdom, could properly redress.

Before we had even gotten to New Orleans, it had already been decided that if we were to change the world, we would need a partner.

For good or for ill, we have been yoked together ever since.

Even in the dark days long before “bromances” and “man crushes,” our relationship would ultimately morph into something resembling that of an old married couple.

This would never be more evident than the night I laid twenty-six points on the Navy ROTC guys in an intramural basketball game at old Gregory Gym, wearing Stevie Wonder sweepback shades and a bandanna tied around my head. He had just pulled down a rebound, if in fact that’s what you call it when a basketball, as if on its own accord, happens to drop into your hands under the basket. As he had been strictly forbidden by me to ever even consider dribbling, I called for the ball as I drifted back for the outlet pass.

Rather than pass me the ball, he simply let it loose and dramatically called a time-out. I was immediately summoned to the bench and obliged to enjoy a short walk down the sideline, away from the others, when he stopped, looked me dead in the eyes, and with an uncharacteristic resignation in his voice, said, “T.C., you know I love you, right? But you’ve got to quit calling me ‘honey’ in front of the sailors.”

For the balance of the game, I, of course, launched into what would now be considered a politically incorrect falsetto every time he got the ball, until he eventually began throwing the ball out of bounds rather than throw it to me.

I tell him these stories now and sometimes I know he is feigning remembrance, but other times he contributes details cut out of whole cloth. He seems content then, if only for moment, but there is also frustration and anger in these moments of clarity, as if he realizes he is supposed to be someone else.

He is lost now and so am I.

This is usually the place in the blog where I transition into a discussion of yoga but I am at a loss as to how to do so, but this is a disease which allows for no smooth transitions and even fewer answers.

And then it hit me.

It is like those days when I find myself adrift on my mat, wondering why I do not feel inspired or even particularly grateful. While I would like to say that in every class there is always a moment of clarity or insight, that is not always true.

There are those days when I leave as empty as I entered, my practice devoid of meaning or purpose. And then there are those days when I find the deeper expression of a pose or some peace in a transition that had confounded me or perhaps even just the resignation that I must accept that a modification or the use of props to assist me in my journey.

Sometimes it is satisfying and sometimes it is not. But whatever my limitations, it is always a gift.

            I have to remember that my best friend is still a gift and that I must strive to find meaning and purpose in this newest incarnation of our friendship, even if that means- at first -as little as simply showing up.

And while I will miss the deeper meanings and expressions of our friendship, I am obliged to accept it as it is now and I pray we can modify our friendship to accommodate the limitations which confound it.

            The last time I went to see him, I took him a picture my brother had taken of the two of us on the bench the night we played the Navy ROTC guys. It was a picture of two guys who planned to change the world.

            I had placed it in a frame so he would have it for his room.

But he didn’t know where his room was.

© Thomas C. Barron, 2016