21. Let’s Be Friends
The Year of Paying Attention
Guitarist Allan Holdsworth has died. My first impulse was to call my old friend Jack, but he’s dead, too. As college freshmen sharing a tiny Boston University dorm room rumored to have been built on the blueprints of a prison, Jack and I blasted Holdsworth music out the window and over the football field. In that room Jack created an unforgettable choreography to “Snake Oil,” Holdsworth playing with drummer Tony Williams. He’s dead, too. Look up “Snake Oil” on YouTube or Spotify or whatever else makes every song instantly available, and imagine a slender, pale, high-foreheaded Connecticut boy absurdly writhing like a patrician snake, around a cluttered, walk-in-closet-sized dorm room.
All this death is a reminder to not squander my time. This morning I’ll make waffles for Sarah’s birthday breakfast, because she’s very important to me, and I love her. Then I’ll try to drum up some action for JC’s online health-crisis fund-raiser, because he’s my old friend, and I love him. Later I’ll phone Coach Billy to talk some more about a group coaching business, because I’ve worked with Billy a lot, and it’s fun. I mentioned that Billy and Dean and I wrote some humor books together, starting right after I was pushed out of a company I thought I had started, by a guy I thought was my friend. All of this demonstrated the risks and rewards of working with friends, the biggest risk being you might stop being friends. Which could break your heart if you’re not careful.
After a string of successful creative collaborations over a few years, Billy and Dean and I had become good friends. But it’s more like I’m friends with Billy, and I’m friends with Dean, and Billy is friends with Dean, and we work well together, and the three of us get together to eat regularly, after which I wonder if Billy and Dean are better friends with each other than I am with either of them. Like it’s a contest. In junior high school. I don’t want to be the most expendable in the threesome, but somebody has to be, and it’s me. Or it’s not. It’s clear they’re not thinking about this. They would both mock me for this line of reasoning. What man thinks like this?
For most of my life, I had that rare thing, a Best Friend, from childhood nearly, who’d known me my whole life. We were best man at each other’s weddings, raised our kids together, and our wives were good friends. I met Ben in 9th grade, in the school play, Harvey. I was Dr. Sanderson (small part), he was Dr. Chumley (bigger part). We bought our first bag of pot together, from his cousin. It was a bag of seeds. After college I slept on the couch one weekend in his New York apartment when I was testing the relocation waters. Today, almost forty years later, I live where I do because Ben advised me to get on his building’s waiting list — the two of us have lived in the same building on Roosevelt Island for half of my life. But we haven’t been friends for nearly a decade now. What happened? I think it’s what happens when marriages end. The circumstances of our lives continued to change, as they always will, and we continued to change, and I, for one, didn’t notice what was going on until one day at work Ben called to say let’s have lunch. He told me over Korean food that I’d really let him down over the past few months. He’d been looking for a new job, and I had been trying to make some introductions. He claimed I had given him the brushoff. I pointed out how that wasn’t true. He didn’t see it that way. The tension remained, and I was hurt and annoyed and probably angry. Within a year or two my marriage was ending, and Ben and his wife went with my ex. No doubt Ben has a very different version of the very same story, and for the longest time, I wanted to convince him my version was right, that he’d misunderstood, had been unfair, unreasonable. People experience and remember things very differently, not so hard to believe. The hard part is the accepting. I struggled for years with it, because all of my high school and young adult and family-man memories include Ben. After the breakup, I’d miss the old days and think, maybe there’s something I should do to restore our friendship. Sarah heard a lot about this, because I felt humiliated to have been ditched by my oldest friend, who might have felt the same way. It’s what kids call “frenemies,” I think. At this age? I’m telling you about it because it feels weird, but could it be common? The topic doesn’t come up. Straight, white, cisgendered men don’t break each other’s hearts, do they?
Surfing the bottomless web this morning I came upon a quote from Thornton Wilder, who shares Sarah’s birthday: “My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy the ice cream while it’s on your plate.” I also read about Bob Kaufman, the poet who coined the term “beatnik,” one of the many Beat poets who joined the Merchant Marine and sailed the world and survived shipwrecks, and I thought, as I often do when I read about some romantic activity, maybe that’s what I should do.
Then I remembered that I’m too old for that now. I’m too old to do the things that bright-eyed, ignorant people without a care in the world or much responsibility can do by simply deciding to do them. The heedless, or inspired, risky or brave things someone in his twenties, in his thirties, his forties or fifties might do — that’s all off my list. I can only do the things one does in his sixties. So, no Merchant Marine shipwreck for me.
In my twenties I was furiously trying to create who I was. In my thirties, I was consumed with being a new husband, a new father, a successful professional, a New Yorker. In my forties I nearly lost my family and stopped drinking. I got a shaky grip on my life, and practiced being a responsible grownup. In my late fifties I did the unthinkable, and got a divorce. In my sixties I’m looking for what to do with all of this experience, all of this privilege, while there’s time left on the clock. This morning Chris Christie, the repulsive governor of New Jersey, was on the news, his political career unraveling, a reporter asking him how it feels. He said his obituary would be fine, that it will report that he “lived a life of consequence.” A question I push out of my thoughts is whether I’ve lived a life of consequence.
Next week: Denial: Optimal Coping Strategy?
