22 0ctober 2005

Its’ Saturday, almost 1:30 in the afternoon, and it’s time for the usual Saturday lunch with my parents and my big bro. We walk in to the restaurant, one of those open-'til-two breakfast and lunch places, my big bro first, with me being the last to enter, when I hear a bit of a commotion at the front of our group. Sitting in the middle of the restaurant, around two pushed-together tables, is John Boy, one of my best friends from high school, along with his parents and assorted strangers.

I shook hands with John Boy’s dad and hugged his mom. His parents had been great to me when I was in high school, so it was great to see them. But then I felt bad because I drive by their house almost every Saturday and Sunday (into and out of Madtown on my way to where I live), and I can sort of see their house when i'm at a four-way stop, but I never stop by. First, I’ve never been a pop-in kind of guy, and, second, I’m just no good with people, and especially not with people to whom I am grateful. Yeah, I know that that sounds really stupid.

And then I went over to John Boy, who was sitting on the other side of the tables. We did the shake-with-the-right-hand-half-hug-with-the-left thing that guys do. It’s a hug, yeah, but it’s not wussy because there’s a handshake involved, which butches it back up to an acceptable level. (I wonder who were the first guys to handshake/hug.) I said “How are you doing, bro?” because we’re bros, because I’ve known him since 1985, when he was a freshman and I was a junior on the wrestling team, because we worked together to become better wrestlers, because we sweated and bled on the same blue mats.

But then it was the autumn of 1987 and I was in college and I was busy and he was busy, and, little by little, we fell out of each other’s lives, the way that people do. Goddamn, life is sad. I saw him at his wedding and then when he came back from Texas, and a couple of times after that, sometimes separated by many years. The last time? I can’t remember. It could be four years ago, maybe five. Since the year that I started college, I’ve lived in many different places (Clovis, Fresno, Seattle, Modesto, Madison, and where I am now), and so has he: Texas, Fresno, Santa Cruz, Visalia, and those are just the places that I know about.

And now he’s in Portland, Oregon, has been there since January, which blew my mind for two reasons. First, Portland is one of my favorite cities in the whole world (currently, it’s second on my list of places where I’d like to live [if I can actually summon up the guts to leave California], right behind Vancouver, British Columbia). Second, I was in Portland for an afternoon in late-July during a leg of the Pacific Northwest Museum Tour, and if I had known that John Boy was living there I would have tried to put together a lunchtime hang or something. That’s what’s called a missed opportunity.

After the hug, he introduced me to his new wife and her young daughter (his now stepdaughter). I’m not going to get into his deal (because it’s his deal, and where the hell do I get off?), but there was drama in his life (hardly any of which was of his making [and, yes, I know that he’s my buddy and that I’m far from objective, but, seriously, hardly any of it was]), and there were years that could have gone better for him, but here he was, with his wife and their daughter and his parents, and he looked (what’s that word?) content. Satisfied. Like it was working out. I was really happy for him. Sitting here, writing this, I’m happy for him again.

And then I gave him my website address, which made me feel stupid. Part of that had to do with my having a website (Why would I possibly need a website? Originally, it was to whore my book, but that didn’t exactly go as planned), but it was mostly having to do with saying aloud, “Let me give you my website address.” I felt like a bit of a loser.

As I was writing my website address on the back of a receipt, I started to remember some of our exploits, like driving from Madtown to Fresno City College to play late-night racquetball. I also remembered how we would drive around in his parents’ Ford Astro Van, going really fast while John Boy steered with his teeth. Looking back, it was probably a pretty idiotic thing to do, and dangerous as hell, but we both thought that it was hilarious at the time.

Then there was the time we walked into a dance in the Satellite Student Union at CSU, Fresno and two lovely young college girls almost immediately walked up to us and asked us to dance. We were on the dance floor doing that thing where we take turns leaning in and yelling small talk into each other’s ears as we dance. It was going pretty well, I thought, so I turned to John Boy, leaned in to him, and yelled, “two for tonight,” because it seemed that we had, in fact, found two for tonight. Unfortunately there was a momentary diminution to the volume of the music as I was yelling the aforementioned phrase, so the young college girls also heard me. Needless to say, they didn't look too pleased and, unsurprisingly, they didn’t end up being two for tonight. John Boy didn’t let that one go for a while, and, really, who can blame him?

God, it’s great to be young. But, like I said, all of that is in the past, most of it at least fifteen years in the past.

As his family was leaving, his parents stopped at our booth to say goodbye, and then so did John Boy. I told him to have a good trip back, and, as I saw him walk out, I had the feeling that there was a good chance that I would probably never see him again now that we were so many miles away from each other. It's horrible how that happens.