Today’s post is for me. There’s nothing legal about it, it’s a personal one. I’ll do those from time to time. Next week, we’ll talk law.
The last time I saw Evan we were 23 years old. Our high school class officers, desperate to try and go back in time, had decided to hold the most useless of reunions – the five year reunion. It was, in reality, nothing more than an excuse for the people in our graduating class to get together and drink legally for what was likely the first time as a group, because in all honesty there wasn’t much a person could accomplish in five years after graduating. If you were really accomplished, you had started some post-graduate program and if you were extremely uninterested in growing past the age of eighteen for a while longer you probably held down the same job you had in high school with the word “manager” added somewhere onto your nametag. For the rest of us there was the middle ground of having graduated college, or still attending college, or having never attended college and instead went directly into the workforce. People who had accomplished great things had no interest in having bad beer with people you barely tolerated in the past.
The reunion was held in a little “Irish” pub on one of our hometown’s “social” streets – a strip lined with taverns, hookah lounges, eclectic shops, and shitty restaurants. We had naturally broken off into the groups that we hung out with back in high school, and for me that would have meant the guys I played football with back then: Coleman, Dick, Joe, Hoff, Wes, Chad . . . the old crew. Which would have meant that reunion was particularly worthless, because the seven of us had mostly stayed in touch over the five preceding years even if we hadn’t seen each other in person (separated as we were by going to different schools, none of which were the university located across from our old high school), but we wouldn’t have really had any catching up to do. It would have been mostly about the shitty beer – something that it was, despite allegations to the contrary, never about back in school as none of us (to the best of my knowledge) had ever been much for parties or drinking then.
I say “would have” because, to be frank, I don’t remember much about the reunion. I know I attended it, there’s photographic evidence in the form of me leaning against the bar in an old leather bomber jacket holding a rocks glass of what I can only assume was Jameson, but there’s nobody else with me in the photo and I have no idea who took it. I know a few of the others were there – Hoff and Wes mainly – because in the years since both of them mentioned it to me at least once. But of the event itself, I have no recollection past “it happened.” What I do remember about that night is finding myself at a greasy, all night restaurant called Juanie’s in a scummier area of town which had become a haunt of mine at that time in my life. I remember the meal – burnt toast, greasy eggs, bacon that had been cremated well past what any reasonable funeral home would do, and coffee that was bitter and somehow both burnt and ice cold. But the reunion itself I don’t remember at all, and I’m certain that it would have been the last time I saw and spoke to Evan face-to-face because I know we only spoke over Facebook after that time. There’s no memory of him ever showing back up past that.
A lot has changed since that night. The “Irish” pub had, the last time I was home, become a gay bar (though in all fairness that means it’s probably as still as authentically Irish now as it was then). Juanie’s is still around but the food is much improved under new ownership, as it transformed from a real shithole to one of those “trendy” shitholes as the neighborhood around it got more streetlights and fewer police calls. And Evan, who I would have last seen at an event my memory has supplanted with shitty food and bad coffee, is being buried at 11:00 this morning.
Continue reading “Number 73”
