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.
I first met Evan as a freshman in high school. More accurately, though, I met him about two months before my freshman year of high school. The school was a public school but also an academic and performing arts “magnet,” which meant nobody just got in. You had to apply, and the school would decide whether or not you could be accepted into one of their many programs. I would love to say I got in on a sterling academic resume. Being immodest, I’ll say I was a smart kid…but that didn’t translate to being a good student. Often I wouldn’t do work assigned because I already knew how to do it or, more frequently, because I had decided I’d rather read a book that had nothing to do with math and a lot to do with fantasy. The truth is I was accepted to that school because (1) my dad was old friends with the football coach and (2) I was a big kid.
So, as a part of being accepted I had to join the football team. You’ll recall I said a moment ago the school was an academic and arts magnet school, which meant the student body (with some exceptions) was composed mainly of nerds, geeks, musical theatre kids, chorus kids, dancers, and artists. Not what you think of when you think of guys who want to slam into each other every Friday night.
Okay, maybe some of them wanted to slam into other guys every Friday, but not in the way that’s appropriate to do under bright lights on a grassy field with an audience.
…We’re just going to move on.
So I joined the team, as was the deal. I wasn’t the most athletic kid. I had attempted basketball in my youth, but quit shortly after eating a giant bag of Skittles right before practice one afternoon made me re-taste the rainbow at half-court. Soccer was once I got signed up for as well, but that ended when my couch yelled to me “Hey! [Boozy]! They’re coming toward you!” when I was playing as one of the backs and I answered by saying “OKAY! HEY GOALIE, COACH SAYS THEY’RE COMING TOWARDS YOU!” and went immediately back to looking at the clouds. My baseball career was similarly shortened when I discovered I much preferred blowing dandelions all over right field to actually trying to catch any balls sent my way and became an instant liability to my team ever getting anything more than a “Good Try” trophy. In short, I was not the type of person – even amongst the limited selection at our school – who would be considered a good fit for football.
This was highlighted at my first practice – begrudgingly attended because it was summer and I was in the middle of playing Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis which I had rented the weekend before – when a coach came up to me, looked me up and down, and asked, “Can you run?”
“No,” I responded.
“Can you throw?”
“No.”
“Can you catch?”
“Sometimes?” I answered questioningly.
The coach considered this, spit onto the turf, and said “Offensive line. Over there.”
I’m not going to bore you with too many details, this isn’t a story about my sterling high school football career. That’s coming in my highly anticipated memoir “Hit Somebody, or How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Getting Bruised.” But it’s important to get that backstory because, on that day, I was sent to a corner of the practice field where a group of big guys were hitting a sled of dummies and driving it along the ground as the offensive line coach – a large man who I would later learn had been a college player, an Army ranger, and had a brief career in the Canadian Football League – yelled a cross of encouragements and chastisements at them. Once there I was shoved into a group of similarly gawky, nervous teens – all freshmen – who were awaiting the offensive line coach’s attention.
When it came, the coach came over and gave a brief introduction: He was the coach. We were going to be worked. Some of us would decide we did not like hitting things and being hit and quit, and that was fine with him, but if we wanted to play he would make sure we played no matter how much we sucked. Then he said, “We’re gonna let you pick your numbers, but you can’t pick any numbers that someone else has. Here’s what’s available.”
I picked 74. Evan picked 73. Coleman was 67, Hoff 54, Joe was 71. Dick, the odd man and latest addition to our group as he was a receiver and not one of the burly brutes of the line, was number 13. Wes, who would later go to defense, was 78. Chad…well, I don’t remember Chad’s number because he became one of the guys that decided he didn’t like being hit but he did it close enough to the end of the first season that he had bonded into the group.
Our numbers lined up with lockers in the locker room, and that meant all of us – except Dick, that is – dressed, undressed, and bullshit with each other in the same area in addition to our time on the field, and we did it daily. So it was only natural, I suppose, that we gravitated towards each other – we were on the same team, on the same unit, and in the same locker room. We saw each other for hours every day, were all equally lost. Also, to be blunt – once you’ve seen someone’s asscheeks every day for a week you bond. A part of me is convinced that’s actually the reason teen boys bond in locker rooms – the constant exposure to each other’s asses.
***
But this isn’t a football story. Not really, and I’m not going to dwell on that topic. Football, in this case, is a catalyst, not the tale. The tale is the friendship we formed, our group of seven teen dipshits. The Friday nights when we went to Hooters as a group. The evenings after games sitting in the bed of my old truck on the practice field, decompressing and talking before going home. The going out to movies together, the double dates, the dances, the breakfasts after body check (the Saturday after games when the team had to report early to get checked out by the trainer staff and then lift weights), all of that.
There was the time, for instance, we decided to skip our morning classes and go to Shoney’s for breakfast. Sitting here now, I’m not sure who came up with the idea, but we all agreed it was a good one. We’d go to breakfast, enjoy it, then park in the overflow lot a block away from our school and sneak in, nobody being any wiser. We would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for the fact the principal was doing a check of the overflow lot as we pulled in.
Coach was told. Laps were run.
Or the time we went out to the local Denny’s for breakfast after body check one Saturday. I had gotten my license literally the day before, and was driving my old Ford Ranger with Evan riding shotgun. We all finished breakfast and Evan and I climbed into my truck, but backing out I misgauged when to start turning and very gently bumped the rear fender of the car next to me.
“Oh no,” I said, looking around, “Ah shit. What do I do now?”
“Go,” Evan said.
“What?”
“Nobody’s here. Go.”
Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember what 16 year old me did then, and that’s my story.
* * *
Except that wouldn’t have been Evan. The story doesn’t fit Evan’s personality, even back then. Evan was the son of a gregarious preacher, and had a deep and quiet faith about him. He wouldn’t judge you, that wasn’t his style, he just accepted people as they were and loved them as such – for example, he never said a word when he saw me leaving the Gay Straight Alliance meeting after school one day to any of the other guys, and never acted any differently towards me. He just treated me as he always had. And, more importantly, Evan had a deep streak of integrity about him even as a teenager and was honest as the day was long. Evan would never have encouraged me to drive off – besides, he often rode with Coleman to breakfast after body check.
Maybe it was Wes. Or Hoff. That would have fit either of their personalities to a tee. Definitely not Dick – he was just as anxious as I was back then. If he had been in the passenger seat the story would end with us both frozen in tears and shame convinced we were going to jail without having fully digested our Grand Slams.
Or the time we went to Cleveland for spring break. Chad and I had been pushing rather hard for Florida, but Evan wanted to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Evan was a classic rock fan, and his love for the genre was shared by the rest of the guys, so when he suggested the trip everyone just sort of…agreed. Except, of course, Chad and I who remained sullen the entire drive there.
We discovered during that week that there isn’t a goddamn thing for seven teenage boys to do in Cleveland for a week. If memory serves, we ended up renting a porno on the hotel pay-per-view and watching it through with extreme interest in, no shit, the storyline. I remember the story well enough – it had Ron Jeremy in it (back before we knew of his many crimes), and he was running from the mafia. Along the way he was meeting women whose clothing just happened to come off. At one point there was a goat at a motel, purely as a plot device, but the storyline with the goat was never fully resolved.
“WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE GOAT?” Evan cried out as the credits rolled.
* * *
Except, again, that wouldn’t have been Evan. Now that I think about it, Evan had gone down to the lobby to read a book while we were watching the movie. He didn’t really approve of it – son of a preacher and all – but he also didn’t want to mess up anyone’s good time. I remember that now because when he came back up to the room he suggested we order pizza, his treat. Even though we had sort of chosen an activity that excluded him during the trip.
There are a lot of memories of those guys, sitting in my truck bed in the school parking lot in the mornings, eating McDonald’s and talking. Or sitting in the cab of my truck and talking. Those were Evan, that I know, because he was the easiest of all of us to talk to. Whatever problem you had, he had an answer to it even if that answer was “There’s really nothing you can do, man.” And he was always willing to listen. None of the other guys were like that.
My favorite memory, though, has to be the fishing trips.
They started when we were seventeen, the seven of us heading to the Kentucky River and renting canoes to go fishing on an overnight trip. Just two days with us heading down the river together, hanging out. Those trips were tailormade for Evan, because he was the actual fisherman out of all of us. The rest of us just had a habit of drowning worms.
For most of us the trip was just an excuse to be together without having to admit we wanted to be together. By the last year, we weren’t even bringing poles anymore though we insisted on calling it a fishing trip still. I don’t think anyone actually ever caught a fish, us for lack of caring and Evan because we didn’t care if we scared away all the fish. For example, one time as we were coming in to a sand bank to fix lunch and drown worms, Wes and Dick spilled their canoe over. This was an issue, because their canoe had the potato chips, and we watched the bag floating quickly away until Wes screamed “THE CHIPS!” and took off after them…directly into rapids.
Ten minutes later, soaked to the bone and half-drowned, Wes appeared along the bank and waded out to the sand bar. He sat on a rock by Evan, who unlike the rest of us hadn’t panicked at all and had instead simply cast his line and said “Well, not much I can do about this.”
Evan glanced over at Wes, dripping on the rock, clutching the bag of Ruffles.
“That was stupid,” he said, “You coulda died. And you scared off the fish.”
“Yeah,” Wes answered, pulling the bag open, “But I still got chips.”
* * *
High school ended. We went separate ways. Coleman and Evan went to college at the same school and walked onto the football team there, a Division III team but fun for them. Dick started at one college, then headed to another. Joe became big time, he went to Berkeley out west and left us in the dust. Wes…hell I have no idea where Wes went to school, or Chad, only that they did. I, meanwhile, did a year in college before dropping out, only going back shortly before that reunion I talked about earlier. And then, after the reunion, our contact became less and less because we had all moved on in the world and what was weekly check-ins became monthly, then yearly, then every few years, and finally turned into hitting a like button on Facebook every now and then.
I became a lawyer and…well…whatever you call the performing shit I do. Dick designs things for the Corps of Engineers. Coleman is a preacher. Chad is a family man. Joe is a doctor somewhere in Tennessee. Hoff went crazy for a while – the last time I saw him was right after he cancelled his wedding and got out of the mental hospital, he was tooling past a bar on this big Harley and we saw each other and went in for a beer – but he recovered well and travels the world now with his wife taking pictures of mountain peaks and waterfalls and such. Wes…does something? I want to say real estate. Evan got married, went into law enforcement, and had kids.
That’s the way it goes sometimes. People just drift apart. But sometimes you have a group where you’re certain no matter how long it’s been since you talked last if you all got back together it would be like coming home. They’re simply the best people you’ve ever known. For me, that was this group.
If this was a movie or a book, this is where I’d say something like “I think about them every day.” But the truth is, I don’t. Until last week, I hadn’t thought about them in a long time – not in anything more than passing or a “I should reach out and see how they’re doing.” I knew Evan had cancer in his brain, and I kept meaning to reach out to him and let him know I was thinking of him. I didn’t, it kept slipping my mind. I knew he had gone into remission, that he was going to get to see his kids grow up, and I thought “I should call and tell him how happy I am for him.” I didn’t, it just kept getting put off.
I didn’t know the cancer came back last May. I didn’t know it was aggressive. I didn’t know any of it until one of the guys sent me a message last Friday morning.
“Hey,” read the message from an unfamiliar number, “It’s Chad. Evan’s dead. Cancer. Miss you guys.”
It shouldn’t have hit me that hard. We hadn’t talked for years. I hadn’t seen him in longer. We weren’t teens playing football together anymore. I knew almost nothing about his life these days, he knew almost nothing about mine. We weren’t really “friends” anymore, were we?
As I get older, I find it’s harder to say that. The friendship of men is different in a lot of ways from the friendship of boys. It can be a thing that just hangs in the background for years, unsaid and unacknowledged until you see each other again. And I remain certain that if I had seen them again, we likely would have fallen into the same, easy talking we had twenty years ago – maybe a little awkward, maybe a bit of time to warm up, but there. And suddenly I’ve realized that, no matter how long we had gone, I had lost a friend. A dear friend. A friend from that time where we were boys on the cusp of adulthood. A friend that can’t be replaced at all, and even if he could any grown man of a certain age will tell you how fucking hard it is to make new friends – and many times that you don’t even want them. You want your old friends.
The first of us to go.
I haven’t seen him in decades.
I’m going to miss him terribly.
Sleep easy, 73.
