MEMOIR
Dear Dwayne
No perfect thing lasts forever
Toward the end of my eighth grade, my mom divorced my dad for the second time. During the aftermath of all that carnage, she loaded the two of us into a pickup that was judged sound enough to make the trip and took us away from Central Texas and out west to a part of the state called the Permian Basin. It’s a flat and dusty land of bobbing pumpjacks — those perpetual-motion machines — and uncouth roughnecks. It’s the place where that world-famous West Texas Crude gestates below layers of sandy dirt.
When we first went out to that far-flung spot, we landed in an ugly town called Big Spring, the seat of government for Howard County. However, mere months after taking shelter in a cheap rental located on a street called Duquoin on the south side of town, my mother, being the marrying (and divorcing) type, met and soon married a nice man with a comb-over and plastic-framed glasses who happened to be the superintendent of schools in little Forsan, a nearby town so small and insignificant that it can’t be found on most maps of the Lone Star State.
So, we moved again, into my new stepdaddy’s house in little Forsan, population approximately two hundred human beings and about that same number of stray cats and dogs. This second relocation took place at the end of my freshman year, a bewildering time in my life. I was still suffering from PTSD over what had taken place between my parents, and now I was a stranger in a strange land. I wanted to know girls but had no language to speak to them. I felt ugly. I had pimples. My hair was too puffy. I could barely stand looking at myself in the mirror. And I felt so alone that my heart ached to have a friend.
Then I met Dwayne.
Dwayne was two years older than me. When I was a lowly sophomore, he was a much-revered senior. Plus, he had muscles and girlfriends. Why he ever befriended me, I’ll never understand. I guess there was something about me he liked. There was plenty about him I admired.
Dwayne lived in a trailer house with a two-pack-a-day mother who had managed, just as my own nicotine-addicted mom had done, to recently remarry after suffering through her own version of marital hell. The best thing about Dwayne’s new daddy, a man named Kevin, was that he was a mechanic who liked souping up cars. He got his hands on a three-on-the-column 1965 Chevy short-bed pickup and using wrenches, screwdrivers, and things I don’t even know the name of, turned that rusty and sputtering thing into a beast that scared the living shit out of all who beheld it. And then, after it had undergone its metamorphosis, Kevin gave it to his stepson.
Dwayne’s new pickup had a guttural voice that suggested animal lust. I know it might sound silly, but at that time in the country’s history a certain socioeconomic class of young men, especially those who lived difficult lives and resided in forlorn places, had formed their own tribe. They spoke their own language, worshipped their own gods, and had a compelling need to find ways to make themselves worthy of admiration by others within their group. In other words, my best buddy’s pickup was much coveted by all the young men our age, and we liked that this was so.
Me and Dwayne both belonged to that tribe, and we didn’t. We didn’t because we read books and dreamed of going to college. At Forsan High School, most of the other boys figured that only sissies did such things or thought about subjects that existed outside the standard categories of driving fast, getting laid, finding a way to make a buck, or locating a supplier for any number of mind-altering substances. Such young men wanted to finish school so they could get jobs working on oil rigs. The work would be murderous, but finding such employment would allow them to make enough to buy nice cars and be big tippers at strip clubs.
The one good thing about Forsan is that it was connected to this labyrinthine network of caliche roads that ran out of town and into the mesquite tree wilderness. The oil companies had put in this network of dusty, meandering paths to service the pumpjacks and thus keep the oil, America’s drug of choice, flowing freely.
On weekend nights, late, after the decent citizens of Forsan had bedded down, I’d sneak out, meet Dwayne at his trailer, and the two of us would push his pickup away from the house, starting it up only after we were out of earshot. Me and Dwayne knew all those caliche roads by heart and we’d head out to find one that would take us far away from town. Often, we’d have a six pack or two and a pouch of Red Man or a plug of Brown’s Mule chewing tobacco. If it was warm, we’d take off our shirts and roll down the windows and listen to the night bugs making their insect testimonials. The farther out of town we went, the narrower the trails got. Once we had gotten a fair piece away from civilization, animal eyes would begin flashing and glowing out in the brush. They belonged to deer, opossums, skunks, racoons, and other wilder and rarer things.
Those trips out into the great wilderness were our way of escaping the tedium of home life. In those hidden spots, we experienced a rare kind of absolute freedom. We could get drunk, chew tobacco, and utter every forbidden word and phrase that would have gotten us in hot water had we said them under our parents’ roofs.
Out there, the two of us shared our fears and dreams. We talked about girls we loved and what college would be like. We talked of our families and the heartbreak they had caused us. I’ll never forget the night Dwayne told me the sad story of how he had never met his real father.
Often, during such conversations, we’d crawl onto the hood of that great monstrous pickup, lean our shirtless backs against its cool windshield, sometimes bringing out goosebumps if the wind was brisk and chilly. Inevitably, after our words were spent, our attention would be drawn upward and outward into those dark and starry skies. Long periods of silence would pass. From time to time, one of us would hand a full bottle to the other.
That was what high school was like. Then we roomed together at college. Shortly after graduating, Dwayne married, started having babies, and moved off. Life took me in a different direction too. I went to graduate school, joined the Peace Corps, and ended up leaving the United States for nearly two decades.
Today, these many years later, I wonder about my best friend. What does he look like? How does he pass his time? Does he ever think back on those years now long past?
For a long while, after I’d lived abroad, married a woman I met while living in North Africa, and had returned to America, I would secretly lurk on his Facebook page. Then, for lots of reasons, I got off social media. I haven’t seen an image of him since, nor do I know about any of his doings.
Sometimes, the way things have turned out makes me very sad. Other times, I know that nothing perfect lasts forever and am at peace with that reality.
