A Friendship’s Final Act
You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend. When I was down you just stood there grinnin’
Bob Dylan, from “Positively 4th Street”
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I had a driver’s license. I didn’t have my own car yet, so I usually walked or hitchhiked back and forth to work at the Red Bull Inn, a couple of miles each way.
One nice, warm spring night, as I was strolling up Pioneer Avenue on my way home, still wearing my white dress shirt and black slacks (part of my busboy uniform), I heard my name being barked out. ‘Oh, here it comes’, I thought.
I turned around, and up the street charged my old best friend, Chuck, followed by a couple of his cronies. They must have spotted me from the St. Pius X school grounds, where most of them still hung out, playing basketball most nights. I didn’t hang around there anymore. I had a job. I was living in the real world, now. They were still little boys and girls, playing little boy and girl games, as far as I was concerned. I had moved beyond such childish games.
My junior year of high school was almost over. I was not planning to go back to the Catholic high school for my senior year. I was so over that place, that all-boys hell of a prison, where I had been “doing time”, and doing my best to avoid Chuck and his gang practically the whole school year. There had been a promised ass-kicking that I really didn’t feel like enduring. I was pretty much done with them.
But now, they’d finally tracked me down. ‘Oh, boy, this should be fun’, I thought. I braced for what was sure to come. I was kind of glad to finally be getting this encounter over with. I’d known that it was going to have to happen sooner or later.
“How’s it going, Chuck?” I said, cheerfully. Chuck had his best pissed-off bully look on his face, as he spat out, “Hey, Peter (he was one of the few people who ever called me by my full first name). What’s this I hear — you’re smoking cigarettes now? And drinking?”
“That’s right”, I replied. “You should try it— it might do you some good to loosen up a little — you’re always so uptight, Chuck.” I’d never talked to him like that before. He was clearly in no mind for loosening up. He stepped right to me and dropped me with a sucker-punch right in the eye, breaking my glasses. I was in no mood for a fight. I never was. I didn’t like to fight. I thought fighting was stupid and childish. I always thought it was better to reason things out, like adults.
I got back up and said, “What’d you do that for?” Bam! He knocked me right back down again! This time, he jumped on top of me, and started wailing on my face and head with his fists, screaming abusive taunts at me. I did my best to defend myself, but I would not strike back at him. I saw no reason to. I was bigger than him, and could probably do some serious damage to him, if I’d really wanted to. I knew I could take whatever he dished out — I was tough in that way. But fight back — why? He was completely insignificant to me, at that point. I saw no point to it.
We had been best friends for five long years — you rarely saw one of us without the other being close by. I had been loyal to that friendship, to a fault. However, by the previous November, I had realized that the friendship was strictly a one-way street. I was a loyal friend to him — period. He was never a friend to me. I was just his favorite scapegoat.
He had enjoyed berating me and putting me down in front of all the others for years; I had always taken it, because I didn’t think highly enough of myself to stand up for myself. I just wanted a friend. But, he could never be just a friend.
Once I’d started working at the restaurants, I had come to realize I was worth a lot more than those guys ever gave me credit for. I was out there in the world, earning my own way, hanging out with people who appreciated me for who I was, people who didn’t have to put me down for not being just like them.
If I had harbored any doubts about my decision to break away from Chuck and his gang, this encounter put them all to rest. I picked up my broken glasses, wiped the blood that was all over my face on the sleeve of my torn-up white dress shirt, broke into a big smile and laughed at him, laughed right in his face. I shook my head, saying, “If that’s all you have to show for a five year friendship, then you never really were a friend.”
He was ready to pounce on me again, his face a ball of rage, but one of his cronies pulled him back and said, “Chuck — you’ve done enough damage, here! He’s not going to fight you. Let him go. This isn’t right. Let’s get out of here”. Even they were embarrassed by his bullying behavior. They took off back down Pioneer to St. Pius X. Such good Catholic boys.
I continued walking up Pioneer towards home, a bit broken up, physically, but my newfound freedom fully intact. I wore a broad grin on my face. I was looking forward to a summer of fun. I never looked back.
Epilogue:
Good old Chuck. I never heard anything, from or about him, again after that, as I just moved on from that world after that somehow fitting “closure”. A couple years ago, at my oldest brother’s wedding up in Connecticut, I was chatting with Jim’s best man, Dick, who still visits the old neighborhood from time to time. His family lived right around the corner from Chuck’s family.
So I asked Dick if he ever heard anything about my old friend, Chuck. Dick had been a prominent psychiatrist with Johns Hopkins, now retired. He shook his head, and said, “Classic case of arrested development there, Pete. Chuck never moved out of his parents’ house. He never did much of anything with his life. He hasn’t worked in years — a total recluse. At some point, he apparently crawled into a bottle, and the man has never crawled back out.”
Kind of ironic, isn’t it? Even after all we’d gone through, if he ever reached out for help with that, I would be right there. It’s what we do. Plus, I always was a loyal friend to him — until I couldn’t take it any longer. It was simply too costly a friendship.
Originally published at cowbird.com.
