Hoping For the Best
When I get into writing mode, I just write whatever comes up when I sit down to write. This period of my childhood that the last two stories has covered, a period which I’ve written extensively about before, has just resurfaced of late. It might have to do with some work my wife and I have been doing with a group we’re involved in, and some issues that have surfaced in therapy for me. I’ve been seeing a therapist for close to a year now, and finding it pretty amazing to my mental health.
I try to tell it from the perspective of myself, both then, and from whatever awareness I’ve managed to pick up along the way. I hold no ill will or resentment towards my old “best friend”, Chucky. I know that he was bullied quite a bit by his older brothers, and my understanding is, he’s had a really tough time of it as an adult. I don’t take any delight or pleasure in this knowledge (though, I’ll admit, there was a little bit of that when I first learned about his struggles — but that was just me being a smug, arrogant idiot).
He was my friend, and I did care about him, even if he eventually found me to be disposable, and did not have my back when I really needed him to. I’d always had his. That’s what I meant by him being a One-Way, Dead-End Street. When he wound up with a girl that I really liked, which I had confided in him about how I felt about her, that was pretty much the last straw of our five year friendship. I could take the physical and mental cruelty and abuse, but that crossed a line, for me.
It was many months after I’d stopped hanging at the school yard and was working in the restaurants that we had the big fight I’ve written about before, where he openly attacked me right on Pioneer Avenue, with a couple of his cronies in tow, and beat the living crap out of me just because he’d heard I was drinking and smoking.
As dramatic as that scene was, it was really just an aftermath to a friendship that had already ended about a year before. Nothing more than the exclamation point that got put on the friendship’s ending, that told me he never was a real friend to me, and I could stop giving a crap about him.
Yet, I find myself giving a crap, when I think of him now, and wishing he’d had a better lot in life. That’s pretty crazy, isn’t it? Like I said — I’ve been in therapy for the past eleven months. What do you want?
But, he was my friend, and I did care about him. I care about my friends — present and past. They’re all part of what made me who I am today. I truly hope that whatever hole he may have found himself in as an adult, he is or was able to find some way to climb out of it. Everyone deserves another shot — I’ve certainly been given more second chances than I can count. And besides, I always thought he was much tougher than I was. Maybe he could somehow find the strength to make something of the rest of his life.
I know this — I never want to hear about him what I heard about my other good childhood friend, Pete Kribel — that he took his own life. Or, the same thing that I heard about the old school bully, Ernie Brandi.
No, I’d much rather hear that something changed for him, and that he turned it all around. That would please me a great deal.
