Old Friends
My friend Darrell met me for lunch in the parking lot of the Roberto Clemente museum, in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, two blocks down from the site of my great grandfather’s store and home, where he lived from 1875 to 1911, and worked until 1938.
It would be the first time I saw my friend in 46 years. Since we last met, Roberto Clemente had gone down, heroically, in a plane, Darrell had joined the army, I’d joined the navy, we both got out some years later, and proceeded to live our lives. We simply fell out of touch with each other.
A couple years ago, he reached out to me on social media, then we had a long phone call, where I realized yes, we were still friends — there was still a spark of that thing called friendship there, and we decided we would try to get together. It took a while, but after 40-some years, what’s another year or two?
Since I had a 2:00 appointment for a tour of the museum, we’d settled on 12:30 for lunch, and he’d meet me at the museum. We drove around the area, he pointed out a few landmarks to me, then we found a good Pittsburgh deli, where we found a table and ordered sandwiches.
There was always an easiness to our friendship — he was my first good friend after I broke free from the gang of jocks for whom I was their scapegoat for five years, and he’d always simply accepted me as a friend, with no hoops to jump through, no tests to try to pass.
We’d been through a lot together, in the two short years we ran together. In addition to my best friend, he’d been kind of a mentor to me, showing me the ropes of life outside of that insular catholic school crowd I’d been ensconced in for my whole life, up to that point.
It was his older sister’s wedding in the South Side, after which we’d run the tickets for her flight the next day out to her at the hotel near the airport, where we’d also crashed the party that I wound up dancing with Tina Turner at.
Of course, as always seems to happen when I run into old friends from back in the day, he bore news of another old acquaintance who’d ended their own life. That’s number three, this one his old college roommate. The other two were kids from my catholic school days.
I’d go down to the college he attended, while I was still in high school, because the good parties were there, as was my best friend and mentor. They were really wild times — I’d met a girl named Mary Mee at a grecian tea, and I had eventually gotten myself banned from the campus of that fine institution, which I did to help save the scholastic career of my good friend.
I’d worn that banning like a badge of honor back at the high school. It gave me street cred at the time, which to me was more important than grades or anything else, for that matter. It showed that I was a man of substance, not just some catholic school reject.
We had fun walking down memory lane together — we both knew it was a wonder that we ever overcame our wild youths to find a foothold in the real world of substance, and actually made something of ourselves.
I knew that I’d never have made it without the friends I was blessed to have along the way, beginning with Darrell. As wild as we were when we got together, his was a friendship that helped me break free of the chains that had bound me up until that point in my life, and helped me to see that there was life beyond that insular catholic world I had felt trapped in my first sixteen years.
I especially remembered our second to last meeting, before this one. I had come back to Pittsburgh for my brother Brian’s wedding, in the fall of 1972. I had just spent a summer trying to commit suicide myself, having run out of reasons to be alive.
I’d moved with the family to Connecticut in the middle of my senior year of high school, and after a good start there, everything had unraveled, and I’d lost my way in a strange new land, without any friends. I was still a little shaky on that trip, still trying to find my footing, after a month or so of psychiatric care, and was still very confused about the question of life’s meaning.
Darrell had come by, after the wedding and reception, and reminded me of one good reason to go on living — friendship. We’d gone out, driving around in his mom’s ’69 Oldsmobile Cutlass, getting wasted on weed, pounding back a few beers, and laughing at life’s follies. For those couple hours, I’d forgotten all about the big questions of life, and just enjoyed some time with a good friend.
46 years later, I got to enjoy a wonderful lunch with that same friend, after which I knew my life was blessed to have such friends in it. When all else fails, spending time with a friend makes it all worth the while.
