People | Mates

A Dear Friend

“My slow journey back to him is what defines this kind of quiet love.”

There is a thirty-mile stretch of coast between my small beach apartment and that of the small beach apartment of my dearest friend. In front of my place, there’s a Ferris wheel and a market-lighted street crammed with mediocre food made for tourists that’s nestled up to the sweeping view of a half-moon bay. His place faces a busy harbor with a haunted ship and locals with overly tanned skin. Still, we probably gaze among the same moving particles of the Pacific Ocean each day.

I have known Alex since birth and I like to call him “my dearest friend.” Our parents too have a long, rich, and sometimes dark history, just like us. When I think of our long friendship, I admire its longevity—about thirty-two years. By birth, by obligation, and by sheer will and adoration, we have stayed friends.

The story goes that our fathers were childhood best friends, and when Alex’s parents were separating, his father moved into my garage. My father had just been laid off, as my mother tells it; our fathers were selling and enjoying party drugs for play and money. My mother kicked out Alex’s father and, shortly after, my father too. That is what I know to be true from my four-year-old memories and the stories of many adults.

The days of sloshing around in small, half-broken, plastic kiddie pools—while our tanned fathers stood in the backyard with cans of beer, spraying our naked kid bodies with cold hose water—were gone. My mother packed away the lawn chairs that were already bent and decrepit, and the grass dried up by the end of summer.

My father never forgave any of us for it. He never spoke to Alex’s father again.

As if all those warm childhood memories were inherited, Alex and I were laid out upon quilted blankets in parks by our mothers, single and surviving together. As we grew older, we hunted during late afternoons for crawdads in man-made park marshes; our parents snapped photos of us half-naked and rolling around in the shallowest part of the ocean.

Our parents wrecked it all before they had any other children; Alex and I were left biologically sibling-less, with single parents, and both of us, like it not, were devoted to our mothers and obsessed with our fathers. Perhaps that’s why he feels so dear to me, and so close—the nearest thing I have to a brother.

Alex’s mother eventually remarried, and so did his father. His parents were better lovers than mine, and they moved on. He inherited a stepsister, a half sister, and then two half brothers. My parents however, probably still in love and seemingly broken by divorce, never dated anyone else.

*

Sometimes one of us would speak of our fathers—their drinking and their women and their restlessness. But most of the time we did not.

“I haven’t really seen my dad in a while,” I said.

“Probably me too,” Alex said.

Instead, we made things together and discovered pieces of the world whenever we could. More stories say that I made Alex show me his penis in a closet when we were very little, and another goes that he forced a blue marble out of my esophagus with one punch. He once kicked me in the eye before preschool picture day and my mother feared the world would think I was abused. I think I remember pulling a bee stinger from his hand, or he pulled it from mine.

We’ve melted crayons in the microwave, dug holes in the dirt, made forts, watched R-rated movies, set grapes on top of a treehouse in hopes they’d become raisins, drank booze in parking lots, smoked weed out of apples and Gatorade bottles, and a lot of the time during puberty we pretended we weren’t friends, even though we ate Cheez-Its and milkshakes on his couch pre- and post-growth spurts.

We shared holidays, the same babysitters, and in high school we had some of the same classes. Finally, we decided that we’d share the very same best friend, Mary.

She is a woman we both love, and respectively we hold very different relationships with her. I talk to her most often; we express our ridiculous love, and we share our daily gossips and heavy hopes whenever we can. Sometimes I ask Mary about Alex. She’s the holder of everyone’s secrets and she’s a good listener with a superb memory, so she’s the best person to keep track of people like Alex and me: aloof, missing, forgetful, and messy.

The thing about friendships is that they are remembered by individual perceptions. I bet if Alex told you about our friendship it would sound different, and maybe he’d call me bossy and loud, or still he’d be angry that I point out people’s flaws with a striking blast of unwarranted honesty.

Maybe I’ve romanticized our friendship, how much he loves me, and what it means when we laugh together. Maybe Alex doesn’t even remember the time we watched Reservoir Dogs for the first time together on VHS in his big sister’s room.

I’d bet he’d say it won’t matter—that my perceptions are mine, and this friendship, and all friendships, are mine to build out of nothing. And still, it feels good to love people this much, even when we’re not perfect. I think we’re doing our best.

*

Alex and I are quietly living parallel, busy lives; we rarely see each other. We are both artists, and spend the majority of our time working to live, and living to create. He’s a trained fine artist and I’m trained writer. We have not found much success in our fields, but we both agree and acknowledge that we are doing it because we love it, that’s enough, and that we’ll get by making our own version of making it. There was never a moment where either of us said, Hey I’m going to be an artist. It just happened, right alongside each other.

I’ve been to his art shows and admired his paintings stacked against walls in his studios. Once he did a show in LA with exaggerated oil paintings of no-brain celebrities like Paris Hilton, adorned in the pinks and whites of that Perez Hilton blog. He’s devoted years to reading poems and short stories and essays that I send to his email. None of this goes unnoticed, but it is never worth saying too much either.

We’ve both derailed from our chosen professions many times. I was a letter-presser for a few years and needed Alex’s guidance designing prints; Alex is in a band and has asked me to turn my bad poetry in songs.

Perhaps our friendship can endure because we have the drive to swim upstream when everyone in our lives hasn’t cared too much about what we decide to do, as long as we can do it on our own.

Recently I told my husband that I wanted to learn modern dance, and he sweetly reminded me that I have absolutely no experience in dance, and that my rhythm and love for music isn’t enough to choreograph a Sia video like I desperately want to do. He says this idea is not rooted in reality, and that’s why I married him. Meanwhile, Alex sent me YouTube links to his favorite modern choreographers.

We’ve inherited pieces of our father’s friendship, which must explain our love for music and our lifelong journey to explore it together.

We discovered Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska around the same time. In high school, we drove an hour to Hollywood to watch The Last Waltz on the big screen, certainly one of our musically inclined fathers’ favorite movies. Alex took flash pictures of Bob Dylan’s feathered fedora as inspiration for his prom look. We have spent the quietest and most joyous moments of our friendship listening to music of the wrong generation. Getting sad-drunk and talking Harry Nilsson, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, David Byrne, Mick Jagger, Levon Helm, Emmylou Harris, Brian Wilson, Patti Smith, and Jackson Browne, all the time worrying that we’d end up like our fathers. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, we must have said once.

Mary’s mother once asked a drunken Alex what he wanted to eat, and he said, Make me whatever Crissy is having. We both had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (more peanut butter than jelly), and among the music and Mary, there were a million things we must have known about each other, and a million things we’ll never know.

*

When my father died, I came home to California. I spent most of my time with Mary and Alex. They picked me up from the airport and we rushed to that Taco Bell that is closest to LAX. It was the moment they told me they were both vegetarians. A shocking blow for me, a moment of jealousy and hate, because I had missed out on becoming a vegetarian with them. Though the truth was, and still is, I never eat meat from Taco Bell.

Over the next few weeks, they did whatever they could to help me ease the pain of sudden death, the kind that is clouded by years of love and sadness.

My father died in a seaside apartment when the early morning sun began to polish the ocean surface. He stumbled drunk to his bathroom, assuming he had to pee after every night of drinking like that, and tripped in the early morning light. He fell backwards, slamming his head into cheap industrial carpet, and bled to death. He left behind a tidy apartment and a small patch of deep red blood on the floor. There was a lamp that went down with him, too—a pile of big glass pieces. The rest of his apartment was like all the others he’d had over the years: overgrown with spider plants, piled high with movies and books, and small trash bins filled with empty Coors cans.

The place was full of many years of every-other-weekend memories, photos of us and friends, sorrow, and the sweet fondness of his smell, his laugh, and his charisma. There was the overwhelming, comforting smell of coconutty surf wax and weed. And still, I’d forgiven him long before the final fall. It was the only way to love him.

We had a party at Alex’s rented backhouse, the one with a pool that was so close to the door that it felt like you could be swallowed from the living room. I cracked among the music, and I propped myself against the ground and a stucco wall outside to cry. Alex slumped down next to me and we sniffled together, smoked cigarettes, and let the music beat us up.

“It could have been any one of us,” one of us said.

Outsiders have wondered how men can be friends with women, especially our friends, who have made up many theories about Mary, Alex, and me. I can only assume those people have never had real friends, or we are all just in denial about the abusiveness of unconditional love. What we saw over all the years: True love hurts, even the friend kind of love. And: some forgiveness.

I am bad at holding grudges, bad at judging others, and I always forget past wrongs. We’ve forgiven each other many times. Once Mary kissed the boy I said I loved, and we didn’t speak for a year. Once Alex made a new group of friends in college and never called, but I still came to visit his haunted house in Pasadena.

I think we are all slightly in love with each other, and in fleeting moments and heart thumps and twitches of eyelids, well that love is romantic too, for a few seconds.

Isn’t that the joy of it?

*

Last year, I got married in the Catskill Mountains, far away from the beaches of my past. Certainly it was farther than the jammed sweep of the 405 Freeway that links my place to Alex’s. I was married a few hills from Big Pink, the infamous music-making Woodstock retreat house of Bob Dylan and The Band.

Alex didn’t make it.

I missed him that day, as well as a ton of others we lost in some way, but still Alex felt close to me. And when I returned to California, only thirty miles away from Alex, I wondered if our friendship had finally taken a major hit and if we’d recover from the disappointment I felt upon his absence in New York. Because I’m still navigating the meaning of unconditional love and forgiveness.

When you’re alone most of your life, you wonder if you’re capable of such loves that sound like they are made of silliness and magic. But our lifelong friendship is always pulling me back. And my slow journey back to him is what defines this kind of quiet love that shapes, for me, the very best friendships.

The true loves in my life have always been hard to describe, and so very often, I don’t say much out loud. A squeeze of a hand or a wink from me feels like I’m climbing a mountain. But the things that are left unsaid are the things that have mattered most. The dear friends of mine know how much I love them and, stretches of seas apart, I feel it too.

Like our fathers too, Alex and I have always been ghosts. We go where we please, when we want, and never bother to check in with each other on any regular basis. Our friendship exists on a paranormal field with its own rules and expectations, which are few, and it makes it hard to be angry at him. I’m not mad at Alex for not coming to my wedding because I love him, no matter what. It’s possible that when we are apart we might not even be friends, and when we are together, we are the most devoted.

We’re always occasionally together, slumped over bars, a beach day, laying flat on apartment carpet listening to records, or begging Mary to make us food. Neither of us mad about all the things before, and our lives are always moving fast with equal parts darkness and light.

I have added personal emojis to all my favorite contacts in my phone. For example, my mother has earned the bright sun and my husband has some whimsical heart thing.

Mary has that pink, bright, tropical flower. When she went to Hawaii for a week during our eighth grade summer vacation, I thought I’d die without her. She sent me many postcards; my favorite was a picture of red and pink hibiscus flowers, which I still have somewhere. I think when she was away, I knew I’d have to love her forever.

Next to Alex’s name is that one-eyed ghost. I don’t know why I selected it, but today it seems right. Our friendship exists in memories and among the things we have never been able to see.

And, exactly like me, Alex is notorious for not returning text messages and phone calls.

I texted Alex yesterday. I wrote, I’m listening to Springsteen and Dylan and I’m writing about our friendship.

He responded the next day with an emoji of what looks the smallest version of Yosemite: a tiny colored tile made of a deep valley and the highest of peaks.