goodbye, friend

At first the words confused me. I had glanced at my phone as we were waiting to pay and leave the restaurant, and wondered why my friend Dave was posting about himself in the third person until the meaning of the words sank in: “great sadness,” “passing of my brother…”

“Oh, no” I blurted out. I shared the news with my husband, kid, and mother in disbelief. He was my friend from high school, I explained to my son. My mother remembered Dave and how he’d eaten a lot of kimchi when he came over to our house. We hadn’t been in touch in several years. We were connected on Facebook, and had often commented on each other’s posts. But he hadn’t been showing up on my feed recently, and I’d wondered if he’d left the platform altogether as so many others had done. I’d wondered, but hadn’t asked.

The last time I saw him was back in 2018, when my husband C and I took the kids to Los Angeles during their spring break. We met up for lunch at a restaurant in Koreatown that Dave had chosen. He knew all the good eating spots. By then, he’d been in Los Angeles for over two decades, working as a gaffer in film and TV, a proud union man. Over the years, he lived in different apartments around the city. We would occasionally meet up while I was in grad school at UC Irvine in the ‘90s and I vaguely recall rooms with white plaster walls and hardwood floors, sparsely but tastefully decorated. And he always had a cat or two for company.

I am trying to remember how we kept in touch before social media and cell phones. Email was just becoming more common in the early ‘90s, but I suppose it was mostly phone calls on landlines. You had to be intentional about making plans. And we did make plans. Talking in the kitchen last week, C and I tried to reconstruct the details of a party we’d been to in LA that Dave also attended. It was in the backyard of a house, maybe someone’s going away party, maybe at my friend J’s house; I could picture the photograph of me and my husband (we’d been dating for about a year at that point). C remembered that Dave had brought a girlfriend, and that her name was unusual, a mythical name, maybe mentioned in a Freud essay. I dug around in the box of print photographs and a photo album and found both the photo of me and C that I’d pictured and one of Dave, sitting on one of those white plastic lawn chairs, smiling at someone or something outside the frame, holding a beer bottle in his hands. Part of a woman’s torso fills the right corner of the photo; she’s standing, so her face isn’t visible. Gradiva was the name. The printed date on the back says Jul 1997.

I am also trying to remember how we first became friends, but details escape me here too. I was an awkward, bookish immigrant kid, who moved to the Long Island suburbs from Queens at the beginning of 7th grade in 1981. Most of the kids at Great Neck South Middle School had known each other all their lives and had their established circle of friends. Maybe Dave was just more open to strangers; in any case, he was one of my first friends, someone I hung out with outside of school, an important distinction in the unspoken hierarchy of friendship.

Sometime in the second half of high school, my primary friend group coalesced – three guys, Dave among them, and me. We hung out mostly in S’s room but sometimes at Dave’s – plaid wallpaper, movie posters and other memorabilia, several cameras. We sat around shooting the shit, about what in particular I don’t remember.  Dave loved quoting lines from his favorite movies, mostly comedies – Monty Python, This is Spinal Tap, Blazing Saddles. When I wanted to see Jim Jarmusch’s indie film “Stranger Than Paradise” after seeing it reviewed on Siskel and Ebert’s show, Dave was the friend who went with me into the Village.  I had an on-and-off crush on S, but mostly I was happy to be one of the guys, recognized for my smarts, included without much fanfare. We all had other friends, some in common, some not; they went to parties I wasn’t invited to; they had more cool cred, more history with the other kids. But when I look back at that time, I remember the four of us spending hours together, driving around at night blasting music, ending up at all-night diners, biding our time before we really started our lives. I didn’t feel like I fit into most of mainstream culture, always more observer than participant. In the age of big hair, frosted eye shadow, and lip gloss, I wore menswear-inspired button downs, cuffed pants, and leather shoes. But hanging out with those guys made me feel like a normal American teenager.

I realize now that all these years, I took for granted that, unlike most friends from my high school, Dave and I were still in touch; that, through our overlapping years in California, we were casually, sporadically in each other’s lives, and that it would stay that way. I’d assumed that, surely, our paths would cross again like two birds alighting for a bit before resuming our own migratory paths. If anyone had asked me, I would have said we were “good friends,” but how could that be true if we hadn’t spoken in so long, and I didn’t really know what was going on in his life? In grieving him now, perhaps I’m grieving our young selves and the lost thread of our friendship as much as his untimely death. I miss him, but I’m struggling to understand what that means.