Most people like to think of themselves as basically good people. We all have flaws and moments of weakness and loss of self control, but over all every person thinks that come the day when the jackal-headed Anubis rips their heart from their chest and places it on the scales opposite the feather of truth, that Thoth will write down in his ledger that their heart did rise. [I suppose traditionalists would probably have preferred a St. Peter and the heavenly gates metaphor here, but you can not beat the Egyptian Book of the Dead for evocative imagery. If you fail the test you will get eaten by a monstrous crocodile-hippo-lion beast called Ammit, meaning "she who gobbles down". So eat your veggies kids.]
And while I do genuinely believe in the basic good intentions of mankind -- I attribute most evil to ignorance and fear -- clearly this world has more bad people in it than people who think they are bad people. That is, we all lie to ourselves. It makes sense. When it comes to oneself, it is a little hard to maintain an unbiased opinion. If you have two pieces of information that contradict each other and one says that you are good person and another says you are bad person, which one are you likely to go with? And who hasn't taken the side of a close friend in a dispute, reassuring them even though you knew them to be in the wrong. Being a good friend wins out over cold honesty most times, but it is this sort of thing that tends to skew a person's perspective.
It not my intention to come to a final evaluation of myself as a human being today (Interim Evaluation: Lazy Awesome), but instead to discuss a particularly dessicated bag of bones that is rattling around in my mental closet. We have all done things that we regret, things where we hurt people. Sometimes unintentionally and other times, well... When I look back on my life one major incident keeps ricocheting around in my skull.
This will probably come as a shock to most people, but as young lad I was just a wee bit nerdy.
No it's true.
I liked to read science fiction and fantasy books. I had big thick glasses. After reading came a love of computers and computer games. And then there was Dungeons and Dragons. I think you see where I am going with this. Like many young men, I entered my junior high years not exactly looking my best. I went from a diminutive, but adorable leprechaun of my elementary years, to a still not particularly tall but all stretched out and gangly teenager. Never the most outgoing of kids -- shy would be one way of putting it -- my realization that girls might be more interesting than I had previously thought did me little good. I switched from a public school to a tiny private school, so the pool of fish became very tiny indeed. And I was not one of the sharks, I knew that much.
It was here that I met one of my best friends junior high through most of high school: Ken. Ken loved all the same geeky stuff I did and we shared a similarly perverse sense of humor. He was ridiculously thin and of normal height, but walked with a bit of a permanent slouch. Along with my big buddy from elementary school, Brian, we made quite the funny looking threesome, I am sure. Geeks small, thin, and large. Pick your favorite nerd to pick on. Although actually, I don't recall dealing with anything particularly venomous that would even register on the grand scale of teenage cruelty. Helps to be a nerd at a prep school. Probably helps more to have a giant best friend (Brian).
It wasn't long before I began spending more and more time at Ken's place. It was where I was truly introduced to the dark arts of the comic book, a medium for which I still have a passion to this day. Ken lent me every single book he had, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the Dark Knight Returns. Many a Friday and Saturday night had me crashing on his bed or his floor. I became friends with his friends, like the always fascinating but difficult to pin down Ray (was he an American Indian? Did he have an inheritance coming at age 25?). And, of course, Ken turned 16 nearly a year before Brian and I did, making him the designated driver for all sorts of shenanigans that I probably still can't discuss, as I am not certain the statute of limitations have all expired. For instance, we shot bottle rockets off his car rooftop, while standing on his back bumper going 50 mph. We are so lucky to still be alive.
There was drinking and there was vomiting. We were stupid kids. I chipped a tooth when Ken jammed a gallon wine jug into my mouth as I was trying to take a swallow. Didn't hurt much at the time. Hurt a lot more later. We discovered Guns 'n Roses and KROQ. We set up electronic bulletin boards, which were like internet chat boards back in the dim and hard to recall pre-internet days. There was some petty piracy using 5.25" floppies. My tag at the time was Mad Dog. I think I made my signature blink and reverse to say God Dam. I am sure I felt that was very clever. Even earlier I remember trolling and flaming on the Compuserve chat boards. Such behavior didn't even have a name back then.
In general we had a damn good time, wished we had girlfriends, got good at computers, and managed to barely stay out of both jail and the morgue. Standard, if slightly nerdish, teenage fare.
Then something happened. I am going to say it took place during the summer between junior and senior year, but it could have been slightly earlier. There began to be a significant schism in our threesome, with Brian and myself on one side and Ken on the other. There were some other friends involved, but that was the main break. For whatever reason, Ken was getting to be less and less fun to hang out with.
Now I want to take a quick time-out here to warn that there has been over twenty years and a lot of water under the bridge since these events, so while I may now have a much better perspective, the details are certainly fuzzy.
At the time, the common refrain was that Ken was growing annoying because he seemed to be stuck at a level of immaturity that we were growing past. That seems like some unadulterated bullshit now. I do think he was increasingly bitter, sarcastic, unpleasant and abrasive. His mood was often down or dour, and his jokes seemed increasingly leaning toward the infantile or cruel or thoughtless. Worse, he began radiating a strong sense of self-loathing. He also became very clingy, showing up at our houses unannounced, wanting to hang out longer and not picking up on signals that we didn't want to do everything with him any more. That is what sticks out in my memory, anway. Talking recently with Brian, I was reminded that there was also a strong sense that Ken was becoming unhinged and maybe a bit dangerous. Brian recalled one incident:
The big memory for me, I think you gotta remember this one too, was the weird blowup he had [with a friend of ours named] Damien. I think Ken got overenthusiastic with some rough housing, Damien got annoyed and pushed him away or something (maybe hit him or cussed at him or something) and then Ken lost his shit and used some phrase like "I know you all just fucking hate me."... I think it sticks in my head because I remember my reaction being not just that it was a nutty thing to say even if there were tension, but that there wasn't even any tension to overblow into us "fucking hating" him. So I sort of took two mental steps back and thought to myself, 'Wow, that's something a crazy person says.'"Our relationship to Ken didn't change out of thin air. Ken had some serious stuff going on in his life. I want to tread carefully here, because I am not Ken. I don't know all the stuff that happened and how it really effected him. And I don't want to tell too many tales out of school. But around this time period his home was falling apart, his parents separating. His father clearly had issues of his own which certainly leaked out into his relationship with his son. I will describe one incident that must have taken place our Junior year:
We had all gotten up at dawn to go paintballing and we borrowed Ken's dad's car. The paintballfest took place somewhere out in Corona, which was far enough away that I had no idea where exactly that was. On the way there we exited the freeway and hit a sandy patch on the off ramp. We were probably going a little too fast, but basically we slid into the railing. We piled out, but saw no major damage, and continued onwards. After a full day and hundreds of dollars in fees, gun rentals, and paintballs, we were tired, filthy, and several of us had significant injuries (cuts, bruises, turned ankles). Great sport Painball: putting 16-year olds up against Vietnam vets, I kid you not.
Coming back home, we could hear something rubbing in that wheel well. We must have bent something. Sigh. When we got home to Ken's place his dad was watching tv and we told him -- we TOLD him -- that we had had a small accident and something was rubbing the tire. I am sure we downplayed it as not a big thing, but there was no subterfuge. At dawn the next day he kicked in the door, leaped on the bed, literally sat on top of his son, and screamed into his face, "What have you done to my car?!" I was lying five feet from him on the floor. I am fairly sure there was cursing. That was how he behaved when other people were there.
So no two ways about it, Ken was probably going through a tough time. Just being 16-17 years old can be tough enough and he had more going on. He desperately wanted friends to lean on. To support him. So Ken probably tried to grab onto his friends tighter. Of course, we were looking for more space from him, so his actions had the opposite intent. He made us uncomfortable. His behavior was disturbing. His odd actions became the topic of conversation when he wasn't there. By grabbing so hard he pushed us away.
The details of the end of this friendship are a bit loathsome to me. Instead of dealing with the issue staring us in the face -- our friendship with Ken was no longer working -- we started ditching him. Hoping he would get the hint. What kind of crap is that? Tight friends for 4+ years and we wanted him to take the hint to leave us alone? It was not at all surprising that the hint was never taken.
My poor VW Scirocco took some of the biggest hits of this stupid policy. I believe it was an early ditch attempt that led to me shooting down a mountainous street way too fast and realizing way too late that the road was ~100 yards shorter than I recalled it being. Forty feet of skid mark later and the control arm holding one of the wheels had snapped clean through. It was definitely a ditching attempt when I tried to roll my Scirocco backwards down the driveway without starting the motor, so Ken wouldn't know I was sneaking away. You had to get out of the car to get the rolling started and, of course, I lost control and grabbed that open door with all my might, bending it almost entirely backwards on itself. From that day until the day it was given away to charity the door made a horrific CREAK every time it was opened and it had to be slammed shut. Because I tried to sneak away silently. I think there may be some cosmic justice there.
I don't recall how long this pathetic dance continued. I think it started off good-naturedly and infrequent and ramped up to angry and deadly serious. I do recall who it was that finally gathered up enough balls to go out and tell Ken that he was not invited. Me. Talk about mixed feelings. I am glad I finally put an end to this immature and truly mean ditching with some honest talk. But I also was the one who hurt him. Face to face, I used words to hurt him. To tell him to go away. That he wasn't wanted here any more. I spoke for the group and Ken knew it. He said fine, if that is what you want, and drove away. I can't even begin to process what that must have been like. No one has ever been that cruel to me. I can only hope he had, in fact, seen the writing on the wall. That it wasn't a bolt from the blue. His friends -- his friends for all of high school up that point -- telling him they no longer wanted him any more.
I do know that Ken never made a single overture to me after that day. I think we spoke a few times, but only in the most perfunctory, excuse me you are standing in front of the water fountain sort of way.
Look, clearly there are a lot of problems with trying to judge decisions made as a teenager from the perspective of an adult. If Adult-Me had an old friend going through some stuff so serious that it effected his behavior towards me, I would either try and help the guy through it, or at a minimum, just put some space between us until that guy had gotten his shit back together. But Kid-Me was simply not capable of that. Kid-Me had no clue what was going on, except that Ken was becoming more angry, more troubling, and generally less fun. Kid-Me addressed the problem by at first running away from it, before finally snapping under the constant pressure of running and telling Ken to fuck off.
For this I am sorry. You deserved better, Ken. I was just a kid and maybe I did not have the capacity for more a nuanced or braver approach, but that just explains why it happened, it doesn't excuse it. I strongly suspect there was no way of avoiding the trainwreck our friendship became. But handling it kinder would have been better.
We handled it with all the tact that 16 year olds at the bottom of the social food chain could muster, which is to say, very little. - Brian
