Of All The Gin Joints...

In 1967, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram designed and executed an experiment to test the degree of connectivity between Americans across a wide geographic and socioeconomic spectrum. Long before social networking was even a thought in any of our heads, Milgram was investigating human networks via the permutations of association and happenstance, with surprising results.

He mailed packets of materials to people he’d randomly selected in Wichita, KS and Omaha, NE. He asked the participants to send the contents on to one randomly selected individual in Boston, Mass, but only if they knew that person on a first-name basis. If not, they were asked to send it to someone that they were on a first-name basis with—any friend, relative, coworker or associate—that they guessed might have a chance of knowing the stranger in Boston. Each person in the chain signed their name on an included roster so that when the parcel got to its intended recipient in Boston, Milgram could track how many people it took to complete the connection. On average, it took six. On a couple of occasions, it was as few as two, but never once did it take more than nine individuals. He dubbed it Small World Theory, although it’s more popularly known today as Six Degrees of Separation. Or Six Steps to Kevin Bacon, if you prefer.

L-R: Me and Charles 

I’m pretty sure my cousin Charles wasn’t thinking about any of that when he invited me to come hang out with some of his friends up at McCredie Hot Springs in Oakridge, OR during the Fall of 1996. Oakridge is a little town nestled in the Cascade Mountains—population 2,200—straight out of Twin Peaks, and not any place you go expecting to find the Nexus of the Universe. It’s where you stop for gas on the way to the ski slope, or where you go to find a natural hot spring where you can toss the Frisbee, drink some beer, and soak your bones. Which sounded like just what the doctor ordered, since my long-time girlfriend and I were on the outs for the millionth time.

Charles and I had always been close as kids, born just five days apart, and had grown up to be quite similar in many respects—easy going, philosophical, kind of given to hippie pursuits— although we had different upbringings. I’d been raised a Military Brat and had lived in six states and one foreign country by then, while he was the son of a blue collar working family, born and raised his whole life in the same house. But he had actually finished his master’s degree, while I was still a semester shy of a never-to-be-completed AA in Underwater Basket Weaving. He’d been wandering a while, traveling and finishing graduate school in Iowa, but had recently come back to Eugene to settle down in the place he’d been raised. I, on the other hand, had been wandering my whole life, and had decided to make Eugene my home and finally put down some roots. 

Charles returned from Iowa with a friend in tow, David, who was looking for new adventures in life. He decided to accompany Charles back to Eugene in search of a world more tolerant to his identity as a gay man, which apparently the Midwest wasn't know for in the 90s. David and I had hit it off immediately and, along with Charles, we spent endless hours drinking coffee and beer together and hashing out the world’s problems. So, you know... you’re welcome. It turned out that David was going to be in attendance as well—along with a couple of new friends from the apartment building he’d recently moved into—which kind of sealed the deal for me, since David had somehow become the go-to guy whenever I was having girl troubles. Go figure.

The gorgeous Fall day was crisp enough to make lounging in the natural cauldrons of hot water a perfect counterpoint, and just what the doctor ordered. Everyone in attendance was a nice mix of laid-back but engaging, and it was an easy day of amusing diversions and effortless conversation. One person in particular stood out as being really bright and friendly, one of David's new neighbors, Leta.

McCredie Hot Springs, Oakridge, OR

As we lounged in the spring, it came up in conversation that Leta and I shared the same birthday, which got us going on a train of conversation that lead to a surprising revelation. I wish I could remember our exact path to this rather ridiculous sentence, but we both said it aloud together in stereo: “Keoki is Hawaiian for George.” We shared a sitcom moment of comic surprise, and then began tumbling over each other to figure out how two strangers meeting at a hot spring in Oakridge, OR—who shared the same birthday no less—could possibly both know a guy with the unlikely name of Keoki. The only thing more unlikely was the idea that there could be two guys in the world with that name. OK, probably there are, but we’ll never know, because it turned out we were both talking about the same guy: Keoki Wells.

Keoki played Right Forward on my soccer team in Jr. High, while I played Left Halfback. He scored way more than me, though often on one of my crossing passes. Leta knew him because he was her sister’s first serious boyfriend, back in the day. But the key element to this curious coincidence is that we both met Keoki in... Naples, Italy. We two—strangers at a hot spring in a town that’s just a wide spot in the road on the way to somewhere else, where neither of us lived—shared a decade-old connection from 5,997 miles, and nine time zones away. When you’re faced with the staggering unlikelihood of something like that, it’s pretty hard to maintain a disbelief in… some kind of intelligent design. 

I mean, we were only there together because my cousin from Oregon met a guy from Michigan, at college in Iowa, who somehow made friends with a Military Brat who’d been stationed to the same overseas posting as me, but on the far side of the world. And if she and I hadn’t shared the same birthday, it still might never have come to light. The more links in the chain, the more ludicrous it becomes. But this wasn’t the first time something this preposterous had happened to me. Years previous in California, I met a girl on vacation from Wisconsin, who had grown up in Massachusetts going to school with a girl that I also knew from Italy, Betsy Bina, who had been my first real crush in life. For the sake of brevity, I’ve glossed over the intricacies of that unlikely discovery, but it was a doozy, and really hard to accept as mere coincidence.  

So to have a second equally ridiculous event occur just a few years later (in a totally different state, mind you) was compelling, if a bit... disquieting somehow. Because it makes you feel like the Nexus of the Universe, or at least a spoke in some great, cosmic machine. Ultimately, it reveals nothing of whatever Grand Design there might be. I mean, for a brief moment, life seems crazy beautiful and intricately meaningful in ways you can’t find the edges of, but then you still have to go back to your workaday life and run your errands. 

The following day, I was invited over to David’s place for his apartment-warming party, where I unloaded my Ficus plant on him as a "gift." While I was there I got to meet Leta’s sister, Lori, who just so happened to be visiting from Seattle. Leta had already informed Lori of our interesting connection, and we immediately began to share memories of Naples. Their family had moved to there the summer of 1985, which was when mine was was moving back to California. We were the same year in school, and the time overlap was close enough that Lori and I knew a lot of the same people. We discussed Keoki for a bit, but while my eighth grade memories of him were pretty plain-Jane, he was her first serious boyfriend, so things were considerably less, shall we say, PG-13?

The talk of first loves/crushes brought up Betsy, but Lori’s memories of Betsy were sour, which bummed me out. Apparently, things changed quite a bit in my absence, like I should have expected, but somehow still didn't. People who I thought would be friends forever began hanging out in different crowds, circles drifted apart. I shouldn’t have been shocked to discover this—the center never seems to hold—but I still found it oddly unnerving to hear of people falling out, couples breaking up, and unapproved new players interjecting themselves into my narrative. The nerve of some people.

Cristy, Heather, Betsy and Ethan at Castel Nuovo, Naples

It was naïve to think that a bunch of adolescent tumbleweed Military Brats who moved every thousand days would remain steadfastly in the arrangements I remembered so fondly. I guess we all want our childhood world to stand inviolate as a museum of our lives and a monument to our existence. Instead, the diorama had advanced in my absence into something I couldn’t have predicted, and had no ownership of. Which left me with an incongruous sense of jealousy at having been left out of these changes. Like maybe I could have amounted to something if only I’d stayed in Naples instead of returning to the States.

Lisa & Ethan, 8th Grade Prom

I didn’t have the heart to hear any more, so I inquired about another soul uniquely dear to me from those long-ago days, Lisa Rizzo. Lisa was the first girl to say “yes” to me, kindly granting me my very first dance at the tender age of thirteen. It was platonic by necessity, because she was soon to be my buddy Ethan’s girl. But that didn’t stop me from transferring that fervent original crush from Betsy—briefly, but with dizzying intensity—to Lisa for a several endless-seeming weeks. They say you never forget your first, and while Lisa wasn’t my first love, she was the first girl to endorse me as being an OK guy. At least no worse than the next guy, which is almost as good when you’re thirteen. 

After I related the story of Lisa and my first dance to Lori—my eyes glazing over in rapt nostalgia, as they do to this day anytime I can corner some poor soul long enough to tell the story—Lori had the best response of all time: she instantly produced a picture of Lisa with her husband and baby daughter. There are few feelings in the world as gratifying as knowing that the people you’ve cherished in life are alive and prospering. Seeing Lisa as a grownup, still wearing that easy Italian smile, was immensely rewarding. And considering the preposterous lengths the Almighty had gone to get this information to me, it was all the more so. Although I was a little disappointed that she and Ethan hadn’t gone the distance from 8th grade, Lori assured me that Lisa’s husband Ray was good people, so I let it go. I can be very magnanimous that way.

Center: Lisa and Ray. Right End: Lori and Ethan

One might think that two such experiences in a lifetime is at least one more than anyone could expect. I mean, how many times can the lines of coincidence converge in one person’s life, especially when you consider the huge geographic areas that we’re talking about here? From Italy to Massachusetts to Wisconsin to Michigan to Iowa to California to Oregon. Could even Milgram have conceived of such a thing? 

But wait, there’s more. 

Over fifteen years after this experience with Lori and Leta, having never seen either of them ever again, I sat down to write these stories, wanting to reconnect with old friends. I reached out to Lisa on Facebook, to share the tale of our first dance, “Last Dance in the City of Ruins.” It was well-received, to say the least, and virtually overnight renewed a friendship that means the world to me today. In exploring these memories with Lisa, several unexpected things came to light. 

L-R: Ethan, Lisa, Me, Lori

First, her old beau from back in Naples—my long lost buddy Ethan—now lives in Washington State, not five minutes from where my parents retired. Ethan moved back to Kitsap County, WA after Naples, because that’s where he was originally from. Our family retired from the Navy in Long Beach, CA, having returned there after Italy. We only moved to Washington for work after the California aerospace industry went into the crapper following the end of the Cold War. Consequently, I spent a thousand days in the 90’s living, loving, and working minutes from one of my oldest buddies from a world away, and never knew it. I could have walked to his house. Hell, we probably went to the same crappy little video store at Kountry Korners, and I never ran into him once. 

Luke and Lori at the Halloween party where we met,
our Naples connection unknown to us.

Second, in the intervening decade, Lisa's friend, Naples Lori, whom I'd only met the night of David's housewarming party, had moved from Seattle to my little town of Springfield, and married the brother of my wife’s best friend’s husband’s best friend. If that sounds convoluted, that's only because it is. Allow me to belabor. My wife’s best friend, Kristi, is married to Tony. Tony’s best friend, Jessie, has a brother named Luke. Luke is now married to Naples Lori. As I was perusing Lisa’s pictures on Facebook, I recognized Luke from several parties we’d attended together at Kristi and Tony's over the years. Considering that none of my Oregon connections to Lori even knew each other, that’s a bit much. What a surreal feeling, sitting in my little Oregon town, scrolling through pics of a long-lost friend in Jersey, and seeing someone I knew from across town because of my wife. And by the way, just to keep it interesting, my wife is originally from Alaska.  

But wait, there’s more.

Since I published “Last Dance,” I’ve reconnected with numerous Neapolitan expats, and even made a handful that I’ve never even met in real life into friends. One of the latter kind, Jen, represents yet another thread that converges on my life with an uncanny degree of specificity. 

Jen was three years behind me in school, and was stationed in Naples after I’d left. So although we'd never met, Jen and I became friends on Facebook because of “Last Dance." Over time, I noticed some familiar names and places in her FB pictures and posts, including the Kitsap Regional Library in Poulsbo, WA, where my Mom worked for twenty years. It turns out that Jen had been shadowing me for years. She went to NAHS right after me, then to a rival high school of mine in Long Beach, CA, and finally to the same Community College as me. And we never once met. She then moved to England, returning to the US years later with a husband and family, only to settle in Poulsbo, just 10 minutes from my parent’s house. Upon further investigation, it turns out that our Moms have been friends for years, long before Jen and I even met. 

It’s hard to consider all of this and not feel the invisible turning of the clockworks, the cycles in an incredibly vast and intricate machine. One whose overall workings may be unknowable to us, but whose exquisite synchronicity is beautiful to behold, even for its own sake. Italy, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Washington, Oregon, California, and Alaska. My, what a tangled web we weave, Mr. Milgram. Or perhaps not so tangled after all. Because there have never been more than five people separating all of us from across six thousand miles and thirty years of silent distance. Milgrim had his six degrees, I have my stories. Either way, it’s a very small world, indeed. 

Charles once gave me a book purporting to explain the augury of the specific day you were born. Instead of a general calendar month Zodiac sign, it was like three-hundred-sixty-five individual horoscopes for each day of the year. I don’t put much stock in the metaphysical. Still, the one for the day of my birth has stayed with me all of these years: “You are the place where the lines converge.”

Okay, maybe I’m not the Nexus of the Universe, but seriously? Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world…

The Measure Of A Man

My first experience with death came when my Great Grandmother passed while she was visiting us at our home in Monterey, California. I was 5. I was outside playing in the back yard, showing off a new-to-me hand-me-down letterman-style jacket that I’d bizarrely paired with a turtleneck and shorts. Mom and Dad came out to tell us that Gram the Great—as we called her—had gone home to God. I didn't really understand what that meant, although I was instantly filled with a kind of numinous certainty that my sister’s bed would now be haunted because Gram had been sleeping there when she died.

That same vague certainty of her lingering presence haunting that bed stayed with me even into high school, although a dozen years had passed and we’d moved four times by then. Maybe it’s because of the awful prayers I was taught as a kid. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake…” Wait...could you run that last part by me again? I could die in my sleep?! What kind of bullshit is that to teach a kid? I inherited that bed frame once my sister moved out, and I took it because it was better than the old bunkbeds I'd been using. But believe you me, I hadn’t forgotten for a second that it had been the portal from whence Gram had exited this mortal coil to whatever may lie beyond.

Not being especially superstitious—but, you know...a little stitious all the same—I pushed those preternatural instincts aside and for the most part slept easy in the bed, which was really just the same bare-bones frame by that point, as the mattress had long since gone on to the great landfill in the sky. Even so, on the occasional uneasy night of slumber, I always had to push that same lingering uneasiness back into the dark from whence it came, reassuring myself of the nuts-and-bolts nature of the world. Perhaps owing to some racial memory encoded in my genes, handed down across ten thousand years of ancestral fears of whatever lurked beyond the guttering firelight.

CS Lewis said that if you were in a room and told that a hungry tiger was outside the door, you would feel a kind of apprehension specific to the level of danger that represents. But if you were told that there was a malicious ghost outside the door, and you actually believed it, the kind of feeling that might induce would be entirely different. The latter is the kind of fear that we reserve for Death—Capital D—as the great unknown. Not necessarily for a specific death—lower-case d—like cancer and car accidents (or a tiger) in its practical specificity. More like the approach of our inevitable demise at some unknown point in the future, which might be minutes or decades away. No way of knowing. 

If you’re a practical person, eventually those kinds of fears give way to more realistic concerns. You trade monsters under the bed for concerns about cholesterol and blood pressure, serial killers for car accidents, and post-apocalyptic nuclear landscapes for worries about your 401(k). We stop having time for boogeymen and statistically-improbable scenarios as we age, and the practical realities of the concurrent aging of our loved ones creates a kind of schedule of events we will have to deal with. Most likely your grandparents will pass first, then your parents and so on down the line. When my grandfather Bruce passed, it wasn't really unexpected. He was 97. At that age, everything is considered a “natural cause.” 

I had a complicated relationship with Bruce, and had from the very beginning. He was a complex man, who had never had it easy in life. Born in the 20s and raised in the teeth of the Great Depression, he’d been forced to leave home in his teens and bounced around from relative to relative and foster home to foster home. A ferociously intelligent guy, he was also a veteran of two wars and retired as a full Bird Colonel from the Army to enter into the world of business. He had four kids to support by then, and raised them in the Fear of God and himself—not necessarily in that order—which couldn’t have been easy, considering what a bunch of knuckleheads they are.

But he married the hardest working, most gentle and compassionate woman this side of Mother Theresa, and she raised their daughter and three sons in the reverence of their father, and guarded the empire of his reputation fiercely. She never had an unkind word for anyone, and certainly never tolerated anyone speaking ill of Bruce in the slightest. To this day, his kids—my Dad, aunt, and uncles—have nary a harsh word for him, although he died owing all of them tens of thousands of dollars each. His numerous failed business initiatives took their toll on the family and defined him for most of my life. The fact that he pursued these wacky import/export schemes even as his wife was dying in the care of his daughter—having not seen him for months on end—did not escape my notice.

As a kid, I knew none of the details of his awful, impoverished upbringing, nor any of the complexities of his relationship with his wife and kids. How could I? I just knew he was a mean old man. He hit me in the eye pitching a baseball when I was visiting him as a five year-old, and then found my crying to be an annoyance, and my shiner to be humorous. Another time, he spilled hot coffee on me when I was riding in the front seat with him on a road-trip and forced me to get into the back seat until I could get my tears under control. He always kicked us off the TV when he got home so he could watch Hawaii Five-O, while he at popcorn and drank beer. We could go outside, or we could shut the hell up. Preferably, go outside and shut the hell up.

By the time I was in my teens, I was pretty ambivalent toward him, if not actually hostile. I didn’t care to know the complexities of his life, which might have mitigated my simmering disdain, preferring instead my teenaged certainty about him and the whole world. As a feminist, my Mom was deeply offended by his imperious chauvinism, and constantly held him up as a cautionary tale on how not to live life. A lesson I was only too happy to glom onto, donning the mantle of virtuous disapproval quite proudly.

After Grandma passed, we were witness to Bruce marrying two subsequent women, essentially caretakers, who were substantially younger than him. They decimated his collection of antiques, unique artifacts from his globe-spanning business travels, and numerous irreplaceable family heirlooms, selling them off as they stole from him and even beat him occasionally. When he was finally too old to stop us, we moved him and his third wife—54 years his junior—almost forcibly up to our area so that we could keep an eye out, and spend the remaining days of his life in some kind of relationship with him. He made it about three more years before the end came to find him.

His 97th birthday was a pretty impressive shindig. It is literally the only time in my life that I have been in the same room with my entire extended family on my Dad’s side. We had a ball, renting out a conference hall and a wing of hotel rooms. His irreverent scalawag sons bought him illegal Cuban cigars and Playboy magazines. What those chowder-heads would do if they weren’t always out making themselves better citizens is anyone’s guess, but here was fine food and drink aplenty, professional photography, and a lovely time was had by all. As though he took it as a farewell sendoff, Bruce lapsed into a coma two days later.

By then, everyone had made it back to the various parts of the country they called home; California, Colorado, Washington, Arizona, and North Carolina. So when the call came at midnight, I was the one left to deal, which struck me as an unpleasant irony. Out of everyone, my Mom and I probably had the hardest feelings toward Bruce, and yet we’d been the ones to move him up to Oregon. It was like wrangling a kicking and biting mule into the harness, only to have to drag him the whole the way. At one point, I actually thought I might have to throw down with him to get him into the car, and I was only 70/30 on whether or not I could take the wiry old bastard. As part of the US Army’s Mounted Cavalry Division, he’d literally ridden warhorses into actual battle, and that’s a level of batshit crazy you can never entirely discount. Three years and a lot of hard miles later, I was the one headed to the ICU in the middle of the night.

When I got there, I found his wife in a heap of tears. She was a virtual stranger to me, essentially a hybrid of step-relation and employee, which made it more a relationship of familial obligation than any real affection. So finding myself asked to comfort someone I barely knew over the unsurprising fact of the passing of her 97 year-old ersatz spouse, whom I’d felt conflicted toward at best, I approached with a fair amount of stoicism. I had a plethora of pre-packaged platitudes at the ready, after which I was inundated with more medical information than I could process. The specifics of his brain and heart activity were instantly translated by my own brain into, “He’s old and dying.” Eventually, she asked me to pray for Bruce.

I’ve always worn the mantle of counselor, since I was in Jr. High. I have no idea how I came to find myself in the role, but it’s a natural one to me. So although I’m a carpenter by trade, I’ve spent many an hour on the phone and in person, listening, counseling, and praying with lost, hurting people. It seems honorable enough, so I’m alright with it; but being asked to pray for the recovery of Bruce hit me pretty hard where I live. The idea of interceding for him left a bitter taste in my mouth. But I always toe the line, so I stepped into his room, leaving my wife and his out in the waiting area.

As the door closed behind me, my eyes took a few seconds to adapt to the dim light in his room. In that moment I saw what a frail little bundle of bones was laying in that bed, and something inside me turned. Looking at him there, it was hard to remember what it was that I’d been so angry with him about. Or how someone so small and helpless could ever had held such sway in my life. It was then that I saw that regardless of what he’d done in life—whether or not he’d ever succeeded in business, whether he was loved, respected, or just feared—this was his end. Regardless of how hard his life had been, or whatever explanation there was for him to have behaved the way he had, he was meeting his end.

And I heard a very small voice in me, one that’s clear if I'll be quiet for a minute, telling me something I needed to hear. I like to think of it as the voice of Grace, and it lets me know when it’s time to shut up, when it’s time to apologize, and when I’m just being a dick. I think my life would be a lot better if I listened to it more often. There in the hush of Bruce's room, with only his monitors and labored breathing as accompaniment, I heard that voice quite clearly. Grace said it wasn't time to pray for recovery, but to say goodbye and send him on his way instead.

So I did.

I said goodbye to Bruce. I said goodbye to hard feelings and bitterness, and to the scripted drama of outrage, offense, and disapproval that I’d been rehearsing and rehashing all of my days. Because Grace told me that whatever fate I imagined him deserving, he was meeting his, just as I would one day meet my own. And whatever mercy he needed to compensate for his awful upbringing, or whatever judgment he deserved for all his selfish actions, were none of my business. He owed God one death, and he was delivering on that. As I myself would one day, which might be minutes or decades away. No way of knowing.

I thought of words dear to me: “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” I decided to let him go in the sincere hope that he be measured in Grace and Mercy, just as I will surely need to be. And how, brother.

Bruce passed two hours later, and I’ve never felt another moment of disapprobation or negativity toward him. In fact, I’ve since discovered that the old codger was on to something: popcorn and beer together are just about the best thing since sliced bread. Who’da thunk it? I read somewhere that holding onto offense and anger against someone else is like drinking poison and then waiting for them to die. That sounds about right to me. Forgiveness is for the living, and it benefits the wounded as much as the offender. Perhaps more. Whatever fate there is to meet, each of us will find our own in time.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will find mercy.”

A Thousand Days In The Life

A gaggle of girls was blockading my exit from the row of tables we sat at in class, so I took the long way around, past Ms. Bitchy’s desk, making my way toward the communal pile of textbooks to check mine out for the night’s homework. I didn’t like to pass so close to Ms. Bitchy, as she was the only teacher I’d ever hated in my life. To be fair, she started it. With scowl lines permanently etched into her face from a lifetime of disapproval, she always wore a no nonsense look that ranged from long-suffering patience to withering antipathy. Hard to fathom what a bunch of eleven-year-olds could have done to earn that, but that’s why we referred to Ramona Binci as Ms. Bitchy.

I probably shouldn’t bellyache too much about that gaggle of girls—although they were mysterious and terrifying to me for reasons I couldn’t explain—because skirting their chattering little group caused me to walk past the New Guy’s seat. As I did, I happened to look down and see that he was drawing on a piece of paper when he was supposed to be working on the math problems up on the board. I saw that he’d completed the assignment already, just as I had, which meant he was at least as smart as me, which was frankly unusual. 

It also meant he should have been getting up to check out his own textbook for the evening, just as I was. Instead, he was drawing a picture of a figure very familiar to me: Firestorm the Nuclear Man, possibly the best superhero ever. Not as badass as Wolverine or Batman, but powerful and unique in a way that would make an imaginative person almost omnipotent, which is a very appealing thought to a ninety-eight-pound comic book nerd whose life revolved around doing whatever Ms. Bitchy said and trying to avoid bullies. And terrifying girls.

The New Guy’s name was JB. Actually it was James, but since we already had two other Jameses in the class, Ms. Bitchy had decided that he would go by his initials—JB—which she’d decreed to the class by teacherly fiat, not to be questioned or rescinded. It struck me as odd since she’d previously decided not to let me keep my name—O’B—on the first day of class because it was just initials, and not my actual name. Except it was my name, a shortening of my middle name, O’Brien, which I’d gone by every minute of my life, right up until I came under the baleful gaze of Ms. Bitchy. When she’d decreed to me that I would be Larry instead, after my first name Lawrence, I acquiesced—in spite of my dawning horror at the idea of becoming a Larry—because of her invincible scowl lines and untamed eyebrows. Thankfully, my mother put that to right instantly and I went back to being O’B, while JB was left to his own devices. And so JB he was, and remains to this day, as far as I’m concerned. Thanks, Ms. Bitchy!

I had thus far not approached the New Guy because the last Newbie I tried to befriend had rejected me with extreme prejudice. So the New Guy, with his new and unwanted name, was on his own. See, that’s the thing about being a military brat and moving every two or three years. You get a new life every thousand days, and everywhere you go is a waystation on the road to the next place you’ll be from. You’re always the New Guy, and always on your own. A new town, a new school, a new group of strangers to fit into. Your impermanence, the fluid nature of your existence, is the only permanent thing about you. So you’re always looking for your in, so you don’t have to stand out as the one who doesn’t belong. Even though you don’t. Unless you were among your own kind, like I was there. Like we all were, because Pinetamare Elementary was a Dept. of Defense school, located in Naples, Italy. Everyone in the room was always the New Guy. It was the most at home I’d ever felt in my life. 

So when I passed JB’s seat and saw that picture of Firestorm he was drawing, I didn’t see a New Guy or a stranger, but myself. I saw myself at the desk in my room, diligently outlining the image of Firestorm from the splash page of issue eight on a sheet of tracing paper from a supply that was rare as plutonium. It so happens that it was the very same image that JB was rendering freehand at that moment. I saw a guy who, like me, didn’t get to keep his name by virtue of a capricious shrew, a guy who fancied the power of off-beat heroes. Just like me.

When you’re a kid, that’s all it takes. You walk by and see a comic book nerd just sitting there minding his own business, and out of all the heroes he could be drawing, he picks that one. Not Superman or Green Lantern, not Spiderman or Captain America. Firestorm. And that’s it; I looked down on my return trip with my math textbook, and all I said was, “Firestorm. Cool.” And for no other reason than that, we were best friends for years following. It’s almost though friendship was the default setting, and all we’d needed was even the slightest reason to not be strangers anymore. 

Over the next three years we spent countless nights at each other’s houses, comparing notes on Star Wars, comic books, GI Joe, and girls. We grew out of things together and into the next phase, sometimes with fits and starts and uneven pacing. He gave up the action figures before me, which created friction. He danced with a girl before me, beating me by an hour or so. It just so happened that she was the girl I had a huge secret crush on, so he unknowingly took his life in his hands by asking her to dance. But I cut him some slack because he was the first person to call me Brien when I changed from O’B to escape the incessant mockery. Plus, I was only fifty-fifty on whether or not I could take him, as I’ve been with every best friend since.

But inevitably, our thousand days expired and it was on to the next life, where I was the New Guy at school number six, in Long Beach, California. In that iteration, I was a scared little pencil-necked honky at a rough inner-city school. Fresh from the civilized, orderly world created by the DOD, I was dropped into the Darwinian Thunderdome of Washington Jr. High, where they were teaching 9th graders what Ms. Bitchy had taught me in 6th. If only she’d been there to cold stare that pack of wild animals into submission. Hard to believe I could find myself wishing for her imperious presence as a bulwark against all the poverty and chaos of this brave new world. 

For some reason, everyone kept asking me, “‘Sup, cuz?” At Washington Junior High and Gladiator Academy, nerdy rejoinders like “the sky” were not acceptable answers. And since I didn’t have the nerve to ask what a “cuz” was, every one of my answers was a hopeless non-sequitur anyway. After a thousand days in a foreign land, it was like I’d come “home” to 1985 America, only to find everyone had lost their minds. They had a gross new kind of Coke, I didn’t know what a CD was, I couldn’t figure out how to roll my pant legs correctly, everybody wanted some dude named Amadeus to rock them, and my old elementary school friends were now inquiring as to who my favorite wrestler was. With a blank look I said, “What, like…Greco-Roman?” It was then that I discovered that grown-ass men in spandex pretending to hit each other was one of a million little touchstones that I had no connection to. I might as well have been dropped off by aliens and told to blend into human society.

It was a world gone mad, and I really had no idea ‘sup.

Compared to the rigorous academic environment of all the DOD schools I’d attended, classes at the embattled and crumbling Washington Jr. High were ridiculously easy. So it wasn’t long before the outgunned teachers had me grading papers, and even administering vocabulary tests for them, instead of doing my classwork. I didn’t have the sense to hide that light under a bushel, and instead got noticed by some pretty scary people as the teacher’s pet—or even contemporary—and I instantly became a target for hazing and abuse. So school went from being a sanctuary where I thrived to a foxhole on the Seine, where I stumble shell-shocked from one glancing blow or narrow escape to the next. It was as I wandered aimlessly from one bolt-hole to another that I passed a group of three dorks out by the athletic field who were talking about what turned out to be a mutual friend of ours, Matt Murdock.

All I had to do was hear that name come out of their mouths on my way by and I was arrested dead in my tracks. If these guys knew that guy, then they were all right with me. Out of simple relief and a sense of recognition at an island of my own kind amidst this new sea of chaos, I butted right in on their conversation, without preamble. Anyone who considered Matt Murdock a friend was bound to be good people. My people. Because Matt Murdock is also known as Daredevil, the blind superhero and patron saint of lonely nerds everywhere. I jumped in with them and was welcomed with open arms, because all we needed was the slightest reason to not be strangers anymore.

We formed a nerdly cadre that somehow navigated all the treacherous waters before us, as they saved me from the slow death of a thousand cuts at Washington Junior High. They showed me the ropes, the nooks and crannies where dorks like us could not only survive in that kind of post-apocalyptic landscape, but actually thrive. We eked out a life and culture of our own, out on the edge where we were always only hanging on by our fingernails. We fought and backstabbed, we saw each other through California earthquakes, school violence, first loves, and the end of our collective innocence. At the end of our thousand days, we four had become two, and by the next thousand I was the New Guy again, but in yet another state when I’d run out of schools to attend.

Without that pool of ready-made, like-minded souls, held captive by common circumstance, I had to find a new way, and it wasn’t as easy as it used to be. I still found friends along the way to all the places I hadn’t intended to go—some of the sweetest and most enduring of my life actually—but it was harder. It was as though, at some point, all the rules had changed. More was required, and hearts were no longer open and given with abandon to the first person to share even a common thread. People weren’t looking for a simple reason not to remain strangers, but an abundance of reasons to reject one another. And they found reasons aplenty. 

That thousand-day cycle has continued all of my days. Careers began and ended, relationships came and went, every major change set according to the turnings of a great celestial clock, like some tidal biorhythm. Ended my last major relationship, then met my wife after one thousand lonely days. Married her one thousand days later, bought our first house two thousand days after that. Started my business in another thousand days, made it a thousand more before closing the doors. And the last new friend I made was a thousand days ago, at age forty-three, already fifteen thousand four hundred and seventeen days into my finite supply of thousand-day cycles. 

His name is Jesse. He swears in Klingon, loves TED Talks, and is the only person on Earth who does better Dana Carvey impressions than me. Not to mention he is literally the world’s best whistler. That might be a little Holden Caulfield of me, but I appreciate a good whistler. I met him at the start of another thousand days, the New Guy again, this time at a construction company. Jesse is my alternate self, almost like a mirror image. If I’d been raised without religion, or was of a different political philosophy, I would be this guy instead. Which means he didn’t fit in the construction world any more than I did, but the difference between me and Jesse is that he made no effort to be anyone other than who he is. So he didn’t fit in, everyone knew it, and he didn’t even try. Of course he didn’t reinvent himself every thousand days. Who does that?

Sometimes I think it must be a relief to be able to not choose which version of yourself to present to the world. Thomas Wolfe once wrote that “seeing yourself in another person is like coming home.” I couldn’t agree more, but it’s harder than it used to be. Harder than it needs to be if you ask me. It takes painstaking time, because there are all these rules now. You can’t be too into it, or try too hard, or move too fast. Nonchalance is the name of the game. There’s ten thousand ways to get it wrong, and about two point five ways to get it right. But it can still be done. After all, next week Jesse and I are having lunch together for the second time this year.

I’ve since left that job, and the construction industry entirely, but haven’t even tried to make friends at my new job. Sure, our department has a yearly barbecue one weekend in the summer, but that’s called team-building. And, yes, have a great time and a lot of laughs working together, but no one even pretends that we’re going out for beers together.  It hasn’t come up once in the year and half that I’ve been here. We’re just work friends. Or as Ron Swanson would say, “work-place proximity associates.” I guess that’s how it goes these days.

I don’t know when we all became such a bunch of specialists. Like each person is a boutique, refined to a series of inflexible likes and dislikes, and you either fit in with their brand or you don’t. Every path we take in life dictates to us all the people we will not accept as friends. Gives us another reason to reject them. If you have the right education, the right musical tastes, the right political views, have the right hobbies, like the right TV shows, and don’t do anything on the long, secret list of my pet peeves and dislikes, I can schedule you in for forty minutes, six weeks from now. The siren-song of a busy life drowning everything else out.

When a game of chess starts, there are literally more possible moves than all of the stars in all of the galaxies combined. The number is so big it doesn’t even have a name, just ten with one hundred twenty zeroes after it. But as the game progresses, each move rules out trillions of other possibilities. The further the game progresses, the fewer options remain, until there is finally only one possible outcome. And that’s us, always refining the infinite options until they narrow into certainties, finding trillions of ways to rule out more and more possibilities every day. And then one day we look around and wonder what the hell happened, how did we get so isolated?

One of the top five regrets that people consistently share on their deathbeds is losing touch with their friends, and winding up alone at the end. Google recently released these statistics: Every week in America over six thousand people ask how to make friends, and ten thousand ask how to mend a broken heart. The sum total of human knowledge at our fingertips, and these are our questions of the Oracle?

If only there were some reason to not be strangers.