2002
by Tom McAllister
In summer, we played Wiffle Ball. A few nights a week, we met at Shawmont, a public school that had a big playground with a map of the U.S. painted onto the concrete. It was far enough away from any houses that nobody complained about the noise we made, and the fence was a perfect distance for measuring home runs. Between games we walked to 7-11 and loaded up on Combos and Snapple. Between games we argued about sports, and especially fantasy sports. Now and then, a cop rolled by, saw a bunch of kids with bats, and gave us a warning not to cause any trouble, but you could tell his heart wasn’t into it.
My friends had dispersed across eight colleges, and these were the last years when you could live in a different place from someone and not know anything about their life. There were IM conversations and away messages, but it wasn’t the same. Only some of us had cell phones, and text messages were expensive. Email still felt weird. In May, we reconvened and tried to fit in as much time together as we could. I wouldn’t appreciate until later that these were the last gasps of our collective friendship. Though everyone in the group still lives in the area, I only see one guy occasionally. I’m friends with a few others on Facebook, but I only use Facebook to try to sell my books.
One night, someone brought two bottles of Jack Daniel’s, and after a couple hours, we got loud and sloppy, and the cops chased us off. I ended up hitching a ride home with a woman who had just left her shift as a stripper in Kensington, a Philly neighborhood infamous for its crime and drugs. I was reckless enough then to get into anyone’s car. Six months later, when I didn’t want to walk to work in the snow, I hopped in a van driven by two middle-aged people who were drinking schnapps from the bottle and having what they called a “snow party.” They crashed into a snowbank a half-mile from my work and I got out while they tried to get the van back on the road. The stripper who picked me up wanted to know where to buy crack, but I did not know where to buy crack, an answer she did not believe or accept.
There’s a lot more to this story, but the ending is unsatisfying. It’s all details without a purpose. Three years later, in grad school, I would write a 10,000-word short story about this incident. I was so proud of it that I used it as my submission for a prestigious fellowship, and I spent fifty dollars mailing it to top-tier literary journals. A few minutes ago, I reread the first page and it was so bad I stopped breathing. I can’t imagine how I’d spent months (months!) crafting this story, certain that strangers would care. That they would pay to print it. I feel a great retroactive shame at having forced my peers to read it, at having made a postal worker carry it on their back. A more optimistic person would see this shame as a sign of the progress I’ve made as a writer, but if I were a more optimistic person I would be writing a different book now. The writing process is like the story of Noah, who, despite the ridicule of his friends and family, devoted his life to building the ark and filling it with thousands of animals who could not possibly coexist, convinced that he was the most important man in the history of the planet. Except in this version the flood never comes. Or it does come, but the boat sinks. Or instead of building an ark, you build a shelf instead, and it’s mostly level.
My closest friend from first grade until the end of college was a guy I’ll call James. I slept at his house most Fridays. We shared every inside joke and every first experience. We listened to the same music and ate the same foods and got in fights with the same guys. When I moved to Iowa City for grad school, he and another friend named Ian drove in the U-Haul with me, and that evening, while Ian slept, James drank most of a bottle of vodka and hugged me and asked me why I wasn’t sad. “It’s all over,” he said, and I laughed at him for being too drunk and dramatic.
By the end of college, when we all drank together—besides watching football, this was the only reason we saw each other—all we talked about were things that had happened before. We didn’t create new memories; we tried to enshrine the old ones by repeating the old stories until we had them memorized. We’d talked about my hitchhiking with the stripper a thousand times. There was nothing left but the past.
After grad school, my LauraBeth (then my fiancée, now my wife) and I bought a house in New Jersey, and James came to visit. We sat in fold-out stadium chairs (we still didn’t own much furniture) and watched a Flyers game and ate pizza and talked about almost nothing. A year later, we met for cheesesteaks at my old workplace, barely speaking. I would be the best man at his wedding a year later, and have seen him only one time since. The wedding is the line of demarcation, the last time you really see most of your old friends. They’re partying on your dime because they know this is the end.
LauraBeth—who has had the same best friend since first grade, and has marked the birthdays of seemingly every friend she has ever known on our calendar—sometimes encourages me to email him (I can’t do that; he never told me his email address). To at least send a text (he hasn’t responded to a text in five years). She says I should ask if we can grab lunch again. I should tell him I’d like to meet his son. Is it bad if I say I just don’t see the point? Whoever James is today, there’s a good chance we would not get along at all, except by riding on the wave of nostalgia and sports talk. He’s a cop and the son of a veteran and has always held militaristic and authoritarian views. It’s not a stretch for me to imagine him looking, say, at video of South American children cruelly locked in cages along the U.S. border and saying something like, “If they didn’t want to get arrested they shouldn’t have broken the law.” Or maybe a pleasant conversation gets derailed when he says opioid addicts deserve to die because they’re stupid enough to get addicted in the first place. I suspect even in 2002 if we’d been paying any attention, we would have fought bitterly about the Bush administration and the torture memos and Abu Ghraib. Now, the divide feels insurmountable. I worry that if we met each other for the first time today, we could end up in an actual fistfight. It wouldn’t be the first, or even the third, time we’d fought, but fists are heavier when you’re older. Punches land harder, and they’re not so easy to forget.
I’ve slipped into writing fiction (this happens every time, I can never stay on track), because I don’t know who he is now, and we’re never going to talk about it. I have wondered sometimes if he would come to my funeral. Or if I would go to his, and I admit it makes me sad to type these sentences. When I was young, I thought the only way to validate a friendship was for it to last forever. On campus, I see the undergrads sometimes taking ten minutes to say goodbye to one another; they are savoring the moment and ensuring that everyone knows, no matter what, they will be back. It used to take me an hour to leave a party because I needed to individually say goodbye to every friend, even though I would see them the next day.
With each year that passes, each friendship that fades, each new connection that flares up briefly, it has become so much easier to not say goodbye, to just leave. You can’t survive in this world alone but you can’t hold on to the same people forever. It’s not fair to them. Every draft you write is progress toward some other better version of the project you’re working on. Nobody writes a new book, they just write the same book over and over until they feel a little better about it.
Tom McAllister's novel HOW TO BE SAFE was named one of the best books of 2018 by the Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews. He has also published another novel (THE YOUNG WIDOWER'S HANDBOOK) and a memoir (BURY ME IN MY JERSEY), and his short stories and essays have appeared widely, most recently in The Rumpus, The Millions, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Third Point, Hobart, and Cincinnati Review. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse and co-host of the Book Fight! podcast. He lives in New Jersey.