Losing friends/Luck of the draw-- Long

Seems that this stuff is kind of episodic; we lose those we love, and we
sometimes narrowly escape *being* those people, ourselves.

I often say that as a child of the 60's, considering all the *** I endured
and inflicted on myself, I'm pretty much just happy to be *anywhere* today.
I learned just today that one of my old friends has died. We shared--
strangely enough-- the very same birthday (though he was a year older). I
always thought of Andrew on my birthday.

We used to work together at a movie theater in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.,
together in 1970. He was the manager-- and a cooler boss it would be hard to
imagine. Short of just not showing up for extended periods of time, you
couldn't get in trouble with him. The name of the theater (long gone, now)
was The Cerberus-- named after the creature of myth, as we had three screens
there. The employee's handbook Andrew wrote for the theater contained this
entry: "In Greek mythology, Cerberus (pronounced SIR-burr-us) was the
3-headed dog who guarded the gates to hell -- God knows from what. In
modern-day Georgetown, it is the name of the theater where you work. The
Cerberus is owned by Mr. Martin F----. Martin owns a one-headed whippet
named Victoria." Andrew turned to me one night, after we'd dealt with a
particularly obnoxious customer who had demanded a discount based on...
godnose what reason he'd simply pulled out of his ass. "Ah, the General
Public", Andrew said. "An entity that would find reason in surfeit to bitch
about free admission to Paradise!"

He was brilliant; funny, literate, witty, clever and amusing as hell. He
played the cello, wrote poetry and short stories, painted and drew pictures
and cartoons. He sang beautifully. He was an original. He was eccentric and
lived alone in a dirty and cluttered house his parents left him. There were
still pots on the stove containing the remnants of the last meal his mother
had cooked for him, before she dropped dead of a heart attack one evening at
home. He left them there as a sort of a shrine. Nobody was allowed to touch
them. Atop his refrigerator was a plastic bag filled with onions-- or what
had once been onions. Over time, they had broken down and decomposed to the
point that they no longer had any bulk. Just paper husks and dried sludge.
They also had no odor... Very odd. There was just this long, wide, brownish
stain that ran from beneath the bag down the side of the 'fridge. Rather
than clean it up, Andrew had taken a black magic marker and written in bold
letters alongside this descending stripe of dried goo: "TODT UND
UMWANDLUNG" -- which is German for "Death and Transformation". Uh... well,
what can you say? It was an apt description.

He was clever with his hands and with all sorts of tools. He and I and a
couple of his friends once built a sound booth in his basement so he could
set up a bank of microphones, speakers, tape recorders and turntables (old
school sound-- no digital stuff...) in the basement for a party he threw. He
installed this little plywood booth with a smoked glass sliding panel on it,
so he could observe the rest of the large room. He covered the walls in
aluminum foil and the floor in plastic sheeting, and hung black lights here
and there. It was like a mini disco in his basement... You kinda had to be
there, I guess. Very trippy. The highlight of the evening was the
distribution of several dozen aerosol cans of whipped cream, their
subsequent discharge by all present, and a nude, party-wide whipped cream
writhe-a-thon. After everyone left, Andrew just shut the basement door and
we didn't venture downstairs for several months. When we *did* go down there
again, it looked like a science experiment gone hideously wrong...

He was brash and impulsive and fearless-- and foolish. He'd take any dare,
try anything, say and do whatever came into his head. I was in awe of him,
actually, and aspired to be more like him-- loose and confident and bold and
provocative-- the sort of person who always stood out in any crowd and for
whom no obstacle stood in the way of a good time. He was always up for some
fun, always the first to suggest something exciting to do. He drank too
much, but that just seemed to sort of come with the territory. We had some
insane adventures together.

I remember one bizarre evening close to 40 years ago, now, when he and I and
two pals, after consuming enough cocaine and bourbon to cripple several more
people (and wandering squarely into the peculiar mindset that entails...),
found ourselves at a lull in the night's festivities. Andrew announced that
as our host, it was his duty to ensure that we were not bored and that we
needed a challenge. He decided that maybe wanton violence was the answer, so
we all pummeled one another for a time-- but that hurt, and so we stopped.
Group sex was suggested-- but we were all guys and nobody was really
interested in that. We considered and rejected various ideas, and Andrew
finally came up with SENSELESS VANDALISM! In the wee hours of the morning,
we somehow-- the logic escapes me now--decided on a plan of action that
seemed quite appropriate, by Andrew's lights.

We wound up pushing one of those large, plastic portable construction site
toilets ("Don't you just hate the very IDEA of these damned things...?") out
into the middle of Four Mile Run (a local thoroughfare) by nudging it along
with the bumper of Andrew's car, and then we set it on fire. Just as it got
to blazing away wonderfully, his car's engine died. We couldn't get the car
to move, and here was this conflagration in the middle of the road...
Plastic burns like crazy, and the thing was melting and puddling in the
street. We had to push his car to the shoulder of the road. OF COURSE it
attracted attention, and various uniformed people showed up to deal with it
as we all crouched in the weeds. Am I proud of that? Well... not really. It
*WAS*, however, an unforgettable night. Bet you've never done it...

Time passed, and we lost touch after that theater closed. We all went on to
other jobs, but I'd run into him now and again. My sister, who also worked
at the theater for a time, dated him for a while, and I'd hear about his
exploits from her. He continued to drink heavily. She last saw him several
years ago. He arrived to take her out to dinner, already kind of wobbly. She
was alarmed at his driving, but they made it to the Polynesian restaurant
without incident. Once there, he proceeded to basically drink his dinner--
pounding down several Mai Tais and Zombies and Voodoo what-nots. "RUM! A
favorite of sailors! Ahoy! Yo-ho!" he said several times, and then he passed
out at the table. He had to be hauled bodily to a cab with the help of a
waiter. My sister got him home and put him to bed. She didn't see him again
for a long time. Sad... not amusing.

Ken, a mutual friend of ours, who used to work at that movie theater (and
was there that night, crouching in the weeds with us, watching the
Port-O-John burn...) became an Intensive Care nurse at Fairfax Hospital. He
called one day to tell me that he was working on a patient who came in via
ambulance the previous night. The man was filthy, dressed in reeking
clothes, with vomit-matted beard and hair. He was emaciated and puking up
blood. He had stomach ulceration; his kidneys were in danger of shutting
down, and they were intubating him and hanging fluids on him and basically
trying to forestall all sorts of possible system failures. As Ken worked on
this man, he heard him say: "Well, hiya, Kenny..." and he suddenly realized
that he was frantically working on the wreckage of our old buddy, Andrew.
Andrew was eventually stabilized, cleaned up, treated for a number of
problems, and left the hospital. Sad and horrifying... not clever and bold.

We lost touch completely then-- until he showed up, out of the blue, at my
mother's funeral a couple of years later! Mom liked him a lot, and she
always remembered to call him to wish him Happy Birthday on our birthday.
Andrew was fit, tanned, had a stylish haircut and was wearing an expensive
suit. I'd never, ever seen him looking so good. He was working for an
airline pilot's association of some sort, and spent a lot of his time scuba
diving-- hence the tan. He told me that he'd found AA, got himself a
sponsor, was attending regular meetings and was working the program. He was
filled with energy and hope, and said he was pretty sure he'd manage to stay
with it. He looked terrific!

We corresponded for a brief period, afterwards, and then I didn't hear from
him and lost track of him again. Word reached me a couple of years later,
via some of our old running buddies, that he'd begun to use heroin. Just...
sad and frightening.

Several months later, my old pal Ken called me and told me to have a look at
the front page of the Washington Post's METRO section. There was an article
about an illegally dumped body. The title was this: "WHEN FRIEND DIED, PAIR
LEFT HER FOR THE TRASH MAN".

The article detailed how a woman had apparently overdosed at Andrew's house,
and he and his then girlfriend-- instead of some far more appropriate
response-- zipped her up in a sleeping bag, dragged her up the street and
deposited her on the curb near some trash cans. After much deliberation, and
since her death was ruled an accident and not the result of foul play,
police charged him with.... illegally disposing of a body.

As Ken put it: "I mean, fer chrissakes! Exactly *how* fucked up do you have
to be that you think the best possible thing to do when someone snuffs it in
your living room is to say: 'Uh... I know! Let's make it look like a tragic
camping accident!' What the hell could he have been thinking?"

Sad, sad, sad; horribly, terribly wrong and grotesquely sad. I think I knew
right then that he was beyond help. I never saw Andrew again.

I ran into a woman today who used to work with us at that movie theater long
ago. She told me that she'd heard from mutual friends of ours that Andrew
had died from an overdose of heroin. Life stopped being fun and exciting for
him long ago, obviously. His downward spiral took years-- and it was many,
many years ago that I stopped wanting to be like him. I managed to pull
myself back from the precipice, to avoid the slide, to resist giving in to
the power that substances had over safety and reason, while poor Andrew did
not. Or could not. Why me and not him? Why not both of us-- one way or the
other? What saved me and doomed him? How the hell can I ever really know?

I miss him, though-- I'll tell you that, unashamedly. I miss him terribly,
and despite his tragic flaws, I still remember the glint in his eye and the
purr that came into his voice when he'd suggest some sort of hijinks. When
he was sharp, I swear I'd follow him goddam near anywhere-- into anything at
all. So would you, most likely, if you'd known him then. He had that kind of
attractive, magnetic intensity that said "Come on! This'll be GREAT!"

The last letter I received from him closes with:
"...and so I go off to work, and after a suitable interval, to Boston or to
Hell. Bye-bye."

I hope you're in Boston, Andrew-- but if not, save me a seat near the dance
floor, won't you?


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