To Choose that Stars Redeem the Night

The Story of my Best Friend becoming Handicapped

This is a story with a sad beginning but a human ending. While it is also a story that on its surface makes me appear to be a much better person than I am in my everyday life, I promise that’s not the point. These were the events that made me understand what it means to do good, how impossible doing good can be, and the value of a single life. While an anxious part of my mind wants to agonize over every dirty and mean thing I’ve ever done, so as not to give you a false impression, let us begin this story with a description of my friend B.

Her laugh was pure embarrassment to her, loud, braying, donkey-like. I still recall it distinctly, more than twenty years on. My ears received it like music. No one with a laugh like that could be insincere, and that was an unshakeable bedrock of faith to me. B tried so hard to hold it back, struggling not to annoy everyone, but when she laughed she did it with her whole soul. If I could make her laugh in the middle of class, so much the better. Over the course of our friendship, it became my habit to say things to B that were both obnoxious and ludicrous as well as so far out of polite bounds that everyone would be too embarrassed to repeat what I said to get me into any trouble.

As I now have a child who will likely one day read this, I will not type those words here more than is necessary. Suffice it to say they were profane, sacrilegious, and wild. No, they were not harassing, although perhaps some of them may have sounded that way. Think of the style of a placid lake disturbed by dynamite fishing. That was the mood I always tried to impart to B. If you think I’m a weird guy now, you should have met me in high school.

We met during first period biology. I walked to school early so I could sit quietly in the classroom and think. This is an off-putting hobby I’ve had all my life, and usually causes people to come up and ask me if I’m terribly sad. B got in early because her brother had band practice and she sat several desks away. For some number of days we both sat quietly in the classroom, her doing her homework last minute, me staring off into space and reflecting on the kinds of odd thoughts I’ve collected over my life like souvenirs. The teacher generally rummaged around in the supply closet to prepare a demonstration, leaving us to ourselves.

“Are you like really sad or something, man?” she asked one day.

“No. That’s just how my eyebrows look,” I said.

She laughed for the first time and the sound of it startled me. I said something else, and sure enough she did it again. We talked every day after that and I slowly escalated the absurdities I was willing to utter aloud.

In my memory we were friends for decades, but really it was only several months. Not even a full year. My senses are skewed by the math of proportion. To my son, a year is half his life. To me now, a year is only a few percentage points, vanishing into the wind. But I was young enough then, full of enough emotional energy, that those few months were still full of hidden time.

I didn’t have a lot of friends. So rare was my experience, that I didn’t know if we we’re friends even then. It seemed too autistic to ask. I am good at things. At tasks. Only slowly did I develop a facility with people and I had almost none of it then. I didn’t even realize how much those mornings meant to me until they were suddenly gone.

One day, B was late for school.

Lots of kids were late it turned out. The band room had noticed the absences first. There’d been an accident out on the road to West Port that stopped up all the traffic. A decent chunk of kids commuted from out that way. B was one of them.

B’s best friend came in close to start time and, in a very worldly fashion, pulled out a cellphone to check on her. B had a cellphone, too. That was rare in those days. I wouldn’t have a flip phone until late college. I barely knew B’s best friend then, although we’d later become quite close given the circumstances. She was worried. I insisted it was nothing.

“What if it was B?” I asked, in a tone meant to mock her concern.

Always joking. Keep it light. Say something terrible to make it not real. That was me. It worked like a charm until the bad thing finally happened.

We are all psychic in our memory but as I said it, I felt like someone poured mud over the top of my head and it perfectly oozed down and coated my entire body. I felt cold and dirty. Somehow, I knew. That is my true memory but I suppose it couldn’t have actually happened that way. I remember that I knew even as the words were leaving my mouth and wishing I could pull them back.

I don’t know what B’s friend heard on the other end of the line, and I never had the courage to ask even after we grew closer. Whatever it was, she understood the implications immediately. I saw the color drain from her face and I knew she hated me in that moment. Hated me as fiercely and hotly as any woman has ever hated a man. I knew that I deserved it, too. She began to weep and ran from the classroom. When the teacher came in a while later, he took the first fifteen minutes of class to go into the supply closet and sob.

My failure to run after B’s best friend, to apologize, to be human with her in that moment is also something I have struggled to forgive myself for.

It was the rain. The goddamn rain.

B had hydroplaned into oncoming traffic. The accident that delayed all the students from West Port was her accident. She wore a seatbelt but for a year and a half after the accident I heard parents and students who didn’t know better repeat “should have worn a seatbelt” behind B’s back. I made angry corrections back then, but I now understand it as a superstition to ward off evil as much as burning sage. B wore a seatbelt, but the truck she drove didn’t have airbags. Nobody ever gets to know that kind of thing in advance. Nothing but bad luck.

I sat in the classroom as all the various people who knew B well left school for the day.

I determined that I would not cry. There was something else in me, beyond sadness. Like hot lava hitting the ocean, becoming sharp igneous rock. Like ice cracking in the arctic as loud as thunder. Life had hit me too hard too many times, and I wouldn’t submit. If life tried to hurt me, then I’d tear out everything in me that could be hurt until I wasn’t human anymore. And that would be my revenge on the world for doing what it had done to B.

You don’t even have a right to be sad, I told myself. She had better friends. Nobody even really knew you were friends. So crying would only be selfish. She probably didn’t even think of you as her friend. You’re just someone she talked to for a few minutes every morning.

I broke a four by four in the basement by punching it when I got home. It was old, half-rotted, and in such a position as a strut that I had an extreme leverage advantage. Still, my hand didn’t feel right for a month after that happened and I’m sure I couldn’t do such a thing now. That was what I thought of as a man’s way of crying. I must have sat there for an hour afterward, staring at the wall. Not thinking of anything except for B.

The next week was business week. The longest week of my life, to that point, as I did miserable job pretending to be interested in running a fake company with a randomly selected group of students. I know B’s friend hated me, because we were originally supposed to be in the same group but she demanded to be moved. The words “I hate him” were relayed to me as her reason for making the request. A concerned teacher asked me what was wrong and I asked him to simply relay, “It’s my fault. I am sorry.”

That helped, I think. A little.

The facts rolled in slowly as the week went on. Every day began with “How is B?” and every day the answer was, “She’s still in a coma.” There was no social media to stalk, and so all I could do was pick up little bits of information here and there.

Her brother wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was ejected out of the front window of B’s truck. When one of our teachers went to visit them both in the hospital, I heard him describing to another teacher that her brother looked “like hamburger.” B, by contrast, looked like she was sleeping.

Her brother woke up right away and was walking normally shortly thereafter. You wouldn’t have even known he’d been in an accident if you looked at him. It left scars on his soul, though.

Months drag on forever when you’re a teenager and I spent almost as much time waiting for B to wake up as I’d known her. My habit of staring off into space to think and looking sad was now replaced by staring off into space to think and being sad.

How was she? How could I know? Who could I ask? What about her brother? What about her parents who surely wouldn’t even know my name? How long could she be in a coma before someone pulled a plug? Would I even have a way to go and say goodbye to her first? Would she wake up? Please, God, would she ever wake up?

I kept my feelings private. I had no right to my feelings. B’s more public friends sobbed openly, and supported one another. All girls she’d known forever. They had a right to their feelings. Mine were fraudulent, stolen, counterfeit. I was a man. Men did not have feelings. If you’d asked me to say that aloud I would have said that notion was barbaric and stupid, but in my heart I believed. A man could not be devastated for someone he only knew from a half hour or so chit-chatting every morning. Not for someone where the entire basis of the relationship was saying goofy off the wall nonsense.

There was a show at the time called Everwood that had a plot line about a comatose high school student where the genders were reversed. The boy was asleep and the girl was pining for him. I grew angry anytime I saw it referenced, anywhere. I did not know that I was in love. Had never even dared use that word in the privacy of my own thoughts. Granted, it was puppy love. Crush love. I did not know that, then. I had no explanation for it at all.

There’s something called the Frequency Illusion, where if you think about something you suddenly see it everywhere. Everwood was everywhere I turned, like a country song eerily describing the circumstances of my specific life. Similarly, Bring me to Life by Evanescence was the smash hit of our grade. Everyone was listening to it all the time, and I still can’t hear that song without immediately thinking of B asleep in a hospital bed somewhere, a sort of hybrid of herself and Amy Lee, waiting for someone to wake her up.

I prayed for her every night without ever admitting a belief in God to myself. Just in case someone might be listening, I told myself. I was asking for her, not for me, so that had to be acceptable. It was a conditional negotiation with a universe I had figured was deaf to human desire. A temporary truce with a God who had angered me and also, I was certain, didn’t exist. B’s father was a pastor. It felt okay to pray for her, even if it was a betrayal of my own sensibilities at the time.

There wasn’t much else to do while you were waiting.

After a long wait, B woke up.

The teacher announced it in class one day, and it felt like a mountain fell off of my shoulders.

A group of her friends made plans to go see her. I awkwardly asked to go and nobody knew how to tell me no. I didn’t even understand why I had asked. She hardly knew me, or so I kept telling myself. Somehow, I couldn’t not go. Not going seemed impossible. I demanded my father pay me money for a roofing job in a rare display of backbone. I used the money to buy B flowers. I understood it to be the thing you did when someone was in the hospital. You brought them flowers. I’d seen it in a thousand movies. Nothing more to it than that.

It was her birthday, a week after mine, and several of us came to the hospital with presents. I felt more awkward than ever before in my life, seeing her there in a wheelchair. My tongue wouldn’t work. I was a thing all cobbled together out of spare parts. An emotional Frankenstein, poorly aping the normal reactions of regular people. Whatever I was, I was certainly not cut out for that moment. B looked the same as ever in my eyes. I wasn’t normal, though. I didn’t even have a right to be there. I was an intruder. B would open her mouth any moment and demand to know why a stranger had pushed his way forward on such a special occasion. I mean, honestly, what was I even doing there? How inappropriate!

She could have destroyed me with a word. A frown. Or worse, confusion. A struggle to remember me. I might of died had she done that. The reality of her warped the space in that room until she was the only thing I could see.

B smiled and slowly, effortfully, said my name.

From something like the age of ten to the age of twenty-seven I didn’t shed a tear. I decided to “give it up” as if sadness was a thing you could simply decide not to feel anymore. Or the tears that come from joy, which I had not considered in that bargain with myself. I felt endless, impossible joy on hearing her say my name. I should have cried right then, but stubbornly, I only smiled. I gave her a nod and stood there dumbly while everyone else hugged her. I quietly put the flowers someplace on a table and only awkwardly mentioned they were from me. Still, my smile lasted until we left.

B was awake!

I punched the cement wall in the basement when I got home, but this time in jubilation. If you’ve never been a teenager boy, I don’t know if you can understand this. I punched those cement walls in liberation! Goodness had prevailed in the end! B had woken up! The darkness had been driven back! And I was really good at hitting things, which my hands have not thanked me for in old age and I shudder to remember how often I did this. It was the wildness of life itself in my fists and I was full of merriment as I struck that cement wall.

The questions returned but with frantic and manic happiness instead. How long would it take B to walk again? What help would she need? When would she back in school? She’d miss a year but how long would it take her to graduate after that? When could I talk to her again?

I assumed one of her friends would be coordinating all the niceties for her imminent return. When yearbooks came out, I asked B’s best friend who had it for me to sign. When she only looked confused, in a rare moment of insight, I realized no one had thought to get B a yearbook. Everyone was a teenager, all of us stuck in our own worlds. No one had thought that B would need those kinds of things looked after.

As you’ve no doubt deduced, my understanding of gender roles was fairly rigid at the time. Mostly so that I didn’t accidentally do something even more feminine than reading to upset my father, but it seemed like a man’s job to pay for things. So I again told my dad I needed some money from another roofing job for a yearbook, didn’t tell him it was for B, and used the money he gave me to pay for hers instead. I gave it to B’s best friend, the one who hated me less and less, and asked her if she would go around and get people to fill it out.

It was a small school and we did our best to make sure everyone had a chance to sign it. B was recovering at home by that time. We all went out there to give it to her and she was very happy. I hung back, and watching her in her wheelchair it started to slowly sink in that she wasn’t going to be walking again. It was all the things nobody said. How her parents wanted to talk about our futures and not B’s future. The way they casually changed topics as fast as they could anytime the conversation dwindled. They didn’t want to leave an opportunity for us to ask about sad subjects. Her muscles were all there, and all the nerves, but the parts of her brain that could command them had been permanently damaged. Partial motor control everywhere, but not enough to do anything more than stand for a few minutes, or maybe walk a few feet if she was leaning on someone else.

I spoke with her parents. Her younger brothers. I did my best to keep the atmosphere fun. They were going away to visit family for the summer. B would be back to school the next year. I told her I’d see her there, and this is where our story actually begins. Because at least for a while, I finally got out of my own head and grew up.

When B came back to school, I again had the assumption that her friends would look after her. It seemed like a womanly kind of thing to do, seeing to the emotional needs of another woman. But we were all little more than children and children are selfish. Seeing B in a hospital, unable to walk and struggling to speak for a few visits was one thing. Seeing her in the context of high school, every day, where the full extent of her loss and its implications were undeniable was too much. Very few of her friends would interact with her beyond a sad smile. It made them too depressed or too confused. It cracked apart too many of the fictions that let them feel comfortable day to day. So instead, they gave her smiles. The saddest of sad smiles. The most “I’m sorry for you” smiles in the whole wide world.

If I know anything, I know that pity is a sin.

Pity is too dehumanizing to be anything but an abomination.

I admit that I hung back at first, too. I was also young and dumb. I didn’t know what to say. Then one day, I watched B with her aid, being pushed down the hall with a wide bubble all around her. She looked like the loneliest person in the whole world. And a voice in my heart, the voice of conscience, the spark that God breathed into a bit of dust to bring it to life said, “oh fuck that shit.”

I realized, as if struck by a thunderbolt, what a selfish and shitty thing it is to be wrapped up in your own feelings about someone else’s struggles. How oblivious and blind it is to see only your own awkwardness instead of your friend’s pain. And not only her pain, disconnected from the rest of their identity, but her totality as a human being.

“B!” I shouted, tapping my bare wrist where a watch might have been. “School started two months ago! Where the fuck have you been? This is inexcusable!”

It took her a while to turn, as even her instinctive reactions were slow.

And then I licked my lips, and said some other super messed up thing that made her aid gasp in horror. I suppose I’ll have to repeat some of them to you by the end of this, but let me have my false dignity for now.

By the time B was looking at me, the words had sunk in and it looked like she was crying. Full on tears crying. End of the world crying.

Intimacy is risk. The two cannot be separated from one another. The kind of friendship I have with B is a friendship men generally only have with other men. It involves the application of force, deliberately aimed with maximum commitment… at things its target will not find offensive. By striking hard, with aggression, one friend proves a deep knowledge of the other. You carve out the shape of another person’s soul in the negative. Bit by bit, you prove out that you own a map of their interior. You say, I know you. Let me touch the softest parts where you are most vulnerable and I won’t hurt you. Yet the risk remains. You might actually just end up being a huge asshole.

For a second I worried that I had really hurt the feelings of a girl in a wheelchair. Then she made a sound. It wasn’t the same sound as I remembered. But it was close to the same sound. The same flaring of nostrils.

It turned out that when B laughed after the accident, it looked a lot like she was crying.

I asked her if she needed help with her homework because I assumed the accident hadn’t made her any smarter. She said maybe and asked if I knew anyone smart.

We met everyday after school for at least an hour. At first, I couldn’t understand a word she said unless I basically already knew how she was going to answer. Her voice was slow, strained, and full of gasps. It took a long while to develop an ear for it. So I did all the talking. Anything and everything. I complained about my life and my parents to comedic effect. My younger brother and sister and how I’d already changed too many diapers for someone my age. After I completed B’s homework, we signed her name with me guiding her hand and I insulted her penmanship but told her that she could be a doctor so it wasn’t a total loss. It wasn’t pity or cruelty. It was our old friendship in a new context. Somehow, I understood that and so did she.

By the way, if you’re nodding along to this and you’re thinking something like, “he has the answer, I need to go tell someone in a wheelchair they’re full of shit” that’s not really the point. I am saying you should be who you are. Like Fred Rogers said, “give people the gift of your authentic self.” In my truest core, where I am only myself, I am kind of an asshole. I mean, a little bit. Do you think you’d be reading this if I wasn’t psychologically messed up enough to write it? My great uncle Jack liberated a Death Camp and we didn’t even know about it until after he died. That is what psychological robustness looks like. The number of stupid things I’ve done in my life, and the hurt feelings I’ve caused in pursuit of dumb jokes would prove that out.

This is how I like to talk to people and B knew that. It’s why I tell Chris Best he has good skin or let Mills Baker know that he would be a great Hooters waitress. The idea of everyone sitting around in a circle saying things like “I appreciate you and all of your strengths” or “how can I better be a perfectly spherical cow that uniformly emanates compassion and good will in all directions” makes me want to pass out and vomit. B liked it when I talked to her literally the same way I talked to everyone else. I am a ball-busting, inappropriate, annoying jerk. Being a ball-busting, inappropriate, annoying jerk is me being myself. That was why this was important to our relationship. I was being myself with her. Not some higher version of myself. Not some imagined angelic being from on high taking pity. Just me, as I am.

And that let her be who she was, and helped her remember what that felt like. When everyone is staring at you, wanting you to be somebody else who is terribly sad, you can catch that self-impression like a disease.

I didn’t worry too much about flat out doing her homework. I mean, get real. She was less than a year away from a car accident that tragically changed the course of her life. She had a long-distance boyfriend in Arizona that wanted to break up with her but couldn’t find the courage to say it out loud. Her dreams of college were pretty much gone. What was I supposed to do? Make her painfully fill out a bunch of algebra problems when she could barely hold a pen instead of busting her chops? She needed to be reminded she was human and she needed people to treat her like she was human. If B needed me to dot some i’s and cross some t’s for her then I was happy to help.

There were some real sad moments, still. I’m not going to lie. It was a sad circumstance. People get sad and B was no exception. When B’s friend best who was beginning to sort of like me came around, B broke down sobbing about what it was like to not even be able to go to the bathroom by herself anymore. She started to cry.

And when I felt it had gone on for long enough, I quietly said, “B, we’re friends, right?”

Slowly, she said, “Yeah.”

I looked at her very solemnly, doing my best impression of the sad eyes everyone else gave her. I wanted to be as dramatic as Treat Williams in Everwood. And fine, I’ll type out one of the messed up things I said to B. If my children ever read this, I’ll have to hope they understand in context.

“Then you don’t need to use the toilet anymore because my mouth is your toilet.”¹

Like I said, dynamite in a placid lake.

B laughed so hard I thought that I’d killed her. And her best friend, really our friend now, was so scandalized her whole body froze before she also started laughing.

See, I promised it was messed up.

Here’s another thing I know. There is a Devil. It lives in the shape of sadness and pain that we refuse to leave behind when the time to move on has come. We hurt the Devil most when we choose to be ourselves. Not by lashing out in fear, or succumbing to anger. For me, the Devil is best fought by reaching out with one hand, placing my thumb between your index and middle finger, and saying, “I’ve got your nose! I’ve got your nose!” Don’t be a demon at the Devil. Be yourself at the Devil.

The other thing I did that was important was to be totally selfish about still having fun during our friendship. Everyone felt sorry for B. By that same token, they made it B’s job to be the sad person everyone felt sorry for. She needed to have fun, though. To remember she was more than what she had lost.

In studying everyone’s reaction to B, I understood that there was no possible way anyone could bridge the cognitive distance necessary to get B in trouble for anything short of murder. As long as I was pushing her wheelchair, that meant I couldn’t get in trouble either. This doesn’t follow an exact logical sense, but you know I’m right. It’s how humans work.

After a few weeks, I realized I was one of only a small handful of people who could understand what B was saying. That meant anytime someone wanted to talk to her, I got brought in as an interpreter. And though I would eventually relate what B was saying accurately, that would generally only happen after I first relayed the most depraved responses possible. Depending on the person, real bad stuff. I think I told one girl with a pet dog that B wanted her to bring it close to her hand so she could choke the life out of it and absorb its life force to feel powerful again. Really, she only wanted to scratch it behind the ears.

Yes, the people I said this too found it quite jarring. Yes, I could have gone about it other ways and would do it differently now. I’ve grown. But it also made everyone stop looking at B with the saddest sad eyes in the entire world, even if I had to do that by momentarily turning them both against me.

I duct-taped her hands in place one day so that she was flipping everyone off and we did a tour of the school grounds. It took a while for anyone to even realize what was happening, but when they did the sad eyes went away and they started laughing instead. And that made B laugh and her job as “the person everyone feels sorry for” went away a little bit. That shouldn’t be anyone’s job. Even if that’s a job you’re doing only for yourself.

The primary school building burned down the year previous and was all fenced off. Above all other rules, we were told that absolutely no one was supposed to go in there. So I went in there with B and pushed her wheelchair around the ruins. There was another building close to the burned brick facade of the Weatherwax Building, with OSB boards covering the bottom windows in case the ruins collapsed. I pushed her under those boards during classes so the other students would see us walk by. Again absolutely no one was allowed to do this, but they couldn’t really say anything because of B’s accident. Were they going to make a girl in a wheelchair go sit in detention? If anyone tried blaming me for doing things like this, I made sure to point the finger at B immediately and say she forced me.

I am not proud of what I’m about to type as an almost forty year old man, but I was so proud of it at eighteen that I’m still going to tell you about it. So hold on to your seat, because this one is an doozy. To my children who will one day read this… sigh.

Our principal was a drunk and he looked like a giant stupid Leprechaun. Our school system being the last one you went to as an educational professional after failing out of wealthier districts, or right before committing suicide, as one of our English teachers did my senior year. We got wonderful people and the dregs of society with no in-between. As I’ve written about before, we lived in a rough town. I hated the principal for a variety of reasons, but primarily because he’d slept with the wife of one of my favorite science teachers. That and general sleaziness. Everyone had heard stories about people finding him passed out drunk and shirtless in the middle of the golf course.

He was also a pathological liar.

One day, he gave a tour to a group of superintendents and paused by where I was helping B with her math homework.

“As you can see here, this is a study group I organized to help our mentally disabled students.”

The words fell like a grand piano down a staircase. Mentally. Disabled.

This so completely fabricated I was stunned for a moment. I’d spoken to the principal only once before, to tell him he was a piece of shit. And to hand him a letter I’d written to the local newspaper about him being of piece of shit.²

I was shocked he didn’t remember me but later figured he must have been such a piece of shit that people were handing letters about him being a piece of shit all of the time.

“Oh man… that guy sucks” B said, and I put my hand on her shoulder.

Those words had hurt.

The principal who never spoke to B, didn’t know her name or her circumstance, had come out of nowhere to call her mentally handicapped. Had invented a whole lie to off-handedly make himself good, on the assumption that we wouldn’t say anything. In fact, he was already moving on.

Dear reader… I saw red.

“What did she say?” One of the superintendents whispered.

I’m sure she was a nice person, because that very year all the superintendents would fire the principal.

“Oh, she said, ‘he molests me. Please help,’” I said.

“What?” Another superintendent asked.

“No. I didn’t say that. Oh my God,” B protested.

I translated again without having to be asked.

“She said everyday after school he molests me. Please help. No one can understand. This is so weird. I don’t know why he’s confessing to all of this right now. Help me. You’re my only chance.”

I got up and I started to push B’s wheelchair away to find someplace more private.

The principal got all blustery and said, “You can’t talk like that!”

And then I did that super condescending thing where I did a stupid voice saying, “you can’t talk like that.” I wanted to knock his lights out. When he mentioned writing me up to get me trouble I asked if he even knew my name to write it down somewhere. He did not. I called him a lying sack of shit, too.

Placid Lake. Dynamite.

“Holy shit,” said B.

She was, believe it or not, happy about this. We both liked the science teacher who had been cuckolded. We both hated the principal. What I said was highly inappropriate and from a not very hard to see perspective degrading to her. Yet I had, in my very gross circuitous fashion, done it on her behalf.

To be clear, I would absolutely not do this today. As a grown adult who has been to a lot of therapy, I would simply hold eye contact and ask the principal why he was lying and then refuse to take any polite excuses. Which, in its way, is far more uncomfortable and why men don’t like to go to therapy.

Some number of days after that, I asked B to prom, which is how my dad became aware of the whole friendship. I hadn’t ever bothered to tell him about B. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. I had already been planning to ask my grandmother about odd jobs to pay for the dance. This was also the start of what I call “the hero phase” of my relationship with B, and one that I didn’t like at all.

My dad came home drunk from the bar, and woke me up in the middle of the night. In his hands he held every twenty dollar bill that the ATM had allowed him to take from his checking account. His eyes shone with pride that his gayest³ son could still be such a man, no matter how gay he was. My dad was fresh off his fourth divorce and I guess something about the story had gotten to him.

“You taking that one fucking girl to the prom?” He asked the wall closest to my head, smelling like the bar he’d left minutes before, brushing a tear out of his eye with one hand.

I didn’t even have time to respond before he started nodding.

“Yeah, a couple guys at the bar told me about it. Good fucking man. Good fucking man. That’s my boy, I said. Raised him right.”

My dad dumped all those crumpled twenty dollar bills on my chest and pat me gently over the heart.

“Gotta get some sleep. You’re gonna show that girl a hell of a time you hear? A hell of a time.”

My dad left me to wander up the stairs to his lonely bedroom.

I realized there was something close to two-thousand dollars on my chest.

“People said my aunt Eva was retarded,” my dad belched from the other end of the house. “She wasn’t retarded, though. Just couldn’t hear, you know? Raised me right. Raised you right. I’ll tell you that.”

The next morning was one of the few times I ever witnessed my father experience social awkwardness.⁴ He had to ask for some of his money back. In a drunken moment of romantic eccentricity, he’d forgotten about still needing to pay all of the bills. Credit where it’s due, though, he still paid for the whole thing.

My older sister was a nurse’s aid. She was supposed to help B out on prom night with any bathroom problems, but then my sister’s meth-head boyfriend showed up and they got into a fight. At one point it became so venomous that when I asked her boyfriend to hold B’s empty wheelchair while I got B out of the truck, he forgot and I had to chase it down a hill before it rolled off a pier. Which seems like a movie type of thing, but actually did happen.

We did the whole thing, or as much of it as we could. Corsage. Dinner. Pictures. Dancing.

B did become very upset on the dance floor and she didn’t know how to process everything. It was too much. We called her mom to come and get her and she became depressed for the following few weeks. After the fact, she was also glad she had gone and that she got to get her picture taken like everyone else. It was a mixed bag kind of thing. Most things in life are that way. I’m happy I took her and I’m sad that she was sad. I also knew not to say anything weird because prom night sadness when you’re in a wheelchair is a sacred kind of sadness. I wasn’t entirely without a sense of conscience.

B still has our prom picture put up on her bedroom wall.

If this were a movie, B and I would have fallen in love after sharing a kiss on the dance floor or something like that. In a Hallmark movie that would have even healed her and she would have gotten out of her wheelchair and started walking. This wasn’t a movie, though. My puppy love matured into deep friendship. Also, B is a lesbian. This is a part of what I meant about this being a human-shaped story. You see how there was no preamble to that at all? Bam! Lesbian. Well, now you know how I felt. That’s how humans are, just full of surprises.

Neither of us would know she was a lesbian for some years after graduation, but I remember the day she told me I went on a long walk in the rain. I was single at the time and I remember replaying so many different scenarios over in my head from our friendship and saying “I mean… of course!” I felt like a scientist learning of a new discovery that instantly resolved a million long-standing mysteries.

People started to behave oddly toward me after prom. That’s what I meant about the hero phase. I worry that you, dear reader, might now be thinking some of the same thoughts. My hero phase was a bit like the sad eyes that people gave to B. The hero eyes would go to me, instead. Everywhere, I found eyes said You know like, wow this guy may make allusions to being a total piece of shit, but he’s alright underneath, you know? That’s solid a solid dude, right there. That’s how he is. He hates himself, but underneath, he has the heart of a champion. Maybe you’re even having thoughts like wow, what a magnanimous human being to say my positive thoughts about him right now are unwarranted. That’s humble as fuck.

The truth is that this was one singularly exception circumstance in my life. I walk by all the other stuff you walk by. Homeless people it seems like it would be messy to become involved with. Sick people who would take anyone at all for friendship because I’m too busy and it’s emotionally exhausting. I’ve made my share of awkward and unrequited romantic overtures. I’ve said the wrong thing at the wrong time… like a lot. There’s stuff I don’t really like about myself at all. One time, my penis fell out of my coveralls in the middle of an argument with another guy on the drilling rig about the plot of Spider-Man II.

Still, some of you are thinking of that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where a Muslim Investigator looks into Larry David’s past and finds him to be secretly commendable. I’m not doing that here.

If you think that’s more virtue-signaling with extra steps then I have failed you. This is a story about how it’s enough to be human. To be a person and specifically you. It’s about how there isn’t any perfect life, all laid out like a storybook. You take what you get. You play the cards you’re dealt. You’re not supposed to feel one positive feeling all the time, no matter what, as if there is such a thing as one correct emotional state for your entire life. You’re supposed to be you. Not some other person whose life you can imagine. You are not supposed to be, and I shudder to write it even though I did it once already, “a perfectly spherical cow uniformly emanating compassion and good will in all directions.”

Barf.

I mean… be a real for Christ’s sake.

If I could remove anything from our culture it’s the idea of the perfectly spherical cow that uniformly emanates compassion and good will in all directions. You know what I mean by that. Nobody wants love or affection that the same for everyone else on the planet. That’s the definition of worthless. Love specifically, deliberately, unfairly. Love because, and despite, and with weird human quirks that you can’t explain or justify but that you stick by anyway. Love with a love like someone has their fucking hand in your goddamn chest and could accidentally destroy your soul by sneezing, you coward. Love so that when you give it to another person they can goddamn feel it. Love like you can be hurt and you’ve got something to lose.

Love like people matter. Love like a single particular person matters.

I navigated all of this by instinct and if I had tried to do it on purpose it wouldn’t have worked. If I hadn’t had a genuine friendship with B then it wouldn’t have worked. I did it because it felt right and I wanted to do it, and if either of those components had been removed it would have been false and hollow. And saying it “worked” is a bit of a lie because it’s not like you ever “solve” your life or anyone else’s. Life is for living not for solving. It worked in convincing B that I was her friend because I am. For a time, B was happier than she might have been otherwise because of my friendship. Part of why she was happier was because I took successful risks to make her happy. And at other times she was more sad than she would have been otherwise because she was in a tragic car accident. That’s life. That’s her life.

I started writing this in response to a piece with a favorable view of euthanasia. It made me angry because they got it all wrong. I know they got it all wrong because of my experience with B. It’s draped in the “wisdom” that things are only true if they are terribly sad and make you feel depressed. That’s never said anywhere outright, but each sentence is written with that perspective. I’ve certainly felt the dark call of that point of view, but it’s false. The individual person is the measure for all value in the world. The individual as they are, not a theoretical person that doesn’t exist. If you want a formula for misery, compare yourself with someone who is not only better than you are but who also doesn’t have the burden of actually being real. Start to treat people as fungible economic units and there’s no end to the amount of people you can murder for being inconvenient while dressing it up as moral virtue that you did something like “cure” Down’s Syndrome through genocide.

Then I thought the best argument is really the perspective of the story itself. There’s nothing factually wrong with being depressed if you become paralyzed. But I have been friends with B for over twenty years now. We don’t talk everyday but usually at least once a month. She’s the only person from high school I maintain that level of contact with. We chat about everything you could imagine. Typical life stuff. I tell her about my family and complain about small stuff. I send her pictures of my son doing cute kid stuff. Sometimes, she talks about hot chicks in her assisted living facility. Sometimes it’s the difficulties with getting an ID to open up a checking account. Or the battery in her power wheelchair dying and it taking a while for someone to find her, which no longer worries her as much as it used to. It’s just a thing that happens. At no point in any of those conversations have I ever thought, “You know, B. Have you considered letting someone murder you because you feel sad sometimes?”

Everyone feels sad sometimes. Everyone has stuff they wish they could do that they can’t. Welcome to the human condition.

B is going to college again. She’s tried a few times in the past but struggled to get through due to too many logistical issues. I feel better about her finishing this time. It’s easier to get through online school than it used to be. She wants to become a therapist to help people who are going through what she’s been through. I told her she’s destined to become a doctor and I’ve known it since high school. Like I said already, her penmanship is absolutely dog shit.

1. Not into this by the way, but I’ll say pretty much anything to get a laugh. Especially if someone is down. But yeah, this is the kind of caliber of thing I’d say at that age. Including it here because that one still does make me laugh.

2. The local paper declined to publish it. It did however end up in the copy machine of the school and it was read aloud in several classes. Most viral piece of writing I ever had in high school. Literally nobody liked the principal. He was one of those guys that was always trying to give himself a reason to exist. A lot of our senior students smoked. Which was legal as a they were all 18. They did it off school grounds during lunch. So one day he went and had all of the students recorded and said if they smoked again that he would suspend them all. So I went out and stood in front of the camera but didn’t smoke and went into the office with everyone else and when he demanded to know if I smoked, I said no. Then he said to leave, and I also said no. And when he said I wouldn’t be suspended I also said no, that he was going to have to suspend me because it was as legal for eighteen year olds to smoke as for them to not smoke and he didn’t have the authority to make that kind of distinction. I was really nice to everyone but him, I swear. I hated that guy so much. I also won all the science department scholarships and I’m pretty sure that was a big part of it.

3. For new readers, I’m not gay. My dad thought I was because I liked math and science.

4. The other being when my uncle Mike drove us to a funeral in his motorhome, and then parked the motorhome by the burial site as the casket was being lowered so that he wouldn’t have to walk up a hill.