I spent about three hours this weekend with two of my best friends ever in life. All I can say is that I'm fortunate and sad.
I am sad because I know that the circumstances of our lives and times have separated us. The same forces that put us together took us apart. The unfairness of our society that puts us in our places, takes us away from our families, hometowns, neighborhoods and puts us on paths towards fortune or destitution. If the black men from the black neighborhoods in black California could have stayed put, and never had to go anywhere else to get everything they needed; Lord what we would have done. Instead, we spent time breaking through barriers, kicking down doors, busting up ceilings, falling through floors. I know it could have been worse. It could have been war. And when I think that it might have been war that put us in a trench fighting for our lives, bonded in terror, I feel fortunate. But it was only unfairness and happenstance. We three managed to have our ambitions move us from our point A toward our points B. And this weekend we looped back for a moment to talk about our point A.
Steve and I never made plans together. Darius and I might have been sub officers. I couldn't stand the structure but D could. Steve would handle it less than me. Maybe that's where I fit in between two men that don't know each other but know me. Steve through six years of Catholic schooling. Darius through four of engineering school. As far as I know, the three of us have never accepted the limits placed on us by society. We wrestled and we rebelled, and we found a place somehow. We made enough stink in our own way to let people know we were going to try on our own terms. It was a natural talent for all of us, and getting away with it, we developed it into a skill.
There's a romantic notion in the black America I grew up in, that men such as us might have out talents harnessed and the unbelievable energy would raise a people and revolutionize the world. That fact is true. But we fell into our own ways instead of somebody else's harness. Yeah none of us is immune from the necessity of work, but we chose our harness. And still I think of us as unleashed.
Darius has rigor. I forget about how much he can control, how much he would control if he could. He was a man always in the moment. The kind of man who walks in the room and everybody stiffens and mutters, oh shit, here he comes. Same thing with Steve. Darius is going to tell you that your shoelace is untied and that you forgot to do what you said you were going to do, and dammit he's right. But Steve is going to run up and embrace you and remind you of that time when the two of you almost got busted doing that thing in that place. Men who do everything fearlessly remind us of our shortcomings. Men like that who know us well, must be loved, hated, feared, admired. They don't get much more sophisticated emotions than that. With them, it's always more primal. With them you always end up measuring yourself. And don't you hate that they make you do that? Yes you do. And you love it too.
I caught up to some of their narratives. We narrate our lives. We have a story for others about ourselves, edited yet revealing. As we hit age 50 it gets more interesting and complicated and tends to be about the past. But neither Steve nor Darius asked questions about the past. That's not how they are. They have very little to regret and so they're not trying to explain their way out of anything. It's still more like, who can handle what I know, who can handle what I've done? They don't talk about limits. It's hard to know men such as these because they are always in motion. So all you can do is remember the common checkpoints in the narrative of history when you two were making it together.
I've always known a few great people. Great, bold, brilliant, and but for one unlucky bounce they would be running shit, and yet some still are on their way. I know who they are right now. And this weekend each one of them returned my calls. Ted, Jimi, Darius, David, Charles. And Steve was where I expected him to be at our annual picnic. I got caught in his gravity and couldn't escape until the joint emptied out.
We only have a few years left to make promises to each other. It's a shame that none of us became gods on earth among men. What took place in a good and luxurious backyard with the view for miles around was grand, but not imperial. I plotted to take out the palm trees that obscured one degree of scenery, but that wouldn't have made View Park into Mt. Olympus. None of us hit the homerun that would have gotten us all the ring of power. We were only on the same team for a short time, and could never manage to be traded into the All Stars. It's OK, but it's really not OK.
It has ruled me, my memory. My long term perception. My relentless questions about why we are stuck here without all the resources. How did I get to be me? Going into other people's houses and outbuilding their own creations with their own erector sets. I could never afford my own. Playing the right records in the right order, of music I didn't record, and making people dance. Spitting out paragraphs and concepts out of books I didn't write, aggregating the philosophy in a rented spot on the internet for people I will never see face to face. It all makes sense to me, and I know it sounds strange. But I've also done it to build a better world than the one we've been plodding through. I'm a big brother. I'm an explorer. I say wait here, and then I hike into the deep wood to find the bear. I come back with scars and say follow me. I never fought the bear for myself. But I also never got everybody through the woods. I'm mad that we had to blaze a new trail. I'm mad that we didn't have a bulldozer, or know where the road was. But I also don't pretend to be some bear hunter. I've been living on the other side of the woods in my mind for my entire life. I just did what I had to do. We all just did what we had to do. I know my friends did what had to be done and did it well, but whenever I see them - I think I see them as they would be under ideal circumstances. I wish I could be throwing that party where I knocked down that last wall. But that's how you think of your friends.
Darius has Dick Cheney's disease. He knows too much. He worries a lot. He can't say too much. I know he's done dark work but I have no idea how much. He explained, for the benefit of my son, what he does and I heard it for the first time. (It has something to do with spacecraft). I watched Destination Moon last night - remembering the kind of Americans we used to be, when a guy with slicked back hair from Brooklyn who worked radios was considered the everyday Joe. When Woody Woodpecker used to kick other cartoon asses. We care about an America that sometimes it seems other Americans can't even imagine. I'm not in dark work, so I can say what I please, and I care about that America too.
Steve is a free spirit. I don't even know a popular analogy, such men are so rare. It would be an insult to say Robin Williams, because Williams has grown into a self-important and solicitous dickhead. And I would say Michael Douglas but Douglas can't make anybody laugh. And I would say Paul Mooney, but Steve doesn't even pretend to be a bitter black man. I would like to call Steve a polymorphic peg, because that canny bastard fits into every hole. It's downright scary. But like most men who cheat death, he has ghosts. And he looked me in the eye and told me a ridiculous ghost story. So unlike most men with ghosts, he's actually dealing with his. Steve has advice for Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods ought to stop what he's doing and listen.
I am from a small town called Black. I went back home this weekend to visit some of the kings who grew up there too. They reminded me of how sad and yet how fortunate I am.
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