We played basketball every chance we got.
I had a work schedule. Jake got allowance and had chores around the house.
His parents had set aside times that he had to be inside the house. James and Nancy were hell bent on him being indoors at randomly selected times that seemed to be hinged on whatever fun activity our fifteen year old heads had in mind.
To be very nice and g-rated his parents did not like me. The number of times he defied them increased once we met and grew exponentially as our association wore on. I showed him what vodka could do to you. He in turn showed them what drunken vomit did to new furniture. I took him to his first punk show. He showed his parents what a mohawk looked like the next day.
We both moved to the subdivision by the Navy hospital around the same time in the latter part of our sophomore year.
I met Jake on a hot, soupy late spring afternoon as we both cut behind the small reservoir at the edge of the neighborhood.
"Hey man."
"Hey. You going to play basketball?" he replied
"No, I'm bouncing this orange thing to Kmart."
"Right. Haha!"
His nervous chuckle disarmed me. Something about his nebbishness made me like him enough to not veer off.
We were now crisply walking together, a pair of macho strangers.
"Do you listen to punk rock?"
"No." he said.
"Sorry. Your loss"' I laughed.
He snickered.
"Do you listen to Judas Priest? Maiden?"
"No. I'm not a head."
**"Head was a term used in the eighties by teens. It meant burnout or more directly "pothead" These boys and girls usually hung in clumps, smoking cigarettes and sucking down any pills or cough syrup they could get their hands on.
In a quick forty minutes or so of shooting the ball that followed, we were friendly. We played several games of 21. During the course of the games we talked and taunted one another about whatever boys talked about then. To highlight, I think we ragged on one another's shoes, music taste, clothes, accents and former hometowns in no real order.
During the next few days, Jake and I became friends in a fast manner. Our ball games became often and carried over into school. Somehow we now found each other between classes and at lunch time. We also found daytime drinking at school. I was able to procure this stuff rather easily as I looked 32. Most people, rather those at liquor stores, assumed I had a wife, two kids and a mortgage.
The time drug on and at school we became known as a pair as in "Where's Jake" or "Where's Gus" if the other was not present.
More and more there was drinking and listening to music. When I could get off work, we saw some bands play and often stay out til the late late night hours.
His mother and father eventually tired of the disobedience. They gnawed at him to curb our friendship and hide in their suburban family bunker. Jake enjoyed the squabbles as first, realising that his tight-assed father was paying attention to him instead of chasing women at work.
It wasn't long before girls came into the picture. Monique was maybe the first girl who singled Jake out. I think she was his first kiss if not his first go at 'outercourse.'
Jake and Monique became flatly inseparable. As it usually happens, I was the odd man out. Jake disappeared.
I didn't realise that people could kiss so much. Jake spent hours on the phone with her.
I made new basketball friends. My jobs increased as I took more on. In addition to tutoring these chubby Greek kids and working at their parents Mexican restaurant, I started bar tending on the weekends to make extra cash.
I noticed his absence but in the flurry to work, drink and keep myself together, it was not as pronounced. I had a full plate. Jake had a place for his hands and I had a stepfather who quit giving my mother money.
As a side note, I was interested, albeit tepidly, in girls. Don't get me wrong, I liked them and thought things about the ladies of my senior high time period. There was Shannon, Lori, Lisa and a few others that appeared on my ceiling from time to time.
In the "women I would never get the chance to impress" department, I think I had some very intense make believe dalliances with Elisabeth Shue, Winona Ryder and that girl from Weird Science. None of these girls spoke to me enough to make me pause music or stop hustling for cash.
Eventually there was conflict. Not only had Jake's parents decided that I was an unfit friend, but Monique had voiced her disapproval of my association.
I remember Jake telling me as we made our way to an assembly. Our school was about to begin selling gummy bears to raise money for something like a greenhouse or computers for Africa. This called for 90 minutes of sweating in a gym without a/c.
"Um, Monique doesn't want me to hang out with you. And my ma and dad say we can't hang out anymore at night."
The pause was long. I focused the sting in my head.
"Wow. What? Are you kidding?"
I was instantly blind with hatred.
"And what did you say? Did you tell them to bite it?"
"No. I gotta play by their rules, man."
"Yeah. Right. What about your WIFE?"
"Um, Dude, she's my girlfriend. Wife. Ha. You're just jealous!"
"Me? Jealous of that manatee? She's a lunchlady!"
I paused to load my gun with bigger bullets.
I took a deep breath.
In previous battle with parents of my former friends, I had always lost.
And I'd read enough to know that in spite of sitcoms and John Hughes movies that "bro's rarely come before ho's."
I stopped walking.
I looked at him and said, "OK. I hope she shits all over you and freeze dries your heart. Don't come crawling to me once her gash gives you some rotting disease and you have no friends left."
I paused again.
"And you better give me back my Husker Du tape!"
I like to think I said this, or at least something like this. I forget the exact wording. I know I was mad and hurt.
And that was it. For a few months.
Hormones fleeing and the chemicals of attraction lessening, Monique moved on from Jake. She hooked up with some albino kid named Lance. Lance always seemed to be sweating but never was anything but nice to me. I was glad to hear Lance found a girl, as he seemed pretty lonely and off to himself. They married pretty quickly and divorced almost as quick but not before much jerry springeresque fireworks and public fighting.
Jake hooked up with another girl and resumed the pattern of isolation. We did manage to become friends again, very gingerly. I was more distant, now that I think about it. I had started to drink more and more with a different, smaller more left field crowd. We did a few things together, however, and I even socialised with the two of them on occasion.
Jake married this girl. I think they are still married.
I was not invited to the wedding as his mother feared I would do something embarrassing. Years later Jake found me on a social networking site. I am too petty to forgive, I guess as the first thing I thought about was being left out of his nuptials. I did not respond to Jake, nor to his wife who found me not long afterwards. My words for him were gone, stuck back somewhere in the twilight of high school in the few deep breaths we all took before assimilating to adulthood. I had nothing to say. Our paths were very different.
Its amazing how people can have such an impact on your life at certain times and then in a split second its as if your bond never mattered.
And I never got that tape back!
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