"Honor among rogues"?

“To say that a man is your friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy. Most contemplate only what would be the accidental and trifling advantages of friendship, as that the friend can assist in time of need, by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel; but he who foresees such advantages in this relation proves himself blind to its real advantage, or indeed wholly inexperienced in the relation itself…. What is commonly called Friendship is only a little more honor among rogues. But sometimes we are said to love another, that is, to stand in a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best from, him. Between whom there is hearty truth there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. There are passages of affection in our intercourse with mortal men and women, such as no prophecy had taught us to expect, which transcend our earthly life, and anticipate heaven for us.”
- Henry David Thoreau, On the Concord River

I long have been fascinated by friendship. The concept, that is. What makes for friendship between two people, why some friendships sour and why others endure. My curiosity stems from my personal experience. At various times in the course of one's youth, alliances are formed and shifted. Bonds are forged, hurts are felt, and it all seems like a blur of speed dating or an awkward square dance until the music stops, you are 45 years old, and you wonder where your old friends went and where your new friends came from.

When I was an adolescent, I was one of a core group of four friends, memorialized in my one-act play of the same name. We had other friends as well, but we four I guess you could say had more intense adventures together, we took ourselves further to the boundaries of experience. Among other friends, it was a laugh, when the four of us were together, we were serious about what we were doing, whether it was listening to music, trespassing on a golf course at night with a case of beer and other substances, talking into the wee hours, or dreaming about forming a band. We seemed a very tight-knit group.

Yet whenever there was some kind of an issue about which there was no unanimity, our quartet would split into two dyads. And always the same two. Later, awkwardly, two of us, one from each dyad, had a major falling out, and then it became two separate trios. Actually, three, since one of us was a year older and went away to college before us. The next year, two more of us went away to college, one never did. The three in college went to the same college, but wouldn't you know only two of us, from an older dyad, stayed close. After college, nothing was quite the same. The one who stayed home found a new group of friends and the rest of us never really gelled with them.

Within a few years, we were completely splintered and then one of us died. Two who had been estranged became reacquainted. But the remaining three seem to have little left in common. We are friendly, but can we be said to be friends?

The unraveling of this group has intrigued me for a long time. I dare say it has troubled me. We seemed to have so much in common once. Had we all changed so much? Were the bonds we had shared in the past no longer valid? Had they ever been?

Aside from my play, I have tried writing about friendship over time in other stories. Until I figure it out, I'm not sure I can complete any of them. My current hypothesis is that what poses as commonality is really largely just proximity. I was friends with my friends because they were geographically close to me. We all lived just a few blocks from each other; I and my dyad-mate, in fact, were next door neighbors. We had other similarities, of course, some of them quasi-cosmic: three of us were Aquarians, the other a Pisces; the three Aquarians all had the same middle name, Mark, and the Piscean's first name was Marc. We were all Jewish, we went to the same school, and we all basically liked the same music. Personality-wise, we were far from identical, but it didn't seem to matter then.

Now it seems to matter a great deal. I won't describe us because it will only sound as though I was normal and the rest less than. Suffice to say, I don't always find their personalities so ignorable anymore. Why is that so? Again, I think part of has to do with proximity, or lack of it. We all went in separate directions professionally, we all live in different areas. I am more religious than the others and so am more connected to Jewish ritual and community. My musical tastes are broad and challenging. I am a writer, hopelessly nostalgic, yearning and dreaming of realizing my creative vision.

Of the other two, one is a Deadhead/Phishhead type who owns a small service business, and the other is a wealthy attorney. We three are very much like the archetypes outlined in a concept album by my favorite progressive rock group, Gentle Giant, in their 1972 album, Three Friends. In that album, three friends who are very close in school drift apart as they enter the working world. One is working class ("Working All Day"), one is an artist ("Peel the Paint"), one is rich ("Mister Class and Quality?").

















By being part of different worlds, different communities, we have each been broadened in different ways. Further, we are all part of multiple worlds, multiple communities. We have our home domain, our work domain, as well as cultural and avocational domains. Because we lack proximity to each other, we can't stoke the core elements that once drew us together, and they become further suffused by the layers of new contacts, qualities, skills, interests, and friends that we accumulate every day. When we get together, we almost don't know each other anymore. We default to the shorthand and inside jokes that were relevant 25, 30 years ago, but those things aren't how we define ourselves today and we find it difficult to get reacquainted to who we all are now.

Maybe if we spent a week in a cabin in the woods, we would learn better who we are now. Maybe we would find even more conclusively that we are not simpatico anymore. Maybe it's better simply to sustain the tenuous thread that keeps us connected, and try neither to strengthen it nor take scissors to it. After all, it's not wrong that we grew, that we changed. Nor is it wrong that we grew and changed in different ways. Proximity served its purpose then; the lack of it also serves a purpose today. It allows us to evolve without the constraining expectations of childhood alliances.

Interestingly, I find that I have more interesting interactions with my second tier of friends, those outside the four with whom we were always friendly yet in a more general social way. I had lost touch with them as well, yet I find today that not only do we still retain meaningful bonds and values from the old days, but we are also able to successfully integrate the lives and qualities we possess now. I'm not sure why that it. Maybe my quartet was too intense, maybe we applied too much pressure to maintaining the integrity of our small group, maybe we inadvertently kept each other from doing the self-exploration that is so necessary in adolescence and early adulthood.

I look at my current friends and I don't have one with whom I share the kind of closeness I knew as a child, when two people seem to be one. I have music friends, sports friends, Jewish friends, work friends, neighborhood friends, 117 Facebook friends (several of whom I barely know)...I don't have anyone who spans the entirety of my experience. Maybe I never did. Maybe that's why I feel a certain void in my life that keeps me looking back, trying to reclaim something I thought existed.

Maybe it's not a friendship I lost that intrigues me, maybe it's a friendship I never had. If indeed it has eluded me all these years, why do I feel I need it now? And would I know if it were to come to me? And if I did, would it fulfill me?

Current Projects I: One-act play

One thing I'd like to do with this blog is to discuss projects I'm working on and projects that are in the planning stages. As you may know or have deduced, I am a writer. "Oh, what have you written?" is the common question asked me at parties. I assume the person making the query wants to know if I conceived last month's Cosmo quiz or have published one of those disposable summer paperbacks that are typically left to gather sand on beach towels. But the bubble bursts and the conversation concludes when I answer that I'm a copywriter. Even worse, I don't write bra or laundry detergent commercials. No, I write websites, brochures, white papers, and other marketing-oriented editorial consumables, primarily for technology companies and schools. So unless you recently bought a workforce management solution or applied to MIT in order to major in mechanical engineering, you probably haven't read my work beyond this blog.

In the movie Nothing in Common, Tom Hanks' character is an ad executive who tells a group of wide-eyed student visitors to his firm that he does not secretly desire to write the Great American Novel, that he likes writing ads. In this, as in many ways I presume, Tom Hanks and I have nothing in common. Not that I want to write the GAN (it's probably already been written, and it might be Beloved), and not that I don't like what I do, but writing I do for me is much more satisfying and meaningful than writing I do for someone else, no matter how invested I may be in my clients and their projects.

So, yes, in my spare time (often evenings from 9pm - 1am), I transform myself a la Clark Kent from Copywriting Man to Regular Kind of Writing Man. The first project that I completed, in 2005, was a one-act play drawn from the real-life experience I had of spreading my friend's ashes over a golf course on which we had partied when we were teenagers. He died a few weeks before 9/11 at age 38, and the experience was a powerful and healing one for me on many levels. It's called Four Friends (a nod to the Gentle Giant album Three Friends; Gentle Giant is one of my all-time very favorite groups - yet, oddly, neither heroes nor crushes of mine), and here is the Synopsis and Characters:

Synopsis:
Four friends who were the best of buddies when they were younger are reunited as 40-something-aged men. Three arrive to the reunion – held on a bridge overlooking Sawmill Brook – on foot; one is carried in a jar. The purpose of the reunion is to dump in the brook the ashes of the friend in the jar, whose last request it was that the quartet get back together one last time at the site of their youthful adventures. As the uneasy reunion unfolds, the friends learn new things about each other, which help explain why they had gone their separate ways. With the help of the dead man’s girlfriend (who joins them with her own questions about her loved one’s past), they begin to come to terms with the fragile and long-frayed bonds of friendship that still connect them.

Characters:
TY, writer, the friend who tried to keep in touch
PHIL, unemployed therapist, in recovery, the friend who was hardest to track down
FRANK, distant and arrogant, the friend who is the most financially successful
CHARLES, dead and cremated, currently occupying a jar, the struggling artist who struggled least with his past
DAWN, Charles’ girlfriend, who helped to fulfill Charles’ life – and death

I know what you're thinking: It sounds like The Big Chill. That was a big challenge for me, to not make it too maudlin and clichéd. But the facts are the facts: one of my buddies did die, and the rest of us had more or less gone our separate ways. Obviously, I'm Ty, and I did try over the years to get us all to come together but it never happened until that day on the golf course. The other characters are semi-invented and semi-composites of the core friends and other friends who were part of the scene in those days.

I would very much like to stage Four Friends, but I haven't had time to refine the dialogue. It's still a little too obvious in parts, and I haven't been able to fully plumb Ty's conflicts - no doubt a subconscious bit of self-defense. But it's a meaningful work to me because it actually happened and I think it would be very moving to see it performed.

Obviously, I can't reproduce the entire script of the play here, but last year, I wrote a 1,000-word essay describing the actual events, which I had submitted to a short-story website but which apparently never was published there otherwise I would have received a $40 check or some equally pitiful amount. So here it is:

The Last Time I Saw My Friend Marc
By Jason M. Rubin

The last time I saw my friend Marc, he was tumbling down from a bridge onto the ground approximately sixty feet below. I had a good view because I was the one who caused his descent. I didn’t necessarily want to do it, but he insisted. And he wasn’t hurt by the fall, because he was already dead. You see, I was spreading his ashes.

It was a sunny March morning, and we were enjoying an early thaw. By we I mean an assortment of Marc’s friends, his wife, his two young daughters, his brother-in-law, and his mother-in-law. The location was a golf course not far from where we had grown up. We partied there in the evenings during high school as it offered space, freedom, and privacy – none of which we were enjoying in our homes at that time. In his final days, he apparently told his wife that should he not survive the open-heart surgery he was soon to face, his wish was to be cremated and for his ashes to be spread on the golf course.

Marc and his wife were living more than two hours from the golf course, and his wife had never been there. “No girlfriends allowed” was an unspoken rule, although I had made love to one of mine on the cool grass of a fairway one summer night. As punishment for breaking protocol, I went home with more than a dozen mosquito bites on my buttocks. The point, however, is that his wife didn’t feel capable of fulfilling his final wish, and she told him so. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “Just call Jason. He’ll know what to do.”

Suffice to say this was nothing he had ever discussed with me. We were very close friends in high school and we stayed close during college years, although he never pursued higher education. Then life intervened and jobs and relationships created geographical and personal distance. We remained in touch but rarely saw each other. In the last two years of his life, we saw each other maybe once, spoke on the phone maybe twice, and sent maybe half a dozen emails to each other. I didn’t even know about his final operation until his wife called me three days later to tell me had gone into cardiac arrest in the OR and never recovered. The delay was because she couldn’t find my phone number and didn’t know where I lived.

Surprised by the honor and obligation thrust upon me, and still grieving not only his loss but also the distance that had forever kept us apart, I set about performing my duties. First, I had to call our other friends and tell them the news and plans. There were two camps of friends: there was a core foursome comprising me, Marc, Andy, and Larry; then there were others who had been in closer contact with Marc, yet not with me.

The core foursome came together in high school as we all discovered two key things we had in common: an obsession with music and an enjoyment of marijuana. We did everything together: concerts, trips to used record stores, midnight movies, excursions to the golf course. There were different things that we had in common with the other camp, including a fondness for Monty Python and the sense that we didn’t belong in any of the many cliques at our high school. We became, then, a clique of our own, and basically all one had to do to join was to make us laugh.

The core group was almost entirely in splinters. If I had been estranged from Marc, the others were completely divorced from him. Larry I was in frequent contact with; Andy I communicated with about as often as Marc. For years, I had wanted to bring the four of us together. I was intrigued by the fact that close friends should drift apart mostly due to time and circumstance. How is it we had so much in common when we were teenagers, yet went into different directions as we got older? When Larry’s mother died, I thought that might be a time for us to reunite. Didn’t happen, nor did it happen when my mother died or when Larry’s father died. It didn’t even happen at Marc’s funeral because both Larry and Andy were out of town. I was determined that we four would be together one more time, even if one of us would be in a jar.

We spread Marc’s ashes on his birthday. His family was nervous about sneaking onto a private golf course. His friends, in spite of the solemnity of the day, could not contain their excitement about being back at the site of past glories. As we walked along to a favorite spot, I found three golf balls that had been lost by errant swings some months before. I gave one to each of Marc’s daughters and kept one for myself.

I delivered a prepared speech about Marc, then invited people to speak if they wished. Finally, we walked to a wooden bridge that crossed a grassy bowl between two hills. We stopped on the center of the bridge and Marc’s wife handed me the jar. Inside the jar was a bag. Inside the bag was Marc. The contents were quite a bit whiter and heavier than I expected; not ash at all, but rather powder and bone fragments. I tested the wind with a wet finger to ensure that no one got an unwelcome embrace from Marc as he descended. Then I said goodbye and turned the bag upside down.

As Marc hit the ground, a gaggle of geese scurried over to see if he was food. After a few pokes, they decided he was not. Then we left the golf course, probably for the last time. As I walked back to my car, I smiled. Marc had done what I could not: bring together old friends in a place they had loved. And now Marc has all the space, freedom, and privacy he could ever want and ever need. Forever.

© 2008 Jason M. Rubin. All Rights Reserved.