Butch and Sundance

Eight ball. Corner pocket. Scratch on the break.

Shooting pool at our favorite pool hall, circa 2014.

I’m going to tell you a story now.

Listen well.

Once upon a time, two boys sat together one fine evening, way back in the mid nineteen-eighties, both boys consummate members of that generation of X. Born about two weeks apart, they’d been thick as thieves since they’d first met during their early grade school years among the orange slices and shin guards of little league soccer fields.

The first boy had leathery brown eyes and unkempt, mad-scientist-crazy blonde hair. He was clad in distressed jeans, a well worn denim Levi jacket, a white surf tee shirt, and a pair of finger-less leather gloves, roughly cut to match Mad Max’s wasteland drifter motif in the movie The Road Warrior. He thought the gloves made him look cool, and he may or may not have been right.

The second boy’s eyes were cast in hazel, and he had a short, feathered, brown mop-top that swirled around into a duck’s butt behind his head. He wore a pair of camouflage fatigue trousers, a Judas Priest black concert tee, and a beloved heirloom Air Force green bomber jacket, an impressive squadron eagle patch embroidered upon the jacket’s backside. He thought the bomber jacket made him look cool, and he most definitely was right.

They lounged, lackadaisical as ever, side by side at an alcove countertop in the first boy’s bedroom. A small black and white television blared in front of them, broadcasting a rerun episode of Cheers. Upon the table before them was an array of illicit combat weaponry, purchased over time at swap meets and flea markets, acquired by those same boys in an era where such items could be freely purchased by minors in the state of California.

Their robust collection boasted Chinese throwing stars and shuriken of all shapes and sizes, a pair of yellow and black nunchaku, an elongated blowgun with a brace of plastic-tipped darts, a sword cane with a brass cobra head, and a penny-heavy blackjack. There were several knives laid out in rows for them to admire, a stag-handled camp hunter, a knuckle-duster switchblade, a number of Swiss Army pocket knives, and a matte black knock-off of John Rambo’s survival knife in the movie First Blood, replete with a sewing kit, a micro-aluminum emergency blanket, waterproof matches, and a compass within its hollow steel hilt.

Amidst all the ordnance were battered copies of 80s cult magazines Soldier of Fortune, Penthouse, Mad, and Heavy Metal, a few packs of hard carton Marlboro Lights, a full ashtray of butts, a pair of Hard Rock Cafe two ounce shot glasses, and a red-capped bottle of high proof Bacardi 151, a lone soldier standing three quarters empty.

The two underage boys were three sheets to the wind. How they acquired their adult beverage had been an easy matter for the pair of ne’er do wells, who like many fellow kindred of Gen X, had learned to work the system. The potent rum was not unlike quaffing gasoline. They joked around, hashing and bashing each other about this, that, and the other, gossiped about fellow high school mates, rambling about guns and movies and sex and lost love and fast food and schemes and dreams, all that jazzy Americana bluster two longtime comrades might emit under the influence of excessively calibered liquor.

The first boy, he with the mad scientist hair, known for his occasionally bombastic impulses to ride the lightning, came upon the hazy idea to finally, after years of waxing poetic about it, do the blood brothers bit. The second boy scoffed at first, insisting they were already ‘blood’ whether they’d exchanged plasma or not. The first boy insisted the tangible act was necessary, and for a few moments they debated the merits of the act, bantering playfully in their drunkenness, that kind of liquid courage best suited for awkward weddings and dark funerals, a heady buzz prefacing an inevitable crash, porcelain puke-gods be damned.

And so, the second boy indulged him, with a signature smirk on his face. He sparked a Marlboro with a brass zippo lighter, emblazoned with a military Who Dares Wins logo. He took a deep drag, blew out a few smoke rings, and set the cigarette onto the edge of the ashtray, shaking his head bemused as he picked up the Rambo knife and gently nicked the pad of his right thumb with the tip of the blade. Then he handed the large black knife to the first boy.

The first boy grinned, elated they were consummating their longstanding friendship, a rush of bravado in that young, dumb, full-of-cum fashion that teenagers dwell within. Before the second boy could protest nor intervene, the first boy slashed the great knife across his left thumb with all too much vigor and a staggering lack of finesse. Blood spurted about the countertop table, onto nearby wooden walls, splashed across the television screen, spraying their collection of sharp goods in red mist.

However, the first boy felt no pain and began laughing uproariously, even as the second boy cursed him, aghast, and he pulled a bandanna from his fatigue pockets and urgently wrapped the cloth about the deep wound still gushing blood. He held the first boy’s thumb tight in his palm to try and stop the bleeding. Then he too laughed, and they fell into that rare type of no-holds-barred, infectious state of mirth, outright uncontrollable, where its infected can’t escape the wondrous exhaustion of a perpetual peal of laughter until it runs due course.

Finally, they wrangled a measure of composure. The second boy sucked at his ashen cig and offered another to the first boy, who took one in hand as the second boy popped the zippo lid, snapped it one-handed upon his pant seam, and lit the smoke for him. They listened to the TV for a time, until the second boy dared to peek inside the sopping bandanna. After looking at the cut, which had penetrated close to the phalanx bone, the second boy declared with no uncertainty that the first boy needed stitches and perhaps they should dare the highway roads in their egregiously altered state to hit the emergency room, at which point both underage boys realized the futility of such an endeavor without potentially severe repercussions, and they once again fell into fits of ungovernable laughter.

The night went on. The second boy held tight in his hand the first boy’s thumb well past the witching hour, as they smoked and talked and drank, finishing the bottle of rum, until the first boy’s thumb stopped seeping blood at long last. Witless as the first boy was, he wasn’t fool enough to overlook the love behind the second boy’s eyes.

They were, after all, the best of friends.

I still have the scar, now some forty years later. Almost cut my goddamned thumb off. Thanks to my brother-in-arms, I didn’t bleed to death while rum-drunk beyond rhyme or reason.

I also still have those same gloves, though the bloodstains have faded after decades of storage. Mad Max vogue.

That second boy, the one who took care of the first boy, died last week.

He passed from a massive coronary, brought on by a common malady of Gen X veterans yoked to a cycle of addiction all too common for so many of my brethren, something I narrowly escaped despite all the odds against me.

Loyalist readers may recall a segment late last summer in 2024, wherein I live-struggled with a decision to not attend another longtime associate’s funeral who passed much in the same manner, another cardiac event provoked by a lifetime of addiction. I was forced to honor an alternate, long-planned honorarium elsewhere in the state, scheduled during the same weekend as that man’s service. But I must attend this one, come hell or high water, though I am loathe to do so, as I generally cannot abide funerals.

It’s always been hard for me to deem friendships in terms of who was a ‘best friend’ and who was ‘lesser’ than that accolade. I often felt all my buddies were a veritable posse of ‘best’ friends, and didn’t really feel a need to rank one friendship over another. But there’s the amount of time spent with someone to consider, and the degree of vulnerabilities exposed, and whether there was, ideally, a hard-won trustworthiness.

The bottom line is, he was my best friend, across the many epochs of my life.

Tried and true.

Butch and Sundance.

Which one was which in our dynamic duo, kinda depended on the day and mood du jour. I mean, every grownup kid wants to be Sundance in retrospect, but he really was more of a hustler than me. I was introspective like Redford’s gunslinger, and he was quick with the charm like Newman’s outlaw. Let’s just leave the allegory as is, ‘cause it’s my grief-stricken rant n’ rave, right?

He was the kind of guy who’d hold a near-severed thumb in hand for hours to keep the pressure on. That’s the kind of man he was, and undoubtedly still is, wherever he is. Interestingly, he almost severed his own thumb many years later while woodworking a handcrafted tiki idol from a eucalyptus stump.

He and I shared blood. As you have come to know.

We were estranged.

Life tends to warp that way, too often.

I am heartbroken we didn’t reconcile before his passing. I’ve been chiding myself since I first heard of his demise through my familial brother who was still in touch with my chosen brother. Upon hearing the news, I left home, picked up a six-pack of brown ale, drove thirty miles to our high school where we came of age together, where we honed our friendship in sweat and tears and all that passion of torrid youth. My familial brother met me there, and we toasted our friend and poured one out for him, only a few hours after he left this plane of existence. Yes, I realize the irony of the thing. Me and irony, we’re close kin.

I am, alas, no stranger to estrangements. My exes and former pals would surely corroborate the fact I can be a huge pain in the ass, prone to arrogance and susceptible to poor delivery in my conversational skills. I’m not going to share details about my particular jam-up with my blood brother, but we had our share of brouhahas, resulting in years of exile.

Our occasional hiatuses were a kind of dude thing. Dudeness, it can overlap, sometimes too far one way or another, sometimes a passive aggressive hodgepodge, not quite a competition but rather a slapdash cock-of-the-walk dynamic, a tired penchant for good old fashioned whiteboy hubris, most often a breakdown of emotionally arrested communication.

I hate to admit this last hiatus lasted near seven years, right up to his untimely if well earned passing. There was a catalyst which set it off, but I doubt the crux of it was rooted in minutiae. It was, I think, a sociological distance we’d incurred between each other in our middle age, a bit of it politics, but much of it our tension between his suffering from his alcoholism and my occasional, gentle-yet-urgent reminders that he ought to try and dry up before he inadvertently lay himself low.

But he did lay himself low, and a long, hard haul it was. Again, I am broken up about it, that I couldn’t help him, though I tried time and again over the decades to do so. We all know how it is with addiction in someone we love. They have to choose the path. We can’t force them on it. We can only support them however we can. That truth helps me not one bit. I don’t want to focus on his darker sides, of which we all have, myself included. I don’t judge him. I never did. We were flip sides of the same coin.

After our last falling out, I tried to connect with him several times. I called him when Neil Peart died, the drummer of Rush, one of our favorite bands, and invited him to accompany me down to Peart’s funerary wreath on Hollywood Boulevard. I called him during the pandemic, to see if he was alive and well. A few years later, I left a note at his favorite bar, along with a painting of mine he always loved, plus a custom golden cue ball we’d picked up together, some few years before, while we were enjoying a mid-life resurgence in connection by shooting pool together once or twice a week.

We always had a love for billiards, be it through a kiddie bumper pool table, braving the long, pristine stretches of regulation sized premium felt, or most frequently, hanging out for hours circling countless dive bar rattrap tables practicing trick shots and passing the time. Note the header photo above. It brings a smile to my face to see his cutesy pigeon-toed stance while lining up a shot, probably no less bemusing than his sarcastic smile every time I’d use my kiddie pool cue grip, the one where I never learned how to line up my shots without bracketing the cue between two forefingers, rather than curl a single forefinger around the cue shaft as is customary.

I penned my phone number on that last note I left for him, suggesting he ought to call me and we’d shoot pool somewhere, sometime. I didn’t hear from him. There aren’t many people left on earth I’d still throw on the monkey suit for, but he deserves the extra mile. I’ll clad myself in the dressies this weekend and attend his service and see virtually all of our old ‘hood en masse. He was a fixture in our hometown. I’ll grit my teeth and absorb all the usual funerary platitudes.

While inside, simmering, smoldering, I will be so goddamned sad.

I’m pretty sure I will see him again. ‘Tis little solace while I still soldier on here. I’m hanging up on a similar feeling as I felt last year, when our other comrade died from a near identical addiction cycle. It’s not so much them dying. No, my regret is many of my former brotherhood seem to not find a peace for themselves before the end. I hope I’m mistaken about that, and that they reconciled their places in life even in those last few seconds before exiting their shell. Maybe a lot of humans do that. Maybe the majority of us do. Who the hell knows what happens in the soul while it’s determining its host body is failing for good? Only the dead. I hope he fell upon his love for his daughter and his mother and siblings, or perhaps he readied himself for a reunion with his father and grandfather, and of course all of his beloved dogs.

I realize actualizing a true peace of mind is an uncommon state of affairs for much of humanity at the end of their time on earth. But I don’t have to like it, and I sure as fuck-all don’t like it. That’s why I’m grateful for some of the inroads I’ve made for myself in that regard. I wouldn’t consider myself a fella anywhere near a symbiosis with the universe, but I think I’ve navigated enough existentialism to pass for a semblance thereof. I’ve experienced my fair share of death. I ought to be elder-seasoned about mortality, and his passing ought not to have knocked me for a loop, but it did. Maybe nobody reaches the major leagues when it comes to death, or maybe those teams only allow on their rosters the most zen monk motherfuckers on earth.

Here’s a not-so-secret secret about my friend, something his people have known about him since time immemorial.

He was a tenderheart.

All the blue collar bravado was a front. He was a sensitive dude, not unlike myself. That might be why synchronicity pushed our paths to cross when we were kiddos, and our tendency for overt emotional reaction could be the reason we were both so susceptible to distractions, that in a hard world too fearful of its own shadow, we turned to flights of destructive fancy.

We created building block moments in time, a soupcon of flashpoint events defining the courses of our lives, some occurring in barrel-bottom darkness, others in the blazing daylight of epiphany.

He saved my life more than once.

We raised dogs together.

I helped him bury his favorite doggie by a river bank.

(Few things will make a country boy dude weep more than losing his dog. I know that as sure as I know the sun sets each day. Been there, done that, bought the tee shirt).

He was there for me when I first faced death straight in the face.

I was there for him when he first did the same.

We cried together.

We laughed together.

Actually, nobody has ever made me laugh harder than he did, and I’m notoriously difficult to amuse.

A byproduct of his passing is that philosopher’s voice in my head, an abrasive member of my inner cast of thousands, currently bellowing at top volume. That inner dude is envious of my friend, because it’s likely he now knows more about the meaning of life and the universe at large than I ever have, yet it’s equally possible he always did. People underestimated him. Actually, he frequently underestimated himself. But I like to think I didn’t.

His demons never deterred me a single time, even when he wanted them to do so, for we had somehow, amazingly, created a lasting synergy with one another, on the sun-dappled soccer fields and the chalky community theater stages and the grimy pool halls and the rolling hills of our central coast back country, a kinship beyond cliques and politics and social standings. That guy’s higher being was chock-full of light and love. I was fortunate enough to know that aspect of him. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I thought the crabgrass son of a bitch was gonna live forever.

I missed you before you died, man. Now, I’m gonna miss you even more, until I too take that passage unto the great light of beyond.

And I figure the first thing I’ll say, if at some point I happen to stumble upon wherever you’ve landed in those higher spheres, will be…

Rack ‘em up.

That’s all I got.

Circa 1986 or so.