Floyd

He sat directly behind me in Miss Klepzig’s first hour Algebra class.  We exchanged names the first time I turned to hand him a stack of papers to pass on down the row.  That same day, or maybe it was a few days later, we found ourselves sharing a brick wall across the street from the school.  It was against the rules for students to smoke on school grounds, but the powers that be didn’t have a problem if we stepped across the street to indulge what one day would become a habit or an addiction.  You can decide which it is.

I don’t remember what brand of cigarettes he smoked.  Maybe they were Winstons.  I smoked Pall Malls; unfiltered Pall Malls in the red pack.  I do remember that we didn’t bum smokes off each other.  Neither of us could afford lighters.  Books of matches were free.  One windy day, he showed me how to light a match when the wind was blowing.  It seemed a good thing to know.

I wish to hell I could recall some of our conversations.  Too damned many years have passed.  I imagine the conversations were less than memorable even then.  What do two teenage boys have to talk about?  I’m betting on girls, cars, teachers, girls we would never get, and cars we’d never own.

We quickly became friends.  Almost as quickly, we became best friends. 

Friendship isn’t a word to bandy about.  It’s a lot like love.  In fact, it is about love.  When you bandy either word about, it cheapens the meaning.  Friends will do damn nigh anything for each other.  Best friends don’t know restrictions.

Back then, anger and hurt boiled out of me like lava exploding from an erupting volcano.  It wasn’t like the anger that is roused when someone crosses you, but it was surely there if someone does get sideways of you.  It went so deep, I didn’t know it existed; I didn’t realize it was coloring every facet of my life.  Our lives are ruled by the decisions we make.  Deep abiding rage makes it virtually impossible to make an informed decision and very easy to make decisions that have long term, negative consequences.

I’m not going to say that having Floyd as a friend influenced me to make good decisions.  I am sure it kept me from making too many bad decisions.  Floyd was a good guy, though not a goody two shoes.  Whenever I came up with an idea that would, were we to be caught, land us in deep doo-doo, he would subtly steer me in another direction.  I never knew I was being steered.

We had a lot of plans, Floyd and I did.  We figured we’d join the army after we graduated, join the army, and become MPs.  When our hitches were up, we would land a job on a big city police department.

It didn’t work out that way.  Dad and I moved back home to Missouri.  I saw Floyd only once after that.  We were in our mid 20s, married, and had kids.  It didn’t matter.  We were as good of friends then as we were when we were teenagers.  Nothing in the ensuing years changed that.  It’s a shining thing to live near a friend, but true friendship is not diminished by time or space.

Floyd came out of the closet when he was in his mid 30s.  He told me he had always been attracted to men; never to women.  It shocked the hell out of me.  I didn’t have the slightest inkling that he was gay.  Apparently, his wife, kinfolk, and friends didn’t either.  Almost all of them dropped him like a hot potato.  I understand that his wife had to move on.  I’ve never understood why friends and family ostracized him.  He was the same good, hard-working, honest, honorable man he had always been.

Yeah, in retrospect I have to admit my feelings were a little hurt.  We had always talked about everything under the sun, every part of our life, every dream we had, and I didn’t have a clue.  The hurt didn’t last long.  I’m not sure he had the words to tell me and neither of us had the knowledge to understand.  Truthfully, I don’t know how I would have reacted.  While I’ve never been homophobic, I didn’t have the level of experience that would have allowed me to deal with it intelligently.

It was what it was.  Maybe it would have been a thing; maybe it wouldn’t.  It wasn’t a thing when he decided to drop the pretense and quit living a lie.

Living that lie had to be tremendously difficult.  I’ve since tried to imagine living in a world where everyone is gay, lesbian, or trans-gendered and I’m the closet heterosexual.  It was an interesting mental exercise.  It isn’t any way I could long live.

Floyd died of some kind of AIDS-induced cancer in 1993.  I didn’t find out about it until well after he died.  His partner found my name and address written on a scrap of paper that was hiding in a box that hadn’t been unpacked from their last move.  He wanted to let me know that Floyd had passed and that his dying wish was to see me one more time.  He couldn’t find the fucking address.

We were friends, best friends.  I wish I could have seen him that one last time.  I wish I could have hugged him tightly.  I wish I could have thanked him for being who he was.  I wish I could have told him I loved him.

Today, March 4^th, is Floyd’s birthday. 

Happy Birthday, my friend.  I surely do miss you.

Life is sweet – even though there is a lump in my throat right now.