If you want an idea of the downside of middle age, look no farther than this: I recently found out that my best friend from high school, whom I’ll call Scott, died about a year ago. That means that my two best male friends from those days are now gone; another good friend, whom I’ll call Barry, died when we were in our mid-20s.
In high school, Barry, Scott and I, like many teenagers, spent a lot of time complaining about our small, repressive hometown, and chomping at the bit to get out. Scott and I were freshman roommates in college, and Barry followed us to the same school the next year. It was the late 1960s, and we dove headfirst into that era’s maelstrom of change and defiance of the status quo with all the energy and naiveté of know-it-all college kids. We flew pretty close to the sun in those days of wide-open possibilities. Fortunately for me — and I realize this sounds cold — I wasn’t burned as badly as my two pals.
Of the three of us, Barry had the strongest personality. A political radical, fine poet and ladies’ man, he charged headlong through life, at times strangely self-destructive, alternately angry and kind. He dropped out of college, married one of his conquests and settled in Charlotte where he promptly began to fly apart. The marriage failed, and he moved to Philadelphia where years of brutal battles — with political foes, the bottle, his poetic muse and his second wife — left him shaken. He moved back to the South and visited me several times in Charlotte. He was obviously not in good shape, but I was glad to see him and, anyhow, all I knew to do was offer the same friendship we’d had before. Long story short, he tried to kill himself, spent time in a state mental hospital and enrolled at the University of South Carolina in Columbia where one drunken night he hit his head on the corner of a pool table, walked back to his apartment and bled to death at age 27. I read one of his poems at the funeral.
Scott was at the funeral, too, and we naturally commiserated, but by then, he was starting to wheel off-course, too. After college, he had unexpectedly moved back to his childhood home and lived with his mother. Once a fine oil painter, he had traded his easel for a camera, began drinking too much, and hunkered down in his despised hometown, waiting for … I never knew what — inspiration? Revolution? An inheritance? Scott took the 1960s’ “break down the walls” attitude to heart, but in ways that lost him even his more sympathetic friends. Most of we young ’60s nuts at least knew how to “behave in public,” but not Scott, who irritated one and all by “acting inappropriately,” saying nearly anything that came into his head, often loudly.
About 20 years ago, he started coming around again, but was no less odd or annoying. At one point, he told me, “I don’t know about you, Johnny, but I try to nurture my neuroses. I mean, who needs ‘normal’?” There was no talking him out of his deliberate slide.
A few years later, another friend expressed what most of us felt by then about Scott: “He’s such a brilliant, talented guy, but now he’s the last person I want to see at my door.” He showed up unannounced a couple of times at the Creative Loafing offices, the last time about five years ago. By then he was 50, wearing a red do-rag and a couple of earrings, and still living with his mom. He told me that reality was just a dream, and oh, by the way, he was now out of the gay closet I had never known he inhabited. I don’t think I ever saw Scott again. Friends in Gaffney told me he had gotten into, and then out of, trouble — something about teenage boys — and was drinking heavily.
Not long ago, I thought of Scott, did a Google search and there was his obituary. He had died in his home — the same house he grew up in — of alcohol poisoning, the end of a tortured life of frustration that had begun as a celebration of art and wit.
The arc of those two men’s lives and deaths throw a spotlight on the way personal lives can intersect, for better or worse, with history. My generation, of course, is rife with stories of “’60s casualties,” some of them the walking wounded; some of them, like Barry and Scott, dead from being unprepared by their background for the personal upheavals allowed by that revolutionary era’s ethos. At least that’s what I think happened to them. Barry’s upbringing was poverty-stricken, brutal and dysfunctional. Scott’s mother was grossly indulgent, even of her son’s growing neuroses, and clung to him like a 5-foot-tall leech. My own parents, thank God, at least had common sense and a determination to survive the down times. Some of that wore off on me, I guess. I’m grateful, but it’s unsettling that the luck of the draw — having sensible parents — is what, in the end, probably kept me from falling off the edge with Scott and Barry.
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2007.
