High school. Freshman year. An invite to a party, along with my best friend, Philip. Okay, it’s probably not a party; it’s more like a sad conclave of bored freshmen in ill-fitting clothes, maybe a half dozen of us, all boys, most of whom do okay in science class and can recite Ghostbusters line for line. There is a long and circular discussion of how the desired alcohol will be procured—elaborate, detailed brainstorming and planning from the brains of fourteen-year-olds who have little money and no car and need to be home by 10:30 P.M. We sound like we are planning a heist from the Louvre. All we want is a twelve-pack.
Suddenly Someone with an Unexpected Connect arrives with a twelve-pack of Milwaukee’s Best. The Beast, we called it. Or, the Worst. We ask no questions and begin consumption on an upstairs couch.
You probably remember your first sip of beer—the sultry crispness of the yeast, the hints of harvest pumpkin, and the faintest whisper of elderflower. Okay, it did not taste like that. A fourteen-year-old does not think beer is yummy. And the Beast is the Beast for a reason. It is the cheapest of beers; it costs less than bird food and tastes only marginally better.
I think I had two. Max. Maybe two and a half. Philip is bigger, so he probably had three or four. I remember sitting there on the couch and waiting for some wild feeling to wash over me—a blast of adulthood in twenty-four ounces, a sudden urge to sing country music at the top of my lungs—but before anything happened, I noticed my watch.
Almost 10:30. Shit.
Philip and I fast-walked back home in the darkness. By now we were feeling it. Our steps got heavier, words slower, stupider things funnier, but I didn’t feel completely aware. When we got to Philip’s driveway, I said farewell and scurried off into the night, running down the hill to my family’s house and slithering through the back door by 10:29. Phew.
Upstairs, my parents had already gone to bed. From the kitchen I called Philip at home. There were several long rings before he finally picked up.
“Philip?”
“Yeh.”
“Is Jassin. How u pheeling from the beer?”
“Nossure,” Philip said. “I sink I pheel it…”
“Defitly a buzzzzzzz.”
“Buzzzz. Yeh, defitly a buzz.”
“But is this wasssted?”
“I don’t fink I’m wasssted…”
The next morning Philip’s mother walked downstairs to her kitchen and saw the red light on her answering machine flashing. If you are under the age of forty, an answering machine was a highly sophisticated robot that answered the telephone, folded laundry, and lit cigarettes for families in the 1980s.
Philip’s mother pressed the flashing red button.
“Philip?”
“Yeh.”
“Is Jassin. How u pheeling from the beer?”
The machine had recorded the whole slurry conversation. It was the ninth-grade Nixon tapes.
Thankfully Philip’s mom, Rosalie, was the rarest of all maternal species: the “cool mom.” She had a reasonable attitude about teenagers and alcohol and did not immediately put Philip’s head on a stick. To this day I remain grateful that she did not call my parents, who undoubtedly would have put my head on a stick and paraded it down our street. She did give us a light cautionary talk about responsibility, and drinking, and why it was probably not the greatest idea for us to be huddling up in a classmate’s room and guzzling Milwaukee’s Beast and then wandering home in the darkness. But deep down I think she thought the whole thing was pretty funny.
And we did get the message, and learned something important. Philip and I never, ever…drunkenly talked into his mother’s answering machine ever again.
It is nearly thirty years later and Philip and I are still friends. Between us there are now four children, three college degrees (two of those are his), at least a dozen crappy cars (even split), and now an entire United States. Years back Philip moved to California, and that was that. He’s never returned. I always secretly hoped he’d find his way back here, to the concrete grind of the East Coast, but he’s a wilderness person, and if he doesn’t see an owl every ninety minutes, he goes into anaphylactic shock.
We don’t talk all the time. Weeks pass. Months, often. You find yourself doing that when you get older, letting friendships slide. It’s both regrettable and unavoidable. Distance makes it hard. You cannot call your friend on the other side of the country—with two kids—and ask him if he wants to go drink a six-pack in the woods. Maybe you should. Maybe you need to call your friend on the other side of the country—with two kids—and ask him if he wants to go drink a six-pack in the woods. Maybe you meet halfway. In the woods of Nebraska. (I am not sure there are woods in Nebraska.)
As you get older, friendship becomes a maintenance thing. You don’t change the oil as much. You run the tires down. You turn to it when you need it. (You pray the friendship is a Volvo.) And then moments happen that remind you why it’s so important.
I had been living in New York City all of eight months when I got diagnosed with testicular cancer. I lived in a tiny apartment I paid way too much for, and I was mostly by myself and whacked out from the surgery and the radiation, and I couldn’t really eat anything because I was pretty quickly puking it up. It was miserable, and I made it more miserable by shutting down to the outside, to my parents and friends, telling everyone I was more okay than I was, self-martyring, the whole bit.
The one person I’d been talking to through the whole episode was Philip, whom I still called Philip, even though he’d become Phil somewhere around seventeen and the only people left who called him Philip were me, his mother, and bank tellers. He was already out in California by this time, and over the phone he said the kinds of things that people say to people who are sick, about keeping your head up and pushing through. One night he called and asked how I was doing and if I was still puking and unable to eat. I have no idea what I said in response. Then Philip asked if my apartment was number 2 or 3. Before I could figure out what he was talking about, the buzzer to the apartment was ringing and there he was, all six-foot-five of him, freshly arrived from the airport on an impulse ticket that must have cost far more than his starting-out salary could support.
I didn’t know what to say.
These days I see Philip in person a couple times a year. Maybe there’s a lucky third or fourth time, when his business takes him back east or I find my way to San Francisco. It is why I cheer for the San Francisco Giants to make the playoffs, even though Philip could not name a Giant if you dangled him by his hiking boots off the Transamerica Pyramid. This friendship is one of the great joys of my life, and yet it doesn’t feel like an accomplishment. It has survived distance and my flakiness and the natural atrophy of time. And it is always there, still vital, essential, ready to be picked up where it was left off. Friendship like that is a treasure. I am buying a six-pack and I am going to look into the woods of Nebraska.
★ Friendship is good for you; we all know this. There are a zillion studies establishing that the more friends you have and the more socializing you do, the more satisfied and happier you are, the more money you make, the better sex you have, the more Grammys you win. More friends does mean that you will also spend a third of your salary on birthday presents and go to a lot of birthday dinners at loud restaurants where no one can hear anything, but I have come to believe this is a fair trade-off. As Philip knows, I am a friend who needs improvement. I too easily fall in and out of touch; I fail to return e-mails promptly; I am not interested in helping you move next weekend because, well…I have to go to my cat’s art show. This is a personal shortcoming. This is an area I vow to improve. As I get older, the two things I want to work on are improving friendship and making a margarita without having to Google “How to make a margarita.” If I can do those two things, I will be set. Nobody lies on a deathbed and wishes he had fewer friends.
★ I can’t believe I typed that last bit. Terrible.
★ Can we just address the horrifying “nobody lies on a deathbed” cliché for a moment? It’s the most hackish of all contemporary advice clichés, but it had to start somewhere. Who was the first person to exclaim “Nobody lies on a deathbed and…”? Was it actually from a deathbed? Who makes this bed? Was there always a bed? Everyone knows that beds were only brought to Earth in the early 1990s. Was it first a “death floor of reeds”? Nobody lies on their death floor of reeds and regrets having a second mammoth burger—especially you, Ruk-Tu, who lived to a ripe age of nineteen. Is there any table of evidence to support this life philosophy? The “nobody lies on a deathbed” genre is so stuffed with conventional wisdom. What if it’s all butt wrong? What if people lie on their deathbeds and say, You know what, I really should have spent MORE Saturdays at the office! I could have called my mom less. I hated that once-in-a-lifetime family cruise to the Antarctic. Why did I eat all those salads?
★ On the topic of friendship, I take great inspiration from my wife, Bessie, who is the greatest friend I’ve ever seen. She is the person who does not just remember your birthday but attends it, with a gift that was not purchased on the way out of the airport but actually considered and wrapped, with a card, handwritten. She is interested in your high school reunion and your ultrasound and your mean boss at work, and will listen, raptly, to it all. She will like your milkshake-covered child on Facebook within minutes of your posting your milkshake-covered child on Facebook. This quality has made my wife a very popular person, to the point where her friendships are like a second job and second life, with voluminous responsibilities, including what seems to be at least an hour on the phone at night. This might sound like I am mocking her, but I am not. It makes me admire her and love her very much and realize that I still have growing up to do and I am basically a weasel who buys gifts on the way out of the airport all the time.
★ The best type of friend is a no-brainer: the Listener. That’s the kind of friend my wife is. There is always a place for the Listener. It’s like knowing how to make children’s balloon sculptures or deep-dish pizza. In life, there will forever be a place for you.
★ Hang tight to your friends from growing up. I know that is not always an easy task. Perhaps you moved often as a child and live in a completely different part of the world; perhaps you are very famous and your childhood friends are always hassling you for autographs and private jet rides; perhaps your childhood friends were imaginary and now have jobs working overseas. Understood. But it’s helpful to have at least one person who remembers you before you became the person you are now. As you age, it’s easy to forget or romanticize or even block out where you came from, and a childhood friend is useful for being that compass and reminding you that yes, you wore the same pair of red corduroys every day of fourth grade, and tried to grow a ponytail freshman year of college.
★ Yes, I had a ponytail freshman year of college. I didn’t look anything like a hippie. I looked like a sixty-one-year-old guy who lost an audition to be Neil Diamond’s keyboard player.
★ I would like to make the case for old-fashioned phone communication. As in actual talking, with your mouth. Like you, I live in a thoroughly modern world in which texts and e-mails have almost completely replaced verbal interaction: if I look down at my phone and notice that I am actually about to receive a phone call, I am fairly certain that the person on the other end is going to tell me an asteroid the size of Greenland is thirty minutes from barreling into Earth, and I still debate letting it go to voicemail. But I think talking to your friends is good for you. I think there’s something emotionally satisfying about the experience. It is also nice to be reminded that not every phone call is a nightmare to be avoided. The person on the other end is not asking you if you would care to do a brief phone survey about your recent stay at the Courtyard by Marriott. The person on the other end knows you vomited in the passenger seat of Gil Hundley’s parents’ car.
★ Not long ago I was back home and I found myself driving past Gil Hundley’s childhood home and wondering if, for some sort of cosmic justice, I should let Gil Hundley’s parents vomit in the passenger seat.
★ Everyone these days has friendships that have gone exclusively electronic. I am on daily—sometimes hourly—e-mail chains with people I went to college with whom I have not seen in years. I can’t decide if this is a terrific accomplishment or undeniably sad. We are in touch, after all. When my wife asks if I have heard from my old friend John V., I hear from John V. six times a day. I have seen photos of his kids, I know about his new job, I know his opinion about the New Orleans Saints defense, because he wrote three hundred words about it in a group e-mail this afternoon. But I have not spoken to him in five years. There is at least one guy on that chain who hasn’t contributed since 2008. I am only 10 percent sure he is alive.
★ Apparently it took many, many weeks for Gil Hundley’s parents to get the smell out. I heard about it forever.
★ My wife is a great fan of mixing friends, which is a dark art. She will mix childhood friends with work friends with college friends with someone she met eleven minutes ago on the sidewalk holding a boa constrictor. I respect her compulsion. If it works, it’s a seamless and rewarding arrangement of lovely people who share a common thread: you. But this is tricky business. In my experience, the newer friends tend to integrate well, but the college and childhood friends quickly grow resentful and suddenly remember they have to head home and write a passive-aggressive text to you about your “fancy new friends.”
★ This is going to make me sound like a crank, but I believe the culture is currently suffering from birthday party creep. Your parents had it right: they celebrated Dad’s fortieth and Mom’s fiftieth (though everyone joked she was thirty-nine, hee-har), and of course everyone goes for Mom and Dad’s seventy-fifth because, you know, death! If Grammy makes it to one hundred, ya gotta show and see if Grammy can still blow out the candles. Those are inarguable standards. Must-appears. But lately there is a trend toward celebrating every adult birthday, as if we are still nine years old. On the face of it, this is okay: in a world in which we are losing connectivity with our friends, we should take advantage of every opportunity to gather, and if that means marinating in a restaurant chair for four hours for someone’s thirty-sixth birthday, watching them drink eleven glasses of rosé and slowly unwrap presents, so be it. But soon you are back celebrating their thirty-seventh. And this is where it begins to feel like an obligation. My wife, with her many friends, attends roughly six thousand birthday parties a year, a level of dutiful constituent loyalty that should get her elected to the United States Senate.
★ Twenty-one, of course, is a ritual. But do not go to a thirty-first, forty-first, or fifty-first birthday party. You do not publicly celebrate your forty-first birthday unless you are a highway car dealership.
★ Reunions are tricky. On paper it seems harmless: you’re traveling to a place from your past; you’re meeting up with former colleagues; you have no idea how they look or what they have become; you have to dress up; there’s the extra twenty pounds you now carry; there’s the fact that it’s happening in a gymnasium where the varsity baseball captain once held you to the floor and farted in your face; there’s the existential collision between the person you once were and the person you are now today; there’s alcohol…okay, on paper it sounds completely terrifying. I would rather go on one of those “working vacations” where they wake you up at 3:45 A.M. to milk the cows on a dairy farm than attend my high school reunion. I prefer to revisit high school on my own time, preferably from a moving car doing at least 70 mph.
★ If you choose to attend a reunion, it’s important to always have an evacuation excuse, a reunion “out”—you have quintuplets back at the hotel who need to be in bed by 5:15 P.M., or you just noticed on the drive to the reunion that your childhood home was on fire and you need to get back and put it out.
★ Related: be wary of visits with your friends to Ye Olde Stomping Grounds. I have done this; it seems like it’s going to be great—you’re visiting an old college bar you loved twenty years ago; the memories are going to come flooding back; you’re going to dance around to the Temptations like you’re Kevin Kline in The Big Chill. Then it dawns on you that you are a bunch of forty-two-year-old dads in the corner drinking Coors Light and eyeballing students who could be your children, and the rest of the room is asking, What is up with those dads over there?
★ When you go to a bachelor/bachelorette party, it is never one of your close friends who winds up being the Crazy Person at the Bachelor/Bachelorette Party. The crazy person is always the last-minute guest, the person from the office nobody really knows, who winds up stealing a horse.
★ It’s smart to make friends in the workplace. But it’s also important to keep friends outside your profession, who don’t really care about your boss, or the latest petty internecine rivalries, or how awful the bagels were in that meeting. We all have to monitor our propensity for talking shop. I work as a writer, and if I ever find myself in a room full of writers “talking shop,” I locate the nearest window, climb out onto the fire escape, glide quietly down to the sidewalk, and run as fast as I can for forty-five minutes in any direction.
★ Every group of friends has “the Organizer.” This is the person who once a year sends a plaintive e-mail about Vegas or Sedona or a trout-fishing trip to Montana and then proceeds to get increasingly agitated as nobody responds for three weeks. Guys, I am just checking in about Montana. If we want to book the lodge…But every once in a while the Organizer pulls it off, and it’s a great trip. (For two days, until everyone turns on the Organizer in a fight about how much the stupid lodge costs.)
★ Think about friendship as a lifelong ambition. Everyone hates to be told to “make new friends”—it conjures up haunted thoughts of your mother laughing to herself as she drops you off at a month-long archery camp. Friendship does not have to be a conscious act. It does not have to be explicitly stated. Life is not Facebook. But if you can maintain friendships deep into adulthood, this will enrich your life in ways you cannot imagine, and it will give you emotional ballast for all the relentless everything that is to come. We are now a terribly busy and technologically dependent species, and in the rush to stay connected and present, we too often disconnect from very human and necessary feelings of interaction. Friendship humanizes. You will appreciate this later, on your death floor of reeds, drinking from a can of Milwaukee’s Beast.