A Farewell

I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in any afterlife. Neither did he, but I’m being cautious about answering my telephone this week, because his wife has my number, and I hear from my ex that she’s trying to organize some kind of “memorial service” for him at Ft. Logan National Cemetery. You know what that means. Prayers. Religious hocus pocus. Undignified sobbing and snivelling and strange tingly chills on your skin as the hard clods rain down on his coffin. Sadness. At this time of year, with the landscape brown and lifeless and cheerless anyway, I don’t need it. Any of it. Neither does he.

After all, he’s dead.

I might say that he was my friend, and at one time, I suppose he was. It might be more accurate to say that I was his friend, for I don’t get too close to many people, and I tried not to let him get too close to me. He needed friends. Badly. He was desperate for friendship. The kind of clinging, clutching, grasping friend that stifles and smothers and entraps you. You find yourself finally just wanting to get away from people like that. It was that way with him.

It would be more accurate to say that I knew him. I mean by that: I knew him. Like the back of my hand. Too well. There are some people you don’t like to be near, because watching them reminds you of yourself in ways you’d just as soon not notice. They mock you. He mocked me.

And yet, we weren’t alike, not really. We both had the capacity for evil, but he – he knew how to carry it out. Cold. Bloodless. Unfeeling. There comes a point at which I would certainly balk; I couldn’t hurt children the way he hurt his. Or, if I did, I would have done it quickly, and I would have done it by killing myself, so that I wouldn’t have had to be alive to think about their pain every night when I tried to go to sleep. If that makes me a coward, what does it make him? He hadn’t any conscience; he was only four hundred miles away the whole time, living a regular life, and for all they knew, he’d dropped off the face of the earth. Vanished.

Oh, he sent them little letters occasionally, and enclosed a little money. The letters were postmarked from places like Germany, to fool his wife, who really was quite stupid and gullible. Otherwise, why would she have married him? When she mailed me a letter, a year ago last Christmas, I simply passed along her new address and telephone number to my ex-wife . All she’d said in the letter was that Jim was “gone” and that his kids sometimes talked about me, missed me, and might like to see me. I couldn’t handle it. But my ex-wife and daughter visited her late that Christmas day and called me in the evening to tell me what he had done.

Several summers earlier, he’d taken his boy to one of the high mountain glacial lakes where he liked to fish, illegally, for native cutthroat trout. They were hiking out with their catch when a game warden confronted them. Unbelievably, Jim went for his gun, and somehow, the warden disarmed him and arrested him. He’d been out on bail awaiting trial. So he left the house one morning to do some kind of errand and just never came back. The little letters came to the kids on birthdays and holidays, postmarked from Germany. That’s where he’d been in military intelligence in the early ’sixties, and where he’d met his first wife. “He’s in Germany,” my ex-wife said. “Bullshit,” I said. “You’d have to be an idiot to try to hide in Germany – the police there require you to register with them if you so much as move across the street. Jim wouldn’t go there. I’ll bet you he’s in the States. He wouldn’t stay in Colorado, of course, because he’s wanted here – but I bet he isn’t far away. He just sends the letters to someone he knows who does live in Germany, and they drop them in the mail for him there. Oldest trick in the book. No way he’s in Germany.” And he wasn’t.

His son, a boy I remember as very intelligent and very sweet, had reacted in a predictable way to his father’s treason – he’d dropped out of high school, started hanging out with a bad crowd. His little daughter cried herself to sleep, hoping aloud that her daddy hadn’t gone away to start another family, praying that he still remembered her.

I thought about him quite a bit last year. We’d had some good times, sure enough. I love to cook, and so did he. We’d try to outdo one another inventing recipes. That was back during my drinking days, and when we had dinner together, we’d go through a couple or three bottles of a good cabernet sauvignon and talk for hours afterwards. I can still vizualize him sitting at the opposite end of his dining table, the bewitching con man’s smile on his face, his big thumb and forefinger pinching the delicate stem of the big crystal wine goblet as he raises it in another charming toast. One of the reasons I socialized with him was because he was bright, exceedingly bright, and I was staying away from Mensa then.

We met at work. He’d just been hired as marketing manager; I was managing the sales force, having suddenly replaced another manager who’d gotten drunk at lunch one day, called the owner’s wife a naughty name, had left in his car and had drunkenly driven it into a ditch not two hundred yards down the street. It was that kind of place.

Our very first conversation was about Nietzsche, I recall that. There just aren’t a lot of people who really know anything about Nietzsche. Fewer still who’ve read him. At the end of that first day, he invited me to drop by his place on the way home, and I remember the embarrassed look on his wife’s face as she tried to gather up some of the clutter and dirty laundry that seemed to be strewn about everywhere. He was oblivious to her discomfort, and we had a drink or two. After that, we saw a lot on each other. My wife was pregnant then, and due to deliver within a couple of months.

When she came out of surgery – she had to have a caesarian section – Jim and his whole family were there, and we went together down to the nursery to find my little daughter, her wizened face pinched up in newborn ugliness, kicking her feet and flailing her little arms and crying behind the big glass window.

For another six years our families were close; hardly a month would pass when we wouldn’t have a big dinner together. I recall one of my birthdays. Jim concocted something special that day – trout stuffed with julienned carrot, fresh herbs, shoestring strips of rabbit sauteed in Grand Marnier, roasted pinon nuts – and other ingredients combined by magical processes that I can’t recall, for we never wrote anything down. It was fabulous. I’d never felt so honored.

If I were maudlin, if I were sentimental, I’d say right now, “That’s the way I want to remember Jim – the way he was that evening.”

But I remember another aspect of Jim, an uglier, more wretched aspect. He was in debt. Always in debt. He liked living in a high and handsome style, and so he was in debt. His wife worked. He worked. His house had a second mortgage. But still he spent.

We knew he was in trouble again on this particular visit, because his wife had confided in mine; we arrived early for dinner and Jim insisted I accompany him to a liquor store on capitol hill that was having a wine sale. I figured he’d buy a couple or three bottles for dinner, maybe, but I wasn’t prepared for what happened.

When we got there, he grabbed a shopping cart and proceeded to the wine section, where he buttonholed a clerk and started reciting his order, naming labels and vintages with a casual and practiced familiarity, and the cases were deposited in our basket, one upon another, and then we needed another basket, and when we finally maneuvered the incredible load through the checkstand, Jim wrote a check for over seven hundred dollars.

Oh, Jim, you unthrifty Scot!

A few years ago, shortly after we’d had a final parting of ways, I interviewed for a job. Everything went very well until I let it slip that I’d known him; I dropped his name because the employer I was interviewing with had sold cardiac pacemakers, and so had he. At the mention of Jim’s name, it was as though a wall of ice suddenly descended. From the curt termination of our interview, I gathered – and later managed to confirm, for my suspicions were aroused – that my old pal Jim had indeed been involved in a kickback scam, long notorious in the medical community, involving pacemakers. A lot of heads had rolled over that one. I should have suspected it. Needless to say, I didn’t get that job. I didn’t even get a standard rejection letter. I’d known Jim. Therefore, I didn’t exist.

It explained a lot. It explained why he didn’t work in the medical sales industry anymore after he and I were finally “laid off” by the bankrupt company that had hired both of us, the company where we’d met. Instead, he drifted from one position to another during the years we were acquainted, selling aluminum house siding for Sears, and televison satellite dishes for someone else, always travelling. But he loved it. You have to be something of a sociopath to succeed at salesmanship, and Jim loved nothing better than to sit down at a kitchen table with a couple of poor working-class people in some dirty, depressed little rural town, convince them that they were less than dog poop in their neighbors’ eyes because a little of their house paint was peeling off, and get them sign up for siding they couldn’t afford, just so they’d be respectable again. He was a master at it. He bragged about it. He had an abiding contempt for humanity. He made me look like Albert Schweitzer.

He did things that began to grate on us, though. There was the time he borrowed my four wheel drive pickup to take his boy on one of their trout poaching excursions. He brought it back splattered with mud, and when I took it out the next day, the speedometer didn’t work – its cable was broken. Now, if I’d borrowed someone’s car, I’d have brought it back clean, and in good working order, or if not, I’d have offered to pay for repairs. With him, it was as though he’d done me a favor by taking the truck.

But he got away with it by doing little things, every so often, of a “generous” nature, things calculated to put marks in some imaginary accounting ledger, in his name, marked Accounts Receivable. Things like showing up at the hospital when my daughter was born, unannounced and uninvited, to “help” us celebrate her birth. Things like the dinners which were, confessedly, held at his home more often than at mine. I always had the uneasy feeling, whenever Jim did anything “nice,” that he expected tit for tat. Some people can be generous and give you gifts and you don’t feel that way. They don’t expect anything in return, and consequently, you’re more likely to reciprocate because of it. With Jim, it was different. He’d give, and the implicit message was, “You owe me one.” I don’t like owing anybody anything. I don’t like strings attached to friendships. I grew increasingly uneasy.

There came the day, finally, when he called me in desperation. He was badly in debt, had to work, and his wife had to work, they both needed cars, but one of their cars was totally broken down and couldn’t be fixed. Could he borrow one of ours? My wife wasn’t working then, and so we relented and let him borrow her car. Borrow it.

Well, the car had a dented fender and a somewhat wrinkled hood, owing to a collision with a deer earlier that year. But it was drivable. Perfectly drivable. Jim “borrowed” the car and after a couple of weeks, when it hadn’t been returned, I called to see when we might expect to get it back. “It’s in the shop,” he said. “Was it in a wreck?” I demanded at once, expecting the worst. “Oh, no – I just took it in to get the hood and fender repaired.”

I blew up. I knew what was going on. Either he’d pay for the unauthorized repair, expecting tit for tat, or I’d get stuck with the bill anyway when his check bounced. And besides, we didn’t want the damned car repaired, and would never have permitted it, because it was old and worthless anyway, and we planned to trade it in soon on something better.

Five years of festering uneasiness erupted in an outpouring of sarcastic venom as I proceeded to tell Jim what I thought of him and his manipulative behavior – something I should have done long before, I suppose, before the message had become wrapped and sealed in rage. Something his wife ought to have done, his mother ought to have done. I did it. And after he’d whined that he had to have the car, I named a figure and told him he could keep it on only one condition: he had to show up at the bank the next day, at a certain hour, with either cash or a cashier’s check, nothing else, and we’d sign and notarize the title and he’d own it. Otherwise I’d report the car as stolen and have the sherrif come collect it.

I had to work, and so it fell on my wife to meet him at the bank, which was fine because the title was in her name anyway, and he showed up with the money, ashen-faced and humbly apologetic, but she was tired of being conned, too, and took his money and brushed off his almost desperate pleas to be able to talk with me, to “explain things.” I had my phone number changed that very day and made sure it was unlisted. I cut him off. Totally, irrevocably. Something I’ve done before, to others. I have practice at it. I don’t mind being alone and friendless. I don’t need any damned friends. Not if they’re like him. My carapace had become a little thicker that day.

It must have been then, that summer, after our last conversation, that he’d gone up to the mountains with his son and pulled the gun on the game warden. And it was that following Christmas season when, out on bail, he’d come by our house one day while we were out and had left a pathetic little home-made book of poems on my doorstep, an almost heart-rending peace offering, and one that could have worked, had I not known him too well. The poems were good, and from them, I gathered he’d just lost his brother, which turned out to be true. They guy had blown his brains out in Jim’s basement while staying with him; we found that out from his wife last year. But no clue as to the game warden incident; I didn’t know about it.

I tossed the poems away, and once again forced myself to forget about him.

Four years passed, and then his wife wrote to me last Christmas to say he was “gone,” and my ex wife visited her, and got the whole story, and his kids wanted to see me, because they liked me, and I knew they wanted me to be their surrogate father, and I didn’t want to be anyone’s father, because I was already a father, and a failed one at that, and the whole business repelled me.

And so, last week, my ex wife called me once again. “Jim’s dead,” she said. “How?” I asked. “He was living in Albuquerque. He was riding a bicycle and got hit by a car. They made a positive identification.”

And now, yes, I’m saddened. Now, again, I see you smiling, your face flushed with good wine, beaming magnanimously, toasting me from across the table. It’s a little too late, because you’re dead now, and you’ve left me owing you, you bastard.

This is for the poems, Jim. Payment for your last unsolicited gift. Account settled. This is for you:

Goodbye, my friend.