My First Real Friend Revisited

Do you remember your first friend? I mean, your first real friend. My brother has been my best friend for my entire life- but I guess for this exercise he doesn't really count. My second blog entry here was an old post from 2005, about my first real friend. I suppose everyone has done the old friends search with Facebook or Myspace before out of sheer curiosity- "Oh, I wonder how so and so is doing? Where did they end up?" Most of the time though, you're only curious for a second. I know that most of the people I looked up I didn't really want to contact, and even if I did "friend" it was just a formality to get my numbers up during my early Facebook days. He was different though, I actually wanted to contact him. Maybe not to rebuild a friendship, but definitely just to know that he was alive and doing well, that he maybe even remembered me.

But I couldn't find him on Facebook couldn't find him on MySpace. That's okay, I thought, he probably just didn't have a computer. My sister suggested that I try looking in the Department of Corrections; I'd seriously thought about that but didn't want to admit that it'd have the possibility of bearing fruit. But sure enough I ended up fiding him on the Penn DOC website; I knew it was him because he had a very unique name and I could still remember his birthdate. He was doing an undetermined bid in a medium security prison outside of Philadelphia, but I didn't know what for. I found out yesterday though. I was trying to write a post about something else entirely when he popped into my head again, I'm not really sure why. So I went through the online Pennsylvania court papers; it didn't take me long to find him. Turns out, he's in prison on a gun charge, but he's set to stand trial in May for first degree murder. Between his arrest for the gun charge and the trial date he shot an 18 year old kid, in a grocery store, over an argument. And it's not like he's a first timer; his rap sheet is two miles long. Guns, dope w/ intent, guns, aggravated assault, burglary, dope w/ intent, and more guns. Like I said before, it was always likely that he was going to go to prison for something. When I saw his name in the system I thought it would only be dope and guns, at worst assault. I couldn't imagine something like this, his picture in the paper like one of the men from America's Most Wanted, looking just like I remember him only older, grimier, as if he was bred to do what he did.

The question I keep asking myself is, why do I care so much? He was my first friend yeah, but we haven't been friends in a LONG time. I don't know who he is, I only know who he was. On a certain level, I care on moral grounds, because two lives and two families were forever ruined on that February day in 2007. Two young Black men, one did not live to see his 19th birthday and the other (if the evidence is as strong as it seems to be) will spend his 23rd and every subsequent birthday for the rest of his life behind bars. I read an article describing the birthday party that the victims mother was throwing for her now deceased son. It's hard to keep from crying as she describes the hurt that her family has gone through. It's tough to think that a person I knew when he was a little boy could cause all of that harm.

On another level, I care about it from an intellectual point of view. It's just an example of the violence that plagues so many inner city Black neighborhoods- the police call that section of South Philly "Little Beirut." It's something that is hard to come to grips with, even in the abstract, as the death of that young man and the imprisonment of my old friend becomes nothing more than another data point belying the hopelessness under which so many people live. My friend was a sociological stereotype- absentee father, welfare/addicted mother, older brother already doing time, lived in the projects, substandard public school. Yeah, we went to the same shitty South Philly public school, but even at 8 it was easy to tell the difference. It was the way the teachers treated us, what they expected from us, and what we expected from ourselves. There were two classes of kids that went to that school, the navy kids and the project kids and it was always easy to tell the difference- from the reading class that you were in to the simple fact that you came to school with clean clothes. (there was also the occasional Italian kid whose parents were too poor to send them to Catholic school but thats another story). Us Navy kids certainly weren't rich- to put it in perspective, I make $14,000 more in inflation adjusted dollars than my father did after 20 years of service in the Navy, and he had to support a wife and three children. But compared to the kids from Passyunk, we might as well have been Warren Buffett. I'm not trying to reduce what happened to some case study about young Black men in the ghetto, but I can't help of think of it in those terms. Because I knew him so long ago, in many ways my friend has morphed into a silohuette, a piece of anecdotal evidence for improvements we need to make in our society.

But I think mostly, I care because he was one of my best childhood friends. Thinking about all of the places I lived growing up, all the friends I had to make and remake, there are four that I remember vividly, four that were part of my life the way no one outside my family was. Three of them were Navy brats like me, our lives were pretty much the same. As I've gotten older (because of college and work mostly), my friends have tended to be more and more like me, a larger percentage of my friends are Black or at least minorities, and as whole they are much better educated. I guess it speaks to the innocence of childhood that he and I could be best friends, even though our worlds were so separate.

A man who murders, particularly in the manner in which he did, is a monster to the outside world, and I can't dispute that. But he wasn't always one. He was a good kid while I knew him. At school we were inseparable, we were always on the same team in kickball, always partners on field trips, always sat together at lunch. We lived too far away to hang out much outside of school but we talked on the phone nearly every night. Usually to play MASH or talk about which girls looked good and which ones were ugly, but also about what we thought middle school would be like and which lunches tasted the nastiest in the classroom. All dumb kid stuff at the time, but I felt so adult because my mom let me talk on the phone for hours.

And he was always there for me. I didn't get made fun of for "talking white," or not cursing a lot, at least not nearly as much as I might have. But I was still a Black nerd at a bad school, and there were more than a few occasions where he protected me, fought for me. I remember one time, I'd gotten into a fight the previous day with some kid over being a doorholder at the end of the day. When my friend found out, the next day he bloodied the kids lip in the auditorium during an assembly. At the same time though, he followed me too. We met because I had to tutor him in science at the beginning of the year and pretty soon he was actually interested in school- getting all A's and B's on every report card for almost the entire school year. My mother told me, years later, about how our teacher would let our youthful shenanigans slide a bit because of the "positive effect" we had on each other. When we moved away it was my first experience ever missing someone.

As I got older, after his phone got disconnected and we lost contact, I started to realize just how perilous his situation really was. But I always held out hope. Yeah, the statistics say this and that. But it was going to end differently for him, I just knew it. I knew that he would get out of Passyunk, maybe out of Philadelphia, and expand his world in ways that wouldn't be imaginable to most young men in his situation. I just knew that he would get a good job, maybe even get a chance to go to college, break the cycle of poverty, start a newer one, a better one. Deep down, and it's entirely my selfishness and foolishness talking, I knew that he would be a better person and have a better life simply from knowing me.

I shake my head now thinking about how foolish and egotistical I was. Thinking that his success would be a referendum on how good my friendship was, my 8 to 11 year old friendship. That somehow just because he became a vegetarian like me, and made the honor roll at some crappy elementary school and some crappy middle school that it actually meant something more than just two kids from different worlds being friends. That it could overcome every male example that was set for him and the environment he lived in his entire life. You can't save someone from what they're going to become, I suppose, especially when you're just a long forgotten ghost from the past. But damn if I didn't wish it could be that way.