Buddy System
For Hunt.
“If, by virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out… that you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. […] That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape.
[…] That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.
That God – unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both – speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.”
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Daisygreen has grown accustomed to me calling just about everyone I know in comedy "a buddy of mine" because "buddy" feels the most appropriate. We are friends at a very specific level. More than acquaintances, certainly. Not super close, but not so far away that we can't have a conversation without getting stuck in small talk ruts.
"Buddy" seems to be the most appropriate word here because they are friends, but a bit of distance remains. There is still this one element we have not bridged. A gap we have not crossed. A chasm we have yet to fill with normalcy.
The fraternity I joined in college was the first place I ever think I really had "buddies." I was close with some – my pledge class, my “family” lineage – but most were buddies. We could catch up on the weekends and not miss anything big during the week. As my time in school went on, I started to spread out beyond frat life, and I found other people I could be buddies with.
I enjoyed the just-below-surface-level nature of these friendships. It was always great to see a buddy. They never overstayed their welcome, and I never felt like I was overstaying mine. You never have to feel guilty when you’re pulling an Irish goodbye at your buddy’s party.
Friday night, we do another WRONG! at the Alamo Drafthouse. The show goes well. The comics have fun, the audience has fun, the parents who have schlepped their kids here so they can watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie as a family and now have to shoo them away from our foul language probably have less fun. But everyone's enjoying themselves.
After the show, there are buddies sticking around. We hang out. We get donuts made with mochi flour, which adds a level of springiness to the dough that I haven't experienced before. We go to a bar where there's a dog inside. "We saw that dog earlier," two of my buddies exclaim.
Saturday night, I start off by going to a buddy’s comedy special taping. There are a handful of other buddies there. We talk about movies, mostly. One of them is a dad and hasn't seen a movie that wasn't made for kids in almost a full year. We riff in circles. We read through the list of songs that got put on a "do not play" list by Clear Channel after 9/11.
These are the kind of inane conversations that are catnip to comedians. Not small talk, not big talk. Just enough meat on the bone to gnaw at the topic for a while, before someone's brain inevitably makes the leap to somewhere else.
Later, I am at The Comedy Store to do a spot. There are old buddies I haven't seen in a while. We are hanging out, catching up on how life is in Chicago or New York or wherever. There are a lot of people out of breath from rushing to make their spot on time, whether they just woke up from a nap or they didn't get notified about their spot and didn't realize they had one until they saw a social media post with their face on it, and made quick moves.
The spot is on my buddy Dave's show. The show is standing-room only. The crowd is hot. I have a very fun set, then I head back downstairs.
Sunday, I am leaving improv rehearsal when I get bad news: a friend from college has passed away suddenly, unexpectedly. He was 30. There was some sort of issue with his breathing, or maybe with his heart. He was somewhere far away. He didn’t get the medical attention he needed in time. We don't have answers to the whats and whys of it happening; all we know is that it happened. My friend who calls says he’ll tell me more when he knows more.
I sit with this swirling around my head for a while, while I eat Korean fried chicken with my improv team and wait for our show to start.
I go from our show to a friend's birthday party at a dive bar in the Valley. There is pizza. There is karaoke. There is a smoking section outside with tubs of sand and repurposed park benches. I spend most of my hour at the party outside, chain-smoking. If there ever feels like a time to chain-smoke, it's after you find out that a friend from college has passed away suddenly, unexpectedly.
At this point I have told no one but Daisygreen. This doesn’t feel like info that makes sense to divulge at an improv show, or at a birthday party, when buddies ask me “how’s it going?” and “what’s new?”
Monday evening, I talk to the friend who told me the news. We are grieving in different ways. They stayed closer after college, distance-wise and friendship-wise. He is much more in the thick of the whole situation, emotionally.
I share the one thing that keeps coming to mind: because I have chosen a line of work with a lot of people who need help, and didn’t get it, I have experienced a lot of death. I have been mighty close to a lot of it. I still have a lot of their phone numbers.
As I tell him the only thing that makes sense to tell him – that this will suck, and come in waves, and it will be okay eventually but God only knows when – I remember them, again. Brody, Jak, Jeff, Teddy, Kevin, Jud, Anna, Matt. I let the memories linger.
Even if I don’t think about them all the time, I can’t imagine not remembering them. Sometimes I don't think about them for weeks or months at a time, then suddenly all I can do is think about them. About half the time, I think about what they’d say about the current state of affairs – especially those with the sharpest, most incisive minds – but the other half, I think about not seeing them. I think about not running into them in a hallway at a comedy club, or at a show, or at an airport, or in a parking lot. I think about how I will never delete their numbers from my cell phone.
Monday night, I am on a show at a bar hidden inside a barber shop. A non-secret speakeasy. A new buddy of mine shows up and brings two dudes with her. One is dressed like a metal band's frontman, the other like Carmen Sandiego.
After the show, I catch up with some comics for a while. We're getting older now. We're getting better writing jobs, and talking about what to do if (more likely, when) the strike happens. We're getting engaged, and talking about how set in stone our wedding plans are. We're debating which strip club in Los Angeles is probably the best place to take someone on a date. (We land on Jumbo's, even though none of us would classify it as a strip club.)
I stay for as long as I can until I get a phone call from a friend to talk about grief.
We talk on my walk home, and we talk a little longer after I arrive at home. I ask him if I should watch Eraserhead or The Righteous Gemstones. He says that the last time he was grieving, he just wanted to watch violent movies – Rambo, The Equalizer, The Equalizer 2. "Sometimes you just want to watch a dude murder people with a pen," he says.
I’ve often noticed feelings of guilt pop up when I deal with death. It never feels like I’m actually doing enough. No matter how much I’m doing to help, it is not enough. It’s really insidious that way. But what I have learned is that you can’t predict how you’ll feel, but you can choose the actions you take.
It’s not always your job to put the world on your back. Those small actions – the calling, the texting, the sending of flowers, the making sure the livestreamed memorial service is in your calendar for the correct time – are enough.
Thursday morning, I talk to my therapist. The grief comes up, of course. But what comes up even more is my tendency to keep people at arms length.
“Part of my job is to make sure I don’t have a job,” he says. “Do you have these kinds of deep conversations with other people in your life?”
“Sometimes,” I say. Because it’s not like I’m making the conscious choice to avoid getting meals or coffees with people, or writing with people, or dropping someone a line and checking in. But I seem to grasp his larger point: buddies are fine, but friends are worth cultivating.
The thing about pursuing a career in the arts is that you really need people in your corner. You need friends who are interested enough in what you're doing that they'll shepherd you through all the creative peaks and valleys. You need friends who will love you unconditionally and support you conditionally, because not every idea is good, and not every joke deserves to make it out of the notebook. Let’s put it like this: you need people who give a shit.
Even back in the fraternity days, Hunt gave a shit. At a time when I got a lot support, but not necessarily understanding, Hunt attempted to understand. He not only actively encouraged my pursuit of stand-up, but also seemed fascinated by it. He was always down to talk shop. We even had a few failed comedy writing outings together, quickly derailed by us getting too high, but he made the effort to “get it.”
Now, I know so many people now who “get it,” but there’s still something keeping me from using that as a way to connect. And it really sucks that it takes grappling with Hunt’s death to understand that – especially while I grapple with the fact that Hunt and I were not as close after college as we could have been – but at least it has allowed me to have this perspective.
Sunday afternoon, I hang up the phone. As I walk to the Korean fried chicken place with my improv team, I remember the last time I saw Hunt. I ran into him in Greensboro, at a hotel bar, out of the blue. I was there for a wedding, so was he. We introduced each other to the women who would become our fiancées. He was about to take a shot, hair of the dogging it, and I had to go meet up with my family for lunch, so I hugged him and said goodbye.
The encounter was brief, but one of those weird "small world" moments that’s indelibly etched in my mind. I turn this memory over continually in my mind, flipping it like a silver dollar. And as I stash it away to handle the minutiae of what I’ll order and how I’ll pay for it, I look forward to the next time I can remember this chance encounter that brought me so much joy. It will always bring me joy.