Drifter

His car had an unmistakable smell. There was this stale ritz cracker and saw dust smell that soaked deep into the interior and intensified in heat if a window wasn’t cracked. Nothing about his day-to-day lent itself to this result. He was a true pioneer in all ways purely by nature and sometimes maybe hapless good-fortune, as it so happened. Good ol “T” had a knack for it. I gave him that nickname because the more obvious nickname based on his birth name wasn’t very fitting.

He was a former gymnast turned soccer player, turned football player, turned track runner/skier, turned free-riding jack of all trades. His body held onto its athletic shape but his mind passed on all of the elitism. At about 5’9, he was muscular with a slightly slouching posture that seemed to tilt forward in the hips but backward in the torso- like he was leaning both in and out of conversation. Fitting I guess. Not to be construed as a negative, he was actually tremendously interesting. As long and messy as his hair was, the waves seemed to style themselves and his tired green eyes were legible from a mile away.  He was a person who truly challenged me in a number of ways.

In all honesty, he was just the hot piece that my lady friends started inviting around so they could shoot their shot with him. We would meet up with him at frozen yogurt joints and outlets malls while a parent hung somewhat nearby until we were ready to go home. People who grew up with stay-at-home moms are such a foreign concept to me.

The night that truly sparked our friendship was a wild one. Four of us pubescent boys (myself, an old friend and two new ones including T) decided to paint ourselves for the JV soccer game. It started off as a bet for my buddy had a crush on a couple of the girls, but in a grand “hold my Caprisun” type move, it became plans set in motion. At 6:00PM on a Tuesday, the four of us dressed up in the shortest, loudest shorts we owned and painted ourselves in school colors for our lady eagles… In nearly 30 degree weather. What started out as genuine fanaticism became reduced to survival as the breeze started to set in over the red-bull and complimentary hot chocolate that came with our game tickets. Our nips were harder than woodpecker’s lips, slicing through the air as we somersaulted, hopped, hooted and hollered for any and every little atom that moved in the general vicinity of the soccer field. Goalie walking over to pick up a ball? WOO. Player fixing her hair band? YEE BUDDY. A dad catching himself mid-slip to save 2-for-$1 corndogs? WOO WOO and a YEE YEE.

The crowd got a kick out of it (yup). When the game was over, we let fly with our scraggly underarms and formed a spirit tunnel for our victorious eagles to run through. Some of the girls opted for the fence, but most appreciated that 100% of their fans that braved the cold (and weren’t their blood relative) made the effort to be there. As soon as my old buddy finished spitting game at girl that would come to be his girlfriend for a time, we sprinted back to his empty house and ruined his parent’s electric bill… And their upstairs bathroom with all the paint chips. We were quickly labeled “those guys” and as a result, hung out more. Some friendships are only a matter of time.

Many of my nights in those days were spent sitting on pavement, lobbing up air balls mid-sentence. As I’ve said many times, with many different names, there was never a goal for these conversations. Just some friends, a hoop and a ball. We called it a “bro sesh”, which looking back, is a very misleading phrasing. The humor of it isn’t lost on me. I’m kicking myself for not having caught it in the moment. That’s minus 5 funny points right there.

It was about this time that we started out as “hey should I talk to this girl” always eventually became “so what’s your relationship like between you and your father?” It’s about this time that the ball really comes in handy. It’s much easier to perform emotional autopsies when you can act like you don’t notice the knife sectioning you off like some macabre spin on the game Risk. But any good surgeon who’s been around the block knows how to make it slight, if not at least painless. You follow lines that are already there and sew them back a bit smaller if time permits.

It’s funny, you would’ve figured that by now my shot would be on pointe, but I guess that just goes to show how bad I am at basketball despite all the time invested. As a wise coach once said, “effort does not equal achievement.”

The first couple of sessions I only managed to crack deep enough to see the muscle tissue. Things like how things were with his sister or if he was satisfied with his hobbies. We didn’t crack open that sternum and sift through the chest, the life-or-death things like that one time the parent took it too far, or the things that keep us up at nice, until we the two of us were holed up in a cabin chipped out of a mountainside. There were no cellphones, communal menthols or charity bottles of whiskey. It was just a couple of guys, a bible and the quiet of night that our high school town never really knew. I loved it when he would ask me questions, because he was never the type to do anything out of obligation. He did things because he wanted to. There was a power in peaking his interest. “T” was a maze of defenses, but above that he was looking for a hug from the one person who wouldn’t give it to him- and aren’t we all. These days it would take a Sean Penn from the Secret Life of Walter Mitty to capture him in his natural movement- crunching quietly through the morning’s fresh powder, passing at cloud-line and never looking back.  The ski slopes and snow flurries of Gunnison, Colorado must know him more than any man ever could. Nobody ever told him that mother’s aren’t always a dove commercial- until he met me. And nobody told him that love doesn’t always win- until he met her…

But in a much more real sense, he grew simpler the more you knew him. Before long, T was just a man doing as he does. The solitary trail he walks is the one he calls home: unleashing prisms of complex light from his mind onto snow caked underbellies of evergreens and patching up injured birds as they stop by to his heart’s content- and for nothing less. He offers wordless compassion not because he has to, but because he wants to. The sort of creature you dare not to startle, thus you might stir the quiet and miss the revelation.