Old Friends Drop In and Out

Morgan and I were sitting in a Brooklyn tavern on Sunday afternoon. It was a pleasant day, and a pleasant bar (even if sputtering, misbehaving taps were pushing the unsmiling bartender to the brink of hysterics). n Come the second pint, the conversation had wandered into "old friends" territory. Friends we had when we were kids, or in college. Former roommates.

People we'd fallen out of touch with or had falling outs with. Friends who had moved away or drifted away or ran away screaming or who had stabbed us in the back.

I was hardly one of those people who was always surrounded by friends. In fact, people who are like that tend to make me suspicious. There was always something a little sad and desperate, I thought, about people who had dozens and dozens of friends around them all the time. I was much happier?and luckier, too?to have had just one or two people around who I could trust. Keeps things easier that way. Looking back now, I can pretty much say that, at any given time, there was at least one person around to call a "friend." Occasionally a couple more than that, but never too many.

I don't have much contact anymore with people from the old days, whichever "old days" I happen to be talking about at the time. Occasionally I run into them?get an e-mail or a phone call out of the blue?and it's always unnerving. We never have much of anything to say to each other.

There are a few people I've remained in contact with over the years. One from, Christ, grade school even, who's still living in Green Bay. Nobody from high school, really. Grinch from college. Nobody from Minneapolis (though I imagine they have their reasons, and I don't blame them for it). A small handful from Philly. I've lost touch with so many people. It's grim if you think about it too long, but it only makes sense.

It's even the case with the friends from my days at the Guggenheim. The crew of guards there in the early days?right after the renovations?was a good one. Drunks, artists, soldiers, mental cases. But we all got along pretty well, all of us determined to be rusty cogs in the machine. We went drinking together, went to each other's houses. Got together once a week to watch bad movies.

As each of us left the museum, though, one by one, we drifted apart. Some got married and had kids, some moved away. Some simply vanished. I guess they had their reasons, too. It's an old damn story.

As it turns out?sheer happenstance it was?the Tuesday after Morgan and I were talking in that bar about the loss of old friends, two old friends, from two completely different worlds, showed up in town.

I still talk to my friend Linda?she worked at the Gugg?once a week. She lives in Florida now, where she's spent the last few years trying to save up enough to be able to leave that godforsaken state, never to look back. She gets up to New York maybe once a year, to visit old friends (most all of whom are former Guggenheimers) and show her artwork around.

She was always the most logical and rational of the Guggenheimers. The rest of us, to be honest, were kind of a mess. In a way, she was the one who held everyone together. Still does, really?she still stays in touch with most everybody, and vice versa, even if the rest of us don't stay in touch with each other.

Maybe that's why (it didn't strike me until later) we spent so much time when we met for lunch talking about what other Guggenheimers were up to. Who got married, who moved, who was looking for work, who had kids. Mostly all these people live here in town?some mere blocks from my apartment?easy walking distance?but it took having Linda fly up from Florida before I found these things out.

Which I guess is mostly my own fault.

Mike's another case. Mike's kind of a goof. First time I met him in Philly, he was up onstage, reciting a piece called "Safety Rules," while a three-piece band called the Balkan Apollos played behind him. ("Safety Rules" was, by the way, just that?a list of various things people should keep in mind in order to play safely.) He used to put out one of the nation's only funny humor magazines, Expresso Tilt (where, if I'm not mistaken, "Safety Rules" first appeared.) Apart from that, Mike did a lot of freelance journalism?he wrote the first detailed history of Jersey's Tube Bar, and the infamous "Tube Bar Tapes"?and made money by writing technical manuals.

These days, after various other bands, plays, performance projects and a true-crime book, he still writes the funny stories and the technical manuals. Also,a few years back, he set up an award-winning website, MissionCreep , which features writing and artwork by Philly-related types (including assorted "Slackjaw" ephemera).

I hadn't talked to Mike in some time. Over a year, was it? He'd let me know when he was coming to town, but something always kept us from getting together.

In a way, Mike was like Linda. That is to say, he had the same relationship with the Philly crowd that Linda had with the Guggenheimers. By the time I left that town, most everyone I knew and had dealings with knew and had dealings with most everyone else I knew. Mostly, this was through coincidence (Philly's a small town, after all)?but much of that also was Mike's responsibility. He was a contact point in town for several different circles?musicians, artists, writers, weirdoes.

He's a tall, gangly, intense fellow, with vocal inflections as easily imitable as my own. Mike also has a tendency to tell long, pointless stories that, despite the fact that they go nowhere, are absolutely hysterical. One previous afternoon a couple years ago when he was in town for the day, he held Morgan and me absolutely spellbound at a bar as he spun out, over nearly four hours, a detailed account of the care and feeding of his new pet turtle, Stanley.

(I'm serious about that. It seems Stanley was a very difficult customer.)

So after lunch with Linda, I picked up Morgan and we went over to our regular tavern. She'd told Mike he'd be able to find us there.

Shortly after 4, the bar's front door opened, Mike walked in, then let out a whoop.

Two minutes later, after getting him a beer and refills for ourselves, he was deep into the saga of his incorrigible neighbors. Mike, so long as I've known him, has had terrible luck with neighbors. Drunks and inbreds and screamers, most of them seem to be. This new lot, apart from being screamers, keeps sending their dog over onto Mike's lawn to do his dirty business. That drives him up a wall.

Well, the conversation rolled on, nonstop, through folks we used to know who turned out to be paranoid schizophrenics, to the history of Niagara Falls daredevils, through his encounters with a chiropractor.

Come 9 or so, he figured it was time he got back on the train and headed south. So Morgan waved down a cab for him and sent him on his way to Penn Station. The two of us then, drunkenly, made our way to the subway, where she sent me on my own way, before heading home herself.

It had been nice to see both Mike and Linda. They were good folks. More often than not, encounters with old friends make me nervous, leave my head hurting and my guts all knotted up. I was feeling okay that night, though. 'Course the beers helped.

I sat down on the train and, condition that I was in, figured it might be best if I just sat there quietly for a while. Other passengers, however, didn't feel the same way I did.

Across the way, a young mother was trying to teach her three boys a song. They weren't quite getting it, so she repeated it, and repeated it. It took me a minute to recognize what it was?and even after recognizing the tune, I was still having trouble. Then I realized I was having trouble because this young mother had written her own set of lyrics.

Though, thinking back on it now the following morning, I see that it can be interpreted in any number of ways, the way I was hearing it that night, the song came to be known (by me at least) as "The Desperate Single Mother's Nursery Rhyme," and it went like this:

Patty-cake, patty-cake

Make me a man!

Make me a man as fast as you can!

Rollll it up!

Stick it in your mouth!

It took three go-rounds before I finally caught it?and when I did, all I could do was shake my head a little, and wait for my stop.

Tapping home some 20 minutes later, I turned the corner off 8th St., and heard the voices a block ahead. The street was quiet, there was little traffic, but I still couldn't quite discern yet what these two people were saying. It was a young man and woman standing on a corner under a streetlight?that much I could figure. Their voices were slightly louder than necessary for normal conversation?I could tell that, too. Still, what was happening there wasn't clear until I actually tapped past them.

"No, you don't understand," she was saying, with a slight Hispanic accent, "I have to cut it off now. That's all. I can't go on like this. You don't understand that."

"I do understand that," the man protested, calmly. "I really do. So c'mon, let's go home."

"No! No! You see? I'm not coming home! Not ever again!"

Oh, there you go, I thought, as I continued down the street, the pitch of their voices rising, chasing me the last four blocks to my apartment.

I folded the cane, let myself inside, emptied my bag and sat down. Both cats wandered into the kitchen to yell at me. Man, I was tired.