We Learn Nothing Read online

  Over the years friends of mine have suggested various other possibilities, none of which sounded plausible to me: maybe he was afraid he was an alcoholic and thought I was a bad influence on him; maybe he was secretly in love with me. “Was he crazy?” my friend Abe asked me. “Not really,” I said, after giving it some thought. “You don’t think Felix was crazy?” said his wife, Margot, who had gone out with me years ago and remembered Felix well. “I’m sorry, man, but if you don’t think Felix Harlan was crazy, you’ve lost perspective.”

  Admittedly, our friendship had always been sort of volatile. In fifth grade, Felix and Tom Weaver and I were all best friends. Three, as practitioners of statecraft and the polyamorous lifestyle know, is an inherently unstable number. We constituted a bitchy triumvirate of constantly shifting alliances, bitter enmities, and shaky three-way accords, employing the likes of Chris Schlemmer as double agents. Felix and I mocked Tom behind his back for a thousand little quirks and idiosyncracies, but, because I was nine, it took a couple of years before it occurred to me that they must be doing the same thing to me. To complicate things further, we were also the charter members of an organization called “The Comic Club,” which was ostensibly dedicated to drawing cartoons but was mostly consumed in litigation over copyright infringements.

  We were constantly defriending each other. “Defriending” (or “unfriending”) has become a common term on social networking websites, where it involves discreetly clicking on a screen name to delete it from an electronic list, but let the record show that it was Felix Harlan, Tom Weaver, and I who originated it, circa 1977, and back then it was a deliberately cruel, face-to-face business. “Get away from us, Kreider,” your best friends would say. “You’re defriended.” (The convention among the boys in fourth and fifth grades was to refer to each other only by last names, which sounded tough and manly and cool.) Oh and God help you if you got sick—you’d be absent for one day and return to school to find every boy in the class now united under the auspices of something called the Anti-Kreider Club, whose raison d’être was its dedicated hostility to all things You. One morning in sixth grade I showed up with an elaborate colored-pencil drawing of ancient Babylon—ziggurats, the hanging gardens, the tower of Babel—that I’d prepared for a group oral report on the ancient Chaldeans I was to give with Felix and Tom, only to be told they had defriended me again. Looking them in the eyes and smiling with the steely resolve of a samurai committing seppuku, I slowly tore the drawing in half. We all got zeros. It was a magnificent gesture and I still admire myself for it.

  Each of the three of us had his own totemic animal—Felix’s was the owl, Tom’s the mouse, and mine was the polar bear—from which our fragile coalitions took their names: OP (Owl/Polar Bear) was Felix and me versus Tom, OM (Owl/Mouse) Felix and Tom against me. Notice that 1) the O always comes first and 2) there never was any PM or MP, and not just because it would’ve lacked a vowel. Felix was the fixed center of this triad, the one Tom and I each wanted to like us best, like a capricious child emperor for whose favor we courtiers were kept competing, cannily pitting us one against the other in Byzantine intrigues. Fifth grade is the last time I remember being unself-conscious enough to come out and ask a question like, “Who do you like better, me or Weaver?” But it wasn’t the last time I wanted to know.

  Why we put up with this treatment is a question only a grownup would ask; anyone who remembers the heartless economy of grade school knows how fiercely we covet the affection of those who disdain us. Even though I often came home from school feeling like crying and drew cruel caricatures of him when he’d defriended me, Felix was my best friend. We’ve all gone through phases with roommates or road trip partners in which we speak in the same idioms, finish each other’s sentences, and all but read each other’s minds; Felix and I were like that for decades. We were often mistaken for brothers as kids, not because we looked alike so much as because we were alike. We didn’t just have similar senses of humor; we had the same one, because they had formed together, like twins in utero. I could imitate his voice so well—it was less an imitation than like channeling—that he once asked me to impersonate him in a phone call to his sociology professor to explain why he/I would be unable to deliver an oral report on Monday morning. It was dodgy going at moments, but I pulled it off.

  He was also the most hilarious person I’ve ever known—and I hung around with professional humorists for a decade. Unlike most comedians, he wasn’t just quick at thinking up funny things to say or do; he was himself somehow inherently funny. He was always having to explain to authority figures—first teachers and later the police—that he wasn’t being a smart-mouth or talking back; that was just how his voice sounded. He somehow looked insolent just sitting there, innocently doing nothing. Cops instantly recognized him as the enemy and tried to find some probable cause, which was usually readily available. In photographs of Felix taken decades apart—the high school yearbook photo of the Dungeons and Dragons Club where he’s sitting at a table in the library with the touch of a smirk on his lips, a snapshot taken in a Baltimore row house in the late nineties in which he’s long-haired as Manson, retinas hellishly lit by the flash, displaying thirty-seven teeth in a demented Cheshire grin—you can see the same minor demon glittering out of his eyes. It’s a barely suppressed hilarity, latent chaos, a readiness to loose anarchy upon the world as soon as the teacher’s back is turned. The kid was trouble. I can still see him toppling out of his chair in the middle of reading class screaming, “Foot cramp!”; folding himself up into a bookshelf in the library and then being unable to extricate himself; leaping drunkenly onto the new ski machine at the Weavers’ house one Christmas Day in college crying, “I’m Jean-Claude Killy!” and busting it. The day he dropped out of Boy Scouts, Mr. Weaver, who was his Scoutmaster, told him: “Felix, you’re always gonna be on the outside, looking in.” This prophecy came only halfway true.

  Well into our thirties we continued to behave the way we had on sleepovers, except now with no adult supervision and legal access to alcohol. We’d be peaceably drinking in a bar when suddenly the dreaded Grappling would break out—a sloppy, spastic tussle that got us ejected from establishments not known for rigorous standards of conduct. We took forty-ouncers in paper bags to women’s softball games, where we’d sit on the bleachers ogling the players. We once went stoned to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, where Felix filled up a flask with holy water from a holy water fountain for his own obscure purposes, nearly knocked over a six-foot-tall candelabrum, and we went back for seconds on the host. One hungover morning at my house when Felix had stayed over, I was surprised, when I woke up, not to find him on the couch. I figured he must’ve gotten up early and driven home. I was making breakfast when I heard a small noise in my hall closet, as of something shifting or settling in there. I opened the door and Felix spilled out onto the floor in a loose tangle of limbs and hair. It wasn’t until some time later, while we were eating breakfast, that he remembered what he’d been doing in there. “Oh, yyyyeah,” he said. “You’d gone into the bathroom, and I was gonna leap out and scare you when you came out!”

  There were some unhilarious times in those years, too. If you spend enough time careening drunkenly around county dive bars, bad things happen. Once, as we were passively watching a developing bar fight, Felix muttered to me, “I hope we don’t get sucked into this like we always do.” On one occasion I kind of got him punched in the face. And there was a grim week indeed when Felix, having totaled his second car in just a few months and unable to face his parents, holed up on my couch watching reruns of TV shows so terrible—a spinoff from Three’s Company called The Ropers was a low point—that I began to fear for his sanity. One morning I had to go pick him up at a local correctional facility, where I found him limping, half his face abraded by gravel. We were both puzzled as to what he had been doing there. The last thing either of us remembered from the night before was seeing a Magic Markered sign in the Rendezvous Inn advertising two-for-one shots of
Jack Daniel’s. I took him out to breakfast at a diner, where he coolly ordered “the Short Stack” in a way that made it sound obscene.

  I’d always thought of him as the kind of person who would survive a pogrom. He had zero respect for authority of any kind—on some level he simply didn’t recognize its legitimacy, whereas I, to my shame, am too well brought up not to. If I were ever arrested I’d be scared and embarrassed, accepting in my gut that I must’ve done something wrong, and I’d try to be polite and compliant, hoping they’d treat me decently and let me go sooner rather than later, even as they loaded me into a boxcar. Felix, on the other hand, at the first sight of his old nemesis The Man, always immediately tossed his wallet into the bushes, noting its location for later, gave them an insouciant nom de guerre—“Malachi Stack” was his standby*—and watched for his first chance to escape. He was double-jointed and got to be adept at skinning the cat while handcuffed, slipping his arms under his feet to bringing them around front. He really did successfully flee the custody of the police, twice—once by slithering loose and vanishing into the roiling mobs of Mardi Gras, and once just by noticing, as he was sitting on a bench in a police station while everyone else was poring over a law book arguing over what to charge him with, that nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him, or the door. He just slipped out and hailed a cab. mmwOWm. It was this same self-possession that so shocked me when he vanished—his assumption of his perfect right to up and walk away.

  Losing him meant losing an Alexandrian library of memories, old stories, and in-jokes: Felix smugly saying, “Mix up the animals, Tim,” after winning another hand of five-card stud played for stuffed toys on a sleepover; Mrs. Gore’s vast planetary rump eclipsing my writhing and terrified face, apparently engulfing my head as she accidentally backed into it in class; Felix wrapping his hand in toilet paper to retrieve a rubber-tipped dart he’d fired at me from the toilet bowl where it had landed, only to have his protective sheath transformed into a long slimy tentacle that he frantically tried to whiplash off his hand, flinging toilet water around the room; Tom Weaver sliding spectacularly into an open sewage line during a kickball game. We used to revive these stories periodically, retelling them to ourselves, honing and codifying them and fixing certain canonical details (how Tom slid across the pool of sewage on one foot, sending a gleaming fan of blackwater into the air before him until his heel hit some impediment, a root or pipe, that abruptly sent him sprawling headlong through the sheet of spray, leaving a Weaver-shaped hole in it, and he plunged facedown into the muck), until I no longer knew whether I really remembered these things or only the stories. Without him, I’m like the last surviving speaker of a dead language.

  I’d often drawn Felix as a character in my cartoons while we were friends—the wily-eyed stoner always advocating some insanity in judicious and reasonable tones. (“Maybe just one more and then that will be it.”) It was hard to tell whether he was flattered or chagrined when strangers immediately recognized him from my caricatures. After he disappeared, I cast him in increasingly demeaning situations—as a corpse having his bare haunch eaten in a postapocalyptic bunker, his unhappy head impaled on a bamboo pole. Maybe I was trying to prod him out of his silence. But if he saw any of these provocations, he never reacted. He lost his speaking lines in my cartoons as his voice grew fainter in memory, but he persisted as a figure in the background for years after I’d last seen him, going through the same rote motions, as ghosts are said to do. It’s still hard for me to believe that he isn’t, some random morning, going to topple out of a door I’ve forgotten to check.

  It’s been suggested to me that I could just track Felix down and ask him what happened. He still lives in Baltimore; I even have an idea which neighborhood. I still have the disembodied head of what was officially called a “frustration pencil”—a regular no. 2 topped with a tuft of brightly colored craft-store hair, a black deedlee-ball nose, and plastic googly eyes—but which we all called “wubbles” when they were briefly a craze in our sixth grade class. I have given serious thought to tracking down Felix’s current address and leaving the wubble head on his doorstep, like a grisly calling card. I know that when he got home and found it lying there he would immediately recognize this artifact, and that as he picked it up and looked it over, his eyes narrowing, the word wubble would enter his mind for the first time in thirty years and he would understand exactly who had left it there, and nod coolly, its message received.

  The only flaw in this plan is that I would then be insane. Even hanging out in the dive bars in Felix’s neighborhood and asking around about a Felix Harlan (or Malachi Stack) would be weird. The obvious impossibility of this plan illuminates something about the nature of friendship and its limits; after sixth grade, you simply aren’t allowed to ask questions like, “Okay, Harlan, how come don’t you like me no more?”

  Defriending isn’t just unrecognized by some social oversight; it’s protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn’t just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing. Laura Kipnis’s book Against Love: A Polemic includes a harrowing eight-page inventory of things people are not allowed to do because they’re in romantic relationships, from going out without saying where you’re going or when you’ll be back to wearing that idiotic hat. But your best friend can move across the country without asking you.

  When you’re a child, your best friend in the world is the kid who lives next door. It doesn’t occur to you then that this is a matter of arbitrary circumstance. When you grow up you like to imagine that your friendships have a more substantial basis—common interests, like-mindedness, some genuine affinity. It’s always a sad revelation when a good friend acquires a girlfriend or a husband and disappears. You realize that, for them, your friendship was always only a matter of convenience, a fallback, and they simply don’t need you anymore. There’s nothing especially cynical about this; people are drawn to each other because they’re giving each other something they both need, and they drift apart again when they aren’t getting it or don’t need it anymore. Friendships have natural life spans, like love affairs or favorite songs. It’s just easier to be mature and philosophical about it when you’re the one doing the defriending.

  Currently my closest male friend is Harold—the same one who occasionally spots Felix in Baltimore. Even though we no longer live in the same city, he and I talk on the phone for at least an hour several times a week. These phone conversations are essentially the same as the ones I’d have with Felix for hours every afternoon during middle school, when we were no longer in the same classes; we’re keeping each other company through a lonely time. Our conversations of late tend to begin with an opening statement: “A man has nothing.” (This locution of referring to oneself as “a man” is one I picked up from Felix years ago, persisting like a whorl or cowlick passed from one generation to the next.) We bitch and commiserate about the emptiness of our lives, the absence of any available or attractive women anywhere in our foreseeable futures, the despair-inducing desirability of various unavailable women, exes, girls glimpsed on the street, and British actresses of the sixties. I have had to beg him not to tell me when he is Ironing the Pants, a rite he must perform each Sunday night before the next workweek that lays bare the absence of any hope or meaning in human existence. Last night I was outlining for him the latest of my implausible romantic schemes and he said, “Aw, you’re gonna find happiness, and I’ll be left Ironing the Pants of Despair.” I was touched by how openly he admitted that he didn’t want me to be happy. It’s impossible for me to believe now that there may come a day when Harold and I no longer want to call each other all that often, and we’ll have a hard time remembering what we talked about for all those thousands of hours. But for now, a
t least, we still have Nothing, except company.

  Part of any friendship is ephemeral and contingent on circumstance, but there is another part, in some of them at least, that outlives the incidentals of your neighborhood or classroom, a part that is unkillable. During a recent visit home, on a nostalgic impulse, I detoured through the development where most of my elementary school friends had once lived. I got pleasantly melancholy driving past corners that had been my school bus stops every day for years: there’s where we picked up Nicole Rovner, with her fetishistic attachment to the color purple; there was the house of Drew Blitz, whose head looked like a Q-tip. But as I turned up Milk Thistle Way and approached Felix’s house, I was startled by my own response to the sight of that familiar driveway: my stomach suddenly rose up with giddy anticipation, as though I were being dropped off for a sleepover or we were about to go out and smoke pot and Cruise the Night in Mr. Harlan’s Impala, a car no doubt long gone. It was as instant and visceral as the smell of your first girlfriend’s perfume, or the sound of the recess bell. Some part of me still hadn’t heard the news that Felix and I weren’t friends anymore. It was like seeing a dog who can’t understand that his best friend is never coming home again leap up, suddenly young again, at the sound of an opening door.