A Friend

Not a single day goes by that I don’t remember my good friend Arthur. Of course, no one ever called him that for his name was Art’s biggest weak spot. It really was. And it resulted in him spending most elementary school at home weeping. Artie’s antics as m mother later called them were nothing new to me. Matter of fact, the guy grew up 3 blocks away from me until the end of high school. Things got so bad at one point in 5th grade that one day while getting made fun of on the playground good old Artie just plain gave in and shit his pants right there on the playground if front of every one in our grade. He spent the rest of that year nervously shuffling his feet beneath his desk as our teacher taught lessons. After his incident Art’s social life at school seemed doomed. He kept to himself and surrounded himself with stacks of Herge’s TinTin comics. He drew his own comics during class. After his parents realized their son was a little off, they pulled him out of public school and sent him off to who knows where. Although Art left school we continued to play in the neighborhood together when it was simply convenient. As we grew older we saw less and less of each other. We lived in different universes. Kids at school occasionally gossiped about what had happened to Art. Some kids said he had been in and out of institutions throughout middle school. I lived across the street from him, but throughout most of our middle school years, Art was a ghost.
I didn’t see Art again until the first day of 9th grade. The first time I spotted the guy, he was getting chewed out by a concerned parent for smoking across the street before the bell wailed. This was seen from behind the windows of the sputtering school bus, driven by the exact same bastard that drove me in middle school. The driver was a quiet type who’d probably came from a dull family line of bus drivers. As I saw him that first day, he stood tall like a roman soldier in the face of an intimidating late model Volvo wagon.
For the next four years of high school Art and I occasionally spoke or crossed paths or bummed a cigarette of one another. But other than that, our relationship stood more as a memory. The type of memory you would put in a tight mason jar with a stick on label and put away to age. Sometime after college I was working in New York City. I wasn’t exactly raking in piles of cash but I had enough to live in a small studio apartment a few blocks off Canal Street. I was a commuter like so many other lost souls in this dirty city.
One night after staying late after work I walked slowly down to the 22nd st station in Gramercy Park. I stood alone on the yellow bordered stone platform staring off into the tunnels that led into oblivion. A city worker rustled behind me sweeping up bits and pieces of rat shit. As I stopped to zone out and decipher the silence that now surrounded me, the man approached me from behind. I recognized him immediately as Art. He asked me for a cigarette and I obliged. We spoke for the next five minutes about everything that needed clarification. His life, his career, His family. All had gone to shit. A failed marriage and a lack of a high school diploma were just the beginning of his problems. I listened attentively although I didn’t seem to care about his failures. I saw the boy I had grown up and imagined the loud fun times we had together. I felt sorry for him that he’d probably miss out on his kids entire childhood. A loud whistle and a sudden screech indicated my train was here. I said goodbye to Art and entered the train looking at him directly through the automatic doors. I would miss him.