Someone I Almost Forgot

Or, remembering a friend from a different time.

My graduation in 2012

My mind wanders into stale corners I’ve since abandoned. Boredom helps clean the cobwebs. Old friends appear in the warm gust of forgotten summer nights. I had one such friend in high school. We orbited different constellations. He was a quarterback on the football team, and I was a skateboarder. He walked to and from school. I took the bus. We had fathers who were missing. Mine haunting me from the grave. His was floating somewhere on the East Coast.

He told me his grandfather came from Mexico and changed his last name from Moreno to Marston because he wasn’t getting hired with a Mexican last name. I knew that was a lie. His mother told me once that the grandfather in question was a German immigrant. He legally changed his last name to Moreno anyway. He dated a smart, rich, and deeply Catholic Vietnamese girl. Her father walked in on them in her room one day, and after that, their relationship took place in secret.

He and I spent most nights wandering the city. I bought pot for the first time with him from a dilapidated house that had foil on the windows and stacks of televisions and tires in the living room. The dealer made me smoke from the bong to prove we were cool. Pit bulls barked at us through a hole where a window used to be. We’d get high and continue wandering. Home was claustrophobic back then.

After high school, I moved out and became a full-time loser. He had a new girlfriend, another deeply catholic Vietnamese girl. He got offended when I acknowledged this. She’d smoke my weed, drink my booze, feel guilty, and call me a bad influence. She crashed two brand new BMWs that year, and her father bought her a third. I made sure not to acknowledge that fact.

One day, he texted me that he was coming over, but he never showed up. He didn’t return my calls. Last I heard, he married that girl. He was baptized by her father and took her last name.

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I am writing a book and I need your help! Here’s my pitch:

This is a true story.

When I was ten, I dreamt my father died in a car accident. I called him and I told him through tears. He said everything would be fine.

A week later, he was dead.

Next year, I will be older than he ever was. I want to know if the dream was real or if I made it up to survive.

I want to know why he was living in a trailer when I was born. My family says he was hiding. They won’t say from what.

I will ask scientists, priests, and the other man who survived the crash.
I will ask my family for the last time.

I am raising money to do this. To write it down. To close the distance between what I think happened and what did.

Thank you.

My father and I