letter to a lost friend
THE TWO OF US FIRST MET WHEN I WAS HALF...
THE AGE THAT I NOW AM, WHICH WAS 39 YEARS ago. As with all friendships, ours endured some of the most terrible strains, even though we usually saw the world in the same way, were enraged by the same atrocities, amused by the same hypocrisies, celebrated together the often paltry evidence of human kindness or generosity. I first met you in 1975, the year that the city of Saigon surrendered and the Vietnam War came to an end. As the years passed, there was even more awful evidence of man's apparently infinite capacity for stupidity, but between us there was a splendid exchange: Yeats for the blues, James Joyce for Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway for Langston Hughes, both of us claimed Willie Mays. That simple faith, with its insistence on irony, was at the heart of our friendship. But America grew older and so did we and something changed between us.
The bitter truth was: over the years, a shadow had fallen on the once sunny fields of our friendship. At the heart of the matter was the fact that you had lied to me about your heritage, when you informed me that you had a tinge of African-American blood running through your veins, and I found out by accident that was not true, when your sister snitched on you and told me that your family was 100 percent Irish. I had heard your endless tales of woe about the mixed heritage, the damage it had done to you while growing up in Louisiana, how you had always felt yourself to be a part of the permanent Underclass. I believed you because you had convinced me of it. Then you retreated defensively into cliches of glib racialism when I approached you about what your sister had said. Your argument was simple: if I didn't believe you, then I was a bigot.
In the best of all possible worlds, of course, none of this would have happened. You would have been honest with me. Instead, you came at me with a steel face and inflamed eyes and an apocalyptic solution to our friendship: there would no longer be a friendship because I was nothing more than a yahoo liberal and was, therefore, a disgusting hypocrite, as well. It was then that you came to the decision that you never wished to speak to me again.
It was many years after than when I arrived in that peculiar time zone where I was no longer young and had grown old without having you in my life. Through the grapevine of old acquaintances, I came to understand that your health was rapidly deteriorating, that you were now unable to walk, and have difficulty in breathing. And the terrible truth was that upon hearing the news, I was neither sad nor happy, because you no longer mattered to me...
...And the both of us ought to be regretful about that...
The bitter truth was: over the years, a shadow had fallen on the once sunny fields of our friendship. At the heart of the matter was the fact that you had lied to me about your heritage, when you informed me that you had a tinge of African-American blood running through your veins, and I found out by accident that was not true, when your sister snitched on you and told me that your family was 100 percent Irish. I had heard your endless tales of woe about the mixed heritage, the damage it had done to you while growing up in Louisiana, how you had always felt yourself to be a part of the permanent Underclass. I believed you because you had convinced me of it. Then you retreated defensively into cliches of glib racialism when I approached you about what your sister had said. Your argument was simple: if I didn't believe you, then I was a bigot.
In the best of all possible worlds, of course, none of this would have happened. You would have been honest with me. Instead, you came at me with a steel face and inflamed eyes and an apocalyptic solution to our friendship: there would no longer be a friendship because I was nothing more than a yahoo liberal and was, therefore, a disgusting hypocrite, as well. It was then that you came to the decision that you never wished to speak to me again.
It was many years after than when I arrived in that peculiar time zone where I was no longer young and had grown old without having you in my life. Through the grapevine of old acquaintances, I came to understand that your health was rapidly deteriorating, that you were now unable to walk, and have difficulty in breathing. And the terrible truth was that upon hearing the news, I was neither sad nor happy, because you no longer mattered to me...
...And the both of us ought to be regretful about that...
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