Dustin, Tribute to a Friend
I wrote this in three segments, not in the three Act structure sense but in the “I need to take breaks from this to pause, think, mourn, conjure up a spirit” sense. This is a tribute to a friend I’d recently found out had passed away — four years after the fact.
Prologue
Not long ago I extended condolences to a friend who’d lost his brother. He just looked off into space and shrugged, “it is what it is.” I know he was trying to console himself but I never understood that phrase because we never fully understand death enough to declare what “it” is (separate from the fact that the phrase is pretty meaningless, which I did not point out then, because that’d be a bad time to be a stickler for language.) I’ll at least speak for myself—I don’t understand death much more than I did as a child, even having gone through loss of friends, family and pets several times over now. I don’t know what it is, or where we go, or much of anything other than that is a loss, with finality.
Dustin
Dustin liked to point out, on an almost yearly basis, "I hated you when I first saw you because you're wearing a Broncos hat and I hated the Broncos so I hated you." He was the biggest Raiders fan I've ever known and so naturally sworn enemies with the Broncos and I suppose it was a testament to myself and our friendship that he was able to overcome this horror not too long after, to become my best friend for the better part of two decades.
He was such a strong and loyal sports fan to his particular and peculiar (in my estimation) collection of favorite sports teams that it was even called out in his obituary, that he loved his raiders, his Cincinnati Reds, his 76ers, and Virginia Cavaliers, more than just about anything or anyone else. All these teams were odd choices for someone growing up in Santa Barbara, California (not that my masochistic affliction of being a Broncos fan was "normal" either).
He was one of a kind, an odd duck, a sentimental fool god bless him.
I have to put back together the essence of him, the visual picture, in fits and starts, as if he'll slowly be revealed as an image in a dot matrix printer, a million dots that all look like him in tiny fragments but not til all the pixels are reconnected can I remember who he was to me.
More than fifteen years passed since I'd last seen him. He moved around a lot in his adult years, unsettled, unsatisfied, not unhappy, but hard to pin down. I'd visited him during a trip to New Orleans, near where he'd been living in Slidell, and before he moved to Mississippi, and then Virginia where he'd finally settled (after I'd lost touch with him at last, regretfully.) His family had southern heritage and he had brothers in that part of the world so it is not surprising that he ended up in those places.
But who was he, what were those dots that made up the Dustin I'd knew?
I mentioned he was a huge sports fan; there was a time in high school when he briefly had dreams of us making the varsity basketball team which was ridiculous on the surface, and below the surface, because while we were both pretty good at Nerf basketball, something we would continue in college*, we were not as good at real basketball other than the fact that I could make my free throws quite easily and that I was taller than him is not saying much because he was always quite short. And my 5’11” wasn’t tall on the hardwood as it is in real life, barely a point guard, which I certainly wasn’t. My main skill was free throws which is hardly a ticket to the NBA. His was elusive quickness. He wanted us to try out for the team to say we had done such a thing and maybe miracles could happen. what really happened was we were the first and fastest to be cut from the team, after two days of practice and tryouts. I looked relieved, I’m sure, but he looked crestfallen. For a few minutes until bouncing back quickly, because he’d learned the art of bouncing back from a young age.
So he was a dreamer, whose growth had been stunted in part from having gall bladder cancer as a child, from which he'd basically fully recovered by the time we'd met. Other then, at that age at least, still having to take a mysterious medication and having to barf from time to time, he was, I was promised, recovered.
But chemo and the trials of cancer (as well as some shortness in the family tree) kept him as he himself put it, "runty," and scrappy, a painful thing for someone who lived and dreamt sports far more than even I (and I thought I was a big fan, who cried when the Broncos suffered embarrassing Super bowl losses as a kid). But sports was everything to Dustin, and I should add he was a pretty decent hoops player, with some point guard moves on the real court, and--when he could get a shot off--a decent fingertip roll. If you'd combined the best of the two of us minus the negatives, we might have had a shot at the team but it does not work that way and we did not. The game we really excelled at was one even less likely to lead us to success, one my dad imported from New York, from NYC of the 50s really -- stickball. We played in my dad's long driveway with a gopher hole-laden front yard the outfield and a few avocado trees the back "fence" and the strike zone a square made of masking tape on the garage door and the ball either a tennis ball or more traditional rubber ball and the "bat" a broom handle with the broom removed.
*College dorm room Nerf basketball: Games that would get so rambunctious that the women in the room below us in the coed building would call to complain, with weariness, "Hi…. can you guys maybe stop stomping around up there, we're trying to study." "Sorry we were playing basketball--uh, just Nerf." "Well, there IS a gym on campus you know." "Right." I seem to recall Dustin thinking we should at some point go downstairs and apologize in person, because you never know, but I was too easily embarrassed and shy and thought we'd already blown our chances with these ladies before we ever started (note: I was probably right, but still, get over it young Craig!) Dustin, meanwhile, was old fashioned in many ways, with women in particular, chivalrous and traditional minded, that made me think he would’ve been happier in another era, and another location — liberated, liberal San Franciscans didn’t always know what to do with or make of Dustin and vice versa —but he also could be ahead of his time (he was the first I knew to flag a famous, popular professor on campus for being “a pompous untrustworthy asshole” in a class Dustin ultimately quit, only for me to hear years later of several sexual harassment charges against the same teacher.)
Yes, we did go to college together, were roomies in the dorms of San Francisco State for a little over a year. Something over the course of that year plus put a change in Dustin, while I was fumbling around with adjusting to college and campus life and trying to find a place and an identity — you know, like everyone else who ever went to college — Dustin was too, on the surface, but also with mood swings, more drinking, moments of distance with me, and then closeness, as we each tried to find new friends, as our interests started to diverge more than they converged.
We still shared some bonds; we were among the first to perfect (in my humble estimation) the art of “hate-watching” TV, which we did on my small set in our little dorm room.
I had my own unrelated battles with depression and homesickness which I’d fight through at night, trying to get to sleep, drowning out dorm hall noise, by listening to jazz on my discman. Dustin had his own sleep issues; he’d sometimes sit up bolt upright in the middle of the night, still fast asleep, talking to himself in a sleep paralyzed-jibber-jabber only half-intelligible, waking me up, too.
At first, I would worry about his safety when this happened but he would always lie back down, slow the chatter into a calmer sleep -- while it would take me a good while longer to do the same. Eventually I got used to it, and had learned to drift back asleep with music with headphones on. I’d given up on trying to decipher his coded sleep-talk. I once asked him if I also talked aloud in my dreams, almost wanting to be a member of this secret, odd club, and he said not that he could tell, but he was usually in such a deep sleep full of philosophical conversations that he wouldn't know.
II.
When we were in high school, Dustin drove the old pickup truck he'd saved up for from odd jobs, and didn't pay much for, it rattled and smelled always of the gas he was constantly having to put in it. The gas fumes made me dizzy the few times I’d ridden in it. One day in late summer before our junior year, he drove that rattly old yellow Chevy into another car head on after speeding and losing control. He'd spend the better part of two months of our fall semester in a coma and then rehabilitating after he'd come out of it. He wobbled at first, had a partially shaved head where you could see the stitches and veins and where the fracture was —when I first saw him in rehab I thought I was looking at a wounded alien, Sam Francisco from Alien Nation.
He moved stiffly when he came back to school, could barely crane his neck, his speech slurred at first, though all these things would return to him by winter, somewhat miraculously, like an athlete determined to make it back on the field despite all odds. While I was still my shy-slow self, including with girls, Dustin took his rebooted life as a sign, and as if by magic while I wasn't looking he had a girlfriend. Selfishly I felt like I'd lost my friend again, or at least lost much of his time, but despite my jealousy and irritation deep down I was happy for him too. He’d nearly died, so what the fuck was my problem. I was nice to her even though we didn't actually speak that much, she was a sweet but shy Latina.
I don’t exactly remember how he ended things with her other than a vague recollection it happened after graduation due to she and him going separate paths; some of the gauzy memory here is my own habits back then of purposefully distancing my feelings from anything painful or too personal. I’d get easily embarrassed. Some of it is Dustin putting a privacy sheet over certain aspects of his life. We both didn’t always know how to “do” friendship, or what was required of it, only that we know our comfort lines and how to express just enough affection so everything remained as is.
We both got into downbeat mope rock with wry lyrics, like INXS, REM, and Morrissey. We went to a concert for the latter at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara and were confused and surprised (not in a negative way, just not expecting it), to see a large part of the crowd there for Morrissey, a British gay new wave pop singer, was made up of Latino men. (Yes, I've since come to understand this interesting phenomenon.) It didn't matter to us, within a few songs everyone was singing along, eyes closed, nodding to the gothically self reverent songs that I am now more prone to roll my eyes at...
III.
The last time I'd seen Dustin in person was when he was living in Louisiana and I'd traveled to New Orleans with some mutual friends from college to experience Mardi Gras in all its glory -- this was after college when the rowdiest parts of Mardi Gras (drunken frat guys yelling "show us your tits!" and vomiting up the red remnants of a cheap hurricane) were already less appealing -- and I'd reached out to Dustin, who came by our forgettable motel and we caught up on the balcony in the fetid air, looking out on the magnolia trees and revelries below. There was a bittersweet feeling between us of knowing we'd grown apart in many ways -- taken different paths, different interests, different choices, but also maintaining a great affection for each other.
Dustin had dropped out of college -- he left midway through our sophomore year, after we'd been roommates for awhile, leaving me solo in that lonely little room for the last quarter, something friends assured me would be "awesome" because of not having to worry about anyone else if I wanted to bring a girl over (which rarely happened anyway) or watch whatever show, or to sleep my own hours and not worry about being spooked by someone talking in his sleep -- but it turned out it was lonelier than it was awesome, that I’d missed the friend I'd known since childhood, and shared many secrets and confessions with, had listened the wee hours of the night have philosophical conversations with me or theological conversations with himself, had moved on, and even then at age 20+ I'd known things would not quite be the same. (OK, this is the part where Richard Dreyfuss or Daniel Stern would probably narrate, but they're not here -- we'll do this quietly and you'll accept it.)
So when I saw him in that balcony in New Orleans, we talked about the future -- he was finishing his degree in a college in Louisiana, which I was thankful for, and his near-future seemed to involve being with his older brother and running an automobile business together. I made him promise to look me up in San Francisco in return, but while we stayed in touch a little bit after that, he never did reach out to visit. Sometimes communication among friends dwindles like a trickling stream until you are just left with a dry collection of rocks. You can back up, go upstream in your memories but for whatever reason (dropped balls, inertia, fear of seeing who either of you have become) there doesn't seem to be anything going forward. I do recall accepting how much more comfortable he'd felt in the South at that point, than in California. Most of his relatives were scattered throughout the South and the pace of life and the politeness, whether true or superficial, was something he was more at home with.
Out of respect for his family I won’t go into too much detail (such as I know) about Dustin’s demise, only to say that I realized after learning more, that he probably lived much of his life battling physical pain from cancer scarring and from the accident, and ultimately paid the price in “remedies.” I learned that he’d married and found some happiness, which made me happy too if also wistful I’d never met his wife and sad for her that she didn’t get to spend many years with him. He was dealt a bad hand several times over but I can’t say he didn’t live his life to the fullest. He deserved a longer road but he floored it as much as he could.
Epilogue
I wanted to end this with a happier memory.
Middle school. Mr. Jones, a round, goateed Richard Attenborough or Burl Ives-esque science teacher who would stop mid-sentence to call one of us out for wearing our favorite sports team hats in class (an old-fashioned teacher he was) or if we were goofing off, to say "What's your maladjustment?" which became a running joke phrase between us well into high school and into college. Jones was a well-meaning teacher who actually had a sense of humor but his strictness and oddly out of time manner made me nervous. Dustin delighted in him, thought. This was my first inkling that Dustin was attracted to fellow time traveling oddballs. A friend of ours used to draw doodles of Jones that made him up to be Jabba the Hutt, but I saw the man as more of a character actor playing the part of a biology teacher. Dustin, whose real father was out of the picture long before I knew him, but had a much more considerate stepfather, often found himself buddying up to grandfatherly figures, into college as well, before he’d inevitably feel let down by them and move on to a new mentor. Somewhere in storage I still have the Pee-Chee folder with a rare drawing by Dustin of a round man saying, with a continuous bubble pointing from his mouth, “Phillips, what’s your maladjustment?!” And a doodle of a short kid in a baseball cap, behind the teacher, mockingly saying “Muahahah” as if Vincent Price. The “runty”kid would surprise you.
It is what it is.
Rest In Peace, buddy.
