I had many friends in college but a favorite of mine was my friend Saul. Saul was the rarest kind of liberal one who stood for the rights of everybody to have free speech. He was a Communists in days before he knew me but he grew out of the phase.
Saul looked much like Shaggy of Scooby Doo. His voice was soft and relaxing and memorable to anyone that heard it. I developed an interesting imitation that I called psuedo Saul. His bereaved cousins insisted that I do the immitation and laughed because I did the substance as well as the voice. His voice so distinctive that my grandmother never remembered his name she called him " the fellow with the soothing voice".
Saul and I were an odd set of friends as I was an still am very much a straight arrow
and he was a charming rouge. He was always into the next get rich quick gimmick but that was the price one paid for his friendships. Saul never tried to hustle me largely because he saw me angry just once and it scared him. The incedent is forgotten but I picked up an idiot with my left hand and hung him on a coat rack.
" I didn't know you were left handed" he said. I told him I am not left handed and left it at that. I do not like fighting and the idiot was intent on provoking me so I left him hanging.
Saul battled drug and dependency problems all of his short life. In the end he was killed by diabetes no doubt exacerbated by his alcoholism . His ending may be more merciful then I thought at first. Saul never had to grow up or take responsability for his misadventures. He will forever be the friendly rouge as I grow older and more cantankerous.
He once fell deeply in love with a lovely girl named Angela. I arranged their first date and the chemistry was there. Angie was like a butterfly sweet and charming but just not too deep. One day the buttterfly left and Saul was just never the same. His remaining years his rougish bit was a tad more sinister. Sadly, he never let on to all but his closest friends how hurt he was.
Yet there is a lesson about my friend that all of us can remember. He lived a short life but ultimately it was too easy in many ways. He was so bright that he could get by with a fraction of the effort that lesser people could. Yet because he was so brilliant and unaccustomed to hard work and perserverence he could not make it in the real world. Love and sucsess do not come in a bottle and the best of us are judged by our families and the friends and company we keep.
I am thankful for knowing my good friend Saul. In the end his own words said to me over a beer and my Mountain Dew were prophetic. "We do not get to write our own final chapter".
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
Sometimes we have a friend our diametrical opposite. And sometimes we have a friend is self-destructive. Those facts don't lesson our sorrow when we lose that friend.
This past summer, I lost my cousin-in-law to brain cancer (breast cancer metastasized); she skipped those mammoograms--irresponsible, as her mother died of breast cancer. My cousin-in-law were opposites in many ways, yet we loved each other--until the brain cancer made her psychotic and she turned on me as the object of all her anger over her impending death. That last was the hardest part because we didn't really get a chance to say good-bye near the end.
My condolences, Beak. Losing a friend to death is part of life, but that inevitability doesn't make the loss easier to bear.
I forgot to say...The passage of time helps the sorrow, but anniversary dates bring back some of those first feelings of grief.
Poor Saul. Bored to death by Beakerkin’s incessant prattle; but at last he has found his peace.
I am having a hard time believing that Saul was a "rouge" though. Is this another tall tale from that infamous lipstick they call Beakerkin?
C x
How nice the light in the loafers 167 joins us incommieneeto
No you daft old demented prat; 'tis I, Craigy
C x
Oh wrong personin the UK but still light in the loafers. We have an official troll Ducky . We prefer our pests to be manly and sneering.
Now run along to your master I am still laughing about how absurd Rob Bayn and Justin made him look on the Iran thread.
Seems Justin doesn't buy the zionist media bs and Rob call it as he sees it. Don't tell me you missed that go find it.
I see that Craigy is keeping his prattling down to a few sentences now.
Good! The less he writes the more he seems (almost) sane.
Beak, I lost a friend (Steve) two years ago to a drug overdose. I had know him since high school.
He was a real hell raiser. Once we were intentionally ran off the road by a car load of guys that we chased across town and into a house. They locked the doors and called the police. (guess they didn't think it was so funny then). We used to rent an entire small motel and throw parties that lasted all weekend long. We charged admission and shared bouncer duties. (Talk about wild parties!) If someone started a fight or got out of hand, we thumped them, then threw them into the trunk of a car until they sobered up.
Over the years we drifted apart, his wife divorced him and at his last job they told him to go into rehab or they would fire him, he quit and was dead within two weeks.
Sometimes I feel that if I had known how bad off he was I could have did something, anything, but I don't know what it would have been.
Growing up in NYC I knew many people who went down the wrong path and made their lives much more painful that it had to be. Some have been able to move on in life and get back on track; still others got stuck and never set themselves straight. It's painful to watch and often there's little one can do. He's lucky to have you as a friend, Beak ... and it's sad that the trolls can't respect simple human decency. But then again, in their stilted ideology “the people” is just an abstraction –- actual people never really count. (corrected typo)
I've got much of the wrong path stuck in the treads of my boots. There is no peace to be found on this earth. It has to be found within.
Post a Comment