I had no idea where any of it would take me, but I knew with every fiber of my being that I was going to live and die, finding out…

When I was a kid, there were still (and only) home-phones. I’m not old, but I’m old enough to have had the good fortune to experience many now-dead things that required deliberateness and patience… though we didn’t know or appreciate that at the time.
 
The simple act of hand-dialing a number, the tolerance of… a busy signal. The fact that if you missed a call, you may not know until either someone told you, or they called back. Clear to see why optimal communication required evolution, but valuable to recall some of the virtues the inefficiency helped develop.
 
Sometimes, though, one edge of the knife is sharper and more malicious than the other… As is the case with the most important phone call I have ever missed.
 
I was goofing around with the neighbors; Stirring up dust, breaking something so we could figure out how to fix it, or building something so we could figure out how to break it. It was past dusk on a warm spring night, and time to go home.
 
I had missed a call. The handwritten recap said “Chris: 8:40pm, no message”. Then, it was not thought of twice to return a call the next day, unless a specific directive was given otherwise. And just after 9pm… The time had not yet come when a phone call for any reason at any hour was common fare. In school the next day we were sure to catch up on anything he wanted to tell me on the phone.
 
Such was the world, before it became a technological macrocosm of careless instantaneousness and largely unnecessary immediacy.
 
Chris was absent from school the next day. Odd, but not alarming… Until, it was.
 
As it occurred in a pre-device-based-Newspeak world, true voice-based interaction began to circulate that something had happened to Chris. Although I have notes from the time surrounding these events, all they said about this day was “No one knew the truth yet”, followed by “Heard from Meghan. Chris is dead.”
 
The girl that shared the news with me was not someone that would have moved in my orbit, ordinarily; Chris and I were quite close, and she knew that. She was also a friend of his, and as it did with all of us, shock and grief blurred any notion of adolescent caste system or social-order hierarchy.
 
As depicted in any movie on-or-relating-to the topic, small groups huddled together in stairways, girls walked arm-in-arm, crying down the hallways… Boys looked solemn, but tried not to look “weak”.
 
Details were surfacing, but the blur still outweighed the clear. We learned at the very end of the day that Chris had hanged himself in his bedroom the night before. I learned the next day that he had not died immediately, but that his parents had found him, taken him to the hospital, and then lost him. Once examined and investigated, it appeared to have been more a plea for attention than an actual attempt, and that it had simply (and not simply) gone as wrong as any cry for help could have.
 
In the same distasteful manner as followed several other situations I stumbled into as a youth and young adult, I was a different person after that day, and not in a good way.
 
Chris was the charismatic ladies’ man, with the gorgeous older sister and the cool car. His car was the first place I ever heard Black Sabbath, and his stories were the first I heard of… a lot of things. This was my also first look into the vicious unpredictability of the human mind, as- on paper- what happened made no sense to anyone that had ever met him; Especially the friend he had called on the phone, not long before it occurred.
 
I attended the wake, and at that time, had not yet been exposed to such sadness and widespread grief. I had been to funerals for people I knew and cared for, but a kid, taken in that way… In a community where such a thing was, at the very least, uncommon…
 
It was nearly debilitating, and combined with the fact that many in attendance were no more than casual school acquaintances and wouldn’t have had anything to do with me outside of these heightened circumstances, it felt even more isolating and volatile. Since isolation and volatility were already concepts I had made unintentional friends with, I chose not to attend the funeral.
 
Though I’ve lost many friends since, and far too many in far too similar a manner, I have not attended another funeral. I pay respects in my way; I attempt to pay respect with my entire life. I know the weight and gravity such things hold over me, and also how easily they can all join together and drag me under.
 
The fact that we had been made to endure a loss such as this together manufactured a fleeting sense of class camaraderie in the weeks following, however all pieces of the situation drove me to feel otherwise. Certainly a bad habit that I’ve held on to since, but circumstantial unity was never a notion that stuck with me; I isolated and removed myself even more from “conventional” life, and the paths it set me on and doors opened by doing so are certainly the only un-scarring take-aways from such a sad and overwhelming event.
 
I liken the psychological aftermath of such a thing to the storied BB lodged in the knuckle; Everything still mostly functional, but routinely painful, and truly unforgettable.
 
All aspects of what transpired were sharp and mean in ways I was unprepared for, and also as confusing and troublesome as they were avoidable; By me (maybe).
 
We’ll never know. But rest assured, I’ll always wonder.
 

-ist: A suffix of nouns, denoting a person who practices or is concerned with something, or holds certain principles, doctrines, etc. (apologist; dramatist; machinist; novelist; realist… )

Everyone’s gut talks to them differently; I’m still not sure whether the way mine communicates is a blessing or a curse.

I moved to California in January of 1999 to work at what could be considered the only “real” job I’ve ever had. I’ve never not worked- I started when I was 15 and haven’t stopped since- but it has always been for either small companies, for myself, or in a placeholder-type position while I was occupied (or about to be…) with travel for bike riding or music.

Moving to the LA area from my hometown of Rochester, New York for a real job was a decision I did not take lightly, and once made I had no intention of putting in a simply mediocre run at it. As soon as the amazing opportunity presented itself I took it, and the heartache of leaving my family, friends, and hometown was matched and possibly even overshadowed by the clarity I felt towards the potential magnitude of the situation I was entering. Working for a major bike company (among some of my childhood heroes) was something I never could have imagined would lead me into the murky and dysfunctional situations I would later come upon.

Existing in the action sports industry in Southern California afforded me more than a fair share of interaction with people I could neither relate to nor take seriously, and when I saw yet another trimmed, skinny goatee climb out of a giant, lifted Ford truck at a skatepark in Orange County, I had profiled and dismissed it before the boot had even hit the pavement.

Over walked a tall, good-looking, dark-haired guy wearing a button-up shirt with a big fly collar, oversized pants, and dress shoes… wheeling what appeared to be a really nice BMX bike. Unless he had a change of clothes in one of the gigantic pizza-pockets on the back of his jeans, it looked as though he were going to ride the skatepark in an outfit that would have been more fitting at a Top-40 nightclub in West Hollywood. In an industry and region of the country where people were routinely made fun of for simply having the seat of their bike too high, the oddity of his outfit made it a spectacle, and a curious distraction.

Once the ice was cracked during routine exposure and casual conversation over the coming months, it became clear that Andy was the troubled, caring kind- much like most of the people I’ve been closest to in my life- and also extremely insecure, but for no discernable reason. Another addition to the unfortunate and bewildering script: Handsome, extremely talented in a variety of useful ways, and a do-anything-for-you sort. Plane re-routed and new arrival airport is two hours from the intended? Andy will get you, and somehow make the headache into an amusing adventure.

Having a fondness develop for someone you assumed you were going to dislike always seems to add extra depth or deepened authenticity to whatever shape the relationship took from that point, since it was forced to rise from adversity.

He ended up taking a sales position at the same company I was in, and he was preternaturally good at it. His bad habits followed him, and over the next few years, everyone in our circle did everything they could to chase him back to the things he loved and excelled at each time his demons tried to drag him away.

Never discourteous, never disheveled, never so focused on himself that he couldn’t be asked to lend a hand to others; It was his casual day-to-day demeanor and admirable code of conduct that kept anyone from noticing that he was drowning.

He had moved into a room in the beautiful home of a friend and co-worker of ours, and the hope was that the proximity to normalcy would help him out of the dark, but it did not appear to be working. After receiving a frantic call, I hurried over to the house and found Andy in his room, with a loaded gun to his throat.

I believe strongly that the pure discourtesy of me being forced to intervene was the deterrent he needed that day, coupled with not wanting to disappoint someone that had put faith, time, and effort into him in both personal and professional realms. I was not afraid for my safety while intervening, as no matter how convoluted his mind was I knew he would never harm me, but I was enormously fearful of mishandling something so volatile.

It took several significant missteps and some pretty flagrant irresponsibility for the owners of the company to intervene, though when they finally did, I was tasked with delivering the news. I told them he was really struggling, had a lot of support within the company, and really needed the stability the job provided, but “risk” vs. “reward” for careless people that only see black, white, and green looked a lot different than it did to me; No professional risk could be outweighed by the potential of personal reward.

I was ordered to fire Andy, on a Friday afternoon, as per the handbook. Another co-worker was made to be in attendance as well, but I said the words, and knew it to be a mistake in both fact and conscience before I had even begun the wrong-minded task. The twists and pitfalls and gravity of what was unfolding within the company, and the amount of daunting-but- positive things I was spearheading, infused pressure to tow the company line even though I knew in heart and head that it was wrong. If I had flat-out refused, I believe many of the valuable projects we had in the works would have suffered; That presents as nothing more than trite, weak-minded justification, now with all things considered.

I fired Andy, and he killed himself the next day.

If humanity’s blight of selfishness that I had stood against and written about throughout my entire young adult life and avoided in all aspects of my “career” could manifest in such a profound way by my hand, there was a chance (at least in my mind) that I had been mistaken about the strength of my conviction to a self-less path. In a time when the questioning I was doing of myself was already nothing short of debilitating, adding that level of self-doubt to the list taught me some lessons in darkness that I definitely did not need to learn.

The end result is the end result. Of course there is rational discussion and point/ counterpoint conversation that could be had, but they would all end with the commiserators eyes on the ground, shoulders lazily shrugged, while the simple truth remains:

Were there other serious factors in play? Yes.

Had they all performed their uprising and been put back down, time and time again, with Andy’s life impacted but intact? Yes.

Did I cut the final fray of tightrope that resulted in the loss of that life?

Yes.

Was it possibly just a slight tipping of the already-in-motion “Hand of Fate”, and not an unexpected shove off of a seemingly stable ledge?

Anything is possible.

It is a possibility that he had planned it all along, and regardless of how his week went, Saturday night he was going to make damn sure of how the next one started.

But.

Hypothesis does not ease guilt or sorrow, and compartmentalizing the negative (especially that which we carry a burden of fault for) into the “Everything happens for a reason” folder, doesn’t either. There is no new-agey phrasing that can distract from the fact that I fired a good friend against my better judgment, while they were struggling, and he took his own life the next day. I will read that sentence until the day I die and never feel even 1% better about it than I do right now.

I’ve made a self-preservation-measure of peace with my mistake, but that doesn’t mean it will ever sit still, or play nice; As it shouldn’t.

Close friends, appreciated acquaintances from underground culture, people I looked up to for many of the same madnesses and idiosyncrasies that led them down their path to self-destruction…

The self-guided hand of doom has not discriminated in my life, and instead of the impact of the blows softening (as many tend to do with time), it now all just seems more horrible, and somehow, avoidable.

Several such situations have affected me in ways I still feel every day, but even the heavy ones can’t hold a candle to the heartbreak and self-scrutiny that resulted from the loss of my friend Andy.

A still-treasured gift; A reminder, a decoration, a warning, a weapon… A thing-of-no-thing.