“People don’t change,” Bob once told me. “They only become more of who they really are.” Maybe he was trying to tell me he thought he’d always be an asshole, or an alcoholic—with his brokenness barreling out of him in fits of rage. Maybe he was preparing me for the end of our relationship that he saw as inevitable. Maybe, he was protecting and warning me about himself.
I’ve struggled to keep meaningful relationships with other men. Most men I’ve been close to hurt me in ways men hurt others. I’ve always been sensitive and many men take it upon themselves to toughen up people like me. They compared me to women or gays because, to them, being female or liking men makes you weak. They laughed at me when I cried and made petty what felt monumental to me.
Bob was no bully, but he was hurting and he hurt others. At least that was the case more than 10 years ago when I heard he’d threatened my life.
I used to think of Bob as an older, angrier version of myself. He was my conscience—my Jiminy Cricket. He was the dude I brought home because he didn’t want his mother to see him drunk. He was the best man at my wedding. He was raw, vulnerable, human emotions wrapped up in a small, red-headed package who was told way too often to “be a man.” And he prepared me more for life as an adult than anyone else. He was my best friend at a crucial time, toward the tail end of high school and into my mid-twenties.
Bob was always fighting against something.
“Redheads should be a box on an application,” he’d tell me. “Like ‘Pacific Islander’ or ‘Black.’ If women won’t date you because you’re a ‘box,’ you should get some kickback.”
“Big guys can’t fight,” he’d say, “because they’ve never had to. I’ve been fighting all my life.”
He was born between a mediocre older brother and a handsome, do-nothing-wrong younger brother, or so his father saw it. All of them are older than the family’s only daughter.
Bob crumbled under the pressure his father placed on him.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t succeed. He just couldn’t live up to an image—a character really—that had nothing to do with him.
His father Vinny is a New Yorker with a fierce blue-collar outlook. He is the type of man who believes the only difference between success and failure is hard work. No systems. No disabilities. No class chasms. No skin color mattered. Gumption was all it took.
The family folklore reminded them that Vinny, a truck driver, bought ten or so acres in north Georgia and parked a camper on it until he could afford to build a house. When he built the house, it was massive and pastoral—a touchstone to the days of plantations and sharecroppers in the North Georgia Piedmont.
Vinny ran for state senate a few times and lost. It was as if he was determined to undo centuries of bottom-rung living for his ancestors. He sought to redefine his bloodline. To make anew the promise and potential of his family.
Bob loved and admired his father to a fault.
Having a father like that is tough for boys, especially those of us who are sensitive.
My father was like Vinny but without success, which made it easier for me to shake off some of the baggage. But Bob’s family had reached a few rungs on the ladder mine had not.
They provided a softer landing pad for Bob than mine had but it came with a heavier burden. While I might’ve landed on the cold, hard ground, when Bob landed he had a stack of weights coming down on him.
Bob was meant to carry the strain of his father’s unfinished work. Young enough to know better than the firstborn and old enough to be more mature than the youngest boy, he was meant to be somebody. Not just anybody. Somebody.
The message, of course, was that he wasn’t good enough as is.
It was the same for me and my family but the bar was lower. All I had to do was make it out of high school. It didn’t matter that I only did so by going to summer school after my senior year. My parents didn’t care that I walked for my graduation but did not receive my diploma for a full year after. By 14, I’d exceeded their expectations for my life.
We were similar, which is why we got along. But we were different, which led to the end of our friendship.
Looking back, he was the last male friend I really had. Since then, I’ve been wandering around too afraid to trust others. He hurt me. And I guess I’m still not past it.
I’m also sure I hurt him too.
Somewhere on the other side of this story is a similar, just-as-certain narrative about the motherfucker I am. And, it’s undoubtedly true. Life is stories, pieced together to make sense of the incomprehensible, the sacred, and the painful.
You don’t have to have regrets to not want to have hurt somebody.
I don’t remember when I met him.
He was the lead singer of a band in which a friend of mine was. He had graduated from high school two years prior. I was a sophomore and had recently moved to Georgia from Tampa.
They were looking for another guitar player. So I joined them. We were called Rubber Joe, which was his nickname as a boy because his brother couldn’t say “Robert.”
Bob was a good lead singer, with purposefully Morrison-like curls. We were angsty and grungy. But we were also heavily inspired by Radiohead and cerebral bands that came along in the mid-90s. For three years we practiced a whole lot and played out very little. We made two records, DIY-style with home-printed labels.
We had three moments of greatness.
Our first show in front of a crowd was at our school’s annual White Christmas celebration on the last day before Christmas break.
We played under a basketball hoop in a gym with five hundred people split between the two sides of the bleachers. They loved us.
We had yet to learn why drummers put rugs under their equipment.
I kept the time for the songs on a Takamine cut-away dreadnought. In the middle of the first song, I could barely hear a voice behind me. I turned back and saw our drummer Tommy yelling at me. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I thought he wanted to kick into the next tempo. So I shook my head “no.” I heard him again and did the same. I turned back around and continued to play the song.
Moments later a few friends who had realized what was happening gave Tommy the help he’d been asking me for. Without a rug, with each bang on the skins, his kit had slid away from him. Inch-by-inch, the kit slid across the coated pine boards, stretching Tommy into positions he’d likely not posed in since his primary school days. By the time the friends came out, he was in a near split, with his kick drum on one side and his high hat trailing off the other.
Our second rousing success was a show we held at a Mellow Mushroom to benefit our first recording. More than one hundred people showed up and paid three dollars to see us. We made five shirts with shoe polish and threw them out to the crowd. We promised if they wore the shirt to any of our shows they’d get in free. “Even,” we told them, “when we play the Fox Theater!”
We recorded at Elixir Studios, a now-defunct studio in Athens, Georgia. We sang and played in the same dark, labyrinthine room where Stipe, Pearson, and many other local greats had stumbled through.
Our third great moment was at our last White Christmas celebration. It was my senior year. This time we were on a bonafide stage in our new high school.
It was the year of Columbine. And the year my parents split up. I remember letting go for probably the first time in my life. I thrashed the stage, not caring about how new it was or that the principal had asked us not to play too loud. Who the fuck did he think he was, anyway?
I banged on my guitar ’til my fingers bled. Bob slammed the mic stand into the stage. When we were finished, we let the feedback ring. I felt sorry for whoever had to follow us.
After high school, the band parted ways. We were tired of the petty squabbles and ego-driven grandstanding.
Bob and I stuck together.
Not long after I graduated, his girlfriend got pregnant. She decided to not have the baby. Maybe it was the pressure of her stepfather that led to her decision. Maybe not. Either way, he was not the same after that.
I never saw a man cry so much. I never saw him so angry. He turned to booze for comfort, attempting to bury the pain.
He’d figured out when the child may have been born. Each year he remembered that date. He’d drink heavier those days.
Bob spiraled and I didn’t know what to do. So I pretended nothing was wrong.
It’s not that I was doing any better, but I was in less trouble. I took safer paths than he. I never dated. Never had sex. Never did drugs. Never drank before it was legal. I had my life planned out, at least until I was 25. I was just too afraid.
I wanted to get married and have kids by 30 then retire by 55. If I was going to do that, I needed a job to support the family. When given the choice to go to college or take a promotion at the restaurant I worked at, I chose the promotion.
“Why spend money when I can make money,” I told myself and anyone who listened and questioned.
Even today, on some level, I’m still paying for that mistake. I used to think these decisions made me virtuous, but I was simply scared.
When I met my wife, I took chances for the first time. I think I was fed up of not being happy and too fucked up to be scared anymore. I’d tried everything but risk.
I wanted badly to be with my wife, not because of youthful lust or errant, butterfly feelings. I wanted to be who I was with her. There was just something about her presence that made me want to feel better. There still is.
So I risked my heart. I risked rejection so much more than I allowed before. I risked letting somebody other than Bob see who I was. I fucked up so much along the way, but I kept risking. I stayed in a state of discomfort, somehow knowing that was all I had left. Comfort got me nowhere and I wanted to be somewhere with her.
Sometimes you don’t realize how bad things are until you have a reason to fight for what’s good. Mal made me want to be better, so I began the work of trying to be.
That’s the best definition of love I can imagine—a feeling that ultimately makes you want to be a better version of yourself. Sometimes it takes wanting to be better for somebody else to get on the path of being somebody you’re proud of.
As I became better and started to heal from all the trauma I’d never dealt with, Bob and I drifted apart. He got worse and grew to resent me.
I started to resent him too. I was angry that he was so messed up. I’d lost empathy for him. My presence in his life had become painful for both of us. At the time I called it “enabling.” I did not know how to save him and that’s what I felt I was supposed to do. And I began questioning whether I was in any condition to save anybody but myself.
I used to think that being needed was the same as being wanted. Not to say that Bob didn’t want me. He just couldn’t fill my voids. Nobody could. So, I realized—painfully and slowly—that our relationship was my fault. I was the only one who could do anything about it.
Bob couldn’t help me. I couldn’t help Bob. So, I quit.
Bob served as the best man at my wedding and it was the last “brotherly” thing we did together.
He once told me his dad had warned him that I would leave him for Mal as if our relationship couldn’t evolve. What I’ve learned about life is that when you tell yourself a story often enough you believe it.
I can’t imagine the stories he’d told himself that led to him threatening my life. I heard it second-hand from a friend. Maybe it didn’t even happen. She was a bartender and he was drunk. When I found out, it shredded the remains of our bond. Really, it scared me. He was a good shot and a trained fighter. I knew his temper. I knew his anger. And I knew that he’d blamed me for most of what was happening to him. I thought he’d keep his word.
I now feel that he was hurting, likely scared, and ill-equipped to ask for help in any clear or direct way.
When we moved out of state, I made sure he didn’t know.
There wasn’t a moment where I told him we were no longer friends. I just disappeared. I can’t imagine what that felt like and I can only chalk it up to my immaturity. He hurt me, but I know I hurt him.
There’s another side to this story, one that I may get the courage to ask for. I fear he’s angry at me. I know I didn’t go about things the right way. Or, at least, I hope I would do things differently now. With a dozen year’s perspective, I know there were other options.
Nobody goes through life without stories like Bob and I. Nobody walks unscathed through their teens and twenties without regrets. Also, not everybody has a friend like Bob at all, for which I’m grateful.
There’s a blessing in how our memories work. As a sensitive person, my instinct is to trap the difficult experiences deep down. When I lie to myself I forget the harm I’ve caused others and the deepest wounds others caused in me. The story is bland, missing the messy edges where the beauty often lies.
When I first met my wife she called me a robot. If something traumatic happened to me I needed weeks, sometimes months, to process it. Even then, I’d stuff intense emotions away into that place, usually the pit of my stomach, where all the scary stuff lives. It’s how I deal with hurt, especially the pain caused by someone I love.
Years later, during a hypnotherapy session, I learned I’d buried my mother there with all the words she’d said that I turned into pain. It was in my gut where I feared hell and the rapture. Where knots twisted as I sat in church pews. It’s where I hurt for Bob. It’s where I feel shame.
For him, I feel a different kind of hurt.
I miss him, but I’m afraid of him. I fear his anger. I fear his rage. I fear his pain. I fear rejection. More than anything, I think I fear a return to who I was back then.
I remember the way I felt when we were at our best. I never needed a gang or a crew. I’ve always had just one close friend at a time. For many years it was Bob and I. And then we weren’t.
I think about Bob more than I thought I would.
I am such a different person now. I want him to be proud of me and I want him to be okay. I wish I still knew him and he knew me.
Like Eddie Vedder once sang to an unknown person from the past, “Me you wouldn’t recall for I’m not my former.”
I’ve learned that men who puff out their chests are hiding deep pain. I’ve learned that, as boys, most men have the feelings beat out of them. I know this because it happened to Bob and me.
Now, when I look back on Bob’s statement about whether others change, I wonder which Bob survived. Who won out in the end? Was it the man I loved who, like me, felt things deeply and wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable? Or, was it the man his dad wanted him to become?
I’ve learned that guys like me struggle with relationships with other men. We like to talk too much about how we feel and most men view that as a weakness.
I’m not afraid to tell a man I love him. I’m not afraid to hug him. I’m not afraid to kiss him. I don’t have to say “no homo” to scare off the gay spirits. I haven’t always been so open. If I were, I might still be friends with Bob. I certainly would have listened better.
Anthony Sadler 