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The question popped into consciousness and stood out instantly from the rest. It was a good one, the product of some calm, intentional mind-roaming during a blue-skied October morning commute up 202 North in the Philly suburbs.
“Greater NBA player: Steph Curry or Allen Iverson?”
A perfect one to toss into the years-long, running Facebook Messenger group chat between Ed, Theo, and myself, friends since Ed and I roomed together at La Salle in the mid-1990s and Theo manned the basement with us during summers and vacations home from Florida A&M. The chat still sits open on the Iphone today, waiting passively for a new round of useless but life-affirming banter to begin.
The Iverson vs. Steph debate never got off the ground, though, because Theo died last year of a massive heart attack at age 42. The chat is still open, but Theo is gone. Just like Ed said through a cracking voice and tears that hot early summer night in June 2018, hours after my beaming wife and I closed on our new home in the middle of the American dream.
“Theo’s gone, man.”
He left behind a boy and a girl, very close in age to my boy and my girl, who are now 7 and 4. And a wife. And a lot of friends.
Theo always met my need to have a worthy adversary for arguments. Not real arguing…sports arguing or movie arguing or culture arguing. He met my need to feel challenged, like rams that need to butt their heads together to feel like rams. He’d so casually chuckle and rope-a-dope me when I got too excited and fell prey to absurd overstatement, as I’m prone to do about six times a day. He’d listen and hear me out if my absurd overstatement had merit. We’d gang up on Ed in the group chat for not knowing enough about sports, an act that, despite constant repetition, never grew old mostly because Ed has more athletic ability in his right leg than Theo and I have in our entire family trees combined. (“Ed, please. Theo and I are discussing playoff baseball. Wait your turn.”)
I didn’t put enough into our friendship as we made the passage from vastly overextended adolescence to family men. We had the Facebook chat, visited daily, even hours before Theo’s heart attack hit like a thunderbolt. Not much more contact than that for several years. It seems we men sometimes struggle to find a logistical structure for our friendships once life doesn’t allow for hanging out in Manhattan bars or fifth-floor walkups until 5 am for twenty-five Saturdays a year.
But man, do we need friends as the challenges of life become unfamiliar. When the budget isn’t stretching far enough. When there’s a glitch in the connection with your wife. When a kid might need head surgery. When you don’t know what the next job is going to be or how the hell to get out of the current one. When you just need some new ideas.
Text chains and group chats have kept some connections alive that might otherwise have gone dark completely with moves to different towns or countries or the time crunch of parenting and corporate life and commuting. But they’re not the real thing.
Questions like “Iverson vs. Curry” or “Name the eight Caucasians to average 25 ppg in an NBA season since 1980” filled a lot of time between Ed and Theo and I. But there’s one thing Theo said to me back in the early 2000s that never left, back when our friendship was vibrant, alive, and everything it should have been.
“Man, it’s so tough when love and fear are fighting it out inside you.”
At the time I was bouncing between sleeping on Theo’s couch and Ed’s couch after an agonizing, humiliating end to a three-year relationship and brief engagement. He understood exactly where I was, and more importantly conveyed with kindness and warmth that it was totally okay and understandable to be there. What he said to me had so much more value than he even knew, because I honestly had no idea that anyone else in the world knew what it was like to feel the way I felt at that time. He put it out there in 14 words, totally sincere, smooth as silk, soft as butter, hitting the spot like a Saturday Guinness.
I had that feeling in me but lacked the words to get it out of me. I didn’t even know a guy friend could help. I was hurt and embarrassed, trying desperately to manage through it, wishing someone understood. Somehow he picked up on whatever I was putting off at the time, and hit exactly the right spot.
Because he put those words on what I felt in that moment, to this day, nearly twenty years later, I know to keep an eye out for that no man’s land where love and fear are battling and fear has first-and-goal from the three. I know it’s tough, I know it doesn’t last forever, and I know I’m not the only one who knows what it feels like.
That’s what friends are for.
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Photo: Shutterstock