James

Saturday, May 4, 2002 -
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

I can't believe we have forgotten James this year. I called the Big Squeeze as soon as I remembered, late last night. Maybe I should have waited until morning, but I was hoping that only I had forgotten. I think I was hoping if the Big Squeeze assured me that he had gone to the grave with cigarettes and Spanish peanuts, and to Mud Lake with beer, and bread for the ducks, I wouldn't feel like such a shit. But no such luck. I only succeeded in making the Big Squeeze feel like shit. He had forgotten, too.

James died when he was fifteen years old. Every year on his birthday, the Big Squeeze and I bring cigarettes to his grave, because at fifteen, James was already a nicotine addict who was always smoking his last pack. "I'm quitting," he would say every time he lit up. "This is my last pack." He smoked that last pack for more than a year. At the graveside, when the Big Squeeze unwraps a new pack and taps out a couple of cigs for James, he always sez something like: "These can't hurt you now, James." or "I wish you had lived to die of lung cancer, James." It's a kind of ritual. Spanish peanuts (you know the small round peanuts with the red skins?) were James' other addiction.

In past years, other friends who knew him have gone with us to the grave, and to Mud Lake, in remembrance of James. Mud Lake was one of our hang-outs when we were in high school. If I wanted to point to one place and time where the Lunch Bunch began, I'd pick Mud Lake. It was a shallow pond of brown water with a mucky bottom, fringed with masses of cattails, shadowed by blue gum eucalyptus and old shaggy cypress trees, in the middle of dry, scrubby hills. It managed to support a scraggly population of ducks, mostly escaped or abandoned domestic breeds. It was occasionally visited by small white cattle herons, hunting for frogs. It was a fairly typical teen refuge: a place away from adults, a place of our own where we could drink beer and smoke and make out, and indulge in occasional stupidities with chemicals and fire and firearms.

The Lake is still there. It functions now as a drainage basin for an upper middle-class housing development. There's a chainlink fence around it, but a chainlink fence, as any dog, cat, cow or teen can tell you, is never a barrier. The ducks, the eucalyptus, and the cypress trees are still there, with two or three acres of bottomland. I saw a single cattle heron stalking the water's edge, a couple of years ago. A friend of mine sez he saw a pair of swans, once. The ducks are now all wild migrating species, and come to the pond only seasonally. But they're always there in March and April for James' birthday. So we bring bread for them, and scatter it on the shore, and retreat about a hundred feet to a fallen tree, where we sit and drink beer, and watch the ducks sneak up on the bread, wary and skittish as all wild things should be.

The ducks that James fed when he was fifteen were not wild, or they were only half-wild. They would waddle over as soon as you started throwing bread around, shoving their way to the forefront of the flock, complacent as any bunch of barnyard poultry, chattering and arguing with each other. (In my observation, ducks don't quack in their normal conversations; they almost cluck. In fact, they sound like they are saying "duck duck duck duck duck duck duck" in a continuous stream of sound.) James' mother worked for Oroweat, and was always bringing home bags and bags of outdated bread. Even though the bread was outdated, it was perfectly edible and tasty, but there was always too much of it. James' mother gave it away to friends and neighbors, but there was always a surplus that never found a home, which turned stale (and sometimes moldy) and became duck bread.

The last few years, it's just been the two of us, the Big Squeeze and me, who have kept the memorial rites on James' birthday. Which is okay, which is fine, which is as it should be, I guess, because it's the two of us who have the strongest obligations of friendship. And of guilt. The Big Squeeze's guilt comes from a crime of betrayal. Mine comes from a crime of absence, which was a kind of betrayal. The Big Squeeze carries the heavier part of the burden, perhaps unfairly, but he's proven to be strong enough to bear it. We both have been told that James' death was not our fault, and I suppose that's true. We're both hoping that someday, when we are older and wiser, we will believe that truth.

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

last eleven: