What is a friend if not someone who walks with you to the edge joking while holding on to your belt? I wonder if, once ever, while shit faced, my friend held the scruff of my neck in his teeth, a mewling kitten being picked up and out of the bar.

When I first met my friend I felt dared by him. He was full of energy and all smiles and frequently wore a tie dye led zep tee shirt, which I eyed semi approvingly but with one eyebrow arched. Very soon after we met he invited me over to his house, me and my other friend (he brought his djembe along). It felt very early on in knowing him and betrayed a confidence which, though I was a year older, I lacked. It might today be called a power move, but I accepted the invitation anyway.

I don’t remember how we got there (he grew up clear on the other side of the county from me) but I do remember his mom - a super intellect architect that did not talk down to us - explaining to us how sound and light behaved similarly, so that something that was shiny would reflect both light and sound. I remember staring out at the Pacific Ocean from his family’s beautiful home, that first now familiar feeling of “wow this person’s world is wonderful.” I lacked the words for it at the time, and so my wanting to be friends with him was more like a vague cloud of admiration. I remember yes in fact covering Led Zeppelin (we played "The Ocean," a song with a weird time signature, and my new friend played it perfectly - it was in the stars. The djembe our other friend played didn't sound good, as I recall). I remember his dog, too, a dog named jazz, and I remember how profoundly my heart broke for my new friend the next time I saw him at school - I said something along the lines of jazz is such a cool dog, and he told me dude I have to tell you, jazz died, ran out into traffic right after you left.

That began however many years of friendship, two decades, a lot of it spent playing music together - - no one bashes the drums quite as hard as he does. We’ve collaborated on a lot of different things - he’s become an extremely talented graphic designer, among other things, and he’s done a ton of stuff for me / my projects. But we have stayed up very late, we have made a terrible racket, we have showered with a dozen other people at once, we have lightly commandeered sailboats. We have tied one on and burned one down many, many times. One of my favorite memories involves driving five hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic to help our friend sell a stereo to a weird guy who owned a rare car garage - it was a bust, a super weird hang, something that absolutely should not have been fun, but somehow it was. We once ran screaming in a thunderstorm through a seaside cemetery, absolutely caught in the rain. I remember lying with him on my tiny college dorm bed, a small act of supplication to a capricious and uncaring creator in the weeks after we lost our friend. He has always been kind to me, I have endeavored to be kind to him.

We had this song in our band. A very stupid song, but the holy kind of stupid, the kind of gleeful boneheadedness where true joy, release, and maybe insight lie. The song was called “Knock Knock.” The lyrics went something like:

knock knock

who’s there?

you again?

get it on

But the thing about the song is that we never wrote an ending. We never wrote an introduction, either, or a bridge, or a chorus, really. It was just that one set of lines, punctuated by hits from the band, followed by a guitar riff cribbed from an Elvis Costello song, played as loosely and with as much abandon as possible. Head banging, breaking strings. We always said that we’d play the song “until we couldn’t play it anymore” which either meant our instruments broke or the show got shut down or once, at what was technically that band’s final show, all the band members and then the entire audience had one-by-one wound up in the pool in the backyard where we were playing. I remember looking over at my friend that night and seeing that steam was literally rising from his body, so great was his exertion. We have been to that edge, and others, too. He showed it to me.

Eventually my friend would meet someone, someone I knew was good for him because she was generally game. She was wicked smart and hella goofy, naturally elegant to a sometimes laughable degree, one of the friendlier faces I've had the pleasure of knowing. Back when they lived in New York we would wind up hanging out super late often - the three of us seem to enable each other in that way - and they would often nearly insist that I sleep on their couch. I didn't always do it but if I ever did I could feel how genuinely my presence in their home brought them joy. I feel very lucky to know two people who speak to me as honestly and full of seeing as they do, I feel very lucky to know two people who seem to be made happy by my sleeping on their couch.

These two friends threw one of the greatest ever going away parties. I've written about it in this space once or twice before, I think. It took place at a senior center in Chinatown, there were menthol cigarettes stashed in the bowls of chips, there was astroturf, there was seinfeld playing on multiple TVs, there was everyone you could ever want to see or meet, it went until the sun rose. Et cetera. The part I'm thinking about right now is how at a certain point in the party my two friends wanted to open a bar-within-the-party, where they'd give out shots from their bar cart to people who spun an enormous wheel-of-fortune style wheel. I spun it once and got a nice scotch, my friend handed me the bottle. But before the bar opened they needed some time to do something or other, so they gave me a microphone and asked me to kill time. I made a speech. I talked about how our friends had given us an enormous gift by gathering us all together in that space, not only because it was fun, but because we had a responsibility to the lovely community of friends they had built on the east coast. We had to keep the connections alive, we had to forge new ones, we had to honor the work and love they had put into their relationships with the people in their lives. Something like that, anyway. It was nice. Afterwards a bunch of people told me I had just given their best man speech.

Just now I finally got to visit them in California, it took me too long, and true to form we found ourselves having a ball wandering the aisles of an overly lit grocery store, eating well - we went straight from the airport to an al pastor truck at a gas station, dancing together in a bar at 4am, shotgunning puffs of a jazz cigarette in the alley to the side of their apartment. What a wonderful thing it is to have a friend, to love your fellow man, to think that wow this person has a wonderful world and know that it being wonderful is due, at least in part, to you being in it.

Right in the middle of our knowing each other I watched my friend get his head shaved in his bathroom (he was living in the only non-orthodox apartment in a Hasidic building, something like that, once we carried his many pound weighing risograph machine up the stairs). I sat on the toilet lid, he sat in a chair, our other friend took the buzzers to him. My friend's face changed as the locks framing it fell away, both advancing forward - looking more like "a man," the look was clean and assured - and retreating backward in time - the shaved head made him look partly like an infant, partly like a snot-nosed teen. I had the uncanny feeling that I was seeing every age of my friends' life at once - the plucky, husky teen with whom I had made a racket, the grounding and essential loosie smoker who kept me on my toes when I moved to New York City, the distinguished and professorial intellect with an occasional and pyrrhic urge to party he would inevitably become. I saw all of these things layered on top of each other, and I saw him looking back at me, forehead crinkled expectantly. As if to say, does it look okay? As if to say, are you seeing me? And I was.