Familiar Faces

familiar faces, part one

No fiction here tonight, no comical stories (oh, right, I guess I haven't told one of those in a while), just a moment in and out of time.

Yesterday, Devin and I were hanging out in the park, and there was a young mother whose infant child desperately wanted to play with the dog we were taking care of. We obliged, and made small talk with the mother as her daughter groped aimlessly at the air, trying desperately to pet the small dog. I remember at the time thinking that the woman was attractive, but there was something else, also. We ran into her again, later, at the bank. More petty exchanges were made. Everyone smiled, and everyone walked away.

Today, I got a package in the mail from my dear friend Scott. He sent me a CD I haven't listened to yet and a bunch of pictures from long ago. It felt strange. There were pictures of me with my big hair and pencil-thin mustache, pictures of a lovely young woman I never spent enough time with, pictures of an ex-girlfriend looking fantastic in her shorts and cutoff top, pictures of parties and drunken evenings from oh so long ago.

Maybe that's why it made sense. Maybe that was the key.

I saw the young mother again today. Today, I knew who she was. I wondered if maybe the whole time she and I were chatting the day before she knew who I was, but didn't say anything. I doubted it. Those were different times. That was Then, this is Now.

It happens every now and then, and it never gets any easier to deal with. Those were days of hard booze and heavy drugs. We were different people then. To this day, I'll never say we were better or worse. I won't pass judgment at all.

But we pass each other now and then, and when we're not so bloated or strung out or lost, we don't recognize each other at all. That's okay. For a moment, I thought about going up to this young mother and asking how she was, how she'd been, how her husband was, but I didn't. Those were different days. We all knew each other then, we don't know each other now.

You always hope for the day when everything becomes resolved, but that isn't always the case. Instead, I just watched her and her daughter and thought of days gone by and days yet to come. I thought of us two survivors standing so close to each other, but not recognizing each other. And we are survivors, in a way, since we had to see so many beautiful people lose the battle and pass on.

There isn't a day I don't think of those people.

And when I say those people, I'm not just thinking about those that passed away, bless their souls. I also think of those that disappeared, that hid, that ran away. All those people from years gone past who went their own way, never to be heard from since. Some I know are better off, the others I can only hope.

Then again, maybe I jumped the gun in calling myself a survivor. I certainly still have my daily battles to wage, and unlike many of the people I've been speaking of, I've kept myself in the thick of it all, never turning away.

No, of all people I for sure cannot pass judgment. Our lives are all about old friends and old lovers and old houses and old skeletons in the closet. In many ways, that is what makes us who we are.

Maybe we've survived, maybe we've moved on, maybe we're in a better place now than where we once were.

Maybe I should have said hello.

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familiar faces, part two

I have to preface this memoir with a brief apology. There are people reading this who may not want to revisit the days I'm about to describe. Everyone else will wonder what the hell I'm talking about.

I was bartending Sunday night. It was, overall, a slow night. Right around ten o'clock, my first bar customer came in. His name is Kit, and apparently he grew up in West Chester about the same time I did. He always drops names like Andy Desidario and various other people I vaguely knew when I was there. This makes us close. We're friends now.

H e was waiting on friends, he kept telling me. Knowing Kit as well as I decided I did, I wondered what his friends would be like. Somewhere around eleven, his first friend showed up.

He was of a drunkenly portly build, with close cut curly hair, wide eyes, and a round chin. There was something about him that seemed familiar.

We talked, we laughed, and they drank. As all of this went on, I realized, or decided, that I knew this man. It was his eyes, and also his humor. It brought me back to a time I missed most of the time, and that I regretted ever being a part of the rest of the time.

Kit went to the jukebox towards the end of the evening. His friend had already decided to settle up with me, stating, “I'm having a hard time keeping track of how many I've had, so it's time to stop.” I appreciated that. I also decided this was the best time to ask him his name.

He told me. I knew it before he even said it.

If you read back to the first “Familiar Faces,” you know that I realized with that woman that pressing the issue just wasn't worth the trouble. That lesson went right out the window with this man. It was just too much. Here was someone I had thought about and worried about for almost five years. I got giddy. I was happy to see him again. Some part of me assumed he was dead.

I tried to explain how we knew each other. I mentioned friends' names.

I talked about nights spent together. With every word, I saw his wide eyes slim and his face turn tight.

“ I don't know about any of that,” he said, “but maybe you bartended before…”

He turned his head towards the empty stool next to him. It upset me. I don't really know why. Suddenly I became determined. I threw names at him. I described exact conversations at exact bars. I couldn't believe that this person with whom I had shared such wonderfully drunken moments, whom I had pulled off of the floor at Dirty Frank's and carried to a friend's house, with whom I had shared a fictitious “rehabilitation,” with whom I had locked eyes and seen the pain and
addiction and sorrow. This man was denying me.

I had to catch myself before I brought up the wake, or the painful gathering after the funeral. I looked at him, and saw a man cut off from almost everything. Again, I was angry, because when I realized who he was, all I wanted to do was run to the other side of the bar and hug him. But then I realized that I had to let it go. All he could do was stare at the empty seat next to him.

I hated both of us. I hated the way we had gotten to know each other. I hated the way he refuted me. I tried to tell myself that I had the wrong man, but I knew better.

But the more I thought about it, the better I felt. Perhaps I remembered what I had written before about letting the past fade away. Like I said, I assumed this man was dead, and here he was sitting at my bar. We were, again, survivors, and he had survived more than I could ever imagine. Suddenly I thought back to a conversation we had had earlier in the evening. I gave him a hard time for turning so serious, and he replied, “Yeah, well, it's nice to know I can still be serious when it's necessary. I keep thinking I can't anymore.”

That made it all clear to me. Sure, he was denying me, but haven't I done the same? Haven't we all? Isn't that what you do when you're struggling with an addiction? You put the dark days behind you and try to take each day as it comes. That is what he and I were both doing. I just screwed things up by becoming happy to see this man. Finally, I had decided that it was good enough knowing that he was still out there, that he had not become another tragedy like someone else had so many years before.

However, it was too late. He had already cut himself off. He merely stared at the empty stool beside him and never made eye contact with me again. He eventually left without saying good-bye.

I remembered then that survival is a daily struggle, and I realized that I had just interfered with someone's survival. I had overstepped my bounds. I knew then that I should never had said anything. I could have just let this man be happy and enjoy himself, but instead I threw his own mortality right in his face without even realizing it. Again, just like that woman in the park, I thought about days long gone. Only this time I felt both sad and relieved that those days were all in the past. Sure, I had lost a friend, but I also knew then that I could add one more name to the list of survivors.