I opened Facebook and saw I had a friend request from an old acquaintance. I let it sit there for a long time because I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me so much. Seeing his name brought me back to Eureka in the early 90’s. My house was a gathering place then, perhaps like a tiny Facebook of Eureka….
* * *
Friday afternoon. The phone rings. I should have known who it was before I answered; it was the same every week. Chris Black.
“Where’s everyone at?”
I would answer, “well… I’M right here.…”
Silence on the phone.
I found it insulting. He wasn’t calling me. I was just a place holder. He wanted to know what his favorite group of friends were doing. I wasn't one of them. I just happened to have a house where they all hung out on weekends. The curse of trying to be a teenage real estate mogul.
He was oblivious to my insulted tone. The subtlety lost, overshadowed, by what he wanted most, to feel connected to his group. He, like so many people I knew in those few years after high school, was trying to hang on to that feeling of belonging. It disgusted me. He disgusted me. He and everyone like him with their sad pathetic need to belong. The bandages we all learned to apply layer upon layer through those miserable years in public school, they were all falling away now and to some of us, it was a relief. For Chris, and most of his friends, it was the opposite. Each time he called I imagined his shaking hands feverishly applying salve to the newly exposed skin, trying to quiet the screaming acid like burn spreading over his body a little more every day since graduation.
Never having been shown any examples or given any tools to create meaningful relationships of his own, it was natural that he clung to the happenstance ones from school. Natural, yes. But still pathetic.
Chris’ diminished social skills were the norm among his peers. Following the inevitable implosion of his group, he married the last girl standing and moved to a small town in Oregon. Children, more isolation. A job he hated. Depression. Alcoholism. All masked by an obsessive following of professional sports - every sad loner’s guaranteed tribe. I saw him at our high school reunion wearing basketball shorts and a numbered jersey. I watched his wife hit on his former best friend.
Although he and his wife had been sleeping in separate rooms for years, he couldn’t end the relationship, move out. This woman, this girl from high school, whom he now hated and yet barely knew, was the closest friend he had.
Chris bought a gun. He held it to his head every night after jerking off to internet porn.
Then one night in 2008 Chris joined Facebook. Within a few months he had reconnected with his entire high school gang.
Facebook probably saved Chris’ life. Only I wish it hadn’t because now, seeing his friend request, feels like he’s still fucking calling me.
* * *
