The ringing telephone awoke me from the spontaneous nap I took during one of my favorite TV shows. It had been a long day at work, so stretching out on the couch seemed not only like a good idea, but a necessary one as well.
"Hello?" I mustered, through a half yawn.
"Rich? Hey, it's Chuck." Normally this wouldn't suprise me. There were many nights way back when when Chuckie would call me, out of the blue, to go meet him at the bar, but like Bob Dylan once said, "times, they are a-changin'." And of course, it was years ago when Chuckie would call me to meet him at our favorite spot. Tonight, his phone call startled me. After all, it had been years since we've last talked.
"Oh, hey." I somehow managed to force out. He didn't have to go on. I knew what he was going to say. It's one of those things you just know. You don't talk to possibly your oldest friend in years and a call out of the blue can't be something good.
It never is.
It was as if death itself was on the other line of the telephone, "Bobby's dead." Chuck pronounced, bursting into tears at the sound of his own words. "I can't believe it, I can't believe it..." He kept saying.
I could.
When Chuckie and I were younger, going back about 30 years or so, we would meet up with Bobby at the bar almost every single night after work. Chuckie and I would drink there, occasionally, but mostly went for the company of our old high school friends and the barkeeps, and to grab a bite to eat on the way home. Bobby went there every night for a different reason, to drink. The way I'm sure he did the night before he died.
Shunning our old high school and college habits wasn't hard for Chuckie and I. Our jobs and our new wives pretty much took up most of our time, and before we knew it, years have passed since we last seen, let alone talked to, Bobby. But we knew him. We knew where he'd be every night after he got off work at the local grocery store, where he worked as manager. We just never bothered to step foot in there again. And it wasn't because we didn't want to see Bobby, it was because we simply didn't have the time, after our children were born.
Chuckie was telling me the entire story of how Bobby died. He had heard from the barkeeps, who called Chuck knowing him and Bobby used to be good friends. They didn't know if he had had a family, or parents, and if he did, he never once mentioned them in the 30+ years he had been going there. They found him slumped over next to his beer, cold, dead. A heart attack, they thought.
I let the words filter in through my ears, then turn to meaningless dust inside my head. I could've saved him, I thought. If only I had gone in one night after work, I could've made the time...
The silence grew over the telephone. I know Chuck was thinking the same things.
I wasn't interested in catching up. It had been too long. I thanked Chuck for calling, told him I'd see him at the funeral, if there even was one, and, for the first time, I told him goodbye before I hung up. There was really no point in trying to rekindle the old flame that was our friendship over the ashes of our best friend's death. Our bond had been broken, we had lost a brother.
I sat for a long moment, thinking hard, feeling the hole in my heart widen until it finally consumed me with its liquid escape. It wasn't Bobby I was crying for. I was crying for time. It was time, after all, that had stolen everything I once knew away. It was time that I thought I never had enough, when I now realized that I had plenty; I just divided it up all wrong. I was consumed by work, by money, by time itself.
It only saddened me to hear of Bobby's death because I no longer had the memory in my mind's web of an old friend. He drank himself to death. He put that poison in his body night after night and allowed it's numbness to overtake his entire life, his entire being, until it finally killed him. Poor bastard, I thought. After everything, he didn't deserve to die, but he didn't deserve to live either, not the way he did.
My tears suddenly became bitter, angry, frustrated tears that began leaking out of my eyes in masses instead of droplets. Death seemed too real, now. Too close. And it began to frighten me.
I thought of Chuck, only miles away from my house, my friend who I had allowed to become a stranger. Oh, damned time, silly hand moving too fast. Slow down. I thought.
For the first time in years, I felt broken. My unspoken, neglected past had deteriorated in my hands. And it was then I knew time wasn't the one to blame for Bobby's death. It was mine. And my damned obstinate ways. If I only had called him...
I got up off the couch to go up to bed.
I didn't lose one friend that day. I lost three.
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