LIVING IN CIN BY JAY GILBERT
Damn You for Being a Friend
I
I THOUGHT I KNEW MY LIFELONG BUDDY. I DIDN’T. I RECENTLY LOST MY OLDEST FRIEND, SOMEONE I’D KNOWN SINCE WE WERE 10 YEARS OLD. It’s my first experience with the death of someone who was close but not family. The most painful thing about it isn’t that he died; the end had been in view for a while. Much harder to deal with are the secrets I’ve since learned about him, disturbing things that made me realize I didn’t know my old friend at all. A darker, meaner, unstable person was hiding behind the goofy jokester I’d hung around with my entire life. Finding this out has left me feeling foolish, like the victim of an investment scam. Let’s say my friend’s name was Matt, because for reasons that will become apparent I’ve changed some details of our story. Hell, the story isn’t even ours anymore. It’s his, with me scribbled in the margins. I thought we’d shared our lives, but our lives cracked 2 8 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 1
apart when I wasn’t looking. We both fathered two children, for example, though I never robbed mine. Matt opened credit card accounts in his kids’ names, maxed them out, and ruined their credit when they were still teenagers. Among the many things I didn’t know about Matt—his family has given me permission to disclose everything you will read here—was that he was a reckless spender, always in the hole and always shafting someone. What kind of guy robs his kids? Not Matt, not the guy I knew! I mean, there was that time at Penn State when I rescued him from flunking out by helping him finish his overdue term project. He gratefully said Hey, I’m taking you out to a big dinner, buddy! Then when the check came, he said Whoops, I forgot my wallet. That was a funny story until it became chronic. Other seemingly isolated anecdotes have turned into a list of symptoms. There was the time soon after I’d moved to Cincinnati when Matt came to visit, with no notice. Just a knock on the door. “I beg your pardon, can you help me find the Gilbert residence?” He was always opening with a joke. Only now do I know that impromptu travel was his typical way of ducking consequences from somewhere else. We had to kick him out after several days. It’s not clear today whether his sudden Cincinnati trip was triggered by a crisis of debt, romance, or worse. (Warning: The anecdotes ahead get worse.) But I’m sure now it wasn’t just an urge to see his childhood friend. OUR FRIENDSHIP STARTED IN PHILADELphia. We slightly knew each other in fourth grade until one Saturday at a department store; my mother had taken me there to see a local TV kid-show host showing cartoons. Crowds of unfamiliar kids made me nervous, but then I saw someone I knew: Matt! What a relief! Big, extroverted Matt impressed me. He was funny, and the other kids at school seemed to like him. Afterwards, our mothers agreed to have us spend more time together. And so we started hanging out at each other’s houses, which continued for more than 50 years. By middle school I was creating little extravaganzas on my home tape recorder, often featuring Matt. Our co-starring conI L L U S T R AT I O N BY TA N G YAU H O O N G
