Just Melancholy Stuff
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I felt trapped in my tiny seat and my partially paranoid inner camera honed right in on me, watching my massive self trying to melt into the sticky, wooden floor. Barry had grown up in the area, and so before the concert we’d drive down a number of Lanes, Courts and Terraces trying to find his boyhood home. After an hour, he realized it was razed, destroyed years ago, and so we stopped his Chevy Blazer outside of the replacement, a non-descript yet perfect house. It was the exact address and I felt great pain for my buddy as he snapped a few photographs.
“Where has my history gone to?” Barry said, and I stared intently at the mailbox and felt his sadness, my loneliness, the weight of the fast food wrappers and cigarette butts in his car, the trash in his apartment, and the smell of old Chinese, beer cans, dirty laundry, and lingering flatulence that hovered there. I wasn’t any better myself with an unkempt, malodorous room waiting for me back at a group home in Springfield. I’d been residing for what seemed like forever there with ill folks who oozed substantial anguish. The swirling, racing thoughts overtook me and banged against my skull. 
Look at your damn life! I lectured myself as we sat in that car staring at my friend’s boyhood address. Look at your measly life! I told myself again, sitting in the concert with Don McLean and the hippies, the crunchy peacemakers, the investment gurus, along with a couple of struggling businesswomen with cheap, uncomfortable shoes sitting in front of us. Look at your wasted life, David! I screamed in my head as people rose and gave the singer a standing ovation.
Barry and I weren’t the most perfectly matched friends in the world, but we had an arrangement of amicability. We both visited each other when we’d go into the hospital for suicidal ideation (him) and cutting and burning (me). We went to the movies, out to eat, once we went to a deserted, winter beach and tried to fly a kite, but we gave up when we had to run to keep it soaring. That type of stuff. Sometimes his buddies came over his apartment on weekends, and we chatted and joked uncomfortably about the world before our psychic battles took place. (The four fellows drank beer, ate pizza, and watched porn and Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, followed by a Disney flick and then something religious. I was the lone depressive in the group.
“Dave is the only one who’s ever been properly and repeatedly laid,” Barry said many times to them, and I felt on stage, always sitting atop his cigarette burnt couch. And like a ventriloquist I did my gig; I rolled out the fleshy war stories and talked about taking showers with my summer lover, about scrubbing her body, about the rounded shape of her curves, her ellipses, and our giggly, in-love feeling and what that was really, truly absolutely like. And they listened intently and said, “Wow,” so innocently it was heartbreaking. Heart-crushing, really. Like I was speaking of visiting Pluto or something, you know?
One time Barry and I drove to his father’s grave in a little village outside Providence, and I watched my buddy place daisies and a six pack of Miller Light at the site and kneeled, kind of a wobbly kneel on one leg, and prayed for the repose of his Dad’s soul. He had told me his father never showed much affection, and that when his mother had her breakdown right after Barry’s birth, the father left her to return to his hometown. And that once Barry had his fourth or fifth institutionalization, his father sent Barry back to live in Massachusetts permanently.  Barry’s father worked at a friend’s auto supply store for years before the fatal stroke hit.