“Pussy”

Brian and me in Houston. This photo is on my desk forever.

Brian Gales was my best friend from freshman year of high school until he passed away at age 30. My parents decided to move so that I could attend a larger high school after I finished my eighth grade year. I would have a better chance at a football career if I played at the powerhouse school in the area. I had just won class president for my upcoming freshman year at the smaller school, but priorities are football first with a bow to academics as long as it didn’t get in the way of football. After watching both of my brothers have successful college careers, I was in agreement and passed off the presidency to my vice president who was a girl that I rode my bike to first grade with. I was leaving eight years of history with a certain group of people and starting with a whole fresh gang that had been our cross town rivals growing up.

When I showed up at the new high school football practice started a week before school so I had to make friends from this group – at that age I knew nothing about humility. I had been told that I was a good quarterback for the previous three years by coaches in all different settings, and even though I don’t clearly remember the time now, I am pretty sure that I was a cocky dude. I knew I was better than the guy I had played against the year before and I was quickly put in the starting role. This role put me right next to the best football player in the state in my huddle – he was our running back and he was scary fast and very hard to tackle. He wore a neck roll like a line backer and when he put his head down and ran at you, the best you could do is hold on because you were the one receiving the blow – it was almost impossible to knock him backwards. He was not cocky, or even talkative and I feared him and wanted to be him at the same time. I also played defense at the time, so I knew what it was like to try to tackle him and I can still feel the headache caused by such collisions. I became friends with Brian because of proximity and the juxtaposition of our two personalities. He was quiet and somewhat shy and needed a little help in school, while I was outspoken, cocky and book smart. I helped him with the bullshit politics of school and he taught me a toughness that I still carry with me today. He was raised by a single mother who went on the road with her trucker boyfriend while I lived at the country club with my feuding, but loving parents. He fit in well at my house and my parents both ended up loving him like he was their own. Brian was fiercely independent because he had always taken care of himself.

The thing that we most had in common was our love of laughter. We fucked with each other constantly and with everyone else in our school. We were at every party with a drink in hand and a smile on our faces. Brian had a mischievous side that I loved to engage with and we spent our evenings getting drunk and walking the streets or, more likely, out at the Delta with fire kicked up and our friends surrounding us. I was lucky to befriend Brian because my mouthy personality would have got me in a lot more trouble had I not been friends with the toughest, strongest kid in school. My mouth still got me in trouble with the upperclassmen and I think I reached my mid forties before I actually learned the act of being humble and, more importantly, instilling humility as a basic principle within my personality. I am still working on that. In youth we expressed ourselves with sarcasm, not knowing how biting the mean comments could be. Today I lead with kindness – I try to tap into the playfulness that Brian always presented in the world as he was simply trying to create a laugh and not be mean. He would hide behind a door for ten minutes just to get a good scare in – he thought it was hilarious to get someone to jump through the ceiling with a quick poke to the ribs from a dark corner.

Brian was fearless. He was driving my truck in the desert one night when some local cops decided to bust our party – when he saw them coming, he whipped a U-turn and put the gas to the floor flying over the whoop di doo’s on the sandy road and causing the cop car to make such gyrations that it had to slow down and let him get away. Maybe he wasn’t that brave because it was my car and the cops came by my house the next day and accused me of running from them in my vehicle. I stood next to my parents and told the fuzz that some idiot had barrowed my truck and he must have been the culprit – I wasn’t sure what his name was even.

My mouth got the better of me in high school and I alienated the upper classman or they just plain didn’t like me so I became a target for them which drove me to leave our high school after my sophomore year (described in another blog post called “Where Did All My Friends Go”). Looking back I regret this decision – I wish I would have had those two years with my best friend on the field. I have two teenagers right now and I understand how they believe the entire universe revolves around them and it is hard for them to access the overall situation, how everyone around them feels. I never asked Brian how he felt about me leaving and who knows if we even understood how important we were to each other. I came home in the summers and we spent every minute together – the connection became stronger, not weakened by my departure, so who knows if things would have turned out the same if I had stayed.

Brian went on to play football at the University of Montana on a full ride scholarship. I walked on at the University of Idaho not far away. My football career was fledgling while his flourished, so I always made my way to Montana during the playoffs even when I transferred to Southern Oregon and the drive was 11 hours. Brian was also able to get his girl friend from high school to follow him to Montana two years later. The relationship between the three of us was strong as we spent our summers together every evening and I would pick her up on my way to visit him prior to her moving out there. This is where he picked up the nick name, Squirrel – his teammates at the University of Montana called him Squirrel because he was so quick at changing directions on the football field and he kept a long tail of hair that poked out the back of his helmet. Everyone loved Brian and we maintained our friendship all through college as he spent an extra year playing for the Griz while I started my professional life in Seattle.

I have many regrets about how things evolved with my best friend, but two stick out – one not playing my last two years of high school football with Brian and the second convincing him to work with me after college at a company ran by a drunken blow hard. I was selfish and wanted Brian to be an active part in my life, but he was in love with his girlfriend who wanted him to stay in our home town and work for her father, who was a very successful home builder. I won the marketing battle and kept my friend close to me, but he lost a six of seven year relationship to take a job with my company and move to Atlanta while I moved to Houston, so we weren’t even working together at first. I regret this action, not only because we were working for a scumbag, but because Brian was great at building and would have been an awesome builder and a great husband to his high school sweetheart who is a phenomenal woman. Would he have gotten help earlier from his phycological problems in this scenario – I don’t know?

Brian eventually made his way to Houston to support me as a technical rep and I was the sales rep for a construction chemicals company – the one owned by the drunken blowhard. We ended up renting a very cool house together and having one of the best years of our lives. We lived in a house with teal carpet downstairs and one inch red shag carpet upstairs – Brian’s room even had mirrors on the ceiling. We also had a pool and banana trees in our tropical paradise. We were one block away from Clear Lake which emptied into Galveston Bay and we lived a life that was on the border of obscene. We drank, did drugs and entertained women and it seemed that we tried to do those things every night. I do look back at this unhealthy lifestyle with some shame, but I also have unbelievably clear memories of loving someone as much as I could. We laughed every day and if one of us felt like shit, the other simply had to call that man a pussy and he would have to comply with the plans the other had for the evening. We shared almost all things, we didn’t fight and we would get drunk most nights and tell each other that we loved one another.

I became a drug addicted felon after Brian left Houston to go home. He had started to have schizophrenic episodes which I thought were do to our drug use, so I definitely supported him leaving. During this time I had met my wife and she had moved in with us, not in the shag house but in a swanky apartment on the water, and our relationship was much it had been with his girl friend when we younger – all three of us were close. When Brian left to go back to Washington where his mother was, my wife and I had not yet been married but we had bought a house in Houston and Brian was living with us. He had actually shot holes in his employers walls during his first schizophrenic episode, so he had no job and he was struggling mightily. I really didn’t know what to do as I was about to go down a very dark hole myself. He left before we got married and he was slated to be the best man.

I saw Brian one more time after he left.. I traveled to Washington to give him airline tickets to our wedding and make sure that he was going to be there. We spent a couple days with one of our closest friends from high school and all seemed well. I expected him to get off the plane in Pennsylvania for our wedding, but he didn’t. The best man was a no show and the only words we ever exchanged after that were via letter while I was in prison years later. He actually sent a money order to our house before I got locked up, but it didn’t even have a note. He must have felt guilty for living off of us, but it never felt like that at all to me – I felt like he was my family and I would have done anything to have him healthy and happy. Brian talked to my wife on the phone prior to his last day and she had to represent me at the funeral as I was locked up. Brian’s high school sweetheart was there with children and a flourishing life. All our friends were there, but they didn’t embrace my wife as me like I was hoping. I wanted her to feel some love from them, but maybe I was the one they all blamed, I don’t know. We had all lost one of the most beautiful smiles on the planet and I expected people to feel sorry for me. My best friend had taken his own life and I had thrown mine away to that point. I have lost all my connections to Brian now, except for my wife who loves him as much as I do, and my son who carries his name as his middle name. Regrets are hard to live with, but the world deals out sorrow and if you can carry it with you as a lesson, then maybe you can help the next person who is facing it.

Brian and my wife, Maria, before she was my wife in Houston.