Be My Brother

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 18, Verse 19

"Some people are friends in name only.  Others are closer than brothers."

 

 

---

 

CHIPPED WISDOM:

 

The films that I love most have strong male bonds.  "Funny Bones" is a 1995 film that nobody saw and, while the father/son dynamic was painful and faltering, a bond between two brothers, and a brother and his half-brother is the glue that holds the film together. 

 

1998 saw the release of "The Impostors" where Stanley Tucci and Oliver Platt (who also starred in "Funny Bones") play better-than-best-friends-- life partners (and, no, not in that way) who prepare tea and bread for each other, sleep in tiny wrought-iron beds next to each other and are each other's muse and rock and worst mistake. 

 

"Rushmore" also found its way into indie/emo hearts in 1998, and the lovely, flawed, and love-threatened relationship between eccentric young Max Fisher and monochromatic shirt-and-tie combo wearing tycoon Herman Blume was as achingly sweet and true as it was improbable and incongruous.

 

 

Max: That’s the Perfect Attendance Award and the Punctuality Award. I got those at Rushmore. I thought you could choose which one you like more, and you could wear that one and I could wear the other.

 

Blume: I'll take Punctuality. 

 

And a bond was forged, we'd like to hope, forever.

 

Friendship for me has always been a complicated duck.  I suppose that's because I was never particularly interested in having a friend, I was more interested in having a brother, which I never did.  The friendships I forged throughout my life were quirky, easy to mock, and just as easy to understand and affirm.  Close, protective, exclusive.  The standards I set were rigid-- I expected nothing, except total loyalty and acceptance of my complicated personality, my sometimes need to eat breakfast for dinner, to sit in a car and drive around aimlessly for hours and talk about aboslutely nothing, to require a sounding board for neuroses and failings, to mitigate and sift through hopes, dreams and desires. 

 

That's all I required. 

 

There's more difficult challenges in the world, to be sure, than to be my friend, my wannabrother, but I'll tell you this: I wouldn't want to be my friend.  Because I might not hear from me for six months.  Or a year-and-a-half.  Because one day I might get a lenghty email out of the blue laden with emotion and straw-grasping and belly-aching and what am I supposed to do with that? 

 

I wouldn't know how to be my friend. 

 

As I get older, I'm learning more about how I am.  Not liking, just learning.  About the manipulation, the control, the demands and the resentments.  The need for validation.  Please, make me feel better about myself-- the choices I've made, and those I couldn't.  Am I wrong?  Am I bad?  Should I stay in therapy or should I go?  Was this the wrong thing to say?  Was it right? 

 

Am I right?

 

Should I take Perfect Attendance or Punctuality? 

 

My father had a best friend back in Israel, when he was young.  And one day his friend drowned in the ocean while he and my father and another friend were fucking around together on the beach.  You can talk to my father about the army-- about the redheaded soldier who was so ostracized that he tried to shoot himself in the head and wound up blowing off his jaw, you can ask him about the fear he had in adopting my half-sister and moving to this country with nothing.  But I haven't found the courage to ask him about losing his best friend.  I've lost friends, too, but they were not eaten by Poseidon.  They were taken away from me for this reason or that-- it doesn't really matter why anymore, it's so long ago now.

 

And I get it.  That's supposed to happen.  It's like shedding dead skin, only losing skin cells doesn't hurt.  You don't feel it happening.  A painless procedure.  You'll just feel a little pinch.  A little punch.  A staggering blow.  Out cold. 

 

But, no matter what happens in my life, I'll always have Hollywood-- and its quizzical male pairings, grasping at and clinging to each other for God knows what reason, wearing each other's pins, performing careworn comedy rountines, lighting each other's cigarettes, being there for each other. 

 

Being there.