Back when I was a kid, I often carried around a cassette tape recorder, an outstretched mic created a buffer between me and the world. Recording was my way of managing life. And so I recorded everything, my parents’ arguments and their phone calls and my mom pretending to mime Lingala songs. Mostly though I recorded myself.
With no one to share in my love for a medium. I kind of got frustrated along the way and wanted to abandon it all for something more adventurous.
It was all just me and my microphone for an audience of zero until the day Daniel came along.
I was 12 years old when we were first introduced at an initiation rite. Immediately, Daniel asked me what blood type I was. “0”, I said uncertainly. “Me too”, he shouted. Genuinely excited to find some small thing we shared. I was an aloof kid but was quickly won over by Daniel’s goodness. And the fact our mothers were already best friends made our best friendship feel faded. Plus Daniel proved as obsessive about recording as I was sealed the deal.
The weekends revolved around our recording radio plays, Daniel and I would sleep in the same cowhide in his parents’ den. His dad, Yuventino, a large man with an organic Lango accent would make us breakfast in just his underwear. His undershirt tucked into his undies like it was some style imported from Tito Okello Lutwa’s regime.
One time trying to explain to Yuventino how I like my eggs and had no success with fried. I described two suns in a cloud. Daniel loved that so much that he started ordering his eggs that way too. Two suns in a cloud.
After breakfast, we’d head to Daniel’s bedroom. Shut the door and record all morning.
We were a gang of two.
For the first time, I no longer felt alone. Together Daniel and I recorded prank phone calls, our parents` social gatherings and interactions and we made radio play after radio play, creating characters like ChickenFoot and P.B Lovin`, two burned-out radio DJs.
Years later I’m in Anok Peninsula and Daniel is in Small City, Apolika We haven’t spoken in nine years, and at the moment for some reason, we’re discussing one of our favorite topics- the indie and soft rock music of our ages.
In our late teens, Daniel and I began to have less and less in common and we drifted apart. Our first conversation in almost a decade is not going well.
The last time I saw Daniel was back home in Small City. Our mothers who are still best friends thought it’d be nice for the families to get together. Daniel showed up at the restaurant with a shaved head and thin chin strap beard with the way he kept his arms crossed and his posture erect.
That evening, Daniel had something of the dictator about him. He was living in the bachelor’s apartment in his parent’s basement in Adakingo, a suburb we grew up in just outside of Small City.
Daniel drove a school bus for The Olives School and said the Headmaster had nicknamed him the surgeon because of how he zipped through narrow dusty streets with such precision.
At the end of the meal, Daniel asked if I wanted to go outside and catch a view for old-time sake kind of thing. The idea of being outside a suburban strip mall restaurant while our aged parents waited inside was unappealing
So I said, no. “At least stand outside with me,” Daniel said, “and keep me company”. But I dug my heels in and Daniel grew angry. We parted on bad terms that evening, almost 10 years ago. And that was the last time I saw Daniel or thought too hard about him until now.
The reason Daniel and I are speaking right now is because he has only months to live.
Daniel is dying of Nodding Syndrome and has undergone both herbal and spiritual treatment. He’s recently gone through 11 days of fasting to keep the disease from spreading but it was no use.
Even though that first conversation went poorly, I continue to spend my evenings talking to Daniel because somewhere in the back of my mind is the memory of the kid from my childhood, the kid who stayed by my side tending to my adult-size depression (or so I thought) in the darkest hours of my teens.
I remember days and nights spent in Daniel’s bedroom just lying in his cowhide bed under the black bulb of his light fixture listening to The Fray and System of A Down. Too scared to face the world. Back then Daniel would reassure me, telling me to think all the bad thoughts I could to get them out of my system, to exhaust them so that eventually I’d only be left with the good ones. Being with Daniel was one of the few places where I felt safe so I called him again and again. Our conversations usually occur at night with Daniel still in his parents’ small grass thatched hut. The same hut where we spent our childhoods and me wandering the silent unpaved streets of my Central North neighborhood.
During these phone chats, I never know what to say. I struggle to find common ground but always come up short. When I bring up old mutual friends, Daniel speaks of them resentfully, with jobs it’s the same.
On the rare occasion, I raise something personal about myself. It gets no traction when I tell him how I’m now a father of a five-year-old. Daniel, a bachelor says that people who have kids only do it for ego reasons.
Mostly we stick to the subject of Daniel’s pain, which is brutal. He can’t eat without pain, stand, or even lie down without pain.
Sometimes he’ll put the phone down and I’ll listen to him as he howls from the bathroom. There are drugs, some prescribed and some not. But no matter there’s always pain and anger at the pain and anger at what seems like me.
On most nights after a typical conversation, I come home and say to my wife Angela that maybe this is a bad idea.
We drifted apart for a reason I say we’re strangers and yet, even though Daniel doesn’t seem to even want to talk to me, we continue to talk night after night, I’m beginning to get the impression that maybe he has no one else.
Daniel is no longer the sweet lonely kid who told me not to squirt the housefly in his bedroom because he was his pet. The boy with whom we would throw pebbles at girls and run away. That Daniel seems to be long gone.
Even though Daniel and I weren’t in touch over the years when I’d ask after him, my mother would always say the same thing. Daniel and his parents were fighting like cats and dogs. Daniel’s father died about a year ago. Now it’s just him and his mom.
Daniel’s parents had had another son before him but because of profound mental and physical disabilities, he was institutionalized. After that, they adopted Daniel. Both Daniel and I were raised by parents who saw screaming and hitting as the solution to all of life’s child-rearing dilemmas.
But from Daniel’s perspective, worse than that was the neglect. Daniel’s dad worked a lot and his mom always seemed to have more time for her friends than for him. It’s something Daniel still can’t let go of.
What does one owe a childhood friend? Especially when that friend seems to have changed so much?. Throughout our phone calls, a question that keeps kicking around in the back of my mind is whether all of Daniel’s anger has somehow eaten up the goodness. I continue to phone Daniel over the next couple of months in hopes of seeing it, feeling that goodness again.
And over time, Daniel grows softer with me and I grow less afraid of offending him, Less afraid of offending a dying man.
Then one night I received a message, listening to it now I’m struck by how much Daniel’s voice had mellowed since our first conversations. Instead of “Richard” or “Rich”. Daniel calls me Ricky just like he did when we were kids. Like he did when we were best friends.
Remember Daniel would sometimes drift into delusions, imaginary flights that would weave throughout our conversation. But other times, the delusions were mixed up with childhood memories, like time had collapsed and Daniel was all ages at once dying but also back to an age when his mom took us to the auction market on their Linken motorcycle. The delusions were tender and vulnerable and observing them was like standing over his bed watching him dream. The plan is for me to see Daniel during a visit back home. My first since Urban TV closed down.
Recently my therapist recommended Ketamine to me, a drug sometimes prescribed for untreatable depression. In my case, she thought it might help shift my perspective, which still tends towards darkness. A day after Daniel and I had this conversation while taking several hits from my Ketamine inhaler. And about to go for a Saturday morning run.
I was suddenly overcome with sobbing and a feeling of unreality. As a man who endured epiphanies, I was shaken.
Then for some reason, I was 30 years old moving to Purongo while waiting at the stage for the taxi that would take me Angela, and our then two-year-old son, Lucas to our new life. Lucas walks up to a stranger and hugs his legs and I burst into tears. A smell, a meal, and a day at the beach. And so goes a life. Without the usual record button pressed down, life is fragmented and fast and nearly impossible to make sense of. Narrating it helps me to shed light but always in retrospect. With the Ketamine coursing through me though, I saw the dots illuminate and connect each handing off with purpose. One to the other like a succession of dominoes. Tracing the seemingly useless years that got me to where I was with the wife, the child, the life it all felt so precarious like I was standing on a narrow column of shoe boxes.
It filled me with vertigo.
To the question of what one owes a childhood friend? In my case, I owed Daniel everything. It was through knowing him in those early years that the base of the tower was formed. It was in listening to songs together in his bedroom that I discovered a feeling I’d pursue a career.
Suddenly I could see how everything counted. That Daniel counted. That my love for Daniel counted. I wanted Daniel to know this. I wanted him to know that while our personalities might have driven us apart, a deep-rooted love brought us back together.
But later that day, I got a call from my mother informing me that Daniel had died.
In the months after Daniel’s death. I’m unable to let go of how I wasn’t there for him. In his last days, I obsess over what his final moments might have been like. I begin accidentally calling my son by Daniel’s name. I do this so often that eventually, my son begins to ask who in the world is Daniel.
I try to answer him but never know quite how. “ We were best friends when I wasn’t much older than you,” I say, and then I get small fox and I isolate in my basement. I listen to all the old music collections Daniel and I used to sing along to The Creed, Rob Thomas, The Fray, and Sia. But instead of laughing after each lyric line I cry.
“I’ve always wanted to write a book”. Daniel said during one of our late-night conversations “ Where everything the hero does is wrong.” A lot of things in life like that, I responded. “You don’t understand”. Daniel said. And maybe I didn’t, perhaps a lot of what we take as a life choice is already encoded in us at a very young age, younger than we can even remember.
And by then it’s already too late. The moments are already handing off one to the other. Like those dominoes that cannot be stopped.
Who knows what those first six months were like for Daniel and how they dictated the life to come. Maybe Daniel was wrong. Maybe his paralysis, his inability to leave the nest wasn’t, as he said, learned helplessness but innate helplessness. The kind a baby feels. Maybe for Daniel, the feeling just never faded away.
Because I never made it to Shady, Small City before Daniel died because I wasn’t there to hug him or just hold his hand. I’m left with a terrible sense of loss from the many questions I have about Daniel’s last days. The one that weighs on me most heavily is about Daniel’s anger and whether it ever subsided.
Daniel rode off into the proverbial Mexican sunset leaving me with more questions than answers. But our bond over good, meaningful music will never fade. And as I type this, Elliot Smith`s A Fond Farewell is playing on my mind.
You are missed, Daniel!