We were at the skate park smoking weed when we saw him appear with his new girl next to him. This was years ago, way back before I entered high school. Anthony was two years older than Shawn, Derek and I. We looked up to him in many ways but pitied him in others. For example, he was colorblind. He also had no mother, she died of suicide when he was four. And his father beat him.
I didn't know what it was like to be him. Independent could be a word to describe it. He had a fake ID in ninth grade and smoked cigarettes religiously. If that didn't scream jaded, I had no idea what did.
I knew he was jaded because he didn't like anyone outside of our circle. He always had something to say about anyone he saw walk by. That girl needs a fucking, that guy's belt looks pathetic, those kids should smoke a joint and stop throwing rocks at incoming vehicles… He had a lot to say. Especially about Cindy, his new girl.
So when we finally met her we were shocked. She looked like a junkie. A prat with a kind soul, beautiful eyes, but that was about it. He fell for someone so… ugly. But she was what he wanted. I could tell she was a heteromonogamous nymphomaniac from one look at her. A solid demisexual partner, not a ditzy muse.
He was more intelligent than all of us. But why the girl he probably met outside of a motel? He used his ID to stay at those, often. His father's dates were the cause of this. You'd think someone with real problems would take to some sinister ways. But I knew Tony had decent intentions with the world when I heard him say, "She needs me around."
They dated for seven months. He never explained why things had ended.
I stand at the viewing looking at his pale face. There is a look of peace residing in his expression. If I could say anything without looking like a psycho talking to a corpse, I'd admit he was a good looking guy.
No thanks to his father, who solemnly shakes hands belonging to unfamiliar faces. Does he even care? He looks decrepit. And drunk.
Goodbye, friend, I think to myself. It is this exact moment that I feel a cold hand on my shoulder. I turn around quickly.
The fact that I thought I would see his ghost sends me flying alone. Tears fill my eyes. My conscious thoughts revolve around the fact that I don't remember his last words, or know if he felt pain or not during the overdose, and suddenly I can't inhale air well enough to not be gasping out loud between breaths. If this is a panic attack, these things suck. What was he thinking about before he died?
"You're fine, brother." His voice somehow speaks over all chatter in the room. I'm deliriously hysterical now. His aunt grabs my hand and leads me out to the hallway.
"It's my fault." I weep, although it's not. "I should've never trusted Derek-"
"Honey, he's in a better place now. He wanted to go." she says.
"What?" I reply, taken aback. He wasn't… he never mentioned anything.
"You're the reason he made it this far. When he tried to commit suicide every Christmas, he would use methods that wouldn't succeed. He lived for his friends." His aunt explains. Her green eyes are full of seriousness with a mix of disarrayed kindness. "You've done well, David."
A few days later, I want to curb stomp Tony's father. He has refused to provide a funeral for his own fucking son. I ask myself what on Earth did he ever do that was positive in his life. Aside from nearly drinking himself to death? Nothing at all.
Pride and shame braided together in him like a rope. Tony's father lived like a man perpetually running from himself, and everything he did grew out of a small, exhausted set of motives: avoidance, self-preservation, fear of shame, and a brittle, selfish narcissism that masqueraded as survival. He drank to quiet the noise of mistakes he refused to look at, but the bottle was never a cure so much as a blindfold. With every drink he chose temporary oblivion over reconciliation, and every morning he woke further from the possibility of repair.
He rarely accepted that he could have been the cause of Tony's unraveling; to do so would make him small in a way he could not tolerate. So he blamed circumstance, blamed bad luck, blamed other people. In that blame he kept himself whole enough to avoid the deeper collapse of admitting he had failed as a father. And that is why he can't be bothered.