Tag Archives: friendship

Infinite Saturdays

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Forty-year friendships, making new ones in midlife, and choosing who gets your time

I’m curious: If you’re a Gen X kid, are you still close friends with the people you grew up with?

Because I am.

There was a bigger group when I was in high school. Eleven, twelve, however many guys, plus other friends in my orbit of those sprawling high-school groups. (You are probably one of them, reading this right now.)

But inside it, there was a core group.

That core group has shifted and melded and drifted apart and come back together over the years. There have been different eras in those friendships. People got closer. People got farther away. Life happened.

But fundamentally? Those are still the people I’m going to go to. Those are the people I want in my life.

We don’t live in the same places anymore. We stay in touch mostly through texts, occasionally phone calls or FaceTime. Sometimes we probably go too long without talking.

But we stick together.

At least one of these guys and I are coming up on forty years of friendship pretty soon, if we haven’t crossed it already. Forty years, man.

That is fucking awesome.

And I’ve been thinking about it because I’m watching my son, who is fifteen and going into his freshman year of high school, start making some of these connections himself.

That is something I have always wanted for him.

It was important to me that our family be close, obviously. I want him to love us and trust us, and hopefully, if we’ve done our job well, he does.

But I also wanted him to have other people he could love and trust. Maybe forever.

Is that happening right now? I don’t know. It kind of looks like it.

Obviously things have changed. Technology has changed. The way teenagers socialize has changed. Whatev. But underneath all of that, I wonder how different it really is?

There are four, five, six phone numbers in my phone right now (no longer memorized like in 1992) that I could call and say:

I need you here. Now.

And there’s a pretty good chance at least one or two of those guys would start figuring out how to get here. Maybe more. Depending on what was happening, maybe all of them.

And that is a tremendous comfort.

It’s also a tremendous joy.

There are people from that group I miss horribly, too. I really, really fucking miss them.

But friendship doesn’t survive automatically. You have to work at it.

And I’ve made new friends, too.

Our family moved a few years ago, and I now have people in my life whom I’ve known for only about four years. Are we as close as the guys I grew up with? No.

How could we be? You can’t manufacture forty years.

But can I call them? Yeah.

In fact, we have some stuff coming up on the calendar right now where we need help, and these are the people we called.

Because I love them.

Because I trust them.

They are very different people from my high-school friends, but they share some of the same qualities. Like: They show up.

And I’m discovering something very cool as I get older:

You can still make friends.

Not acquaintances. Not networking contacts. Not “people you know.”

Friends. People you are genuinely happy to give your time to.

And that phrase—give your time to—feels more important to me now than it ever has before. Because every minute counts.

I’m on the younger end of Gen X, which means plenty of people in my generation are older than I am, but at some point you start doing the math.

There aren’t infinite Saturdays. There aren’t infinite afternoons sitting around talking bullshit and laughing. There aren’t infinite phone calls.

So I have become pretty particular about how those minutes get spent.

If I’m spending them with you, I mean it.

I have a group of newer friends I get together with almost every Saturday. Sometimes it’s three hours. Sometimes four. Sometimes five.

And I realized recently: That’s intentional.

That was the word I was looking for. Intentional.

I am intentionally spending part of my finite life with these people.

And they are intentionally spending part of theirs with me.

That may be one of the great defining qualities of friendship as we get older.

It’s not necessarily about proximity, or how often you text, or if you went to the same high school.

Intentionality.

We are choosing each other.

If you can find people you can be intentional with—and who are intentional about you—I think that is what really sets a friendship into concrete.

So I’m curious: Are you still friends with the people you grew up with?

Do you have somebody in your phone you’ve known for thirty or forty years who would still answer if you called and said, I need you?

Have those friendships changed as you’ve gotten older?

And maybe just as importantly:

Have you managed to make new ones?

Because if you have, I’d really love to hear about it.

John Hughes Didn’t Invent the American High School Experience

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Those of us in the Gen X cohort—and probably the Millennial cohort too—grew up with John Hughes movies.

The thing people younger than that potentially don’t understand is that John Hughes didn’t invent class and social struggle in the American public high school. He reflected it.

One of the reasons movies like Some Kind of Wonderful, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and, of course, The Breakfast Club resonated so much with us is because they were true.

Now, they were exaggerated, to a certain degree. Or maybe they weren’t.

No matter how old I am, when I watch Bender’s monologue—“stupid, worthless, no-good…”—and his honest, authentic rage about what happens at his house, most of my cohort is like, “Yeah. I believe that.”

Even if those specific things weren’t said or done to us personally, the sensation of it—the abuse, the neglect, all of it—felt real. And we probably knew someone for whom it was true. I laugh at “Wanna know what I got for Christmas this year? It was a better fuckin’ year at the old Bender family. I got a carton of cigarettes.” This was a real thing for one of my friends.

That’s why we loved those movies. When we saw one of the characters dealing with people of a different alleged social class putting them down in some way, people of my generation were like, “Yeah. That’s how it goes.”

I don’t want to speak for our entire cohort, but I think that’s why a lot of us still love those movies now. (Problematic now? Yes. But that’s a different conversation.)

Things Have Changed

In the intervening years, things have changed quite a bit.

I hope things have changed a lot.

I started seeing it when I became an author and began doing school visits, specifically as a young adult author. I was visiting a lot of high schools, and I could already see differences.

I remember going to a high school football game about fifteen years ago, and the quarterback was also the valedictorian.

Where I come from—I don’t know whether this was true for you, but it was true at my school, in my area, in my era—that was unheard of.

You could be the quarterback or be on a team. You could be smart and get good grades. Or you could be into Dungeons & Dragons, theater, chess, band, or whatever your nerdy thing was. But you cannot be both.

I imagine every school had its own social stratifications. A lot of this depends on what part of the country you were in and what your immediate local community was like.

But a quarterback who was also the valedictorian?

Not where I came from. This is a good change.

We Still Wear the Uniforms

Look, if you’re thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old and you’re still wearing Vans? Bro. You’re probably not skating tonight.

(Okay, some of you may be.)

But the majority of us who still wear Vans probably aren’t hitting a half-pipe anytime soon. Or, if we are, it’s because we’re hitting it with our face and breaking a hip.

So why the hell do we still wear Vans?

Well, first of all, because they’re badass…

But they’re badass because Vans has spent decades cultivating a very specific image and a very specific brand that speaks to us. We want to be associated with that.

One of my prized possessions is a pair of black Vans with the Social Distortion Skelly logo on the side.

I fucking love those shoes, man.

And I want people who see me wearing them to go, “Oh!” and make judgments about me. For good or for ill.

That is the point.

The People Who Never Scared Me

I would genuinely love to hear feedback about this, because I’m sure it’s different for everybody:

I don’t remember ever being accosted by somebody wearing a Nine Inch Nails shirt. Or a Bauhaus shirt. Or fucking Vans, for that matter.

You know what I’m saying?

I don’t remember ever being accosted, assaulted, or made to feel less than by somebody with crazy-colored hair.

Never.

Why? Well, that’s a topic for another time.

I’m just saying that has been my life experience.

Those are also the kids—and the adults—I write about a lot.

I don’t know what the different social levels, categories, or whatever you want to call them are these days in your local American high school. I think they’re different from when I was there.

My kid, for example, is turning into a complete jock. He’s a football player, which shocks the hell out of me.

He also plays D&D.

That was not going to happen in the ’80s and ’90s. Not going to happen.

And that’s cool. I’m so glad to see it.

53rd & 3rd

This book I have coming soon is called 53rd & 3rd, based on the Ramones song.

(It is not about New York. It is not about prostitution. There are just a lot of Ramones references in the story, for reasons you’ll see when you read it.)

53rd & 3rd is a breakdown of “those kids” I grew up with—the kids who, I think, still exist in the American landscape.

It’s about how they respond when someone who allegedly doesn’t belong starts to infiltrate their group.

Like many of my novels, it takes place over the course of just one night, because, in my experience, that’s when the big things happen.

It’s that one phone call, right? That one email. That one text that upends your whole world.

So the book takes place over one night, on one corner, with one group of kids who are all suffering from a collective trauma they experienced in another book I wrote called Mercy Rule.

53rd a companion to Mercy Rule, but not really a sequel.

It’s about these outsider kids—or whatever you want to call them, the kids I was happy to be associated with as a teenager—and what happens when their group gets invaded.

Or so they think. They think it’s an invasion.

It’s a story about being one of Those Kids and if we’re all as open-armed as we think or thought ourselves to be. I know I struggle with that, still. But the kids in this novel still get it right by the time the sun comes up on their little corner of the city.

And that’s the stuff I love to write about. Going through hell together, and coming out the other side together.

Because Those Kids with the crazy color in their hair and their Docs and their leather jackets are why I’m here today.

Remember who you were. Those Kids have a lot to teach us.

How about you? What’s your story of Those Kids?

~ Tom

June 30, 1989

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35 years ago today, I was 15 and trying to make a movie.

I did that a lot between 13 and 15. And, as would become typical later in life, it was a reboot of something I’d already done. There was room for improvement!

I had three guys helping me. Two I’d known less than a year, the other only a few months if that. I honestly don’t remember when he and I first crossed paths, but I really think it was that summer.

Most importantly, he had a VHS video camera, and agreed to come help make this film.

And I was pissed.

We were making good progress at first. We even went by everyone’s house to pick up “special effects,” which included a green floodlight, a red flood light, and two different strobe lights.

As I was directing, trying to get effects set up and tested, someone started playing Guns N’ Roses. Paradise City. And then they fucked around, all three of them. Swinging the floods around, lip-synching into a flashlight, spinning the camera.

I have this on tape. You can see and hear how irritated I am. We are Making A Film, goddammit!

I wasn’t gonna win, though. So instead of throwing a fit, which was typical in those days, I gave up and joined in, thinking that maybe if I did that, they’d get their zoomies out and we could get back to work.

We never did get back to work. Instead we spend the next several hours making “videos,” meaning, lip-synching to songs and recording it all on the VHS. I did “Comfortably Numb.”

And then we made plans to do it again.

Other people heard about it and wanted to join in. This kicked off roughly a decade in total of this odd past-time, known as “Videos.” To an outsider, most of it is probably really weird or stupid. I won’t argue that.

But that outsider wasn’t there, being a rock star for a few minutes a couple times a year, expressing all the joy and rage and angst our sixteen to twenty-one year old selves could muster from bands like Metallica, REM, Genesis, Social Distortion, Pink Floyd, and dozens more. One of my best was “Hey You” from The Wall. I fucking rocked that video.

Jesus, it was so much fun. As we got older and got jobs, we started spending real money on this hobby. Which I guess is normal for any hobby.

Most importantly, 35 years ago today, while I may not have known it at the time, something got kicked off that would last all these years later.

Not unilaterally. Not evenly. (Both to my everlasting regret.) But still here.

Elements and ephemera from that day suffuse my writing to this day. In MERCY RULE, I even wrote an entire scene in which some kids are making Videos, and it’s secretly one of my all-time favorite beats in any of my novels.

The passion, the heightened emotion, the drama and angst…the loyalty…

I write young adult, I write horror, I write urban fantasy, sometimes I even write high fantasy or dabble in some genre. In all of it, those guys are there. That love is there. That hope is there.

That hope that those who read my work feel seen and heard, the way I felt seen and heard giving my best David Gilmour impression with a wooden guitar in hand and fake microphone taped to a PCV pipe “mic stand” performing for an audience of thousands in my living room.

35 years ago today, something special began. I know that not everyone had or has what I did and do. Whether or not you were given that gift, I hope my writing and the community around it can extend it now.

Everyone deserves and needs a June 30, 1989.

Never Abandon the Blissful Value of Saying What Can’t Be Said

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MIXTAPE

by Tom Leveen

(c) 2022

 

A mixtape says the things you can’t. Or won’t.

Or sometimes: shouldn’t.

Mikey fretted over this daily as he sorted through song after song, classics and new hits, trying to compose his feelings with someone else’s music.

Some of it depended on his mood. Some days it was all AC/DC, which he knew Glorietta liked from back in the day. But this wasn’t the sort of situation where one could blithely record Highway to Hell onto the mix, even if it was one of her favorites. The title was just too . . . inappropriate.

He leavened today’s tape with some old R.E.M., thinking some of the lyrics of Driver 8 said a lot of what he wished to say: take a break, we’ve been on this trip too long.

He’d never say that to her. Even if he could muster up the courage and, hell, write the words down, they still wouldn’t come out right. He had way too much experience with that. Glorietta deserved his best.

Nirvana next? No, too abrasive. Poison? No, a power ballad didn’t work either, not today.

Checking the time—he did not want to be late, so as to maximize their time together—Mikey hurriedly chose some Midnight Oil, followed by U2. Classic stuff. Despite not the world’s biggest U2 fan, in his opinion, The Joshua Tree was one of the top great albums ever made.

Minutes ticked away as he painstakingly constructed the opus. He didn’t have a title for it yet; previous incarnations included A Fragile Flash of Lightning, riffing off Pink Floyd’s Delicate Sound of Thunder. Glorietta—she preferred “Glory”—had given him a brief laugh for that, which Mikey cherished. Last week he’d gone full metal-head, nothing but Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, Metallica, Skid Row, Queensrÿche, Flotsam and Jetsam . . . and called it Wish You Were Hair, bemoaning that he’d lost his own long locks some time ago and still feeling pretty pouty and petty about it.

Petty! Of course.

Wildflowers became the last song on side B. Glory belonged among the wildflowers, most definitely.

Mikey hesitated as he scrawled the song title on the lined white insert. Did Wildflowers imply too much? That he, Mikey, should be her lover?

No, he decided. Most of the lyrics seemed very pointed at wishing the best for the other person. If that happened to come from a place of pure love and affection and . . . okay, fine, lust . . . Glory wouldn’t be any the wiser.

He hoped. God, the last thing she needed right now his sappy confession of love. No way, man.

Mikey snapped the cassette into its case and ran for his bike. If he pedaled hard, he’d get there just in time.

He got to the hospital one minute after Glory’s visiting hours began. A little breathless, he peeked into her room to see if she was awake.

She was. Barely. The TV was on. Family Ties.

“Hey,” Mikey whispered, still peering around the open door, not wanting to come in without Glory’s permission.

“Hey, you,” Glorietta said, and motioned with her fingers.

It was all the strength she had, and it was all the invitation Mikey needed. He slid into the room and went to the side of the wide bed, where he slipped the case into her hand.

“I, uh, I made . . . I made this . . . um . . . it’s, it’s a new—”

Even in her emaciated state, Glory’s smile lit his insides on fire.

“You know, Michael, one of these days . . .” She had to pause to take a breath. “You’re gonna have to bring a Walkman. Remember those?” Another pause. “Or you could just send me a Spotify list.”

He shook his head. “Not the same.”

“No,” Glory said. “It’s really not. You’re right.”

She lifted the tape to her face, squinting. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Christ, Michael, you’re fifty-five years old, you better get on it.”

Glory smiled again as Mikey shuffled his feet. He wanted to say, “I did. I did find what I was looking for. Forty-five years ago when you moved in next door.”

But he couldn’t, and wouldn’t.

And, probably, oughtn’t.

All these years, nothing but friends. Through her various boyfriends, her first husband, her divorce, her second husband, him leaving her. Never having kids, career like a pinball in one of the old machines they used to play back in the neighborhood growing up. Then finally, this illness. He’d been the best friend he could. So he came every day with a new tape, and he’d keep coming until the inevitable end.

It was nearer than he cared to think about.

Glory gently put the cassette on a nearby table with several others Mikey’d brought over the past couple weeks. He almost helped her do it, her gesture was so weak. But he knew her stubbornness well. She would have given him a raft of shit for helping.

After the tape clattered mildly against the table top, Glory then stretched out her hand toward him.

“Michael.”

Perplexed, he took her hand. She was so cold.

“You don’t have to keep doing this.”

“Yeah, but, I . . . I mean, I do, I want to, I like to . . . unless you want me to stop.”

Glory shook her head weakly against the pillow. “No. Don’t do that. I’m just saying.” A pause. “You have a life. You don’t have to come if you don’t want.”

Mikey licked his lips, eyes darting. The words were right there, he could taste them in his mouth.

They wouldn’t come.

In a burst, Mikey snatched the new mixtape off the table and popped open the tiny radio-cassette player he’d brought on his first visit. He jammed the tape inside, slapped the tray shut, and pressed the play button.

Freddie Mercury said what he couldn’t. Mikey glanced at Glory, to see if she understood.

Glorietta pressed her lips together.

“Yeah,” she said quietly as the song played. “You’re mine, too.”

Mikey smiled, pulled a plastic molded chair to her bed, and sat down. Glory offered her hand again, and he took it.

She fell asleep an hour later in the middle of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. Mikey stayed by her side until visiting hours were over.

He’d come back tomorrow. Maybe with some Beastie Boys.

 

THE END