NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER

My Best Friend Steve

My best friend Steve, who the first day he met me at Jay Julien and Associates for some unknown reason decided I am going to be this guy’s friend for life, who loved to laugh and joke and was always fun to hang out with, the person with whom I shared all my big plans for the future, my best friend, despite being anti-Semitic (and half-Jewish) and a Catholic who asked me, a born Atheist, not to joke about God, and who had a number of weird ideas—for instance, the one about how, although he wasn’t a musician or trying to be, he was sure he would die young like his musical heroes, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain, and was scared of turning twenty-seven, which was how old they were when they died—who was always up for grabbing a slice of pizza after work and then going to see the next good new movie coming out—in 1994, for example, our first year as best friends, I remember we saw Ed Wood, Clerks, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, and last but not least Chungking Express, which we both agreed was very cool, with great imagery, definitely one of the best movies of the year—who loved movies as much as me and also wanted to make them, and who never did, never even started any of the screenplays he wanted to write—most famously, Down The Tracks, a coming-of-age story about him and his friends growing up in Brooklyn in the eighties (the title came from the train tracks at the end of his block, past a chained link fence, where he and his friends used to hang out)—who lived by his pager, but only interrupted the conversation (which was always flowing) and the pizza if the call was a really important one—specifically, from his current girlfriend or his mother, who had been sick for years—in which case he’d apologize, say he’d be right back, jump on the nearest payphone and within a minute or two we’d pick up right where we left off, who was always the guy I could count on for anything anytime, who I spent the most time with, other than girls—until I went and got married and moved away, to the South of all places, the friggin’ South, and had kids to boot (who he sent the best birthday presents every year)—who I always made sure to meet up with for pizza and a movie whenever I came back to see family, even after our lives started moving in different directions, who almost got married but didn’t, who said to me once he didn’t want to have kids because he didn’t want his kids to have to go through what he did, his mother sick all those years and it being just him there to take care of her after his father unexpectedly also got sick and then passed away, who stayed the same as the years went by, still dating this or that girl, still talking about making movies, writing that screenplay, but never getting as far as the first page—I loved him, don’t get me wrong, but 1994 was gone and wasn’t going to come back—my best friend Steve, the best friend I will ever have—he asked me a few years before he died if I could maybe get away from the wife and kids for a couple of weeks and take that Route 66 road trip we had always talked about, just the two of us (he loved Kerouac, his AOL screen name was Moriarty-something…I can’t remember), and I said, one day, but not now; I can’t—the kids, the cost, etc. Two years later, when I was up in New York visiting family and he was dying of cancer (he had told me he was sick, but not that sick), he invited me out for one last slice and a movie—we had the slice, but then he started feeling too sick and we had to skip the movie, our last movie together. Twelve years ago now, not for nothin’ (as he used to say), my best friend Steve walked out of that pizzeria and out of my life for good—out of the many lives he touched, sure, but out of my life—walked out of my life and left me alone, with a good wife and two great kids and a lot of movies seen and unseen, but still, a little bit alone. The other day I finally saw Chungking Express with my son, who is now as old as Steve and I were when we met that fateful day in Jay Julien’s office (he remembers Steve, even though he was only eight when Steve died, and he has kept to this day some of the toys he sent him for his birthdays). Afterward, we talked about what was cool about the movie and what was interesting, like me and Steve used to do, but mostly what I thought about was the image in the movie of the pager clipped to the chain link fence, and Steve apologizing and saying he’d be right back and heading for the payphone—and of how Route 66 is still out there waiting to be driven, and of how I still haven’t done it and of how I am starting to wonder if I ever will.