Michael is dead and I want to say I don’t care. So is this a sad commentary on his life or mine? Obviously I have feelings about his death but the reality is that for the last 20 years he might as well have been dead.
Truth be told, 20 years ago I had thoughts of killing him myself. That was just after he fired me from the job I had held with his family’s business for over 11 years. I guess now with his passing I will never get the closure that I would have liked.
I have often wondered if Michael ever felt any guilt, regret or remorse for what he did to me. From what I know of his life these last 20 years I doubt if he gave me much of a second thought, unlike me who has thought often about how I could have done things differently. Even to this day I still have dreams about working with him so I guess sub-consciously I’m still trying to work through it.
To quote my friend who emailed me about Michael’s death, “It’s weird to have pity on someone who was blessed with such good fortune”. And that’s the great contradiction of Michael’s life. He was blessed with great promise and cursed with inner demons.
As I’m writing this and thinking back to the Michael I knew in high school and worked with for many years, the tears are starting to flow and the emotion is welling up in my chest and I realize I am sad and I do care. Even if we hadn’t spoken in many years and had totally different lives we still had a shared history and there were a lot of good times in that history.
Michael and I were part of a small close knit group of friends in high school. Mark was our natural leader but Michael was always trying to one up him. I was always just a follower so watching their rivalry was kind of fun.
Michael got his one up when he started dating Mark’s ex-girl friend Lissa in high school and eventually married her, he asked me to give a toast as part of the ceremony (but like so many other things in his life the demons won out and they eventually divorced).
As a follower I went along for the ride on many crazy adventures. With Michael I was there when he got caught trying to steal an amplifier from a repair shop, I was riding shot gun when he hit over 100 mph in his mother’s Electra 225 on a residential street, I was in the basket when he took us up to 10,000 feet in a hot air balloon, and I was there when he got access to 5000 hits of “clear light window pane LSD”. Now I’m not promoting it but there is a special and unique bond that is created when you take multiple psychedelic trips with friends.
Michael was one of the smartest people I have ever known, he had an almost photographic memory so school work came easy. He never studied or wrote a paper until the last minute but always pulled it off and got good grades. After high school Michael was breezing through college trying to figure out what to do with his life. When we would talked about the future he said how he never wanted to work in the family business and was thinking about becoming a Veterinarian. He also thought that the world should be fairer with less greed, some kind of hybrid between capitalism and socialism.
His life changed forever when half way through college his father unexpectedly died and Michael had to go into the family business. I guess the family could have sold the business but instead Michael sacrificed his dreams to keep his father’s alive. My life also changed because soon after I also went to work for them. Over the next 11 years Michaels and my relationship had its ups and then downs. We started off sharing a house and being good friends, we did a lot of fun things together, and our wives became best friends.
Sadly, Michael always thought that he was indestructible, from the crazy risk taking in high school to the never ending substance abuse thru out his adulthood. It was the drug use that ultimately caused our friendship to end. I was able to conquer my addiction but Michael always ended up going back. When I tried to intervene by talking to his mother (who was still the business owner) Michael never forgave me and eventually fired me.
Michael firing me was the most traumatic and then best thing that ever happened to me. If I hadn’t been fired I would have stayed unhappily working, afraid to leave. I would have never started my first restaurant, would never have moved cross country, wouldn’t have become “Steady Eddy”, in short if it wasn’t for Michael I wouldn’t be who, what, and where I am today. I guess if I’m really going to be honest I have missed Michael these last 20 years and now that he’s dead I will miss him even more because any spark of a hope for reconciliation is gone forever.
To view the column in it's original form go to page 12 of the following link. Winters Express 11/10/11
