How to Answer

            by James Barnett

 

Most people have a best friend. Maybe not now, but they have or will at some point in their life. It's an inevitable thing; you just meet somebody who you feel you can trust more than your other friends. You spend all your time with that person cultivating that relationship. You talk about things with that person that you know you couldn't talk to other people about because you just wouldn't be able to. Fear of being laughed at, or coming off as something other than your image; with a best friend you don't ever have to worry about that; they are there to support you, as you are in turn there for them.

 

I met him during my sixth grade year. I left my elementary school and all my friends, being the only one going on to King Middle School. I knew literally one person at school. As a result I spent many of my lunches in the forgiving safety of the school library. Time went on however, and I made friends in my classes and began to eat with them and their friends at lunch. This was a big change for me and I was going to make the most of it. I learned what I could of my new friends. I was a latecomer; all these kids had been friends through elementary, and spent all of their free time together. But times and people change. I became extremely close with a guy in class named Riley. We remained tight all the way through middle school, a kind of inseparable tag team that was able to tackle any problem as long as we went at it together. He became the first person I drank with, and then later the first person I smoked with. He was the person I entered my teenage years with.  He was the person I would stay up with and talk about girls, the person I would go snowboarding and skating with, the person I could be a kid with.

 

As the two of us got older and we left King, destined for the Mecca that was Berkeley High, we were still very much the same people we were in sixth grade, rosy-cheeked and baby-faced. We had no real experience with anything, and were still too innocent and naive to have dealt with things like alcohol poisoning, bulimia, or anorexia, and basically uneducated in the harsher aspects of teenage life. For the two of us that stuff was as foreign and unknown as Latin.

 

Berkeley High was an amazing change from King. I no longer had only a small group of people who I was forced to hang out with, but had hundreds of new people to pick and choose from. And yet I still remained close with Riley; we still hung out on weekends, going to late showings of movies and walking around town like freshmen and sophomores are forced to do.  We even both joined the same crew team. We still did pretty much the same things we had as the little middle schoolers only a few months before. This was not a bad thing, and in fact it was a good thing, helping the two of us adjust to the sudden immersion into a sea of new and confusing social situations.

 

That first year I definitely I stayed in my shell a bit more then Riley did. He was off meeting new people and really befriending them, whereas I was content for the most part to hang around with the old crowd and watch new people with a kind of distant longing. I stayed the same person I was upon entering high school; I still dressed terribly and lacked any social grace at all. I watched as Riley began to change. He began to pay more attention to his appearance. This was not extraordinary because half the guys I know spend a quarter of their lives flexing in front of something. But Riley began to look through magazines, pointing at male models' abs with relish. “Look at that dude's abs, he's so ripped,” he would exclaim. I would agree as always with a kind of curiosity as to why he cared that much. It didn't really strike me as odd that I didn't think the way Riley did about looks and appearances.  All people are different, and all people have a few individual quirks. His was the way he looked, and how odd is that for a teenager, really?

 

Riley's and my relationship progressed in the same way it had for years. I didn't really notice any huge changes, but then why would I? I was off being teenager, hearing my voice deepen, and fending off the occasional acne outburst. I wasn't looking for anything, because I had no idea that there might be something I should be looking for. I just went happily into my ignorance, and lived my own self-involved life.

 

This took me into Christmas break of my freshman year, which was the first time I began to take a harder look at what was going on in Riley's life. That winter he quit the crew team, which is completely understandable, because crew is a sport that requires you to freeze and be in pain six days a week, ten months a year, but it still struck me as odd. He was by far one of the best guys on the team, and for him to quit out of the blue was bizarre.  After this I started to look a little closer at what Riley was doing. I was simply concerned that something might be bothering him, and I wanted to find out what it could be. Of course I never did notice anything earth shattering because he hid it well, and I really didn't look too hard.  The only thing I ever really did notice was the fact that he brushed his teeth a lot, and for an excessively long time. This may not seem like a lot, and that's because it isn't. When you notice something like that all you can say is, well that's a little weird. What can you really glean from a piece of information like that?

 

The thing is that I never noticed any real weird behavior. He was my friend, I didn't want to have to admit that there might have been something wrong with him. I didn't say anything to anybody when I first noticed him going straight to the bathroom after meals, and then watching him drink huge quantities later that night. I didn't want to have to say to him that maybe he should tone it down, or even ask him what was going on. It was so much easier for me to pretend that I saw nothing then to go out on a limb and ask him if there was something the matter. How do you even start that conversation? “Dude, I think we need to talk....”? What would that sound like coming out of my mouth? So instead I said nothing, and he and I both kept going. Him doing his thing, and me doing my own.

 

The truth, as I later found out, was that he had become bulimic. He was making himself sicker by the day and nobody really knew why. Nobody knew why because nobody knew what was going on.  And nobody found out what was going on until it was much too late.

 

As it turned out the bulimia was only a drop in a bucket of mental and psychological problems. I am sure that nobody would have found out about these issues were it not for the fact that Riley finally became so frustrated that he tried to end his life. To this day I am not sure whether he was just calling for help, or truly wanted to end his life.

 

Riley and I went out on a Friday night. It was either the end of the semester or the quarter, but I know we were both celebrating being done with some God-awful term paper. He had somehow managed to procure a handle of the cheapest rotgut vodka that I had ever seen. It tasted like someone was pouring gasoline straight down my throat. It was so bad that I could not even drink it, which for me is saying something. He and I decided that we would bring this stuff along with us while we met up with a few friends and made our way up to the movie theaters. I forget what we were supposed to be seeing, maybe it was the Apocalypse Now Redux or something. But we got up to the theater with a lot of time to kill and nothing to do, so we decided to go into the Barnes and Noble conveniently located across the street. As my friends and I perused the magazine aisle, Riley (already quite drunk) told us that he was gong to the bathroom. As he left the rest of us took up comfortable positions on the floor and prepared to read for twenty minutes while waiting for our show to start. I read through my magazine, not really taking in any of what I was reading, and instead contented myself to simply flipping through the glossy pages of Snowboarder. I read the entire magazine through in fifteen minutes, and when I looked up I saw that Riley had still not returned from his bathroom expedition.

 

As we had to leave in two or three minutes we decided the prudent thing to do would be to go and knock on the door very loudly and yell all types of obscene things, as young boys are wont to do. After two minutes of this I began to get a bit worried; we had not heard anything from inside the bathroom, and the store management was becoming less and less pleased with our sophomoric behavior. As our knockings became more and more frantic we finally heard some sound from within. I called out to Riley that we needed to leave, stat. I got some noncommittal response, but heard the lock being slowly undone. As the door opened we saw Riley staggering around the inside of the bathroom like he had just gone ten rounds with Muhammad Ali. In his hand dragged the backpack he had been using to carry his vodka. We saw him, laughed a bit then told him that we needed to go. We made our way out of the bookstore and towards the movie theater, Riley still only semi-conscious and coherent.

 

When we arrived at the theater Riley could barely speak, let alone walk. For those of you who are not big drinkers, this may be a bit confusing. When you chug a lot of alcohol at once you are not immediately hit by it all at once. Your body will absorb it at its own pace, and so you will continue to get drunker for some time, even after you have stopped drinking. Anyway, Riley was so drunk at this point that we were not allowed inside the theater. I told the rest of the group that I would take care of him, and that they should simply go on without us.

 

It got to the point that I could no longer deal with him, and I started to get a bit scared for him. I had no idea what alcohol poisoning actually was, but I knew if you drank too much bad things would happen. When I realized that he actually could not understand the words that were coming out of my mouth, I knew it was time to call his aunt to take him home.

 

When his aunt came, she understood immediately what had happened, and drove the two of us back to Riley's place. We then tried to get him to throw up, but it just wouldn't happen. His body was shutting down on him, unable to cope with what he had done to it. After several failed attempts at making Riley purge himself, we decided that the only thing to do was to take him down to the emergency room, and have the hospital do it for him.

 

Riley did not leave the intensive care unit until a week after that. His blood alcohol level was .26. Apparently had I waited another hour to call he would have died.

 

It was this night that brought Riley into the months of intensive therapy and prescription drugs which ultimately did more harm than good.  It was this night that ripped our friendship apart. After that night he and I were never the same. There was an enormous dragon in the living room that neither of us was willing to acknowledge.

 

Things continued to get worse for Riley; he could not get better in Berkeley. Despite the treatment, and the best wishes from his friends, something was still making him hurt himself. It was this that drove him out of California and into the wilderness of Oregon. He needed to go find a place where he was not around was what troubling him.

 

He left at the end of my sophomore year, and I have not seen Riley since. Apparently he is doing quite well. He is no longer on any type of medication, and he is out of rehab. I have only talked to him a few times since then. He and I simply became different people and grew apart, as time and absence will force people to do.