Brian

We played Tony Hawk's Underground.

That is how the friendship got built. Not over anything anybody would put in a eulogy. Hours and hours of a skateboarding game, in the house where I was sleeping in a closet, at an age where you have nothing but time and no sense that it is finite.

I want to be specific about that because “we were close” is what people say when they cannot remember anything. I remember the game. I remember the room. That is what a real friendship is made of, mostly — thousands of hours of nothing in particular with one person.

Brian is dead.

The funeral

I went. And standing there I felt compelled to talk about addiction.

I talked about it slightly.

That word is doing a lot of work and I am leaving it in. I did not say the whole thing. I said some of it, in a room where I was not sure the whole thing was welcome, about a subject I was still very much inside of myself.

I do not know whether the restraint was respect or cowardice. Probably both, in a ratio I cannot measure from here.

What I would say now

Nothing wiser. That is the thing I have to be careful about — this is the part of the essay where a person is supposed to have learned something, and I would be inventing it.

What I have instead is that I am still here and he is not, and the difference between those two outcomes is not character. I have told myself a lot of stories about getting clean and almost all of them quietly flatter me. The true version has more luck in it than I am comfortable with.

The album is already dedicated to two people who are gone. Clay and Wayne were collaborators; this is older than that, and it is not about music at all.

We played a skateboarding game for a year. He was my friend. I said part of what I meant at his funeral, and I have thought about the other part ever since.