The Friend Vortex
I spend a lot of my tangibly finite adult life longing for the infinite expanse of my childhood. Just today I texted my neighbors and asked them if they would agree to never see a movie in a theater again for $8,000. Some said yes, some said no. Depressingly I started thinking about how many more movies I would see in a movie theater before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I’m probably averaging a movie in a theater every year and a half. I assume that number will shoot way the fuck up when my kids are a little older. I would happily watch a movie a month if it didn’t involve a babysitter or taking the day off of work. But even at say six a year for the rest of my life. Maybe that’s forty more years. It’s a countable amount of movies.
I don’t have many friends outside of Minnesota. I think it’s maybe about ten close ones, five super close ones. Betsy, Izzy, Afi, Conor, Steph. How many more times do I see each of them? Everything is countable, everything is finite. Every time I hang with a friend someone has to work in the morning, someone has to relieve the babysitter. My life is a calendar. But my life used to be a wide open field; a bowling ball rolling on a street like the Breeders video for Cannonball. I’d spend days at Conor’s house. Multiple day sleepovers. I’d spend hours doing nothing with my dumb, beautiful friends. Lucky/stunting for me. . .the rhythms of a too-long sleepover became my office for my 20s and 30s as a touring musician. It extended my childhood.
Heiruspecs would just get to a town five hours early and post up at a Barnes and Noble and read magazines. And bullshit. And fight. And buy a drink. And me and Peter would smoke cigarettes. And we’d listen to records. Or go swim at a hotel, if we had a hotel. Or just sit in the van with the windows rolled down waiting for the first staff person from the bar to show up. An infiniteness. An adult childhood. A sleepover with performances. And there was no gaggle. No one tagging along. One time two dudes followed us and came to like three shows in a row in the Southwest. One time a friend named Jenny from Chicago traveled with us for two weeks. But basically it was just five dudes sleeping over, drinking, sitting around, begging to get a late check out so we could see both episodes of Dawson’s Creek.
Heiruspecs’ serious touring days ended in December of 2006. Since then we’ve played shows outside of Minnesota but almost always just one and then back home. Finite. Back home for the job. Back home for another gig. Back home for kids. Finite.
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My final group of childhood friends is the Dessa band. Dessa is a singer/rapper/poet who has a thriving career and has a new set of musicians who are the Dessa band of now. But when I talk about Dessa band I’m talking 2010-2016 me, Dustin, Joey, Aby, Dessa. The old Dessa band. Last Monday me and the old Dessa band got together for our semi-annual get together and have drinks and talk. This one was probably less drinks than ever and certainly heavier talks than ever. Our parents getting older. People getting divorced. Bands taking breaks. Our own kids getting older. Our country going to shit.
The forties are a period of great struggle. They can often be the lowest levels of satisfaction that you’ll feel in your adult life. Weighed down with children or with the stress of not having children. Mid-career. Midlife crisis. There is a lot to worry about. And all around the table we worried; we shared the triumphs and the struggles. The struggles outweighed by a factor of 2 to 1. But we also laughed. And we laughed with the intimacy of childhood friends.
I’ve spent more time with Aby Wolf than I’ll likely spend with any new friend I’ll make for the rest of my life. Was it quality time? FUCK NO. It was staring at the back of her headphoned head bored out of my mind, annoyed that the Subway sandwich she’d take a bite out of every twenty-five minutes smelled like it was an onion sandwich made on onion bread with onion mayonnaise and with extra onions on it. But it was all day. And it was brazenly smoking bowls with the van doors open at 10:30am at a gas station in Missouri. It was seeing Joey’s child like love of getting a number of adults to aqua-jog around the perimeter of a pool to ever so briefly turn it into a vortex.
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I don’t know what depth of friendships will be available to me when I am out of the years of deep ass hands-on-all-the-time-parenting. People grow up. They don’t like to stay out as late. They don’t like to watch one more thing on YouTube. They don’t want to drive to Rochester from Saint Paul just to eat at the Golden Corral cause that’s the closest one. I don’t know that I want to do that. But I know there is this special depth that only comes from this quantity of hang, this infinite hang, this forever talk. And I make new friends. I actively make new friends. I love it. And I got just a little taste of the infinite again during COVID. I hung heavy with the neighbors. Long hangs, long talks. Fires. Questions. Inside jokes. Peeing in the yard. It was magical, but it was fleeting. And fleeting is okay. The last real time the old Dessa band played a gig was July 16, 2017 in Rochester. I understood it was the last one. No completely clear articulation, but there weren’t more gigs on the books and there wasn’t much appetite to keep it going just like this from Dessa. I remember breathing in the fun, the crowd, the music, the quality of the band. We had gotten really good. And we had become magical friends. Close like childhood friends. And I knew it would be a bond that wouldn’t break up even if the band did. And that was all true. I didn’t realize it’d be the last group of friends I’d make that felt like that. And I’m grateful for that. A summer night - a group of friends turning it into a vortex one last time.
