Then there are those people...those people who have done everything in the world for you and more. You think of them and each and every time, your heart fills with love and gratitude, not just for all they have done but for who they have been, who they are and who you can trust that they always will be. My heart's best friend; the friend I have known the longest, Brian, is that person in my life.
Disclaimer-or "the small print those damn lawyers make us put in" here: There are many people to whom I'm related that fit this description but Brian is my friend...well, ok, he was my friend first and then we were related, in a sense, but then we became just friends again, though we still feel related-but that's for another letter. I just didn't want any of my brothers or sisters or parents reading this and saying "I've done everything in the world for her-why don't I get in this letter?" See?
In any event, there's Bri. I met him on my first day of law school, 22 years ago-holy shit...it really was 22 years ago...thus, the "oldest friend I have" title I've bestowed upon him. I know he has friends he's known longer than that. He's a lot more outgoing than I am or will ever be. A lot. I don't make friends that easily...that's part of the reason his friendship means so much. That first day, I saw him and he had long hair and looked like kind of a hippie type I could relate to, plus I didn't know one single other person, so I walked down the aisle of the highly intimidating auditorium, so nervous I could feel myself shaking, and asked if I could sit by him. Now, you have to understand here that the auditoriums in my law school were built with a series of two-person bench seats on risers with a flat writing surface in front, with the back of each lower bench bracing the writing surface of the one a step above it (which meant that if someone, say, had a leg bouncing thing that went on, he/she would be forcing the writing surface of the person in back of her/him and his/her own to vibrate uncontrollably...I may have had that, um, problem and Brian was constantly trying to get me to stop until one day when he said "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and joined me in my non-stop leg bouncing gig). So if you asked if you could sit "next" to someone, you were really asking for one singular spot.
He said "no."
"Oh," I said and then walked with all the dignity I could muster to the bathroom and cried until my very first class of law school started, when I returned to the auditorium red-eyed and leaking a river of snot (I'm so not a pretty crier-one tear and I look like I've simultaneously been in a prize fight and have some horrible disorder that produces copious amounts of snot, dripping and running everywhere) and sat in the nosebleed section, trying to disappear.
That was the last mean thing Brian ever said or did to me.
A few days later, we ran into each other in the "smoking lounge," a small, dirty, three-walled space, totally open to the rest of the law school (secondhand smoke doesn't even begin to cover it). Later, I would sleep on these couches between classes when I'd been up all night studying, so tired I was oblivious to the filth and the scratchy, 70's-orange upholstery. We'd give cigarettes to the homeless people who would walk in off the streets of inner-city Detroit so they wouldn't pick butts out of the ashtrays. This day, though, we just started talking, and we never shut up. That, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
When I broke up with my boyfriend a year into the hell that was law school, Brian was the one to pull me through it. When a three hour lecture got so mind numbingly boring we were nodding off, we kept each other awake, usually by writing notes in the margins of our "real" notes like seventh graders. A couple, I remember like they were written yesterday. In one exchange, we were writing back and forth about "when": when would the professor who was lecturing shut up; when would the professor who was lecturing put some kind of inflection into his maddening monotone; when would either of us understand-or care to understand-the Rule Against Perpetuities (you'd be sorry if you asked or looked it up, and don't bother because the dictionary doesn't even recognize "perpetuities
Another one of the notes we wrote is one that I know without question would be the one Brian would name as his favorite. We have always told each other everything. To this day, there are things we know about each other that no one else does. One night, I had a dream about our Labor Relations professor, George Felton (there are stories I can't tell because they involve names that couldn't be changed to protect the innocent because it would ruin the story, but Professor Felton isn't really "innocent,"-if I remember, he was depressed about his divorce and not seeing his daughter and was prone to do some not-quite-kosher things-like hitting on me-so I'm fine with using his name-he'd laugh if he saw this), riding a bike and wearing a tight tank top (let's be honest here-this was clearly a sex dream although I don't think any sex actually happened in the dream, or when I was awake for that matter). I told Brian the next morning. For the rest of our time in law school, I never knew when he'd say "tank top," or when he'd draw a picture of a tank top on my notes like he did that first day. I only wish I could reproduce that drawing here, or I should say I wish I knew how to use this computer well enough to do that. Just think of a very two-dimensional tank top standing alone, a stark pen outline against very white notebook paper.
These things might not sound so funny to you, but they are examples of most of the comic relief we used to get through law school, a torturous experience, particularly when neither of us knew quite why we were there. Maybe if we would've smoked pot, we could have gotten some much needed recreational brain time and had some laugh-til-it-hurts moments...if we had smoked pot. Which we didn't.
Exams were twice a year, at the end of each semester-long class, and most of the time, your entire grade was based on this one test. There would be a week with no classes just prior, lovingly referred to as "study week." From the first study week through the several weeks we cloistered ourselves there studying for the Bar Exam, Brian and I would go to his parents' cottage up North. As miserable as the studying was, and as hard as we truly did work on it, we had each other in stitches much of the time. For example, when I would get particularly discouraged, Bri would yell "handstand!" and then do a handstand and walk around on his hands. It's truly hard not to laugh when that just comes out of nowhere in a place you don't expect it. It was either laugh or cry and for the most part, we laughed. In fact, I once laughed so hard at whatever he said (which I might have forgotten if we were killing brain cells smoking pot, which we were definitely not) that I wet my pants sitting on his mother's pink upholstery. They don't have that furniture anymore and Diane and I are friends again, so (I think...) she won't care (see? I'm just as willing to out myself for embarrassing things-though I'm not embarrassed, it takes a lot more than that, Baby-as I am to out the other people I'm naming in this letter). After the first trip, everyone in school assumed we were a couple. We never were, but their gossip was funny and we laughed about it, as we did most other things. We had our routine there and although neither of us ever got on Law Review, it certainly worked to the extent we didn't fail out, either, and believe me, failing out wasn't a hard thing to do.
Studying for, taking and then waiting for the results of the Bar Exam is sheer, unadulterated misery. Brian had a serious girlfriend at the time and things were on the rocks. I was engaged and my fiance, Jeff Russell (again-not innocent though George was nice and Jeff was not, so I don't give a shit who sees his name) was calling me constantly, not to say he loved me and encourage me, but to nag me about renting an apartment or which furniture to move. During the time we spent up North right before the exam (two weeks, I think, maybe three? Brian will know) we were dealing with those two idiots. The two people who should have been pulling for us most were walking all over us and leaving each of us with long faces every time we got off the phone. Fuckers, fuckers, fuckers. Unless you've taken the Bar (or the CPA exam or Med School Boards), you can't even imagine how cruel of a thing that was.
So we had each other and we had to get each other through this and in the end, that was as it should have been. Again, we had a routine, set by Brian, of course, who is afflicted with the worst undiagnosed and un-medicated OCD I've ever encountered (and even that, I find an endearing quality). Breakfast (read: coffee [for me] mountain dew [for him] and cigarettes [for both of us]) was from 6-7. Studying was from 7-noon. Lunch (more cigarettes and coke for me, still mountain dew for him). Studying from 1-5. Dinner (maybe eating something but always cigarettes-we were chain smokers and I add the beverage each time because I CANNOT smoke without drinking something and it can't be water, a fact which amuses Brian). It seems to me we then studied from 6-midnight. That's a sick amount of studying but I think I'm right. If not, Brian will post a comment and correct me, like he did the other day when we were on the phone and I said something about being 42 and he said "43." He was right, which is as much a testament to his memory than my lack thereof. He's like a fucking elephant.
Brian made all the other rules, too. If we would have been pot smokers at the time, the rule would have been changed from only smoking at night during regular studying to not smoking at all. If we would have been pot smokers. Which we weren't). I had a relaxation tape (yes, it's long enough ago that it was actually a cassette tape) that claimed it both hypnotized you "your arms are heavy" and "you feel the sun shining-it's warm"-and sent you subliminal messages through music on the flip side-which we played every night and knew by heart. Perhaps we often defeated the purpose when Brian, who had memorized the tape by that point, would yell out from the loft where he slept (directly above me so we could hear everything the other said, even during the six hours we were supposed to be sleeping) "YOUR ARMS ARE FEELING VERY HEAVY!!!" and then proceed to have me laughing for the next however long, canceling out any benefit the tape may have had for that night. I eventually had to get some Unisom because I was so continuously focused on the material-and there was so, so much of it-that if I shut my eyes, words would zoom back and forth across the backs of my eyelids and it was truly frightening. Between the silliness and the constant and intense fear, we got very little sleep, though we probably desperately needed it.
The day before the exam, Brian decreed that during the lunch breaks-one on each day of the two full days of the test-we would separate ourselves from the crowd so we wouldn't get psyched out listening to everyone talk about what they said and was it wrong and should they have said it this way, etc. We took the exam with a woman Brian knew, Bonnie, who I had met in our bar review course.
Note: Yes, there is actually a class that you pay exorbitant amounts of money for that purports to teach you the subjects you were supposed to have learned in law school that everyone knows weren't taught in the way they needed to be taught to enable students to pass the exam-or work in jobs as lawyers, for that matter. Seriously. They taught us the probabilities each of the letters in multiple choice questions had of being correct-letter "C" the most popular (I think but again, Brian will post a comment for all to see and correct me if I'm wrong). Another pearl of wisdom? When you write your day full of essays, if you don't know the answer, make it up and "sound like" you're really positive you're right "say 'the law in Michigan is!!!'" Also, the examiners were looking for you to say ten things in each answer, so underline whatever you thought those ten things were. Oh, yeah, and you only have 20 minutes to write each one. What a bunch of shit, you say? It was but honestly, it ended up being good advice to a certain extent.
Bonnie was on her third try at the exam. She had failed twice. The deal with the Bar Exam is that you start working (hopefully) right after you graduate from law school, and you're employed with the understanding that you will pass the Bar Exam. If you take the exam in February, you don't find out if you passed until about June. If you take the exam in July (like we did) you don't find out if you passed until November. So Bonnie had, by the first day of the exam, spent 18 months-a year-and-a-half of her life-studying for, retaking the bar review course, and then taking and re-taking the actual exam. And failing twice. And up for her third try. So we mostly sat with her because as you can imagine, she didn't really want to talk either. I wanted Bonnie to pass almost as much as I wanted us to pass. Almost.
I won't even go into the exam because that's not about Brian and Maggie. It's about Brian. Maggie. It's a hell you ultimately go through alone. Let's put it this way: after all that preparation, there were people who got up and walked out in the middle because they just couldn't take the pressure. Bonnie passed, though.
After taking the Bar and working at the job I didn't know if I'd keep if I failed the exam and with two months to wait before I'd see the results, I was scheduled to get married. It was in September but I can't remember the date. Weird. But Brian will. We had rented an apartment-signed the lease with a woman who told us right off we'd be in big trouble if we broke it. The reception and flowers were paid for. My wedding dress was hanging in the closet. Presents had started arriving at my parents' house in advance of the big day.
Eight days before the wedding (a little less, as it was evening-that counts when you're talking about this gig), I pulled into the driveway and my da and Jeff Russell, that son-of-a-bitch (hey, I've forgiven but not forgotten), were standing on our cool balcony. I thought maybe my da was in Detroit, four hours South of where he lives in Northern Michigan, for work, which wasn't uncommon (in fact, he'd been in the Upper Peninsula and had made a nine hour trip going 80 mph so the dumb fuck wouldn't do this to me when I was alone...later he would tell me he tried to talk to Jeff Russell, thinking something "real" might be wrong but "he sounded like an episode of "Thirty-something" and [my da] just hate[s] that show." How did he know to come? Jeff Russell called and alerted my parents who were both far away that he was going to do this. My mom said to him "if you tell her before one of us gets there, I'll kill you with my bare hands." You don't know my mom. It's lucky for Jeff Russell that he waited-but that, again, is another letter). I waved happily. When I got upstairs, they were both in the kitchen, faces grave. My da looked sick. Jeff Russell looked scared like a bully looks scared when you finally call his bluff.
My da said, "I want you to remember that everyone in our family is ok. No one is hurt or sick. We're ok. Jeff wants to tell you something," and he walked down the stairs and out at my urging (can't remember why I knew he had to go-just did).
Jeff Russell looked at me blankly and sighed. "I don't love you. I've never loved you. I don't know why I ever asked you to marry me and I'm not getting married to you next week."
I'm not telling the rest of that story. That's another letter. This letter is about me and Brian, not that dumb ass, Jeff Russell.
Within an hour of it all happening, when I had stopped (temporarily...very temporarily) sobbing enough to talk, I started calling Brian. I couldn't find him. My parents called Brian. They couldn't find him. I wanted nothing else but to talk to Brian because I knew, knew with all my heart and soul, that no one else knew what they could or should say to me except Brian. My mom fell asleep holding me on the couch at my Aunt Kathy's house (I know Brian would have me insert here a fact that he finds amazing and hilarious, so I will: my da has four sisters and all of them are named "Mary," because, as my Gramma would be happy to explain, she "just love[s] the Blessed Virgin so much." There, Bri). After pulling my arms out from her vice grip, I called Brian all night. I called him everywhere I could think of. I called everyone in his family. I called everyone we knew. In the morning, I sat on the deck chain-smoking (I had been down to about one cigarette a day, having promised Jeff Russell I'd quit but now, well, f.u.c.k. i.t.) and trying to find Brian.
Honestly, after that morning, it's a fog. I don't know when, but either I or someone else got a hold of Brian. He had been up North at a friend's cottage in the same development where his folks had theirs the whole time. It was just that nobody knew.
He said, "I'm coming." And he came.
Again, sordid story of the next month. Maybe a later letter. This letter is about me and Brian, though.
When I went back to Detroit and back to my job, I lived in Brian's brother Steve's (my future and now ex-husband-confused?) house where he rented rooms. Brian was there all the time. He rarely left me alone. If we would have smoked pot, we would've smoked a lot at this point because I would have done anything to alter my state of mind...but we didn't. I had to go to a work-related wedding. Brian was my date. I came out dressed up and the other guys who lived in the house whistled and said how hot I was.
Brian came up from downstairs where his room was and said, "let's hit it." It wasn't as if Brian thought I wasn't a girl...he just truly didn't care. I was "Mags" to him and that's really all that mattered. It's kind of like my husband...I get my hair cut or dyed-and recently I went from having long, blond hair to half an inch shy of a brush-cut-and the woman who cuts my hair will say "well, Gary sure will notice this one." He doesn't, though. Ever. Even when I got it all hacked off. Honest-to-God-swear-on-a-bible I had to tell him. What I do with my hair is just irrelevant to why he loves me. Just like my gender, or seeing me at my very worst and lowest, never has meant one goddamn thing to Brian.
By this point, Brian's "serious girlfriend" had gone the way of the wind. I was his only friend who liked her when they were dating. Brian loved her and believed in her, so I did. No question. Everyone else was right though. She was a Grade A No Holds Barred Bitch-and-a-Half. So it was just he and I, waiting and waiting for the Bar Exam results. One of us would panic-and I mean truly panic-and the other would do the pick up job. One of us would freak out about a rumor they'd heard about the results being posted here or there or that letters were going out on Tuesday or whatever, and the other would join right in and discuss it and obsess about it and be all over it...until it turned out not to be true.
One Saturday, we were sitting around the house decidedly not expecting the results to come in the mail. They did. The mailman came and Brian went out to check the mail and ran in and said "they're here," and threw my letter at me (he's going to say he didn't throw it but he did, just like he says he didn't make me get out and pee on the side of the Interstate Highway because I had asked him to stop too many times, but he did). In the split second before I opened that letter, I said a nine word prayer: "If Brian doesn't pass, I don't want to pass." It wasn't something I did on purpose, it just was. And it was true.
We both did pass, though. And we've gone on through all those years since then as friends, then friends with the woman he picked to marry, then brother-in-law and sister-in-law, then parents-he was one of the first people to hold both my sons, and I treasure the pictures of him doing so-then through my divorce from his brother and through the years since then, and they haven't been exactly what you'd call placid for either of us or our families.
About a month ago, I was in the worst professional nightmare of my life. It was and has been for several years, very, very bad. I was with a friend in Petoskey, 45 minutes away from home, and I was in her driveway heading out. Before I left, I texted Brian: "I desperately need your help. I'm stopping at the gas station and then I'll call you on the way back from Petoskey." Brian will correct what I've gotten wrong in that text, but I know for sure I said "I desperately need your help," and that he texted back-literally withing seconds, "anything." Just typing that I can feel how it felt when I saw that word and it makes me cry all over again. It was the one and only word I needed to hear and, of course, Brian said it.
How many friends or family members do you have that you know for certain would immediately say "anything," without any qualifiers, without any hesitation, if you asked for help without even telling them first what you wanted? I've never asked for help from Brian (and even plenty of times I haven't asked for help but he knows I need it) when he hasn't answered "anything," or some equivalent. I know without a shadow of a doubt he'll always be that person to me.
So lately, there've been a couple things Brian's needed my help with. This isn't an unequal relationship where one of us is there for the other and the other, well, isn't. I'd do anything for him and have been there when he needs me. Right now, though, he's begun to say things like "I don't mean to dump this on you, Mags," or "I don't want to make you spend all this time doing this."
Has he forgotten who he is to me? Has he forgotten how much I love him? Has he forgotten that it isn't even a question of trying to do enough to repay all he's done for me. We have never had a tit for tat relationship. It is with complete conviction I've felt for as long as I can remember that Brian and I are, to use a term anyone younger than 40 wouldn't know, always there to "do a solid" for each other. I've told him to stop telling me he doesn't want to put me out; that I want him to stop saying those things because he knows I'd do anything for him...
maybe, though, he's forgotten how I get that joy from giving when I can do anything for him-like I was talking about way back in the first paragraph of what, I'm pretty sure, is the longest post I've ever written. If that's not true, Brian will have counted the words of each post that could be a contender and we'll have that answer soon enough, soon enough...
So I decided today's letter had to be about Brian. Not "to" Brian, because then he might feel like I was just blowing smoke (I know him), but to you "about Brian."
So here's my question: if you had one friend like Brian and that was the only friend you could have for the rest of your life, could you be happy with that?
I do have other friends and a wonderful family but I have to say, my answer to that question would be a resounding yes ...and I honestly never forget how blessed that makes me...to have found that buried in all the other stuff the Universe has decided to send my way. Having Brian for a friend has been one of the things that have taught me best never to ask "why me?" and be questioning all of the bad things that've happened to you-oh, poor me...oh, pity party-but to ask "why me?" and then marvel at all the amazing things I have in my life; all of the millions and millions of things I have to be thankful for. I'm not saying he told me to do that but that the fact of having him in my life has taught me all on its own.
Maybe now he'll stop telling me he feels badly for taking my help. That would keep me from having to hit him the next time I see him...though, unfortunately, we may be past that point...
