On my way to the DMVyesterday I rode the subway with my childhood frienemy Charlie, that’s him on the right with the guitar on his back.

charlie.jpg

I had recognized him immediately, then sometime while going over the Manhattan Bridge I think he may have recognized me, but we said nothing and didn’t formally acknowledge one another. 

I didn’t really have much to say to him, although the amateur psychologist in me wanted to grill him for as much info about how his mind works as possible.

See, Charlie is?/was a genius, like, for real, major league has the brainpower of eighteen really smart people rolled into one sort of genius.  He was always at the top of all standardized tests from school, never studied, he just knew everything as if Newton’s brain was placed in his head at birth.

Not to say that he wasn’t trouble, in fact he was by far the trouble maker of the block when he came out to play.  The first fistfight I ever had was with him over him taking my hat and we must have had at least 30 or more fights after that, all of which he started.  He always wanted to win a fight, while I always just wanted to call the fights an even match, even though most of our fights ended with him on the ground with my foot going to his head and face repeatedly - obviously he kept trying to prove himself.

In hindsight I like to imagine that since Charlie was constantly being an abused kid at home (I remember hearing his father beat the crap out of him, and it was the norm for his house), his being a troublemaker and always starting fights with all of the kids on the block was his way of attempting to show that he cared about the other kids on the block.  Weird, sick, and twisted, but that just might have been his way.

What’s even weirder about the paragraph above is that I’ve had conversations, been given rides, and even had a drink with his father as an adult, and it blows my mind at how the calm and gentle man that I’ve seen as an adult would have done such horrific things to his kids 15 plus years ago - as Rick James so eloquently said, “Cocaine is a hellova drug“.