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My Friend Steve

My friend Steve died a few years ago, and to my shame I can't even remember when. He wasn't my best friend, more a friend of a friend, but I liked him well enough. He used to drive us all around in one of his many cars. I think all told he had about nine cars, most of them Minis, but the occasional bargain basement deal as well. He drove like a maniac, and we all said that one day the cars would kill him, and one day one of them did, but not in the way we thought. 

For a couple of years he was one of our crowd. We'd all be in the pub together, drinking too much, as is the way of most of the male English population, and we'd worry that he wouldn't be able to drive us to wherever it was we thought it was so important to get to. I don't know if he really drank as much as he said he did, because on the occasions where he was breathalysed, he always got the green light. He preferred to drive, and so perhaps the pub was too restricting for him, too stationary. I used to live in a town surrounded by countryside, so there were always plenty of roads to choose from. 

Where did we drive? The simple answer is "around", but they were adventures, every little journey into the wilderness of tight twisting country lanes, only lit by the pale beams of an ancient Mini. There were many pranks played, like the time we decided to blow up the local radio station, armed only with a few fireworks and the dubious verbal skills of our teenage posse. Of course, we never got into the station, mainly because one of us (a punk born ten years too late) blew the whole game, but the attempt to rid the world of recycled muzak has remained with me ever since. 

The pranks grew stale and childish I guess, because then we roamed further afield, to Brighton or London. On one foray the others made, Steve decided to stay in Brighton with some squatters he'd met, and the first I knew of it was when my best friend Phil came back with Steve's Yugo van and we went for another ride. Steve always did unpredictable things, like when he decided to get married. 

He married an older woman, a girl who was into the unusual side of life, which of course made her fascinating to our parroquial eyes. Her parents were hippies, she had many friends of dubious sexual backgrounds, and the last person we'd expect to get married, but she did. Her name is Zoë, and she was the only person I'd ever met who was prepared to talk about culture in a pub. 

After the wedding (at the reception of which we attempted to grapple dance) I moved away to a grim Northern university, and lost touch with events a little. At every return, the town seemed a little duller - there were fewer people in the pub, less parties, still no nightclubs. Steve and Zoë faded away from the pub life, and I lost touch, save for the occasional drunken chance meeting when we'd attempted to rekindle past memories. The scary thing was, that no-one else seemed to notice the changes, they were still living their lives in a routine of rutting and drinking. So it seemed to my superior student eyes at the time. 

I dropped out of university for a while, the party life haven taken its toll on my grades and study habits, and so I came back to live in my home town. I got a job, and tried to earn the money to get back to the North. One day the news came from Phil that Steve had killed himself. I didn't believe it. We went to the pub in a daze and tried to understand it. Steve had, for reasons no-one understood (even the note he left made no sense) decided to kill himself one day. He'd drunk half a bottle of wine, downed some aspirin, and gone into the garage to start his car. He never left the garage. 

We made a plan to go and see Zoë. Because that's what grown-ups do. We went. We were miserable. She was impossibly buoyant, talking about the way he died, the note, the nonsense of it all. It was strange. So then we went to the funeral, didn't cry, and then, because we all thought that's what he'd have liked, we went to the pub. We made jokes, got drunk, and tried to forget. 

Until now, that's what I've done. I've forgotten for so many years that I can't remember them. You forget your grief, but it never forgets you. Steve was my friend, and looking back, it still seems like I treated him like shit. I wish I'd been a better friend, and now I try to keep my friends. That's something I've never forgotten, but until now I didn't know why. 

1998

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These pages were last updated on 28-12-2003 . © 1997-2003 Señor Pazonova
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