Earlier last week, one of my best friends died. Not a girlfriend. Not a guy friend. A best friend, someone who loved me no matter what the day, whether the tide was turning or the moments where it wasn't quite in his favor. That's a rarity. I honestly always kind of felt like I had taken advantage in a way. I mean, in spite of some people's view of me at first glance, I've never been a "mean girl". I was the geek. The kid who could read before I was 3, do complex algebra at 10, spoke 4 languages fluently and could correct my teachers' grammer in elementary school. The kid who could remember every conversation, verbatim, like a tape recorder, with a semi-photographic memory. I could describe things that I only saw briefly with gross detail. I also was somewhat fearless. I jumped off a second story roof into a swell of snow that was just about close enough to cover the downstairs windows. I thought nothing about racing cars, dragging on ice, and trying anything I was dared to. I was a bit of a wild child crossed with super geek. Joey was the first person I had ever met that was another, or even close, to the same. He could do calculus in his head, could analyze the most complex mathematical challenge that would take a "smart" person hours to figure out how to begin to solve, let alone calculate, and yet was absolutely a wild child sort. Our kindred spirits were inevitably meshed.
The way I met him was through the military, although I had been out for a couple years. Joey was an instructor and just amazing to watch. As an operator and technician on the training equipment that he was an instructor on, I was amazed at how easily he would pick out the smallest anomaly that other instructors would not only miss but would argue that they were not what they were looking for. The first time I met him was as I waddled, pregnant, back down to the class with the equipment and he stopped me...
"Where is this?" He asked. I directed him, thinking what an oaf (everyone knew where he was asking about from the moment they walked into the building for the first time) and continued on my merry way.
A few months later, a cheating husband and an horribly awkward moment in my life, voila. Joey is the instructor on my equipment. (Well, his, depending upon your point of view.) We became fast friends. His infectious smile, his smarts--oh my God, so friggin smart, and just the way he looked at me made my life as my pregnant ass divorced my cheating dog--well, it made my life bareable. Like a gift from God. The fact that he would be pass out drunk by 5 to 6 pm every single day, well, that just wasn't one of my concerns. I could care less at that point. Finding someone that was so intellectual, without caring he was. I mean, don't get me wrong, but so many "smart" people insist that they need to join Mensa or toot themselves off as "smarter" than anyone else, and frankly, I've always found those people nauseating. We are dealt our brains by God, by hereditary markers, by sheer dumb luck. It's not a justification to act like we are better than anyone else. But to meet someone that didn't care he was that smart, and who believed life was fun, and placed a lot less emphasis on brains than interaction, well, he was impressive. He could, in spite of his alcoholism, debate just about any subject intelligibly--not making stuff up but actually knowing the facts to back his opinion up. Again, just impressive. He was, of course, an attractive man also. As a friend would describe him, "tall, olive and sexy....meow, meow, meow mix".
On his birthday, 17 years ago, he begged me to marry him. I was mortified, not because he had taken a knee at his own party, in front of all his friends, but because, well, I couldn't marry a drunkard. Like I said pass out drunk by 5 to 6 pm. Every day. As amazing smart as he was, he was the epitome of my hero, Nikola Tesla. Exactly like Nikola actually. Slavic in decent, smarter than the average bear, the average scientist and even the grossly above average scientist. And...a grossly misunderstood intellect that drowned his confusion in alcohol. There was no way I could possibly put my children in an alcoholic environment. No possible potential happiness was ever worth that. Of course, that could've just been my sappy ass excuse for saying no to his proposal. But I doubt it. It was more likely that gut feeling, that woman's intuition, screaming like a jet at mach as it did a fly by. The smartest man I've ever known after my father was never going to be more than a drunk.
In spite of his fight with alcoholism, he did guard duty at Arlington for a couple of his last years in the Navy and helped oversee some impressive funerals. But none of that even comes close to what he did as an aircrewman on the P-3 aircraft. Submarine hunting was his forte. No one was better. The thing that always amazed me is that he really never needed a calculator. While everyone else was clicking away on their calculators to estimate the location of the submarine based on the visual information provided by the equipment, Joey would have calculated depth and triangulation in this head. Complex calculations that took others punching buttons several minutes to calculate...all in a couple of minutes in his head, sometimes less.
A few years back, both still single, well, we made a pact. We would marry for his 50th birthday if we were both still unmarried. I entered the pact pretty sure it would never happen. I know, my readers might think, well yea, because I would get married to someone else before that rolled around. But my friends that know what a commitment phob I am and have been, well, this was possibly the only way I would ever get married. I suspect that Joey had reached the point where it would be the only way he would get married too. But the reality was that he was having liver problems, kidney problems, various alcohol abuse related physical problems, and time was not on his side. Odds were against our pact ever seeing that day, and the odds were not wrong. Joey will not see his 50th birthday. He passed away last Wednesday evening. The pact null and void.
He promised he would marry before his last day, and I am glad that he was able to marry a woman who stood by him through his last couple of years before his final hours.
When Joey and I made the pact in the background one of my favorite songs played, "Yellow" by Coldplay. Seems fitting somehow...
"Look at the stars, look how they shine for you, and all the things you do..."
Fairwinds and following seas, my friend. See you on the flip side.
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