We have all heard - and experienced - how the world is shrinking - that it is easier to find people, to re-establish connections with friends long disappeared from one's life, than it has ever been.
So it was tonight. By complete chance, thanks to Google and MySpace (there had to be a useful side to the home of the largest collection of egos online), I stumbled upon around a dozen friends and acquaintances have since erased from my life. Well, ten, to be precise. Of the dozen of us that there were eleven years ago, two were not featured on the page, one of whom was me.
Nonetheless, it was quite a surprise. The first surprise was that so many of them are still alive. Given the way that we lived our lives back then, to see so many of them still going strong was not something I had expected to see. Sure, the years and life choices had clearly taken their toll on some of the familiar faces that I found staring back at me from the screen, but they were unmistakably the same people that I had shared so much with. The last time I had seen one of them, he was struggling down the staircase with his girlfriend, who had not regained consciousness as well as he had (he was, at a minimum, somewhat capable of walking). The last I heard of him was a few seconds after I last saw him, as one - or both - of them tumbled down the stairs in the apartment block. I'd assumed that he would have died by now, or at least would be living in the gutter somewhere. I was clearly wrong.
This isn't to say that all memories of these people were negative. They weren't, but other than for some memorable anecdotes, there was a lot of unhappiness mixed in (much of which was internal, it has to be said). The lifestyle had taken its toll on some strands of friendship between us all, most notably when one - nominally the work 'boss' during 'office' hours (whatever they were - it wasn't as if we ever did a standard eight-hour day) - had drunk a skinfull more than he could handle. And became his usual, drunken aggressive self. Fine whilst sober, he became unpredictable whilst drunk. I never understood how his girlfriend tolerated him. Not that he was ever violent towards her - physically, at least, and to the best of my knowledge - but on the occasion of her birthday, he did try to force his key to her apartment onto me, telling his girlfriend and me that they were done, because she was clearly going to fuck me that night. She and I had been talking. After that particular night, I only ever saw her again away from his presence, always in secret, over tea, she fearful that he might turn up unexpectedly.
Hissing at a passing cyclist on her way to work as we staggered back home from the pub at 8am the morning after his birthday celebration, covered in marker pen (he'd passed out on the bar some hours earlier, and eager to make it a night to remember, we decorated him. It was just as well we didn't pass a police officer on the way back to his flat, given some of the symbols we'd drawn on him). Dragging my camera out, he insisted on Hitler saluting it as the timer ran out, capturing the moment forever on film. I never did work out whether he was truly racist - loathing neo-Nazis, he shared their hatred of Poles. They dared to glance at his girlfriend.
But most of the time, he was an aggressive drunk, trying to pick fights on occasion, but usually simply vandalising whatever was within his drunken, groping reach. He had once told me that had I arrived a week earlier in the country, I'd have also been arrested for criminal damage, as he and another friend had been a few days prior to my arrival, having attempted to kick in a door to a random stranger's apartment.
His accomplice in crime had introduced me to substances that would have led to a harsher brush with the law than simply kicking a door in would have done. My aggressive-drunk-friend would not abide of such forms of entertainment, so said introduction occurred whilst my aggressive friend was fetching more beer from the petrol station next door. When I last visited the street where we lived together some nine years earlier, the petrol station had closed a few months before and the apartment block had been renovated.
As I continued looking through the stream of photos on the website, I saw that situations had repeated themselves over the years since I had last seen my former friends. The friend who, regardless of where he was or what he was doing, would always manage to find time - and a place - to have a sleep whilst on the job, usually in a packing crate. The over the top innuendo for the camera - no rubber body parts this time, but bare backsides and stomachs in their place. Rows of bottles of alcohol on the motorhome table - the quantity may not have changed, but the quality appeared to have improved at least a little.
I look at the MySpace friends listed on the page, recognising many names and faces - some closer, some less close to me back then. Only a few of the broader circle of friends and acquaintances appeared to be absent.
As I browsed through the friends list, back through the photos, thinking about how life, work and friendship had been, those many years ago, I realised just how far I had come since that time. I had always been something of an outsider in the group. I didn't grow up in the same region as they had - let alone in a country that no longer exists. My first language is not the same as theirs (even if I had picked their accent up fairly quickly). I wasn't as experienced (or as gifted) in the shifting of heavy objects, working with lighting or the laying of cables (be that under a stage or in the snow) as they were. And I couldn't stand on the top of a ladder, eight metres up - whilst stoned - and continue to work unaffected. I wasn't like that. My path in life had intersected their paths for a few months, and although I had enjoyed the ride whilst it lasted, my train had continued down a different set of track from the train that they were in. We had all ridden the underground together without tickets on many occasions on the way to and from work sites, avoiding plainclothes ticket inspectors, but my non-existent ticket was for a different destination from the one stamped onto their equally invisible tickets.
I considered whether I should scan and email in some photos - to give them a flash from the past. And I still consider whether I should. Perhaps I will - without a valid sender's address. Wait for the photos to appear on MySpace, knowing that my former friends had seen them, worked out from who they were from, and had thought about the time that we had spent together over a decade ago.
The world may be smaller, thanks to the connectivity the Internet provides, but there are certain distances that remain - and with good reason.
No comments:
Post a Comment