Eddie

Eddie

I've always loved humor. I can find humor in most situations and can laugh at almost anything. I use humor a lot. I am more of an introvert. I was shy as a kid and while I can be more animated around my friends, I am still quiet around people I don't know. I do not look to be a leader and am generally uncomfortable being in front of a group of people. I am lucky to have such a good sense of humor, but I also realize humor is a tool that can be used to hide or keep people at a safe distance. While not intentional, I am pretty sure I do this.

I was never one to have a lot of friends at any one time. In my neighborhood, my best friend was Joe my other good friend was Jimmy. Joe and I became really good friends in grade school and stayed that way all through high school. In the 8^th grade I met Eddie. Well, we had met once before, but it was at this point we really became friends and we soon were the best of friends. Eddie was good-natured, non-judgmental, and always kept his cool. He seemed to be able to stay calm in just about every situation. I only saw Eddie look concerned once. It was when we were swimming at Fire Island and we got caught in a strong under-toe. We were quite a ways from shore. Eddie got this serious look on his face and just took off as hard as he could for the shore. He was strong enough to swim through it. I did not have his strength. I could not swim through it and I didn't try. I knew how to swim out of it by swimming in on an angle. I saw him turn to look for me and I signaled him I was OK. With considerable effort he got to shore. He told me when I got to shore that he was relieved that I was OK because he was beat from fighting through the under-toe and wasn't sure he would of had the strength to come back and help me.

People liked Eddie and wanted to be his friend - the in-crowd, the jocks, the greasers, the rejects. Eddie always stuck up for the little guy. He treated everyone fairly and with respect regardless of who that person was. At an early age he had a very advanced sense of fair play. One of the first times I went over to his house we were walking in his neighborhood when we came up on some tougher kids picking on a weaker one. Eddie did not hesitate to step in and break it up even though the tougher kids were bigger and older than him, heck we were just 13. He was a top athlete. He was on many of the school teams. He told me he felt the black kids on the teams he played on did not get a fair shake, and it bothered him. It was the first time I really thought about blacks not being treated fairly. Eddie was an only child. He lived with his mom, his uncle, and his dad, but his dad was not always around. I am not sure he had a regular job. He was a semi-pro golfer and I think he made a lot of his money at the golf course hustling. I think he drank a bit too.

My first encounter with Eddie was while playing basketball in grade school. I was on my school's (West Hills) team and Eddie was on another school's (Beverley Hills) team in our league. Eddie was also a bit famous with us. He had a reputation for being the great athlete. He set a lot of school district records in the physical fitness tests. He was one of the fastest, if not the fastest, kids in the school district, and even in grade school had a body-builder's physique. He was also a star in the little league baseball league I played in. We had heard that Beverley Hills was the best team in the league and it was led by a couple of Eddies. They were a high scoring team and supposedly beat most of the other schools by large margins. My coach gave me the assignment to guard Eddie, “The Eddie”, the one who would later become my best friend. Games started with a jump ball where typically the two centers jumped to try to swat the ball back to one of their players. I lined up next to Eddie. He immediately came over to me, told me his name, asked mine, and wished me good luck like he meant it. He was so nice. I guess I was a little star struck. Anyway the ball went up and their center, instead of tapping the ball back, whacked it forward. Eddie took off, got the ball and scored with a layup, while I mostly stood there. My coach called time out and asked me “What's wrong with you? That's the guy I want you to guard!”. Needless to say they beat us. I was one of the two main scorers on our team and generally a good defender. I did not have one of my better days. Eddie made an impression on me.

Jumping forward to Junior High, 8^th grade - Eddie and I were assigned to the same homeroom. We quickly became friends and started doing things together. We both loved music. We both loved comedy. We both loved to play sports and although Eddie was by far the superior athlete I did have some skills that allowed me to at least compete with him some. Turned out I could actually beat him in basketball much of the time. When we met in 8^th grade he seemed kind of tall, but that did not last long. He was 5' 4” and I was about 5' even. At the start of 9^th grade I was 5' 10” and he was 5' 5”. When we graduated from Walt Whitman High School I was 6' and he was still like 5' 5”.

Eddie was the strongest kid in school. He could beat everyone in school in arm wrestling, even the teachers, or at least the ones who tried him. He did not see himself or anyone else as being better than the rest. He was very sensitive, in a good way, but you probably would only realize that if you knew him well. He had an advanced sense of what was fair. We spent a lot of time talking about and listening to music. We played a lot of sports together. Eddie was the person who got me interested in Civil Rights issues. But what I remember most though was laughing with Eddie. We laughed a lot. We found the same kinds of things humorous. We both liked seeing humor or creating humor in things and did so frequently. We liked and talked about the same comedians. We were close and shared many things, many feelings. Things I seemed to only talk about with Eddie. I had other good friends but none quite like Eddie.

After we graduated in 1967, we both went off to college. I went to Valparaiso in the mid-west and don't remember where Eddie went but I believe it was somewhere in the northeast. 1967 was the year the “60's” political unrest was really beginning to hit the colleges. I was initially involved in the Civil Rights movement but ended up getting even more involved in the anti-war movement. This was not a popular stance at my college at the time. I also was involved with the political left, organizations like the SDS. It was the year Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, among others, were running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. I was reading books on politics, philosophy, black leaders, and Vietnam. When I returned home for the summer I was tightly tied into the leftist political movements.

That summer Eddie and I hung out a lot together again. Most of my high school friends were not interested in or involved with the same things I was. I had even dropped sports. It felt like I no longer had a lot in common with many of them. It wasn't that we were at odds, we weren't. We were still friends it was just that I was into other things. But with Eddie, it was like old times. That stuff just did not seem to matter. We were still close. He was still my best friend.

After that summer my life changed and I pretty much left the east coast for good. I lost touch with most of my friends from high school. I did keep in touch with Eddie but did not get back much for visits. Neither of us wrote and I don't remember calling – in those days long distance phone calls were expensive. But when I did get back East I would always hook up with Eddie.

I hadn't seen Eddie in a few years when I got a call from my mother one day. She told me Eddie had died, hung himself. I was stunned. I felt a deep loss. It was the first time I grieved someone's death. Since I had not been in touch the last couple of years I really did not know what happened, not that it really matters. He was gone. I wish I had been there for him, but I was living in San Francisco, 3000 miles away.

The last time I saw Eddie I remember talking about some current comedians – Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Steven Wright, and possibly our favorite, Andy Kaufman. I still miss Eddie, I still feel that hole. I have many fond memories of Eddie. What I remember most though, is all the laughing we did. To this day when I laugh really hard, the kind of laugh that brings tears to my eyes, I think of Eddie.