Wednesday night I received a message over social media telling me I needed to visit a friend of mine because he wasn't doing very good. About an hour later, his oldest child called me and let me know he had passed away.. I was left numb.. It had been about a week since I had seen him and I really wanted to get out to visit him and just hadn't had time in since I had started this job a few months ago... I feel now that it was just an excuse.. I should have and could have made an effort to drive the 20 miles to his home and visit.. He was after all, "one of my best friends".
We went 5 years without even speaking to each other but in 2009, I made an attempt to reconnect. The time we had spoken before that, we had spoken very harshly with each other and our friend ship ended.. But that day in December 6 years ago we reconnected and it was like seeing a long lost friend that moved away.. He had just had surgery and had lost his toe to diabeties the month before.
Instead of jumping forward to the end of my friend's story, I will instead tell some good memories from our past. ..
1989 : we met in the little quiet town of Bonnie, but not exactly sure, if memory serves me correctly it may have been through my friend Tony who I had met not too long before that too... Keith was very charismatic and outspoken. But I seem to think remember that he some how we needed up going to cruise the mall and hit up the arcade.. Even though I didn't have money he still invited me along and offered to pay. This became a regular thing on weekends and we often times would spend the night at each others homes for game nights or wrestling pay per views.
Over the next few years we were pretty much inseporatable except for when I was at school.. You see he was a couple years older than me, and had actually dropped out of school a couple years earlier.
There was times that we would go "cruising" and flirt with girls in several of the local bigger towns.. We always had clean fun as opposed to the things I did when I was around my other friends.. Keith kept me out of trouble and he almost always had my back, as I also had his.
We both had crazy dreams of our future.. Of one of us making it big and the other one taking the other one with him if he didn't make it too...
We both had been told of our short life spans.. Me I was told by several doctors that I would be dead before I was 30, Keith always said that he wouldn't live to see 40 cause "that's just how it is and I don't wanna get old".. So over the years before we both got married to our first wives, we both pretty much did all kind of crazy things to see that we died in our youth.
We both lived a fairly free lifestyle of knowing what freedom of living on what we saw as being on the edge was like. We did what we wanted and how we wanted and didn't really answer to anyone... Well then we had to grow up.
By the end of the summer of 1992, our crazy childhood was over and we had to grow up.. We were both married and Kieth already had a child and I had one on the way.. We had to become " respectable" cause we were now dads.. Oh how it ended up as being just another adventure... And perhaps I will share some more stories of the adventures of Brad and Keith another time...
God speed my friend you are missed
~B
