by Andrew Sarewitz
Midnight, in front of the wood-burning fireplace in my parents’ living room, Doug and I sit, wordless, smoking cigarettes on the couch. I’m 16. Doug’s a year older. His legs are stretched long and relaxed, sock feet crossed and resting on the slate coffee table, his head leaning back, eyes closed, blowing white smoke rings into the stagnant winter air. I watch him with replete ease as if we’ve known each other all our lives. But in our universe, Doug Foley and I shouldn’t be friends.
We met through his girlfriend Anne in autumn of 1974, sometime after high school classes resumed. That would make me 15. The introduction was at our friend Lori’s house on Clark Street in South Orange, NJ, a few blocks from where I grew up. Events and dates blur, but I seem to think it was the day of The Big Sneeze. I had terrible allergies to cats and some long haired dogs. Lori’s family had both, so it was a challenge finding a fur-free space to sit when visiting in the days before Nasacort. Shortly after Anne and Doug arrived, I sneezed all over Lori’s chest. To add a picture, Lori stands at five foot nothing with a set of undeniably large breasts. Lori screamed. I burst out laughing in-between sneezes. I still wonder: what was Doug’s first impression of me? Maybe my being disgusting was a good ice-breaker.
I write about my teen years a lot. Either I can’t or don’t want to get away from it. Most 15 year old kids, even while fighting pimples and surging hormones, were physically on their way to adulthood. I looked like a skinny, pre-teen, wavy haired friend of Sleeping Beauty. Having survived junior high, I correctly presumed things would be the same when I entered Columbia High, only on an expanded scale. The population more than doubled. South Orange and the neighboring Township of Maplewood combined student bodies from Sophomore year to graduation. Before Thanksgiving of tenth grade, circumstances became so rough I withdrew into silence. And I used it to grab my parent’s attention, who in turn sent me to see a psychiatrist. I’ll call him Dr. Whatever.
Not to travel far off topic, but it wasn’t self confidence unearthed by Dr. Whatever that gave me the bones to survive and in many ways, thrive in high school society. I credit that to my friendship with Doug. Before the end of the school year, I told Dr. W. I wasn’t going to continue with our sessions. In his defense, I had lied and said I wasn’t gay. In my defense, he was kind of a moron. When I’ve told friends, surprise is the common reaction. What’s the point of therapy if you’re not going to be honest? Maybe this is qualifying my behavior, but I didn’t want to be gay, and I was still just a kid. When I told him I was stopping, Dr. Whatever leaned back in his leather chair with steepled fingers pressed to his lips in contemplation, staring at me. Thoughtfully responding, he disclosed proudly how he’d been able to help patients suffering with afflictions ranging from depression to severe mental illness, citing the case of a woman he “cured” of multiple personality disorder. With me, he would sometimes go home and say to himself, “Where did I go wrong with this boy?” That’s a quote. I said to him, “You’re not my father.”
I wasn’t near ready to see who I really was. I just wanted not to be terrorized every fucking day at school, which I believed translated to my “fitting in.” Adult sympathizers of various ages told me “it gets better,” decades before it was used as a campaign slogan. I’d have related more to Alcoholics Anonymous, regurgitating the mantra, “a day at a time.” I had no ability to believe in a future that seemed as far away as the moon. I had three years of high school to get through. It gets better didn’t stop me from killing myself. Doug Foley did.
A year behind Anne and Lori, shared friendships now crossed with high school faces I hadn’t known. Enter among others, Doug. I try to conjure the make up that grounded us. I remember parties and beer and cruising. Cigarettes and weed and girls and the music. And laughing our brains out. But nothing specific leading me to understand his connection to me. Circumstantial evidence points to an anomaly. Doug was a strong, naturally masculine jock. A tall, handsome Irish Catholic young man raised in a working class household with Jameson whiskey and drunken beatings. Not my mirror image on any plane. Maybe I don’t give myself enough credit as a friend. I like that idea. Or maybe I don’t give Doug the faith he deserves. It was no secret that I had a girl crush on him, but that’s the genuine extent of it.
What I do return to with cinema-like clarity is the day Doug invited me to his house for the first time. A bunch of us had gone to the village pizzeria after school. Feathering off through the afternoon, Doug, Anne and I headed out at the same time. Anne wanted to hit the library to study. Doug asked if I wanted to hang out at his place. With the subtlety of turning a page, Anne and I exchanged glances. She understood what this meant to me. Forcing a nonchalant response, I said, “Sure.”
Here’s a thought. Doug didn’t have a younger brother. I wouldn’t have been his choice from a line-up, but as in family, that’s not how it goes. The friendship grew and rooted, and my questions of “why?” evaporated, taking him off the pedestal. We were equals in the give and take that bond teenage boys into friends. At its most casual and substantial, I remember one humid afternoon climbing up to his bedroom sanctuary on the third floor of his home. We smoked Marlboros and drank Cokes while he changed out of his school clothes, showing off his maturing body before pulling a cotton tee over his head. It wasn’t sexual. This was an older brother’s rite of passage.
Being seen with Doug in the high school hallways bought me free passes. I can’t think of a single time anyone gave me shit when I was with Doug, but it must have cost him. Peer pressure to some teens is as powerful as war.
By the summer following his graduation, Doug and I were spending less time together. There was no falling out. Just the inevitable end of the privileged years when public school naturalized seeing friends everyday.
I grew up in an interesting era of American history. I was too young for a draft card or to have lost friends in the Vietnam War. There was no longer the threat of smallpox, and polio had ended its reign of terror. As a white, upper middle class Jewish kid living near New York City, I was among the first twentieth century generation not to lose numbers of my peers to war or disease. Until the mid 1980’s, and that’s a different discussion.
1976, at the beginning of my senior year, rumors spread through the halls that Doug Foley had been hospitalized. Having the wind knocked out of me, I left school grounds. Doug was admitted to St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, NJ. Suffering an adverse reaction to the Swine Flu vaccine, he had collapsed with the symptoms of a stroke. The left side of his body became paralyzed—he was a southpaw—and he lost his speech entirely. Doug was 18 years old.
What I remember like glass splinters is hearing Doug screaming in his hospital bed. Constant and unfettered and heart wrenching. By the time I went in to see him, the shattering pain had subsided. I don’t know what the hell I talked abou,t but he knew who I was and seemed to understand what I was saying to him. But that may be romanticizing the truth.
Piled on top of the unbearable, the day following his hospitalization, Doug’s father died.
Surviving the stroke (later diagnosed as Guillain-Barrè Syndrome), Doug was moved to Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation. Early on, I drove up, my guitar in hand. With the initial thought to be entertaining or distracting, I played a favorite of ours, Elton John’s “Daniel.” Doug began to sing with me. I almost passed out. I ran to the nurse’s station to proclaim I had unintentionally cured his inability to speak. Without condescension, the aid on duty explained that the memory center for speech—versus music—is located in a different area of the brain. He could sing words, but he wasn’t able to talk.
I saw Doug three days a week as a volunteer at Kessler, getting school credits for my time. Within a few months he was released. That’s where my memories completely betray me. In September of 1977, I moved to New York City.
Two summers later, while visiting New Jersey, I called Doug to see if he wanted to go to the beach with our high school friend Rebecca. We drove down the shore. Walking was a struggle, and his left arm was bent and idle. Though his speech was labored, he was constant smiles all day. That’s what I can access, except for one conversation he and I had when Rebecca combed the beach, leaving us alone. I attempted to explain why I hadn’t been around. I didn’t bring up being gay, but I said something about how different I had become from when he and I were inseparable. While stumbling over my excuses, he interrupted me. “I don’t care!” he screamed. “I’m lonely…”
Whatever promises I made to him that day on the sand, I didn’t keep.
A decade ago, I began searching for lost friends from the high school days. I found a number for Doug, who was living in central New Jersey. When I heard his voice, I pushed my phone’s mouthpiece away, and I cried. He sounded as he had when we were teenagers, with only a subtle delay in his speech. He seemed happy and self-aware. Married now for 17 years, he was the proud father of two teenage sons, both sports-obsessed. He loved having his family around him, reminding me that I know how he doesn’t like being alone. He was working in the mailroom of a large, regional store that took good care of him, considering his limitations. I asked if there had been a settlement from the pharmaceutical company. He told me the statute of limitations to sue had passed him by. I said I’d like to drive down and visit him one day.
Before hanging up, I told Doug he’d been the most significant male role model I’d had in my life. I could hear a smile in his response when he said, “Thanks. Means a lot.” That’s the last time we spoke.
I don’t completely understand why Doug Foley came into my life. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Of the friends and lovers that have fallen away over the years, he remains separate and above. An incongruous cog that fit and balanced a shaky young man. If timing means anything, he had been the best friend at the right time.
For my sixteenth birthday, Doug Foley gave me a Seagrams 7 Crown motion lamp. The logo was imprinted on a sheet of black plastic, wrapped cylinder-like, the size of a large can of tomato juice. The tube slowly revolved around a 25 watt lightbulb, throwing the Seagrams image onto my suburban bedroom walls. It’s something you’d see in an Irish pub or the corner liquor store. But to me, it spun magic. Fanning the dark with stained glass in imperial reds and golds. Keeping me company, even after I closed my eyes.
At 17, Andrew was awarded a Letter of Commendation from the Second Annual American Song Festival competition for music and lyrics. In 2013, a new work titled “A Town Called Home” (music: Kendall Briggs, lyrics: Andrew Sarewitz) was performed by Timothy McDevitt at Grace Church, Newark, NJ, in concert benefiting Hetrick-Martin Institute. In addition to drafting more than 100 musical compositions, Andrew has written several short stories (published pieces upon request or on his webpage) as well as scripts for various media. Mr. Sarewitz also has authored numerous historical and critical artist essays with a primary focus on twentieth century non-conformist art from Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic states.