Come out with me tonight, Alex’s text reads. We’re celebrating the end of an era.
So I do, even though we are a couple of lightweights who feel nicely buzzed after only two beers, even though we both find the bar scene laughable. I do it because that’s the way things are with Alex: once he gets an idea in his head, you go along with it.
It is so like him to call the past however many years of our lives “an era” – to Alex, everything is more grandiose and important than it appears at first glance. Everything is an opportunity, an adventure.
He has that sparkle in his eye when I push open the grimy door to the bar he’s chosen. The look is mischief combined with visions of grandeur. “David, my kind sir,” he greets me. He’s acting even more jovial than usual, completely ignoring the fact that come tomorrow he’ll be halfway across the country for basic training, and if he survives that he’ll be shipped off to who the hell knows what third-world country, and if he survives that he might come back to visit. But it won’t be the same.
“Three words,” Alex says, nodding to a girl standing at the bar.
It is a game we play, or rather, that Alex plays and I participate in: three words to describe the object in question. No explanations allowed. The girl is dressed in tiny ripped shorts, and she is leaning against the bar on her elbows while surveying the room with a cold stare.
“Duck-faced,” I decide. “Condescending…and tragic.”
Alex furrows his brow, pretends to be confused. “Oh. I was gonna say my next girl.”
We sit for a while and discuss anything that is not the impending flight than Alex will board in the morning. We have been friends since fifth grade, which sounds like a cliché or an exaggeration, but in our case, it’s true. The only hiccup we’ve had is when we entered middle school and I was trying so desperately hard to be cool. After Mike Peterson left me in the dirt (quite literally), Alex picked me up, dusted me off, and showed me what being cool really meant. It wasn’t about being a football star, but instead about charisma, about finding adventure, about being someone who was exciting. Someone like Alex.
Alex always has crazy shenanigans, and I’m always along for the ride. Sometimes he calls them “entrepreneurial endeavors,” like the time in seventh grade we sold Air Heads out of our lockers until the cafeteria shut us down for being in competition with them. Other times they’re just plain off the wall, like the time in tenth grade when he bought two tuxedos at Goodwill and planned out an entire photo shoot. The shoot was going to involve performing bizarre activities while wearing the tuxes. Slip ‘n’ slide in tuxes, grocery shopping in tuxes. That plan came to an unfortunate end when we decided to begin with playing paintball in tuxes. Although we went to different colleges, we stayed close, driving the half hour to see each other at least once a month, discovering drinking, dancing, girls.
But now we are both 24, that precarious age where you’ve been a college graduate for a couple years and if you haven’t yet found something permanent to do with your life, you’re approaching the brink of major failure. For a while there, we were both back at the restaurant we worked at in high school, but while I was busy studying for the LSAT, Alex went and signed up for the Army.
It’s not like in the old days, when going off in the Army was not only a civic duty but also glorious, romantic, and sentimentalized, something you did with all your buddies. Now it’s a choice – a choice where buddies leave behind buddies, where sons (and daughters) leave behind mothers. I mean, I know someone has to do it, but I never thought it would be someone I know. Or let me rephrase and say I never thought it would be Alex.
Maybe it’s what he wants, but I’m worried it’s one of his whims. I study his face, searching for the cloud cast over it, the silent signal that something isn’t right. But no, it’s glowing, his face is pink and smiling and a faint sheen of sweat is gathering on his temples from the beer.
He leans in conspiratorially. “Three words to describe this place.” It’s one of those nameless joints, one we haven’t been to before.
I look around and above me, pretending to think. “Dismal. Bleak. Depressing.” I immediately hate myself for being a cynic, for not being the life of the party and giving Alex a last night to remember, but he just shrugs. He’s used to this from me.
“Bleak, eh? Been reading Dickens lately, old chap?” He smiles, shoves away from the table and goes to get us another round of beers even though we both know we don’t need any more.
On the walk home, I want to talk about life but the words stick in my throat as though I’m eating an unmanageable caramel apple, one of those monstrosities you can buy at the fair. Alex was the one who got me to go on all the rides when we went in sixth grade, and he didn’t even make fun of me for being afraid. My place is on the way to his, and we halt awkwardly in front of my complex, hands shoved in pockets, toes scuffing the cement.
Alex squints in the yellow glow of a nearby streetlight, waves his hands in front of his face dramatically as though he’s being blinded. I look up into the light, see the silhouette of a moth fall dizzily from the sky.
“I’ll talk! I’ll talk!” Alex jokes. “All right, Mr. Lawyer – I’m cutting your sentimental soliloquy short. No pulling the heartstrings of juries today.”
I want to remind him I’m not due to take the LSAT for another month, but then he says, “Three words.”
There is no prompt attached to this assignment; it is completely open-ended. And three words is just not enough. I can’t say I love you because there is not enough room to explain, you know, platonically. Like the brother I never had. Women can say I love you and that’s just assumed, but with men there can never be enough clarifications. I can’t tell him I’m worried about how dull and mundane my life will surely become without him. I can’t ask, Is this right? and effectively question every decision he’s made in the past year. But this is the way Alex wants it, so I embrace him – more of a clap on the back – and say, “Take care, bro.”
Alex gives me one last salute and turns away. I should turn the opposite direction, head into my apartment, but instead I watch him. Is it just my imagination, or does his posture slump as he puts his hands back into his pockets? I watch him until he becomes just a ghostly figure in the distance, nothing more than the silhouetted moth. Three words ring over and over in my head: an era ends.
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