07 - How My Best Friendship Began, Gabrielside

Before we begin on tonight's walk together, Walking Buddy, I need to ask you for something I would not normally ask, and probably will not again. I need you to promise me that if you read beyond this point, you will also go visit Kathleen's blog directly afterward and also read her parallel account of the events I am about to describe. This story is not actually mine alone to tell, and I am only telling it now with her blessing and permission. Moreover, my account alone is not the complete tale. I want you to stay with me here, and then I want you to visit her. Will you promise me that you will do so, as soon as you are finished here? Please acknowledge in the comments, if you can and will do so. It's important to me.

You guys know Kathleen by now, right? Here she is, wearing a mask so she doesn't get me sick with her coughing cold while we sit and write out our respective sides of the story of how we began our unique journey together. As I'm right in the middle of my "nadir point," during which my white blood cell count is critically low, a state referred to as neutropenia, we are attempting to get through this tandem tale-telling without causing me to die from a sudden fever since that would sort of be an anticlimactic ending to this whole thing, and frankly a little disappointing to me as a storyteller.

She might be smiling, or this could be rage.
The mask makes for mild mystery.

As I've said before, this whole process of evolution into a new chapter of my life has been hard on her. All of our carefully-laid plans of measured-pace transition into healthy, distinct, separate (financially, primarily) lives were shattered the day of my diagnosis, leaving her suddenly and completely on her own in an unfamiliar town with little for company but my empty desk chair and a handful of boxes of my stuff. That's not really a great way to begin much of anything, but you know how life can be sometimes. Adventure doesn't so much knock on your door as it does smash down a wall and see if you were sitting right behind it, like the Kool-Aid pitcher but without the exuberant smile. Kathleen has embarked on an adventure into adult independent life, and I'm a bit sad that I don't get to go along on the first leg of the voyage to see her off the way we'd planned so carefully to allow.

So I asked her, since I'd received more than a couple of requests and interest, if it might not be a good time for her to consider helping me tell the story of how our friendship began. It's a story neither of us have ever told, and the simplest reason for that is because it does not make her look or feel very good. There are aspects of things that happened during that night which were fairly traumatically frightening for her to face, and the fact that my intervention may have prevented them from coming to pass does not make them suddenly flowery and easy to hold up and examine after the fact. It was easier overall to just put those things away, so they got buried, and I respected her (never spoken, but completely understandable) desire to just never bring it up or talk about it again. What was less evident over time, however, was what my respectful and absolute silence on that score was going to cost me over the following years.

Kathleen's family has for a long time been sort of... unsure what to make of me, I think is a fair way to put it. My position in my best friend's life was in many ways far too similar to the standard positions held by a significant other to be entirely defined as a mere friendship. We were more than that to one another, and it can't really be called a mystery when people start to assume or believe that "more than that" must necessarily mean romantic entanglement. It didn't, though, and people heard that from both of us often enough. What they didn't hear, and what they would have needed to hear in order to not just assume we were being coy or were just embarrassed to admit it for some reason, was that there was a different reason which was no less valid, and that reason was one that would make more sense to a soldier than to a civilian. We had survived and faced a threat together, stared down a trauma and come out the other end intertwined in intention and memories that would not be freely shared outside of our binary pairing... well, until now, anyway. That is the wellspring source of our friendship. That is the missing piece everybody never knew about. And that is why we have consistently responded with frustrated irritation at every simpleton know-it-all who responded to our truthful declarations of not being lovers with a half-sly look and the ignorant certainty that they in their plastic-world threatless limited experience knew better than we did what could possibly be the truth.

The majority of that suspicion fell on me, naturally. I was the older and stronger of will of the two of us, so people simply assumed that I was the one calling the shots; if we were telling a twin lie about not being lovers, it was most likely at my direction and by my intention. Maybe I was ashamed of being seen as being with a woman like her (those who believed that in the silence of their hearts, please accept a heartfelt and sincere fuck you from me right now for applying your meaningless social hierarchy into a situation you don't understand; Kathleen is twice the golden-hearted woman just about any of you are, and a lack of capacity to be a vindictive bitch in self-defense is only a negative quality to vindictive bitches trying to find a way to be able to look at themselves in the mirror), or perhaps I was just playing with her but unwilling to commit and wanted to keep my own field open to sleep with other women as well (those who have believed that of me... I don't blame them as much because there was a period of my life - the exact same period in which we did begin our friendship and which I'm about to tell you a story from - in which I would predictably have done exactly that to a woman like her. I simply did not in this case, because I had other goals and things to learn about myself. I was not a saint, nor even a particularly moral guy; I was actually more the charming rogue you fathers out there would have loved to greet with a bat, to be plainly honest about it, but Kathleen was no victim or plaything of mine even as other women around us quite willingly were). Whatever they believed, people generally believed it of me, and I chose to say nothing to contradict them from years of suspicion and annoyance and general disdain for the underlying strength of our friendship due to peoples' natural need to believe that they know best in any given situation. Very, very rarely did I meet anyone who responded to a general overview of my friendship with Kathleen by saying "You know what? That's nice. I really respect that," and to a person those people turned out to be the ones who themselves had a friend they were bonded to in a rare and solid way beyond the simplistic.

I said nothing, because this story was not mine to tell. I did not protect her that night in order to undo the good I'd done by cashing it in later just to spare myself a little suspicion and misunderstanding. Truth be told, I was sort of used to being misunderstood, so it really wasn't out of my way to remain that way for an actual good reason: allowing Kathleen the time to process and the choice to share with others how and when she was ready. But she has agreed that now can and should be that time, and I will confess that I find it a bit of relief to be able to just tell the story and have done with it.

Long preface, huh? Sorry about that. But hey, Walking Buddy, if you aren't used to a little long-windedness from me by now... 'Sgonna be a long road. For you. Just putting that out there now. Might want to pack a sandwich or something.

The night in question was Halloween, and the event was the holiday swing dance. Both of us were members of the JMU Swing Dance Club, and though we had met before that we had only ever talked in an acquaintance capacity. Here's a photo of me and some of the other people in the club from that era, the year I had very first joined:

I'm often red-eyed in photos, due to having these great big cow eyes.

The day of the dance I dressed up as Indiana Jones, and went to work at my job at the campus library. I actually worked the entire day as Indy, though I didn't wear my pistol (fake, airsoft, but rather real-looking black metal) until the evening. I got a lot of compliments on my costume and the reasonable facsimile of abdominal muscles I was sporting underneath it, so I was in pretty high spirits around dance time that evening. I was young, I was single, I looked and felt good, and I was ready to go and work some charisma on some very nice young ladies that I knew. It was, overall, a very good day.

Here's one of the very few surviving photos of me dressed as Indy, taken in the gym where the dance was held that night:

I think it was a fair effort overall, don't you?

When I arrived at the dance I launched into full extrovert mode, a skill I'd learned in recent years that I'd finally gotten a handle on but which exhausted me quickly. I could laugh, tell jokes, and be the relative life of a party for a few solid hours before I began to run dry and have to return to my pod back at home to recharge my mental and emotional batteries. Most dangerously, I had discovered that whilst in this mode, I had a newfound and frankly devastating effect on some of the ladies around me; it turned out that I was actually somewhat charming, once I got over the barrier of feeling all emo and misunderstood all the time as I had during my first four years at JMU.

It wasn't too long into the dance, however, that I noticed Kathleen was upset. I was not close with her, and did not notice for any particular individual reason; the sheepish truth of the matter was I was aware of the presence, name, and evolving disposition of every female at that dance, because I had very little intention of going home alone and a fisherman should know the population of his pond if he hopes to, ah... have dinner. *coughs* ...Sorry about that, Mom. Dad probably understands, though.

Kathleen wasn't really my type, though. She was quiet to the point of being paralytic when I was nearby and in full social mode; there were times when I felt like I might need to take her pulse to make sure she hadn't gone into shock or something. What it really came down to was that she was a small-town girl who'd only been in college a year and some change by then, and was wholly unprepared for a fellow with a personality of the sledgehammer variety like the fake-but-functional extrovert me that existed as my metaphorical fishing rod at that time. It was a prototype, of sorts; you should see my current model. The technology has come a long way.

Ladies.

There was something about Kathleen regardless that had caught my attention beyond attraction (which is saying something, as my list of "things that concern me beyond sex and attraction" was not exactly long at that stage of my life). She was so ridiculously innocent... it was like meeting a doll that had magically come to life, and had no real experiences yet with actual human people and how violently dangerous some of them can be. I had for some time felt an odd scratching in the back of my mind when I looked at her during the meetings and such, a strange impulse to find and gather and approach and attach pieces of medieval armor to her, without explanation, just to sort of casually encase her in steel instead of saying hello. I never had but had always quietly wanted a little sister growing up, and I think some part of me even in that primitive development recognized an independent, non-romantic urge to find someone worth protecting and then protect her until she told me to go away.

I asked her what was wrong, and received no concrete answer, so I cheerfully pressed her with the fact that she could either tell me or I could just stare at the side of her head until she changed her mind. She responded by getting up and going outside, but not as if fleeing from me, exactly; it was more of a combination surrender and invitation to follow, which I did a couple of minutes after. I found her outside the gym, sitting on the curb, and it was clear she had been crying. I sat down, all Indiana and whatnot, and asked her what was going on. And she still wouldn't answer me at first. So I just stared at her for a little while until it was clear I wasn't going to go anyplace until she lowered the gate and answered my question, and I think she must have had the alarmed thought that I would have quite contentedly just skipped the rest of the dance entirely if that's what it took to out-patience her on this one (I am skilled at projecting an attitude of infinite patience when I sense another person's impatience or time-sensitivity as a barrier; it's kind of a hilarious subtle aggressive tactic, when you think about it a little bit, as it isn't actually passive-aggressive as it might seem but directly, if weaponlessly, combative). So she finally cracked and started to tell me a story, and that story went something like this:

A guy had come into town, an acquaintance of her dorm-roommate's. Subtext told me that this male was not entirely unattractive to her, or at least that he had not been at first. This fellow, who was named Adam, was a Navy cadet and a wrestler from some academy someplace who was on a trip and had stopped by JMU to visit, had met Kathleen through her roommate, had followed her about like a puppy for the past day or so, and then had spent the night in her dorm the night before. The short-form version she gave me then and there was that he had been offered the couch in her suite's common room to sleep on, but at some time in the night had come into her room to see if there might not be more to her kind offer of room than just "room." She didn't go into great detail, and I didn't waste her time asking stupid questions: the gist of it went that he put his hand in her pants after a short conversation, she freaked out in a mild-to-moderate way, and he left before her roommate could wake up and things could get even less comfortable. Kathleen had then had to put up with him following her around all day that day as well, and was worried about what else might happen when he was going to be sleeping there the next night. Beyond that, he had all but convinced her to loan him $700 to fix his car, apparently one of the reasons he was still staying in town at all. She was, for her part, completely unarmed. She had no idea what to do, no idea how to say no, no idea what sex was all about with anybody at that point (much less some guy she had known for a total of hours still in the double-digits), and no idea what she was going to do since he was at the dance right now and seemed to have pegged her as his landside "girlfriend" while the storms kept his aspiring sailor self trapped in this particular port.

I didn't have the perspective then that I have now, but I did recognize that the scratching sense of need to armor this girl that had been living in the back of my mind was more of a clawed pawswipe now, pushing me to act. She was in trouble, and had no clue what to do. I had no clue what to do either, but felt that someone needed to do something, and I was the only soldier on the field.

I am not a confrontational person by nature. I'm not even a competitive person by nature. I derive slim joy or sense of triumph from defeating or hurting or besting another in pretty much any scenario, and what little enjoyment I do get is easily dwarfed by the sense of accomplishment and goodwill I get from cooperatively accomplishing something with another person. So I know that you, Walking Buddy, might be thinking masculine thoughts about exactly what would have come naturally to you in this situation: find guy, beat guy, explain to him the general basics of gentlemanly conduct, perhaps. In that order, probably. I am not built for conflict resolution in this fashion, however. My greatest weapons lie in the areas of relative espionage and strategic information retrieval: I can look at a person and tell you his or her greatest fears, their weaknesses, the areas in which they experience doubt and dismay. I can tell you where they would be weakest, I can undercut their egos with a single comment if need be, and I can drive a person from calm to rage in two sentences when and if I choose to poke them in the right (or deliberately wrong, more accurately) relevant nerve that way. Physical confrontation, however, has never been my primary area of expertise, and I've never found too much benefit to be gained from pretending as though it is. So it was with something of a disadvantage and no real plan that I found myself turning to face Adam the Navy cadet wrestler when he came outside to find out where Kathleen had gone, much as I had done mere minutes before.

Adam was not pleased by this state of affairs, my very first glance told me. I turned the full force of my abnormal perception on him and took a rapid-fire readout of all of the hidden information I could gather, which read (from his perspective, then from mine in parentheses) approximately like this:

- He is not supposed to be out here alone with her (note: possessive intent)
- Who the hell is this guy (advantage: surprise)
- What did she tell him (note: body tension / subnote: something to hide / inference: ill intent)
- We're alone out here for now (warning: tactical disadvantage, overmatched physically)

This wasn't much to go on, but it was better than nothing. And I have something of a talent and a history of being able to make do with relatively little in social settings; I can MacGyver verbally, is what I mean to say. The problem was that this particular situation was outside of my sphere. My plan was no plan at all. Instead what I had come to realize was that my intentions were not coming from the usual place, where my intellect made choices which fueled my capabilities and created a cohesive and potentially successful plan of action. Instead I suddenly noticed that what I was feeling was not a plan, but a conviction: this situation was not going to end the way it started, the way it was slated to end had I not gotten involved. It did not matter what I had to do in order to make that true. Adam was not going to leave with her tonight.

I am not commonly ruled by conviction alone. This was a startling realization for me, that I was capable of such a departure from logic and the comfort of its predictable probability matrices. I can remember my passive mental processes calmly pondering this even as I stood and faced off with him in the coming minutes. My brain is a strange and multilayered thing. I stood up and turned around, but paused. I drew the metal pistol out of my holster and handed it to Kathleen barrel-first. I asked her to hold onto it for me, and keep it safe. I did not tell her that I wanted the fight that might be coming to not involve a too-realistic looking firearm even as a blunt force weapon in case the police should arrive and become involved. I might have been better able to defend myself with the heavy fake gun, but logic dictated that I not complicate the situation any more than necessary; it was a judgment call, and the first sign that I was less concerned about my own safety than I was about other factors in the situation, another new realization that had not previously ever been tested or revealed to be the case.

Adam asked Kathleen what was going on.

Kathleen said nothing, staring into my pistol as if it could answer for her. Since it belonged to me, I took that for a transfer of executive privilege.

I responded that I was being told a fascinating tale about a lost boy who seemed to think he was on a hunt of some kind in someone else's forest.

He asked me what the hell that meant.

I told him it meant that he needed to find another place to sleep tonight.

He told me that his sleeping arrangements were none of my goddamn business.

I assured him I could care less about his "business," whatever he considered it to be, but that Kathleen was not and would not fall into that category.

Kathleen said nothing, but made a funny sound like a whistling intake of breath. It was very poignant.

Adam informed me that he had both the power and an increasing desire to kick my ass.

I responded quite calmly that it didn't much matter if he did or not at this point, because either way someone else already knew he was hitting her up for hundreds of dollars and had tried to force himself on her the night before, and beating me up wasn't about to change the fact that his plan to try it again tonight was already ruined. In ten minutes everybody else would know, too.

He stared at me, working that out in his mind. I am quite sure that he was methodically on his way to the conclusion that if he was going to lose his chance for sex and relative anonymity in manipulation all at once, he might as well kick my ass and at least have that. My spider sense was well tingling, the same feeling I used to get when I knew that my brother was charging at me from behind to hit me when I turned my back after a scathing comment as children. I didn't move, though, just hooked my thumbs into my belt loops and rocked back on my heels a bit, a completely fabricated picture of purest calm, as if we were just discussing the temperature.

And that is when a small group of five fellows, friends from the club, wandered out the front doors ten feet away and saw the three of us there. Me, dressed as Indiana Jones, standing calm as one can make himself appear to be in the street in front of the gym. Adam, dressed as a Navy cadet dressed as a normal guy disguised as an angry person standing on the curb in front of me (which put him at head height to me; he was actually quite short, but very stocky and powerful-looking, as a wrestler should probably be). And Kathleen, sitting on that same curb about six feet to my left, still staring as hard as she could into the metal slide of my airsoft pistol. She probably doesn't remember that her knuckles were white, gripping it.

My friend Andrew was one of those fellows who came outside to find me that night. I wonder sometimes if he remembers that night at all, or that moment. The rest of them were all friends of varying degrees of closeness from the club. The guys, some of them at least, detected the tension in the air, but had no idea who Adam was nor what had been about to happen. Adam himself looked as though someone had just put a bare unwashed toe in his pudding cup right in front of his face as a way to tell him he couldn't have any now.

I looked into his eyes and made mine as hard as they can get, like agates when I do it just right. I told him, "It would be a good idea to walk away right now. Otherwise things get complicated." He waited and looked back at me for a long moment.

Then he turned and walked off, and I watched him all the way down the long drive, up the hill on the other side and out of sight. Something inside me uncoiled, but only slightly. I was out of immediate danger. Kathleen, however, was not.

Where things became complicated was that she did not seem to realize this fact. Her shame and embarrassment at having just been a part of such a scene were overpowering; there was not at that time room in her head for further thoughts, such as that Adam was completely unlikely to feel comfortable being so anticlimactically defeated by being outnumbered, or that he actually did not have anyplace else to go except back to her dorm, which was where he was most likely to be heading right now. She was overloaded, and I took my pistol out of her hand gingerly and just let her spin for a minute.

I was still thinking, however, and both of these facts had occurred to me. As Kathleen fought my strong suggestions that she accept a ride home, that she be alert for him to show up again, my sublevels were rapidly forming two counterplans: one in which I could protect her myself, and a second in which I could arrange for her to be protected. Weighing the two even while I was still talking, I found the second one to be far more effective.

I told the five fellows who had come out a very basic, detail-less version of what had happened, basically amounting to that the guy had been bothering Kathleen and I had asked him to leave, and thanked them for coming to find me when they did as they'd likely prevented my being rendered into a different shape and I was sort of fond of the one I had now. The guys laughed and blustered a bit, and asked me if she was going to okay, etc. I asked if one of them could give her a lift home, and Kathleen flat out refused. Then she walked off, the same way that Adam had gone. I weighed following her and fighting her into understanding the situation, deemed it quickly improbable and messy even if it succeeded, and pulled out my phone instead.

JMU's campus cadets are a non-police, student-staffed safety option that goes a long way toward making girls feel they have a safe middle option to not be overreacting but still be reacting to the threats that shitty guys can and do represent on many college campuses, and I utilized them that evening for that precise service. That Kathleen had no idea they were coming and would be watching her, I reasoned, wasn't actually a betrayal of our newly-minted trust, since she'd chosen to walk off before I could ask her permission. So I called them, informed them that there was likely a suspicious and potentially dangerous male individual on his way to or outside of her dorm hall right now who looked like a tall pudding-less dwarf with a stormcloud where his face should be, and also gave them Kathleen's description and her likely range of location. The cadet dispatch fellow stayed on the line with me and I actually heard in the background within five minutes that two cadets had found and intercepted Adam outside of that dorm and forcibly removed him from campus entirely. He assured me that a cadet would find Kathleen and make sure she got home okay and in company. I thanked him for his help. Then I went back into the dance and danced with attractive women for awhile, because "dinner" still sounded good. Would you believe I did end up going home alone that night, though? It was a real shame, all things considered. I'd have written the ending a bit differently, myself.

I never told Kathleen that Adam had been there waiting for her, until tonight, seven years later. She was already scared and mortified; it wasn't the right time for an I-told-you-so, and I wasn't exactly thrilled at having been right. But I did have the brand new notion that I had done something selfless for another person, a young attractive woman at that, and hadn't once had the thought that maybe I deserved some base gratitude in return. I was wrestling internally with the new idea of my invisible, irreversible sense of obligation to this girl I barely knew.

Our friendship has spanned many heights and valleys since that night. She's gentled me even as I've steeled her over years of experiences, and through it all I held my tongue about the way it all began because Kathleen was better, safer inside never having to know that she had almost walked directly into a predator's claws. I've met and truly come to know over a dozen women, good and beautiful and undeserving women who were subject to some form of sexual assault at some point in their lives, and I knew that the irreversible realization of that dark potentiality forever changes the woman it happens to. She becomes wary, colder, harder inside or out. Her definitions change, her guard reaches a minimum base level above zero. And Kathleen was innocent, pure and complete. I thought... I guess I thought she deserved the chance to grow and develop without having to have that shock of icy water thrown over her all at once. She could learn caution, she could develop better instincts and a more reasonably realistic view of the threats of the world without having to form them as scar tissue over trauma like that, and I could prevent that from being necessary.

And she wouldn't, in the meantime, need that scarred flesh to armor her, because instead she would have me. I would stay near, I would keep watch over her, and I would protect her from anything and everything that might try to do her harm until she had grown into a woman who could defend herself, and at the pace her innocence and unique beauty deserved to be permitted. I could do that.

So I did. I have.

My Best Friend, Walking Buddy, is also my Little Sister, and she is also my Greatest Human Treasure. She reached young adulthood and college never having yet been attacked or hurt by the world, and I encountered her at a time when I needed to know that innocence still existed and could be preserved and valued. I made my choices where she was concerned, and the fact that nobody else ever fully understood or could be permitted to was immaterial in the face of the fact of that friendship.

So now we've parted ways, she and I. The stage of our lives that lasted for nearly seven years in which our finances, our living arrangements, our every personal development was shared with the other, it came to a close two weeks ago when I was diagnosed with cancer and entered the hospital and so abruptly exited her home life. Now I live a town over, and she sits across the room from me emanating with the ache of the emptiness and unfairness of that change, and I know she will be okay. She isn't the girl I met anymore, not by a long shot. She would slap that girl now, shake her about the shoulders and wake her up to the way the world is and will be to the unprepared, and I am comforted by the reality of that fact. Kathleen isn't the doe-eyed deer anymore, she's a sharp-minded young professional woman who can and will last on her own. And she has a genuinely great and solid man standing beside her who does love her like a man can a woman, and can be for her all of the things that everybody has wasted my time trying to tell me I must or should or could be for her. Her boyfriend is everything she deserves, and you should take that endorsement for what it is worth, coming as it does from her greatest sentinel and staunchest protector.

That's How My Best Friendship Began, Walking Buddy. Or at least, it's half of the tale. I know this was a long entry, and I know you may not be much for monologue of this length, so thanks first of all for sticking with me through it. Now I need to hold you to your promise, the one I asked you to make if you were going to keep reading past the top paragraph of this stretch along the long dusty road. You promised you would go and visit her and hear her parallel telling of the same tale, and I want you to do so, for me.

If you're a member of Kathleen's family and you are reading this, please know that I've always held you in the highest of regard, even during the long periods when you were looking upon me with legitimate unanswered questions and perhaps a little suspicion. I always believed that you in particular deserved to know the truth of these things, but Kathleen was not ready to tell, and it was not my tale to share. But I also want you to know that I love your daughter, your sister, your cousin and your niece the exact same way that you do, and that I would never and have never let anything happen to her. I value her as the unique being she is, the irreplaceable member of your family you know her to be, and I have fought and would fight again to protect her from anything that would ever seek to do her harm. I did not keep any of this from you lightly, nor do I resent not being trusted completely. It was my choice to remain silent, out of respect for Kathleen. It was my choice to leave room and reason for suspicion of myself and my intentions. But neither do I remotely regret that choice. It was the right thing to do, and I would do it again.

I'm leaving off for now, Walking Buddy. This has been a long and rather intriguingly emotional entry to write, a relative comparison which should seem equally so to you when you consider the subject matter I diverted from to write about this today. But honestly, I care far more about Kathleen, my sister, then I do about myself and any marginal peril I may be in from cancer. I can fight my own battles with a steady hand and the confidence that win, lose, or draw I will be far greater a man at the end than I was going in.

I've only ever wanted to offer Kathleen the same, and I think I've done an okay job so far.

I'll catch you again soon here by the roadside, buddy. Go visit my sister and pick up the coin's other side, if you haven't already come from there. You did promise, after all. Next time we can talk more about me instead; I'll probably pick up the linear tale from the day I decided to go visit Dr. Blay's clinic in Harrisonburg, the first of several people in a line who actively Saved My Life. Until then, be well, and hug someone who is dear to you for me, will you?

The things that truly matter in life.

- Gabriel, a.k.a. Henry Jones Jr. Since They Named The Dog Indiana