Goodbye, Old Friend!

Over the past two days the news has come to me that my old friend Mike Oliver is dying, and dying fast. I've taped a few old pictures by a picture of him on the computer screen.

We spent our teen-aged years on the same short street (5 houses apart) on Long Island. In those days I spent quite a lot of time hanging out with him, sometimes with others, but often just we two. We partied, we listened to very loud music, we told each other stories. We even worked together for a while. Mike loved to laugh, and he did it straight from the belly. He had done poorly in school and we'd tell him crazy tales that we swore were based on real science. Once he went home and put masking tape over all the electrical outlets in his house so that the current would not ooze out into the air and run up the bill so high. He was not pleased when his stepfather disabused him of our baloney.

I have a million memories of Mike. I'll give one example.

Mike went into the army during the very last years of the war in Vietnam, but he did not see combat. I don't think he even left the US, but he certainly loved to tell army stories. Soon after he got out, I joined the Navy at age 18 (the war was over) and while I was in, I stayed in frequent contact with Mike. My time in military service was brief and boring. One day I showed up on the old street, having gone A.W.O.L., and my friend gave me a serious dressing-down. He lectured me about flirting with disaster by giving the navy an excuse to wreck my life. Mike was anything but straight-laced when it came to authorities, but he knew what sorts of things not to mess with.

I had some cash in my pocket, and Mike had a reliable, but famously ugly green car. One fender had been smashed and partially fixed, and all the guys would say that the thing had leprosy. Mike proposed that he drive me back to the base, and so I paid for the gas and he did the driving. His girlfriend at the time, Pat (another friend from the neighborhood) came along.

That sounds like nothing, but the base was in Portsmouth, Virginia --not so close to Centereach, New York. Sure enough, he tooled down I-95 hour after hour, smoking like a chimney but sober, while I and Pat smoked and drank. I was dropped off at the base in the wee hours of the night, very drunk. I had been missing only five days.

Mike had done his best to put me back on the right course, so I could make the best of military life. That's why he bellowed obscenities at the top of his lungs when I went A.W.O.L. again! He yelled and cursed and called me every nasty name. I stayed away longer this time, about three weeks. Mike still wanted me to avoid disaster (being declared a deserter) so he got on the phone and spoke to someone in the Navy. They suggested I turn myself in at the nearest military base, and we piled back into Mike's grotesque car and made a day trip to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. I stayed overnight, ate a meal or two, and was given a bus ticket to Virginia.

The pictures at left and top were taken at my Mom's house not long after I was discharged. I was still wearing my navy beard (something they abolished a few years later). The group shot shows Mike at center-top, me in the center, and at far right (looking toward me) is Bob Kiesel, my close friend who died in a boating accident a few months later. This is the one single surviving photo of Bob --all his family's pictures have been lost or destroyed.

Something interesting happened in 2009 because of the remaining novelty of Facebook. The old gang from the neighborhood got back in touch, often after 35 years of no contact. I had been in touch with Mike a little over the decades, but now we were all sharing the memories. It was Lisa, just to his right in the picture (white top), who made the sad announcement this morning. The small photo shows Mike & me posing by the "grandfather clock," in my family home. We were holding a bottle of bourbon between us, but afterward I cut off the lower part.

We had a reunion in 2010 with over 30 of us in a park, but Mike couldn't attend because he never stopped working. He's an over-the-road trucker, married with 3 grown children. The last time we spoke on the phone, I was calling from Paris to his phone in the truck as he barreled along some highway, far from his home. I had to shout so he could understand me.

Mike came home from a road trip about two weeks ago and was clearly confused and disoriented, so his wife brought him to a hospital. They not only found that he has lung cancer --they found that it has spread all over him and is beyond any sort of treatment. Worse yet, it's effected his brain, so there's no saying a real goodbye, even for his family members. My sister, an oncology nurse, guesses that he'll die within a few weeks.

Mike was always a good fellow. Never mean, always hard-working, always looking at the good side of things in life. I've known him so long that I think he was the first person I knew who went and got a tattoo --the bird on his forearm in the fairly recent shot, taken at his home. This was long before tattoos were stylish and socially accepted, as they are today.

I and all of us from the old street are very sad to lose our good friend Mike, and sadder still that we can't tell him how good it's been to know him.