Baloo

Today I started thinking of him. Absolutely out of nowhere. I replayed all the things that happened over and over again, and as always I was astonished by how randomly idiotic our lives are, and how, no matter if we are aware of this fact or not, they remain being both idiot and random. And how, given the circumstances, there are many people who learn this fact and choose to dislearn it.

Baloo. His name was Baloo. I won't try to find a more dignified name for him, because this is the way he would have liked to be called. And I'm not taking a wild guess here; once, in the middle of lunch, he said, 'If I could rename myself, my new name would be Baloo, as in the Jungle Books. This remark wasn't in any way connected with the things we were discussing over that particular lunch, nor it was in any way related to any conversation we had had previously or afterwards, but nevertheless all of us remember it and none of us were suprised at the moment. He was like that, you know. He was exactly the kind of people who said those kinds of thing when less expected.

I met him in college, when standing in line to register. I was thinking of my stuff, and all of a sudden a hand comes crawling around me, grabs my watch, and says, 'Wow, this is a nice watch. You look just like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland". Upon that time, I wore a silver chain watch in a chain around my neck, and I indeed thought I looked like Alice's rabbit, a fact that amused me to no end. So I was delighted by his comment, and we became friends.

I won't stretch the truth and tell you we were best friends. Hell, what does best friends mean? But he and I were part of a group of five (including Arwen) who took most of our classes together, generally had lunch together and, more often than not, would go to some cantina after class and have a couple of beers. We went out together on most weekends. So yeah, we spent a whole lot of time together.

He was a strange dude. I think I can't convey just how strange he actually was. Example: Let us say his real name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Let us say everybody called him Fitzgerald. First day at Literary Analysis, the teacher calls from the list: John Kennedy! No response. And that happened every class, for at least three or four months. Baloo all the time sitting next to me. Nearing the end of semester, when checking the final grades, the teacher says, 'Does anyone know this John Kennedy? He never showed up.' Dead silence from the class. Of course we all knew he was Kennedy, but we didn't know his first name was John. The teacher goes on, 'It's weird, because he never showed up and nevertheless I have a bunch of papers delivered by him: John Fitzgerald Kennedy." And then Baloo raises his hand, as fresh as a peach, and he says, 'That would be me.' The teacher looks at him, completely dumbfounded, and says, 'Then why the hell you never answered when I passed list?' and he answers, 'I didn't know that was me Nobody ever calls me John."

He wasn't stupid. He was, without a doubt, one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. I mean, the guy was brilliant. I guess he just enjoyed putting people out. For instance, in History of Literature, a subject imparted by the most terrible, iron-hearted, white-haired radical feminist ever alive on the face of Earth, he would say something like, 'I do think that the one thing Virginia Woolf really yearned for was a good fuck', and he would just bask in the sweetness of achieving the teacher's foaming rage.

He didn't hang out with us always. Sometimes we'd run into him in the company of the strangest and most colorful folk. Sometimes really cool weird-people, but also sometimes those I'd-run-away-if-I-ever-find-him-in-the-street-at-night weird-people. My guess is that he sometimes got bored of our unavoidable burgoiseness and he'd escape to find some new flavors.

We were pals. We got together for Christmas, and for New Years'. He made the tastiest apple struddel I've ever had.

When we were alone (and by alone I mean the schoolbunch and its diverse ramifications) he was witty and disperse at the same time. He'd discuss serious and hilarious matters with the same intelligence and same half smile. He could be sweet and he could be ruthless, sometimes he would hurl annoying comments just to ponder their effects. That led to a lot of internal quarrels, but in those times he never had a mean word for me. Or perhaps I'm not too touchy and if he ever said something mean to me, I took it as a joke. I really can't quite remember. And all those comments, he meant them as jokes. I'm sure of that. At least in those early times. He just evaluated people by their ability to catch their disguised jokes. Nevertheless we all understood it and, although he did fight with some of them sometimes, they always remained friends.

Now, when we were at parties, he would change altogether. Not all of those in our group drank, and most of them didn't drink very much, but he and I were a couple of thirsty cats. As I've said before, I can only develop social abilities when I'm more-or-less drunk, and right then I was nineteen and drinking. A lot. But after my first bad experience with alcohol, which took place when I was thirteen, I've never let myself lose control, so I could get very drunk but I never lost it. He, however, would drink until he blacked out, and then he would start looking for more. We also did drugs often, but I was always have been very prissy about drugs. Only one at the time, and never with alcohol. He, on the other hand, would mix them, shake them, and stir them, and trasegate them with generous quantities of hard liquor. That wouldn't have been so bad if he had been able to handle it; I mean, I don't mix drugs because I know I can't handle them, but I know there are people who do just fine. He didn't. He handled alcohol badly, and if he mixed it with drugs you had a recipe for disaster. More often than not, we would have to drag his unconscious ass out of the party and nurse his hangovers. But it was all mostly OK then. He would wake up pale and trembling, with a rueful smile, and he would spin hilarious tales about what he had thought and felt the night before.

Good times.

All through this time Arwen bugged me about Baloo having a crush on me. She wanted us to get together, wouldn't that be fun? I kept telling her she was crazy. I honestly don't think, even now, he ever had anything as mundane as a "crush" on anybody, let alone me. He had a girlfriend for most of the first year and then they broke up. Arwen kept inserting innuendos here and there, and maybe because of her influence, or maybe because we did like each other in a non-serious, mately way, things started to happen. Nothing great, you know: prolonged eye contact, he stroking my hair, hugs that were a little too long, veiled comments. Nothing major. We never went out together and he never called me nor I called him for other reasons than strictly business, namely, where we would get drunk next weekend. Once, at a dinner-party we had, we cuddled in the couch, holding hands, hugging, kissing softly. It was very nice, very pure, and very sweet. It was good.

But it never went further than that. I didn't want him to be my boyfriend, and he never showed any interest in taking the relationship further, either. We'd still go out, and things did not change. Arwen insisted and "coached" us, but it never went further than that. I want it to be clear. I loved him dearly, he was a sweet guy and yes, I liked the situation better if he was present, but I was never in love with him, nor I ever told anyone such thing.

Then, because of one bureaucratic matter or another, there was a strike at the college. Classes were suspended. The community stayed together but we didn't have school anymore, so henceforth our meetings were social. So we got to be more in contact with the "party" Baloo who was, as you'll recall, a substance abuser of the bad kind. It was impossible to have meaningful personal contact with him anymore, so we just got hammered with him. It was fun at the time, but now I think that's were things started to go bad.

On the personal note, we met a couple of times for coffee, and they were good occasions, but it was not enough to compensate what he'd become when not in his senses. Before, when he was high, he'd just be a little crazier and a lot louder than he was when he was sober, and we knew we had to watch out for him because he was very likely to end up swimming in his own vomit if unattended, but that was all. Now, he was actively destructive and looked everywhere to see what he could do to... endanger himself. I can't explain it better than that. He would pick up a fight with anyone by emitting the most offensive comment he could think of. He would stop his car in the middle of the highway, step out and dodge the cars over and over again until we were frightened sick. He would still make hurting remarks at us, his friends, but now it wasn't a joke. He got in fights with most of them, and this time the friendship wouldn't be restored as easily. Most of them tried to, but they found Baloo had built a wall around him and wouldn't be friendly anymore. They started avoiding him.

In one of these occasions, one of these sick sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll parties, we ended up having sex. It was the only time. We were both shitass high and, although it was fun at the time, I don't think it was a good thing to do. If it had to happened, it should have taken place in that time when there was nothing but sweetness and good sentiments between us. When it did happen, it was rough and sick and savage and quick and there were no good feelings; this happened just after my abortion, and both of us were in some sort of death-trip. I snapped out of it, more out of good luck than anything else. He didn't.

After that, he started making cruel remarks at me. It was the first time I ever felt attacked by him. We went on partying together, but from that point on, I don't think we were friends anymore. And our activities kept getting rougher and rougher, until we reached a highpoint in New Years' 2000.

That was a big night. Or it was supposed to be, anyway. Everyone in the planet who did not have a plan for that night was an all-time loser, if you'll recall. Or so we thought back then. For me, the party started at 3 am, when Arwen came to pick me up with some friends, Baloo included. We went to three different parties. I don't remember having a particularly good time at these places, but I do remember drinking a lot. A whole fucking lot. Other substances came into scene. I might have participated. I don't really recall many details of that evening. I remember watching the sun rise from the rooftop of a building I didn't remember arriving to and feeling very, very high. Baloo and another friend were jumping from rooftop to rooftop, both of them shitty-drunk. And I was rushing behind them, running on the very edge of the rooftop. I just can't understand how we managed to not fall.

Then we decided we were hungry, and we wanted some quesadillas from El -----jusco, which is a hill… more of a mount, crisscrossed with the most badly maintained roads in Mexico. We got into the car and I ended up in the passenger seat on the lap of Redhanded Serge, another one from the bunch, and with Baloo at the wheel. Now that I remember I can't understand why none of us even offered to drive instead of him because, while we were both very, very high, Baloo was most definitely in much worse shape than we were. I guess we didn't care. I know I didn't.

Once we were in the highway, Redhanded Serge and I made a bet on who of us would dare to actually sit on the roof of the car while Baloo was driving (rather erratically) at about 70 mph. It turned out we both dared. We took turns to climb to the roof through the passenger window, both of us laughing our asses off. In a given moment when we both happened to be inside the vehicle, Baloo missed a curve and we went into the ditch, cartwheeling twice. No one was hurt (I still can't believe it), but the car was a wreck. Total loss. And there we were, upside down in the middle of nowhere. 'We crashed' Baloo mumbled, staring stupidly in front of him. And Redhanded Serge and I just kept laughing our asses off, although he had landed on top of me and I was a little out of breath.

Arwen and other friends, who had been in another car behind us and who also were much more sober, were really panicking "We thought you would all be dead", Lisa told me later. When they saw we weren't, they were royally pissed at us. Especially at Baloo, but also with Redhanded Serge and me because of the way we'd been climbing to the roof of the car until just two seconds before the accident. If any of us had been out at the moment, we would have been smashed to tiny-winy pieces. And they got angrier when they saw we couldn't stop laughing. I wasn't all that high in that moment anymore, but anyway I felt elated. Wee! We had had a crash! We had almost died! Too bad it didn't happen!

And then I got home, and thought about it, and made a decision. I, until this day, don't know if it was a good choice or not.

(In this moment I have to insert a little piece of my history that doesn't strictly belong to Baloo's chapter, but it's necessary).
For the preceding two months, I had been kind of dating a man. Carlo was 50 and I was 20. He wasn't handsome, he wasn't especially interesting, he wasn't especially charming, in short, I didn't especially like him, but he was persistent, very persistent, and he had made me feel beautiful as I had never felt before. So I saw Carlo to inflate my ego, but I hadn't made up my mind into going into a relationship with him. I thought I didn't want to because I'd lose all the 'great times' with my friends, being my 'great times' episodes similar to a lesser degree to the one I just described.

And then, at home, after this happened, I thought, 'What the hell am I doing? Am I avoiding a relationship with a man who loves me and thinks I'm the most beautiful thing in the world because I want to be with my friends, my friends that drive a car in a state where they can't even walk and then get me into an accident? My friends who, after this happened, could only laugh hysterically? No, I won't have it anymore."

And I didn't. I stopped seeing those guys, I only kept an intermittent contact with Arwen, and I plunged myself into a hell of emotional, psychological and physical abuse with that man that lasted almost a year. I never called any of them, partly because I didn't want to, and mostly because I was not allowed to (that guy, Carlo, was more a sentinel than a lover to me). Months went by. I only knew of them through Arwen, and I didn't know much. Arwen herself had had a fight with Baloo, because he made an 'offensive' remark about her new boyfriend, and they didn't speak to each other anymore.

After eleven months of pure hell, I broke up with Carlo. I was 'free' again. I almost immediately started going out with another guy and got into an only slightly less destructive relationship, so I didn't quite have the time to start thinking about reconnecting with the old friends.

Then, on December 2nd, 2000 (Saturday), a call on my cell-phone. Arwen is crying. 'Baloo is dead.' No one seems to know how it happened.

He just stopped breathing.

Later, when the old group was finally reunited at the funeral, we realized all of us had stopped seeing him at one point or another. No one had seen him in at least three months. He had found an excuse to fight with each an every one of them. The ones who wouldn't fight him, he would find the way to hurt them so deeply they didn't want to see him anymore. There was a method in his doings. That's what he did to me. He tried to make me fight him, and when I wouldn't, he pushed me to the edge until I didn't want to do anything with him anymore.

He had been methodically and effectively pushing all his friends away from him. Then he was alone, and he died.

He had been at a girls' house (no one seemed to know who she was, either, and she was not at the funeral), a casual sex-friend he had met a couple of days before, and had been smoking opium and having sex. They got high, and then they fell asleep. She got up in the morning. He was snoring. (I felt a pang when I heard that; I also remembered his snoring in the only night we spent together). She went into the shower, and when she got out, he was dead. He had just stopped breathing.

At first we were unbelieving. No one dies of opium OD, for Christ's sake; it's like, the most benign drug ever. And indeed, as far as I know, it's impossible. Later we learned he had been doing all sorts of things in his last months, and most probably he just wore his body out until it popped. But the actual cause of death still remains a mystery to this day. As well as the identity of the 'friend' she had been with.

I went to the viewing, I went to the funeral. I saw him. He was dressed in his jeans and t-shirt. He was smiling. I know nobody will believe that, but he was. It was as if he had been dreaming about something rather amusing when he died.

I didn't cry. I felt a deep-down ache, too vague to be real grief, and I was mildly stunned by the fact someone I had slept with was now dead. Most of all, though, I was angry at him. 'You idiot' I kept thinking. 'You idiot, how could you be this stupid?'

I remembered him, so sweet and funny, so intelligent and brilliant. So sweet. I remembered him holding me while I was in one of my fits of rage. I remembered him calling me Alice's rabbit. I remembered him telling me I was pretty. I remembered him singing, dancing, making his stupid and hilarious remarks. He was so sweet.

I remember looking all around me in the funeral parlor at all those potheads who had claimed to be his friends. None of them had been with him. No one's fault but his; he had wanted to be left alone. And we complied.

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All his former friends have canonized him. Not me. I still see them now and then, and everything they do, they do it in Baloo's name. That said, I will tell you that they spend most of their time drinking, getting high and doing the kind of things Baloo was fond of doing at the end of his life, things that would make the guys in Jackass look like sissies.

Arwen took it very badly; it was then that the first crack in our friendship appeared, and also when the first crack appeared between her and her ex-boyfriend, Phoenix. She blamed herself for not being with him when he died, she blamed us for not being with him, and she blamed Phoenix because he was the reason she had had a fight with Baloo in the first place. She also started being very touchy about the subject of Baloo; we couldn't mention him because it set a strange awkwardness between us.

I didn't know the reason for that until recently. She has distorted the whole story in her head, and now she has the notion that Baloo was actually the man for her, and she had known it at the time, but she had done nothing because I was in love with him. That she, instead, had become Pheonix's girlfriend in order to keep our friendship, and she now thinks that was the worst mistake of her life. Because, she says, if she hadn't minded my feelings she and Baloo would have gotten together and he wouldn't have died. Besides, she wouldn't have been with Phoenix, who (she claims falsely) utterly ruined her life.

The things didn't happen like that. I was never into Baloo, and he was never into me. Neither he was into Arwen. We were friends. I know that for a fact. She just likes to think about it like that because it fulfills her desires to be the Queen of Tragedy.

Every December 2nd all of his friends get together and talk about how great Baloo was. They also seize the occasion to drink and abuse themselves as much as they can in one day and one night. I never go, and they resent me for that. I don't want to go. Everyone seems to have forgotten the monster he had turned into in the end. Worse than that: the Baloo they worship, the Baloo they honor, the Baloo they emulate, is the dying Baloo.

Not the Baloo who would go to exhibitions of pre-sound movies and enjoy the fact that there was a lady playing the piano, not the Baloo who would ride his bicycle to college and blow a whistle to warn people away, not the Baloo who had a dog named Athos because he loved The Three Musketeers; not the Baloo who would claim enjoyed porn of fat hairy ladies just to enjoy people's shocked reactions; not the Baloo who made the greatest potato-and-onion frittatas and the best strudel ever.

Not him, but the rude drunkard who would try to injure people as they passed by, be it friend, foe or stranger; the Baloo who would go joyriding and throw empty beer bottles from the car window at other cars; the Baloo who would pride himself of being able to drink, drive, and piss out the window at the same time.

I have never been able to cry for him. For me anger has been the only thing. He was such a great guy, and he blew it. I do remember him as he was at the beginning, but it is as if they were the memories of two different people. I have never been able to make the emotional connection between that Baloo and the corpse I saw at the funeral.

Today, I missed him.

His name was Baloo, he was my friend, and he destroyed himself.