His dad drove a delivery truck for the Philadelphia Enquirer newspaper. He was a proud teamster who loved Mayor Rizzo. My friend inherited that strong love of labor unions. His family were all loyal democrats.
He had a strong Irish Catholic upbringing. He spend two years of high school in a seminary, but dropped out once he discovered girls.
He was a hoarder. He was always taking notes on scraps of paper, and he considered them all important. He had thousands of books crammed into his one bedroom apartment. We named it “The largest unread library in the world.”
He claimed to despise waste, so he recycled stuff he found on the street by bringing it into his apartment. The piles would remain there, untouched, for years. He thought of all the uses people would have for his possessions after he died. When that day came, his landlady dumped them all in a landfill after his family and friends chose the few items they wanted.
We met as freshman at college. We were lucky to have been placed on a dorm floor with a special group of guys. Despite our different backgrounds and interests, we have maintained those friendships for more than fifty years. Some of us were more serious about their studies than others. He and I majored in fun, like many of our 1970s, post hippie generation. We had a large friend group during our college years. There was always something to do rather than focus on school. I did just enough to get by. He didn’t.
He never got his degree. He couldn’t be bothered to take 6 more credits, even when offered six years to do so. Instead, he committed his life to the natural food and supplement industry, and he also was an activist for Native American causes. Thunderheart was his all time favorite movie. Once I was compelled to watch it with him and his girlfriend, and I fell asleep halfway through. I don’t think he ever forgave me.
During those years the two of us, either alone or with others, drove across the United States four times. We visited every state in the continental U.S. except for North Dakota. In later life we planned to check that one off the list by flying there, and then renting a car to cross the Canadian border. We would celebrate by attending a Winnipeg Jets game. We never managed to follow through with that plan.
He was a Philadelphia sports fan. He loved the Phillies and the Eagles, but his passion was the Flyers. He was a huge hockey fan. No matter how tight money was in later years, he always found the funds for the Center Ice Package.
He worked in natural food stores for years, making a name for himself in the industry. He managed many large stores in the early part of his career. He grew tired of day to day retail, and started his own consultancy and brokerage business. He gave lectures, appeared as a guest on radio shows, and attended conventions. He once spent a month in China for something to do with an acupuncture clinic. He was an unconventional businessman. I doubt he ever read a business book. He never took a business loan beyond personal credit cards. He was very successful almost from the start. What no one in the industry knew was that he never filed returns or paid income taxes. He considered himself a communist. He claimed that he refused to pay federal income taxes because he would not help finance the US government’s war machine. I believed him, but I also think he just wanted to keep the money he earned. I also think he was too disorganized to file a tax return. He managed to openly operate his business without paying taxes for more than twenty years before the IRS caught up with him.
I remember one time when we were on vacation together years ago. He got into an argument with a free market entrepreneur about taxes. He started raising his voice in a restaurant, claiming that he “didn’t mind paying more taxes to make sure poor people had food and a roof over their heads.” I couldn’t help interjecting that he hadn’t paid taxes in twenty years. The other guy laughed, and said something like “typical liberal.” My buddy looked foolish, and he didn’t speak to me for a few hours.
He loathed all social media, but sent many texts and emails. I keep my old phones, so I have been scrolling through our daily communications over the years. Ninety five percent were mindless gibberish- just touching base. The remainder were too serious and private to reveal. I told him during our last time together in hospice that I would make them all public, but I wouldn’t do that to either of us.
He despised most modern technology. He would describe in often unbearable detail how the devil inside his laptop was slowly killing him. His brain was simply not wired for computers. His furious rants were sometimes disturbing, and often comical.
He did keep one lengthy word document on successive laptops for years. It was a master list of milestone dates of all of his family and friends. He never missed a birthday, anniversary, or the date when loved ones had passed. You knew you would get a call or text. He always sent cards and notes, sometimes accompanied by a small gift, for really important events.
His political views weren’t always predictable. He didn’t always trust the government. He believed the regulations involving natural nutrition were set up by the powers that be to protect the food, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. He wore two masks at times during covid to virtue signal his progressive bona fides, but refused to take the vaccine. He also refused to take any PPP money from the government, nor would he sign up to collect social security or enroll in medicare. He embraced woke culture, but opposed gay marriage. He was a Roman Catholic who believed marriage was between a man and a woman.
The IRS finally caught up with him around 2016. I remember his phone call to me when he discovered all of his bank accounts had been frozen. As one of his lawyer buddies, I advised him to get a good CPA/tax attorney. He eventually worked out a settlement which allowed him to continue operating his business, but his financial situation understandably took a major downturn. Through it all, he was a hard worker who managed to keep going until covid. The lockdowns were too much.
His business might have survived longer if he had learned to play the fiat game better. He really had no interest in money or investing. He never owned any real estate. He never invested in stocks and bonds. He had a checking account. His savings were kept in cash hidden throughout his apartment and his girlfriend’s house. I’m sure it never occurred to him that those green pieces of paper were buying him less and less as the years went by. Of course I talked to him about bitcoin, or tried to. He wasn’t hostile to it, really. He simply wasn’t interested. When he spotted an MSNBC guest spreading some FUD, he would parrot it. If he heard bitcoin was crashing, I would get a phone call or text. I told him he was my personal contrarian indicator. He didn’t know nor care what I was talking about.
He never realized that the system was rigged, and he had no idea how to play it to his advantage. Instead, he blamed himself. He became more angry. Our phone conversations became less and less enjoyable. Other friends noticed the change in him too. Always an extrovert, he became private and secretive. He stopped hanging out. He made himself a prisoner of his squalid apartment. He stopped getting invited to things, since he always responded by saying he was too busy. It became a running joke in our crowd. He frequently told me that he was a loser, but that was only in his darkest moments.
His life got much worse when his on again, off again girlfriend announced that she had met someone else. She was the love of his life. He had many, many women, but she was the only one who mattered. They remained friends, but that only made things harder. He grew more angry and depressed.
As a life long Roman Catholic, he prayed every night that he would die in his sleep. He would text me every morning with regret that he was still here. By now our relationship consisted of texts and phone calls. We rarely saw each other, as we lived a good six hour car ride apart.
I wish this tale had a happy ending. He never went to a doctor as an adult, which for him meant over fifty years. He fancied himself a sort of natural doctor, so when he noticed a growth on his neck he treated it with natural remedies. It grew over time. He noticed he was losing weight. His potions and pills didn’t seem to help. Since he wanted to die anyway, he watched his own body wither.
Another one of our college buddies had been fighting serious ailments for years, and his time was coming to an end. He asked me to pick him up on the car ride down to say goodbye to our friend together. When I saw him I was shocked. He had lost 50 pounds. His clothing didn’t fit. He was missing a few teeth. He was pale. His long beard did not mange to conceal the oozing lump on his neck. It was horrifying. He caught me staring at him and just said, “I’m dying.” I tried to convince him to get medical attention, but he refused.
I contacted his old girlfriend when I got back home. She was worried too, and offered to take him to the hospital. He delayed and made excuses for weeks. Since I lived so far away, I enlisted the help of his sister, who I had met years ago. She lived in his hometown of Philadelphia.
After one aborted attempt to coax him out of his apartment and accept her help, she finally got him to a hospital near her home. By then the cancer had progressed so far that no treatments could save him. That seemed to be his plan all along.
I always thought of the deathbed reflection to be an unrealistic trope - the dying looking back on their lives with objective, clear appraising eyes. Accidents, heart attacks, and dementia would seem to deny most people this neat summing up. Well, my friend got his, despite cancer invading his brain along with his throat and bones.
His close friends made their way to his sister’s house in Philadelphia for final visits. He spoke about everything, but mostly about the heartbreak he suffered when the love of his life left him for another man. He never did get over losing her. He talked about politics, religion, and he repeatedly discussed his pall bearers, right down to telling us where we should all stand and why we were selected.
Gone were his concerns about his failing business, his difficulty in affording rent and groceries, and the general sense that he was an all around loser. He recognized that he had been fortunate in many ways. He had a lot of fun, and he was grateful for that. He believed he would meet his God. When the final moment came, the love of his life, though married to another man, held him in her arms as he passed.
That, and the number of people who showed up at the packed church for his funeral were really all that mattered.