Costco, Cancer and a Champagne Sebring

by Tom Batten

4/28/2014

Costco is great if you enjoy watching old ladies shove children out of the way to be first in line for a sample of microwave three-cheese quesadilla the size of a nickel. I was in Costco with my parents, waiting while they shopped around, looking at the right-wing memoirs and Civil War histories that make up the book section, when I felt a kind of fidgety presence at my side. I looked over. It was K, an old friend from high school. We’d fallen out. This whole thing, me punching up the walls in my parent’s living room demanding that he get the hell out while he tried to stutter out his parting line, something about how he didn’t care if I wanted to do nothing with my life, he was going to make something of his. End of senior year, a week or so before graduation. This fight having started over a drama class project to build a little diorama. Hadn’t seen him since. He pretended to browse. Every step I took, he followed, eyes on anything but me. He wanted me to notice him. I made him chase me up and down the aisle before I caved and said hello.

“Oh,” K said. “Oh, hey.” He squinted a little like he was trying to place my face. “Tom,” he said, finally, tentatively, like not only was he not sure that was my name, like he wasn’t sure that was a name humans used. Then he perked up. “Hey, I live in DC now,” he said. “Working for [this organization with the same initials as a popular TV crime show]. I’m just down to visit my parents for the weekend. I bought a Sebring, actually, and I’m just in town to pick it up.”

Does that seem like a big info dump in place of a simple hello? Felt a bit unnatural to me. I pointed out that the organization he claimed as his employer had the same initials as this TV show and he rolled his eyes and groaned, “Everyone says that. Not worth trying to explain.”

He looked exactly the same at thirty as he had when we met in middle school, which is to say he looked like a little old man then, too. He had this jowly, lined face and he was tiny, because as a kid he’d been sick and stopped growing. Being as sick as he’d been had made him famous, kind of, in that way that sick kids get treated like stars because what else are you going to do, look at them and cry? He was supposed to die, which made him special. But then he didn’t die. He got better. He wasn’t a star anymore, he was a miracle, and miracles have a way of disrupting a narrative. His role went from tragic hero who reminds us of how fragile life is to survivor whose story should be inspirational in some vague way but who should also move on with his life.

But K couldn’t move on. Cancer was all K talked about. Everyone loved him when he was sick, and he was determined to remind them as often as possible. I used to joke that if K was in math class and the teacher asked, “What’s two plus two?” that K would raise his hand and answer, “As a cancer survivor, I believe the answer is 5.” He’d hit on girls by showing them the scars from his bone marrow transplant and alluding to the fact that none of the kids he’d met at cancer camp were around anymore, that he was the only one left alive. It worked, in a way. Got him a lot of attention. K wanted to be worshiped but he’d accept pity. His illness had left this hole in his brain that could only be filled with either pity or praise. At parties he’d sidle up to women and take out this little notebook he carried around, aggressively tap the cover of the notebook with his pen until they asked him what he was doing and then he’d say, “Oh, this? My poems. Sorry, I’m a poet, I’m just thinking about a poem I’m working on. Do you…like poetry?”

He’d read them those fucking poems, too. All this shit about hourglasses and sleeping dragons.

Standing there in Costco, I started telling him about me, that I was teaching college composition or whatever, and he interrupted to tell me that he’d had a hard time finding a Sebring the right color. He’d actually been looking for a year to find the right one, and how crazy was it that he’d finally found it back home? “I’ve got this Jeep now that I love,” he said, “but the Sebring will be nice for the week, and then I’ll keep the Jeep around for weekends, when I feel like cutting loose. Garage has room for two cars, might as well take advantage.”

I asked how his parents were doing, he told me how proud they were of how great everything was turning out for him. This was not a conversation, this was a performance.

When we were kids, I thought K was pretty interesting. I liked the way he wasn’t who everyone needed him to be — the survivor who teaches us to stop and smell the roses. I remember once being in Health class, the teacher using K’s story as an example to teach us that we should be grateful for all we have, while like two nights before K had gotten drunk on Zima and played out this half-assed suicide attempt with a butter knife because this girl he had a crush on didn’t like a drawing of a robot he made. His existence pointed out some blind spot in the adult world, a need for nice, tight movies-of-the-week when reality was dark, complicated, and weird.

We both wanted to be loved, but unlike me, K actually believed he deserved as much. He was desperate for attention from girls. Never met a female he didn’t make a move on, and his only moves were poetry and having had cancer, until junior year when he got it in his head that he should start dressing like a mobster. We were going to someone’s birthday party, he came to pick me up wearing sunglasses, black suit pants, shiny black leather shoes, a white tank top, and suspenders. All purchased from the kid’s section at Macy’s. In the car, he pitched that when we got to the party it might be fun if we acted like he was a mob boss and I was his bodyguard, that maybe there would be some girls there and that it would be cool if I talked him up to them.

Once we arrived, I responded by duct taping him to a chair and throwing a glass of water in his face.

Pretty fucked up. Not nice. I think I felt a kind of kinship with K because we’d both been too close to sickness and death too early and it made us both assholes in different ways. Or maybe being around K reminded me of how not to act–not to go around shoving my pain in everyone’s face, not to make my search for an acceptable identity everyone else’s problem. We choose friends–especially when we’re young–to fit the story we’re telling about ourselves. K taught me how not to act, and I liked that I got to kind of mentor him. Don’t act like that, don’t say these things, don’t think that way. Toughen up. Every time I said that to him, I was saying it to myself, too.

I probably treated him a little like a pet. I liked being the guy who took care of the little cancer man. I liked having a sidekick, and I figured the benefit to him was that he got dragged along on adventures he wouldn’t otherwise have had. Maybe our ideas of adventure were different. One night there was this pool party, girls in their bathing suits, but I made K leave early to tramp through the woods behind Pizza Hut looking for a sort of fabled hobo camp instead.

We never found it, but this old man pulled a knife on us. K cried, and I think I probably would have cried too, but since he was crying I had to pretend it was great and exciting and just what I hoped would happen.

For the record, we were friends for a couple more years after that party. For context, later that year he won some kind of award from the county and dedicated it to me in his speech (he wasn’t supposed to give a speech, he just blurted out ‘this is for Tom’ when they handed him the thing.)

That day in Costco, listening to K brag, it dawned on me that I’d somehow stumbled into a moment that K’d been anxiously awaiting. The day he got to face me down and rub his great job that I wouldn’t understand and two-car garage stuffed with quality automobiles in my face. Forget that the Sebring is an old lady car. Forget that a champagne Sebring (that was the color he’d spent a year hunting down, champagne) sounds like a euphemism for a sex move that old people use, one easy on the hips and back. K had panned out, and he needed me to know.

Yeah, we choose friends to suit the story we’re telling about ourselves, but the trick is that people are doing that to us while we’re doing that to them. To K, I was Biff Tannen. I was his bully. I was on a list of things he’d overcome to achieve success, a list that also included cancer.

Honestly, it was a thrill. Maybe it shouldn’t have been. Maybe realizing you’re someone’s bully should lead to a degree of introspection. But really, it felt like a victory. In the last couple years there’s been this kind of push to raise awareness of bullying and how bullies fuck people up. Like that’s something new, like the first act of bullying occurred in 2011 and shocked the nation. Quick flashback to me, 5th grade, crawling around the floor of the school bus looking for the fucking tooth that had just been punched out of my fucking face, because my mom had this little jar she kept my baby teeth in, and if I came home having lost one without saving it for the jar she’d want to know why and I’d have to explain what really happened instead of lying that it popped out while I was eating lunch.

Anyway. Look at the good a little bullying served in K’s case! I wish I’d known how K saw me back in the day. I could have been so much worse. Think about it, I was just enough of a monster to get him a champagne Sebring. If I’d punched him in the face, he might have a BMW instead. If I’d branded him with a hot iron, he’d be President of the United States!