Tag Archives: brother

DREW TURNS 50!!

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So Andrew Nowicki is my oldest and best friend – I’ve known him since the seventh grade, almost forty years now – and today he turns 50. To celebrate this momentous event, I thought I’d tell the story of how we became fast friends. 

Drew was in my algebra I class in the seventh grade at Martin Luther King, Jr Magnet High School in Nashville, 1986-87. I had to dust off the old yearbooks to check the dates on that, which is always a hoot. My earliest memories of Drew are a tall, lanky blond who never looked stressed, and who always wore a (if memory serves) beige Members Only jacket with the sleeves pushed up. It could have been grey. Drew always sat in the back, never really drew (ha!) attention to himself, and it wasn’t until the beginning of the second semester that I even really got to know him. I don’t even remember the context that well, but we went on a field trip somewhere that had a giant mall, and I ended up hanging out with him and Lee Winters while we roamed the mall. We ended up at the arcade, blowing through quarters on a game like Gauntlet or some shit, laughing our balls off and having a great time. 

Soon after that, Drew and I became inseparable. This was in the days when kids slept over at each other’s houses, a cultural phenomenon I mourn the death of, because it was the course of a lot of my fondest childhood memories (in the South this was known as “spenninnanight” – say it out loud with a drawl and you’ll get it). Drew and I spent many a weekend at each other’s houses, staying up all night playing video games – well, I would pass out and he’d power through, determined to beat the thing before we had to take it back to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. Great times. 

But the moment that sealed the deal was another field trip, this time a bus ride to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to visit the nuclear power plant. (We were going to a science and engineering magnet, so this made some sense, at least.) Oak Ridge was a solid four hour drive away, so we piled onto the chartered bus and settled in for the ride. By this point, Drew and I had spent enough time together at lunch, recess, and in gym class talking about all the things tweens talked about in the late Eighties, mainly movies and music. I would go on to learn that Drew was, by nature, a collector, and music was and still is his main obsession. He’s the guy who has to have every album of a band, regardless of whether it’s his favorite or not. His cassette collection, even then, boggled my mind, and despite its already prodigious size, once CDs came out, he wasted no time in replacing every single tape with the CD version of the same album. That’s just who he is. 

These days, he collects mainly concerts, from what I’ve seen. He pounces on LiveNation’s $25 Ticket Weeks every year and goes to as many shows as he possibly can. Not having kids, he has more free time than I and can handle late weeknights out better than I can. But several times a month, he’s at a show somewhere.

So we had discussed music before we left for the trip. These were the glory days of the Walkman, and while we knew we could entertain ourselves alone with our respective headgear, we had zero intention of doing so. Music was meant to be shared, man, so we were gonna share it. But how?

Drew had the answer. I brought my iconic 80s boombox, some silver plastic behemoth made by whatever Japanese company was cranking ‘em out at the time, probably Aiwa or some shit, and Drew brought the magic bullet: his spliiter headphone jack. You remember this miracle of technology, right? A little plastic widget that plugged into the single 10mm headphone jack on your boombox/Walkman/whatever, and the other end had TWO jacks, so the signal would split and go into TWO sets of headphones. Ingenious. Whoever came up with that deserved the goddamn Nobel Prize. Corporate America being what it is, he probably got fired instead while some smarmy C-suiter took the credit. We think this shit is all new these days, don’t we? But I digress. 

Anyway, Drew had one of the magical devices, and we plugged it right into the port on my box, and he slammed his cassette of AC/DC’s Who Made Who into the slot, and off we went to glow in the dark.

For those of you who somehow have lost your memories of growing up in the 80s, AC/DC was an Australian rock band that gained iconic international status after the death of their original lead singer, Bon Scott, who choked to death (as so many seemed to around 1980) on his own vomit while passed out from drinking. Rather than calling it quits, the rest of the band hired a new lead singer, Brian Johnson, and proceeded to put out one of the best hard rock albums of all time, Back in Black. You know it, you know the tunes, they’re still popular today – Tony Stark’s theme music in Every. Single. Marvel movie is AC/DC, the first of which is “Shoot to Thrill”, a classic banger that happens to be Track #2 on BiB. AC/DC were superstars after the album came out, so much so that they were recruited to provide the soundtrack for another iconic film from the 80s, Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive. 

If you don’t remember that one, don’t feel bad – King barely does, either. It was his dorectorial debut, he was stoned out of his gourd while making it, and it’s a legitimate turd. After a slew of ultra-successful adaptations of his books, King was offered the chance to direct a film of his own, and so he adapted his short story “Trucks” into a mediocre horror movie starring Emilio Estevez. Machines came to life and started killing everyone, and a ragtag group of people stranded at a truck stop had to fight for their lives to escape the horde of demonic semis that threatened them, the leader of which was a giant black 18-wheeler with the grinning mug of the Green Goblin mounted on its grill. This was the period in his life when coke was a bigger priority for King than the quality of his work, and so the movie bombed at the box office, but, like every piece of film ever made before streaming, it found a cult following on home video and cable for years. 

As bad as the movie is, I loved it as a ten year old, and one of the reasons was because of the soundtrack – nothing but banger after banger of AC/DC rock songs, including an original track for the movie entitled “Who Made Who” which kicks off the album, followed by the biggest hit of their career, “You Shook Me All Night Long”. This is, of course, the single from BiB that made them worldwide famous, so it was in the movie –  it closes out the final shot as our band of heroes escapes on a sailboat to a deserted island off the coast to await the inevitable day when the machines would run out of gas. The movie was cheaply made, poorly written, and it was an absolute hoot. And the soundtrack rocked. 

So as we sat on the not-so-sentient-or-malevolent charter bus, ready to bathe ourselves in nuclear radiation, and Drew pops the cassette in. We plug our headphones into his miracle splitter jack, and off we go with AC/DC propelling us down the highway. But here’s the kicker: we only listened to the first two tracks. As soon as the last overdriven chords of “You Shook Me” rang out, we would instantly rewind the tape to the beginning and start over again with “Who Made Who”. This was waaaaay before putting anything on repeat with the tap of a finger was even a possibility – we had to do it the old-fashioned way, by… well, by pushing the Stop button, then the Rewind button, and then the Play button. So THREE taps of a finger, sure. But we did have to WAIT for several seconds for the magnetic tape to spool itself back to full size again, so there you go. Uphill both ways, in the snow, you young’uns don’t know what it was like, blah, blah, blah… Yeah, we had to wait a good ten seconds or so for everything to reset, and then we pushed Play and dove right back into those two amazing songs, again and again and again, heads banging, for four solid hours. Magic. 

I’ve been fast friends with Drew ever since. He followed me to McGavock when I decided I had no interest in going to a magnet high school focused on science and engineering. He took German with me so we’d have more classes together, a decision that changed both of our lives forever. He started wearing denim jackets the same time I did (dunno if that was his idea or mine, but who cares? And definitely not life-changing). We grew our hair out together, his inarguably cooler and more awesome than mine. We roomed together in college for four and a half years. He was one of my groomsmen at my wedding. We’ve seen each other when we’ve been up and when we’ve been down, and we’ve always been there. I trust him with my life and my soul. I’m an only child, but I’ve had many brothers, and Drew is the first among many.  

And the best part of this is, while I’m pretty solid on most of the facts in this piece, Drew will know what I’ve gotten wrong and he’ll tell me. 

So Happy 50th Birthday to one of the best people I’ve ever known. Love you, brother. 

Brothers

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There’s an old saying about friendship. “Friends help you move. Good friends help you move bodies.”

And then there are the ones who will go out with you in the middle of the night with a gun and a shovel. 

My friend Harvie is one of those guys. He’s my best friend, has been since we were twelve. We met in homeroom on our first day of seventh grade. We were seated alphabetically, right next to each other, and he started talking to me. Within a few days, he’d gotten my birthday out of me, and he was elated to find out that our birthdays were three days apart. Remember when wristwatches that were also games were a big deal in junior high? He gave me one of those on my birthday. Pretty soon we were inseparable.

Harvie’s family life was pretty rotten. He never knew his father, and his mother had all kinds of health and mental issues. He grew up in East Nashville when it wasn’t cool to live in East Nashville. He started spending the night at my house, and a Friday night sleepover almost always turned into a full weekend. He even spent Christmas Eve with my family because we got “snowed in”. My mom and stepdad went out that afternoon and bought him presents so he’d have something under the tree and not feel left out. He was made to feel welcome always in our home.

He never forgot that. Any of it. By the time I graduated high school, Harvie was calling my mom “Mom” too. I can count on one hand the number of Christmas Eves he hasn’t been at my mom’s house, and only one of those was because I wasn’t in town. I’m an only child, but I’ve got a couple brothers, and Harvie is the first.

He was a born scrapper. He called me late one night when we were sixteen to tell me he’d just gotten into a fight at Shelby Bottoms because someone had called him telling him that I had been hurt and to come meet me there. After college, a fight broke out at a party I threw, and I tried to stop the two guys from going at each other. I got stuck in the middle, and without hesitation, Harvie jumped in to pull one of them off of me. If he was ever afraid, it never showed. He was tough, and I always admired that about him. 

He was also VERY good at pissing people off. Harvie was used to rejection, and he had developed a tough skin. He tended to respond aggressively to anyone who threatened him, and he managed to push a lot of people away. But I never judged him when we were kids, and that stuck with him. It got under his skin, and under there was a pretty safe place to be. Harvie’s heart was huge, vulnerable, and full. 

We had times when we didn’t talk, mainly because I had my head up my ass. I got depressed and selfish because I was going thru a rough time, and I alienated him for a while. He gave me the opportunity to walk away from our friendship instead of hurting him, and that snapped me back. We’ve been tight ever since. I know I’ve gotten sidetracked a little along the way with things that happen, because things happen, but I always knew that my brother would come running if I called. If I had ever asked, I know without any doubt that he would have been at my door with his gun and his shovel. I never had the opportunity, and sometimes I wish I had. 

As hard as his life had been, Harvie had turned it around. He grew up with nothing, and he was angry a lot of the time. In the last handful of years, all of that had started to fade. He was becoming successful, he had a beautiful house, he had been married for almost ten years (to a woman who could take his shit and turn it back on him – perfect fit for him), and he smiled a lot more than he used to. Harvie’s 40th birthday is December 1st, three days after mine, and he had been planning to come out to California to visit me and another good friend of his as a birthday trip. It was a big deal. We used to always try to celebrate our birthdays together, because they were so close. My younger brother by three days.

And now I don’t get to see him anymore. 

This weekend, Harvie was on his annual Man Trip with his regular crew of guys on Percy Priest Lake. Yesterday, around noon, he and four of his crew were either leaving or entering Four Points Marina on their small deck boat, and they collided with a much larger cabin cruiser. I still don’t know most of the details, but I’m sure the driver of the cruiser couldn’t see the tiny little boat low in the water, and boats don’t have brakes. All five passengers on the smaller boat went into the water. Harvie is the only one who didn’t come out. 

This just got a lot harder to write. 

His wife called me a little while ago to tell me he had been found, and I’ve been composing the first part of this in my own head since yesterday. I didn’t want to start going down this road until I was sure what had happened. And now it’s hard to find words to say that don’t sound trite, or cold, or meaningless. I even had to try to explain all of this to my son yesterday when he asked why we were so sad. In the gentlest possible terms I could find, I tried to tell him that Uncle Harvie was gone. My son, an optimist of the highest order, kept presenting options as to how he might be found. He even reminded me that he is Superman. I wish with all my heart that that were true right now. 

The last time I saw Harvie was in June, when we were home for our annual family visit. We saw Man of Steel together, and he spent the morning of Father’s Day with us at Mom’s house. She made breakfast like she used to for us all the time. He was approaching a million dollars in sales as a real estate agent. He played with Ryder and hugged him a lot. He was at the hospital with my family when Ryder was born. 

Harvie is my brother. It doesn’t matter if he’s gone, he will always be my brother. Oldest friend, confidant, the guy on whom I could always count, no matter what. I miss him so much already, and it’s only been a day. 

But I hope that my son has a friend, a brother like that someday. I look forward to meeting him. 

Rest in peace, Harvie. Love you, brother.

Harvie Cecil Butler

December 1, 1973 – September 1, 2013

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

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I want to talk about the word “brother” and what it means to me.

I’m an only child. I’m the only child of an only child. As a result, I value my privacy and my alone time. I’m used to having my own space for at least a small part of every day. It’s one of the reasons I’m sitting out on my porch right now as I write this – I appreciate solitude and the opportunity to think, reflect, and let my mind wander. It’s when I get my best writing done. I’m uncomfortable, in fact, writing when there’s even someone else in the room – doesn’t matter what the content of whatever I’m writing may be, I just don’t like anyone looking over my shoulder while I’m doing it. It interrupts my thought process. I become hyper aware of the presence of another and it makes it hard to focus and get the job done.

That being said, I love my friends, and I love their company. I get antsy if I don’t get to spend time with the people I care about, as well. One of the things I miss about my early adulthood was the freedom just to drop in on a friend and hang out, go out, drink, talk, laugh, whatever – no plans, no intention, just dropping in on a whim and being welcomed. Those days are pretty much gone, as adult life takes over and everything has to be planned and scheduled – even spending time with those same people now can take months of coordination to actually occur. Granted, my oldest friends now live two time zones away, so it’s understandably more difficult to just pop by (in fact, not one of them has done it yet!), but even seeing my local friends usually takes a series of emails, texts, and messages thru the Face to get put into iCal and synced onto the phone. Ahh, the good old days….

But friends are important to me. Possibly moreso than some people, and this is due, I feel, to the fact that I’m an only child. My friends are my surrogate family, and I mean that in the most honest sense. I have a handful of men in my life, most of whom I’ve known for more than two decades, whom I call my brothers, and I know full well what that term implies. It means a bond as strong as blood, and in some cases, stronger. I’ve got one friend whom I’ve known longer than anyone else, and he’s my brother.  Not only does he know where the bodies are buried, but he’s the one who brought the shovel. Metaphorically speaking, yeah, but if I needed it for real, he’s the one I would call, and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he would come running, shovel in hand. Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci, standing over the trunk of the car in the middle of the night. Brothers, man.

Male bonding is a powerful thing. I’ve been told by various women that they have a more difficult time establishing and maintaining close friendships because they’re raised to be more cautious of one another, that each of them is out for herself, and that it takes a long time for women actually to become solid true friends. I don’t know if this is a generational thing or a specifically cultural phenomenon or what, but I’ve been told this by more than one woman that I’m close to. Men, by contrast, can share a few (okay, several) beers and be fast friends by the time the tab arrives. Or by the time they pass out. I’m oversimplifying, to be honest, but it does seem that it’s a lot easier for men to open up and to trust each other.

The bond of friendship between men is sacred, is holy. Loyalty is one of the things that truly seems to matter to men of all kinds. If a man puts his trust in you, he expects it to be returned, and he can be devastated by betrayal. I know, I’ve had it happen to me. But when a friend is a true friend, it’s an amazing thing. It’s extremely intimate, and for some men, it’s the most intimate they can be with another human being. That’s a subject for another blog, but for some men, it’s true.

It’s left over from the days when men had to rely on each other to survive on a daily basis – it’s the same spirit of camraderie that exists in men who serve together in the military. When you have to depend on the man next to you to keep you alive, you get pretty close. And you tend to remain close, especially if you’ve been thru hell together. It’s a powerful, beautiful thing, and I hope that there’s a female equivalent. I really do.

My son is an only child. He may not remain one forever, but it’s possible. And in either case, I want him to learn how to trust other men and to form these bonds of friendship. They’ll carry him thru hard times and lift him even higher during great times. And it doesn’t matter if the man in whom you would entrust your life has even a shred of the same DNA as you – all that matters is that you get each other, that you’ll be there for each other, you’ll know each other’s secrets, weaknesses, strengths – all that matters is that he’s your brother.