Note: It’s for drug possession, not anything super bad.
13 years ago, my now former best friend tried to first con me out of money and then did it to my mom instead because my daughter had just been born (which he knew) and money was tight. I always knew he had addiction issues, but I never thought he would actually stoop that low.
Today, my wife showed me that there was a public database where you could search Indiana court cases, so out of curiosity, I typed in his name.
21 court cases, mostly drug, vehicle and fraud offenses in the county where we grew up, went to college in, and which he eventually moved back to, stretching back to 1999! Note he didn’t even live there for 10 years!
He’s currently in prison until December because he was found in possession of methamphetamine. And it was not his first time in prison or the first time he had meth on him. He did drugs when we were in college, but the most serious one was cocaine and that was very occasional. I knew he had a drinking problem, and even that he was abusing prescription medication (he offered me Vicodin when I was visiting him in San Francisco and had a headache) but I had no idea he sunk as low as meth.
This was a guy who wanted to compose classical music when I met him in middle school. He was very intellectual and well-read even then. He eventually went to Indiana University, which has one of the world’s top music schools, for composition. He always was very full of life and cheer and how far he has fallen! I knew he’d sunk really low back when he conned me, but this was the first friend I ever made in middle school in the eighth grade after going through all of seventh grade with no friends and we could and did talk about anything for hours, so I kept him in my life for as long as I could.
After college, he got way into restaurants and cooking and was working at some really high-end places, so when he contacted me and told me he wanted to do a pop-up restaurant as a way of starting a full business and needed $400, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. We mostly talked to each other online at that point, so he gave me a pretty false picture of his life.
I’m honestly not sad about the end of the friendship anymore. I cut him completely out of my life 13 years ago and I do not miss him at this point. Would it have been nice to sit together on a porch in the nursing home in 40 years and spend hours talking about Kafka? Sure. But I’m not losing any sleep over it. In fact, when she told me about the database, it was the first time I had thought about him in ages, but he was the only person I thought of and I had to look.
So I’m not sad about it. I shouldn’t even be surprised about it. But it’s so weird knowing my former closest friend is spending a year in prison.
Have you ever found out anything like this about an old friend you lost touch with?
Man, so many of my friends, who were high-functioning illectuals nerds like me, ended up is really terrible situations: bad marriages, drug addiction, suicide attempts, and they never grew out of the ideation of a teenage mindset OR they became really bitter victims of their own prison. Now they are in their 50s, and nothing’s changed. For the few friends I managed to keep all this time they ended up “doing okay” or better, I am grateful. Hell, a lot of my punk and goth friends did better on average than my science fiction nerd friends.
I know so many really smart people who peaked in high school and are now in similar situations. Although most of my punk and goth friends didn’t do all that well in their lives either. Maybe we all gut stuck in a Gen X rut by trying and failing not to disappoint our parents for not being as successful as they were.
I was in a special program for creative kids as a kid. I remember the director telling my mom something about how kids from this program either ended up massively successful or ended up all fucked up and possibly in jail.
He wasn’t wrong, but he really needed to consider the implications of why that was happening, and a lot of it had to do with class and who had access to real support resources and who didn’t.
All the brilliant poor kids ended up all fucked up and still poor, all the brilliant rich kids ended up rich like their parents. Gee, I wonder why??
That doesn’t actually apply in this case. His parents were rich. They were just also negligent and his father was a major alcoholic.
Even if you grow up with privilege, if you grow up without much love, that will fuck you up.