For Picklestraw

Seventeen years ago today, my friend Picklestraw died. Though his life really ended, I believe, four days before when he drove his car into a tree. Or maybe it even ended before that, when he got into the car after drinking for hours and proceeded to go four times the posted speed limit through the streets of our hometown. We didn't do that, you see. We didn't race and we didn't drive drunk. I saw more people snort coke in high school than I saw fight, race or drive under any influences.

I met Picklestraw the summer before our sophomore year of high school and he died right before our sophomore year of college. In the scheme of things that's not a very long time to know someone. But of course those particular years are the crucial years, aren't they? To this day when I am with friends from that time, whether we've kept in touch or not, it's like all the time has disappeared.

We don't talk about Picklestraw much anymore. We've accepted that we'll never know what he was thinking. He wasn't alone in the car when he drove into the tree. He wasn't with any of our friends, or his girlfriend's friends, but I still can't believe that if he was planning on killing himself he would want to take anyone with him. He wasn't selfish and crazy like that.

He'd had a party that night. His parents were out of town and the old gang had gathered for a last Hurrah before we left for school. Picklestraw and I had gone from being the Sam and Diane of RHS (that's a Cheers reference, youngsters) to being cautious friends. He was in love with someone else and so was I. But we had been able to read each other so easily. Yet I couldn't read anything in his behavior that night, except that he seemed especially disheartened as people began to leave.

He invited M. to spend the night (a common platonic thing in our crowd), but she couldn't. She might even have had to drive me home. No one stayed, so Picklestraw went to the party down the street. Filled with people who were not friends. And apparently those not friends needed to go to the 7-11. At least, that's what I heard. No one really knows why they were driving, or why Picklestraw was speeding. The two with him were hurt but not killed.

Picklestraw never woke up from his coma. And I never gathered the nerve to visit him at the hospital. I fantasized about going in there and yelling at him, ticking him off so much that he'd wake up. But I couldn't gather the nerve to try. I didn't cry until I saw his girlfriend at the wake. All I could do was imagine that her pain would be so much worse than mine, and mine was bad. The wake was the only time I cried that whole week - from the news of the accident to the final after funeral gathering at his parents' house.

Picklestaw's headstone simply says, "A Poet" under his birth and death dates. I think he could have been so much more. He was a great poet, but he was also smart, kind, funny, an actor, a public speaker, a confused, insecure adolescent. He loved Led Zeppelin and sometimes I imagine telling him about Ironflower's tantrums if she can't listen to Led Zeppelin in the car.

Maybe it's weird to still imagine talking to him all these years later. Maybe it's weird to wonder if I would have kept in better touch with some of our old friends if they didn't remind me of him so much. Maybe it's weird to be writing this blog at all. But I don't care.

Picklestraw, we still miss you.