There is no laughter like the laughter shared with an old friend, with your oldest and longest running friend. The guy that’s been there with you through it all, with you and for you every step of the way for over sixty years. So many wars have worked to end us, never succeeding.

I had a moment, this morning, where I realized that no one else will ever know exactly who I am. Only this guy. He’s the one who knows all the secrets, all the dirt, where the bodies are buried. And he’s an old fuck now, like me.

Passing references to some stupidity that happened 40 years ago, one night, in the rain, wrecked and wasted; ex-wives and girlfriends and trucks stranded in snowstorms, in Canada, a hundred miles from anything that could even be called nowhere. Drunk and fights, and chains and knives, dozens of fights; some blood, often a lot of blood. In the morning, eggs and coffee and bolts that needed to be turned. Renegades and mercenaries without cause or alliance, except to each other.

A name crops up, and with it, always, a reference to the car he had, and his mechanical skills, or lack of any particular skills at all. The realization that guy is dead. So many of the guys from those days are gone, some for decades. An impromptu memorial, standing, leaning on the red Craftsman tool box.

A big, dry maple leaf falls all the way down to the dirt, ninety, maybe a hundred feet. We predate that tree. We probably got off our tricycles on that very spot and punched each other in the face. Appreciating we have a unique opportunity to stand where our fathers stood, and to still be standing, long after they have gone to the dust.

Remembering those two men mixing the concrete for the foundation of this garage. A big old rusted cement mixer and shovels and piles of sand and stones. Watching them drinking beer, in the summer sun, and the sound of the can opener ripping open the Ballentine or Schlitz, in the decade that predated the pop top.

Wondering why or how we were never men of their caliber. Or are we the same as them, only we didn’t know them the way we know each other. Did they, too, have their own hidden pages. Pages torn out of and hidden from their books. I hope they did. I hope they knew these things about each other like we know each other. Everyman needs another man who knows his deepest dirt. It keeps you honest and free.

I can’t drive away from that garage anymore without starting to cry, but I’ll be damned if he’ll ever know about that. I just flip him off and laugh as I walk away. “Fuck you, asshole, I’ve got to go…” realizing that one day, maybe soon, or not so soon, it will be the last time.

We all know that our days are numbered from birth, for the most part we refuse to believe it, but the days now, driving away, stomping the gas, dumping the clutch, smoking the tires, seem to have a different quality to them, they carry a weight, as if they were made out of gold, even if they have no real purpose, just bullshitting and ball breaking, same as it ever was, but different. The years themselves seem to have a weight that pushes down making us old and not so upright.

I really wish you’d stop talking about dying and sore bones. Don’t talk to me about deeds to cemetery plots. You’ve made peace with something I’ll never even comprehend. You were always able to make peace. All I ever want to make is war.

Maybe it is because were both old men, or maybe it’s really something else. Every hour I get with you now is a gift, and I will never again take one more minute for granted. These days are all we have left, my oldest friend, in a strange way of all the thousands of days we have spent together, these days are the best, the purest, the most honest. These are the sacred days. These are the days we fought so hard with each other to get to, and now I just want to start all over again, never changing a thing.

Time will kick your ass in a way no man ever could.

My hometown was a small city in the north and it always felt like mid-October. A place in-between, like summer just passed and winter not quite yet come, an odd and often uncomfortable twilight.

A warm and colorful and dark and foreboding place. Full of life and lifeless. At times quiet and complex and terrifying as a Halloween night, full of cold full moons and witchcraft and dark corners and knives. A place of things that couldn’t be explained.

It was good to live in a time when everything couldn’t be explained.

We all seemed to live pretty much the same life in that town. Some kids had fathers and families and some had none. Some of the kids were rich and most were dirt-poor. We were all scared of the bomb and the white kids and brown kids and black kids mostly got along, and when we did fight — and I fought a lot, with just about everybody — it wasn’t particularly violent.

Fighting was more a sport than a way of war. We collected scabs and scars as tokens of our collective rage.

My friend Archie and me were deadly scared of the bomb. It seemed like every day we hid under our desks, hiding from the coming blast. Archie said he was pretty sure hiding under a desk wasn’t worth a pinch of shit, but we hid anyway. I figured he was right.

Farms were nearby and we worked them when school was out. We killed the animals we raised as pets and we ate them because the world has an inherent cruelty that needed to be passed down like a torch, and understood and accepted.

There were a lot of rituals of passage in that town. Rituals of terrible importance that have now faded into memory and dust..

And, every brick and cement building had a yellow and black fallout shelter sign on it. If those signs were meant to comfort us, they did not.

Maybe we got along ok because we all knew any minute the Russians would bomb us, so we figured we might as well stick together.

Driving through Middletown now, as an old man, I feel a hollowness, it rattles like a coin in a can.

It’s the way the rain dripped off the leaves on the summer morning after the evening’s thunderstorm, and the big and small puddles filled with worms and the way the air smelled clean again. The early breeze cooler than the wind of the past few weeks. Some of the leaves were yellowing now and even a few had fallen to the ground.

I come inside and sit in a room I built with my own hands on furniture saved from the dumpster and inherited from dead relatives, enjoying my comfort and privilege. Finding myself irritated the picture window has fogged over because the seal broke and I have to replace the glass panes, fully aware somewhere, someone, right now, is being stoned to death or beaten or imprisoned or raped or otherwise tortured and killed for their beliefs.

Watching the last drops of rain sashay around the edge of a wide maple leaf, find its channel and drop to the ground. A fat squirrel steals his morning meal of wet bird food, as I’m struck with the realization my belief system is gone. It has been on shaky ground since I watched Billy Graham and Nixon pal around in the 70s, and the day I realized God worked for the government.

I turn my attention to a corner of my neighbors yard that grows wild and free. Long grasses and Queen Anne’s lace, purple loosestrife, six foot tall succulents, all well quenched from the storm, one man’s weeds, another man’s garden.

I’ll take my comfort and solace in the random and the chaotic.

Note to breathless reporter: multi-billionaires, hundreds of times over, who have billions and billions of dollars to spend on their toys are not:

A ) pioneers

B ) “everyday Americans”

Every day Americans worry about the fact the cost of a loaf of bread has doubled in the past year, and eggs and milk. That their car needs tires and the cost is up 80%. They do not, in fact, worry where to build their new spaceport.

Gus Grissom was my hero as boy. He was the second American in space. He nearly drowned in the Atlantic when the hatch blew on his Mercury capsule in July 1961. Gus’s dad worked double shifts in the factory so Gus could go to Purdue and get a degree in Aeronautical engineering. Gus changed his own oil in his car, would take a swing at you if you pissed him off, and his favorite expression was “fuckin’ A.” He died in the Apollo 1 fire January 1967. Many think, had he lived, Gus would have been the first man to walk on the moon.

Gus was a pioneer. He was an every day American. Gus had, what Tom Wolfe called, “The Right Stuff.”

Please don’t ever compare these rich boys playing with toys to the pioneers of space flight.