Slang Editorial :: Never Underestimate The Value Of A Holla'

Monday, August 31, 2009
Death Becomes Us

Oneonta backroads (from here)

The father of my best childhood friend passed away yesterday. He was one of those capital M Men(sch) whose life was simultaneously as complicated and yet empirically as simple as possible. He was a man who loved the hunger of life, and yet respected a need to keep things responsibly in order so that he could maximize his throttle-pushing opportunities when he got the chance.

Harry "Buddy" S**** was the kind of man that I, at the age of 13, both failed to understand and yet got completely. So unlike my father--a man who in every minute of his existence kept things restrained, measured, safe--Buddy seemed to understand that life was best experienced by laying out parameters and then, occasionally and with focus and concentration, stepping beyond them. I had friends' dads who were like my own, and even more who were the opposite--careless, selfish, with agendas on their own from their families. But almost none were like Buddy, with caution, care, and responsibility so carefully intertwined with a willful desire to push the pedal to the floor and go go go.

I've already used two speeding car metaphors--well, it's hard not to with Buddy because he certainly loved to step on the gas pedal. How fast can we get to the ski mountain today from home? If we go fast enough over that bump will we actually feel our hearts hit our throats? Yeah, Buddy loved to race. But we also all knew not to think for a second that the car wouldn't be going anywhere if someone's seatbelt were unbuckled.

Classic Buddy story@@: He once got pulled over after driving on Interstate-88 for only one exit. He had just purchased a new pride and joy, a Audi A6, and decided to test it out by stepping on the gas when he went up the interstate on-ramp and let go when he exited a mile down the road. He got up to, I believe, 108 mph. And yet somehow, because he was Buddy, a charming man for whom the word charisma was created, he got off with a ticket for 78 and a warning to be more careful next time.

I've met plenty of folks who had charisma and charm like that who were also full of shit--two-faced fakers who cared more about impressing those outside of their lives than taking care of those within. But this wasn't Buddy either--Buddy was as bullshit-free as they come. He was a man who was refreshingly honest and so blunt and to the point at times as to be brutal. But for him, beating around the bush was a waste of his time and yours, time that could be better spent living and learning and figuring out how to do things better the next time.

As might guess, Buddy was sort of a father to me, or at least a significant male role model--he was the man I never realized that I always needed my father to be: a brash, ballsy, charming man who picked flowers for the ladies and talked his way into whatever he wanted, but all the time respecting and caring for those around him, sacrificing his own needs and desires to help his family and friends.

That Audi? As much as it was his pride and joy, he let his wife use it as her primary car. And the nice Volvo he gave to his son when he got his license. Buddy instead chose to drive a beatup '84 Volvo he'd taken from a scrap heap and restored slowly. It ran terribly and often died in the winter, but he knew that outside of the moments he'd set aside to live large, he didn't need anything more than simplicity to get by with the rest of his life.

And that was it: for a man who seemed to need to make time to catch some of life's proverbial Big Air, he seemed to understand that he'd be able to enjoy it more if he balanced it with tons of slow cruises down the green circle slopes that, in reality, make up most of life's trails***. This dichotomy of living was something that I think I struggled to appreciate intellectually as a kid, mostly because kids have no idea how hard it is for adults to find a good balance as they age between youthful wild action/indiscretion and the cautious conservatism of parenthood and old age.

I know that Buddy too had some demons--he drank too much, he struggled a bit figuring out how to raise his first child, he sometimes couldn't put the cap back on the bottle if the good times had been unleashed and he was having too much fun. But they were admissible outcomes in the life of a man who seemed to have figured out the magic secret for living large for those of us with neither the skills of the pro nor the bank account of the rich man. He put a lot of thought into what he knew made him happy, and figured out how to invest the time, energy and money he had wisely into those endeavors and not waste it on the rest.

Because of the way he which I was in his son's life--through sports teams and science projects, I got to see the full-throttle Buddy constantly. On some strange, unexpected level, he taught me how to be a man more than even my own dad, or at least to be the man that I am now: find the meat of life you most want to eat and then sink your teeth into it and chew tenaciously, savoring every bit like it's your last (while of course remembering to share with others if they depend on you).

Sadly, the last time I saw Buddy was probably five to seven years ago--I can't remember if I was out of college or not. And really, since his son and I grew apart in high school (he looked through microscopes and saw amoebas; I saw swirling kaleidoscopes of lysergic nothingness), my last period of spending a lot of time with him was probably 10th grade. But from age 12-15, few people in my life impacted me as much weight as he, and his simple-but-devoted thoughts and ideas posited on life resonate with me still today.

Of all these things in particular is road bicycling, which both he and his son were into when I was in their lives and which I completely hated. At the time, road biking seemed to me like an entirely masochistic endeavor, akin to running as something that no one could possibly enjoy even if they did it well$$$$. Buddy laughed it off though and told me that I was being a baby and had no idea what I was talking about--when you bike, you are a machine, he said, and there's isn't much in life that can feel more beautiful and meditative than that. And the one thing he told me that I think of literally every single time I mount a bike is that, as an extension of the man-as-machine idea, your goal for getting on a bike should be to determine what your ideal pedaling RPM should be (cadence) and then stick to it, for the entire ride--shifting gears as necessary but never pedaling any more or less than the chosen rate. Know thyself, sparrow, and know it well, and ye shall find the God within.

Oddly enough, in the midst of my miserable eleven hour God-must-hate-me ride to Montauk on Saturday, I thought of Buddy a lot. At no point in all of the biking I've done in 2008 or 2009 did I feel more unsatisfied and not wanting to be on a bike as I did Saturday, but to stay on the bike and keep going I just kept thinking of Buddy and repeating the word "cadence" to myself, over and over again. I decided somewhere around mile 80 that I would write Buddy a very short letter when I got home that said,

"Dear Buddy:

I still remember 'cadence', and everything else.
You are a great man, and I want you to know how much you meant to me.

Love, Ben"

And like everything else about dipshit 27 year olds living in New York, I forgot when I got home that night and passed out instead. And then next day, it didn't matter.

So:

Dear Buddy,

I'm writing this to you now even though it's too late: you are an amazing man, and you can't possibly know how important you were to me in helping me learn about how I might become the sort of person I should want to be. I'm sorry that I probably never made that clear enough to you when I was a dumb teenager hanging around your home, but I hope that somehow you knew anyway.

I love you forever, and hope that your soul rests easy wherever it decides to go.

love always,

Benjamin Scheim

LISTEN:

Tom Waits - "A Good Man Is Hard To Find", from Blood Money

NOTES:

@@ -- I have no doubt that i've gotten some of the exact details in some of these stories wrong, so if you were there and know I missed something, sorry, but the spirit remains true regardless.

*** -- Not on the actual ski slope, of course--for an old man, he certainly loved letting it rip, and was the only parent of any of my friends (besides my ski coach) who I enjoyed skiing with

$$$$ -- While I still feel this way about running, I admit now that it's possible i'm wrong on this one too.

Labels: BEAUMONT, friends, memories, old flames

posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 8/31/2009 08:54:00 PM 2 comments

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...: I feel the same way you do, thank you for putting it into words. So many good times with him...

-Carrick; 9/02/2009 03:34:00 AM
Dustin said...: He got the car up to 110 and when my mom asked how fast we were going we told her 75. I love you Ben, thank you.; 9/02/2009 05:05:00 AM