How do you recognize someone you haven’t seen in eighteen years?
Particularly if, aside from growing up, you have also created a new life far away from all that is familiar and dear? Surely we had both changed so much it would be impossible to find each other in a crowd.
These were the questions tumbling through my brain as I walked toward a Clerkenwell pub to meet David, who I haven’t spoken to since 1988.
When I found out that he lived in England I elected not to get in touch for a long time. I figured that he had remained lost for all those years because he didn’t want any of us to find him; I know very few people from my youth, and prefer to keep it that way.
Why, then, get in touch?
Because he left in a clean and subtle way, without getting tangled in the drama that destroyed the group. Because I remember that he always made me laugh, and that he enjoyed the macabre excesses of my humor. Because we ended up in the same place after all this time.
The answer of how to spot him was quickly revealed: we both, for some inexplicable reason, look the same.
My hair is long and tangled and of indeterminate color; as always, I wear weird spectacles and inappropriate clothing; the only real difference in my public persona is that I laugh without covering my mouth.
David still has short dark hair and sharp garbed demeanor and burning wit. The main difference in his manner is the acquisition, after an adult life away from home, of a hybrid accent. He no longer pronounces Olalla the way we would have back in the day – and since my own grasp of rural colloquial phrasing is draining away after only two years in this country, it was fascinating to listen to him talk.
It was a shocking thrill to find that the particular aspects of our personalities that were dark and hidden are now the most visible and pure portions of our identities. What we could smell on each other back in 1984, those profound needs that would create our small community and later drive us away from home and out into the world, are no longer secret.
We grew up and out and into new lives, and that is a dangerous thing, because it requires shedding the old life along the way. But we are still fundamentally just an inverted form of who we were all those years ago.
Meeting again was a risky proposition, and could have been a tedious exercise. I’m sure that he felt the same – what a potential bore to offer up your Friday evening to someone you knew, briefly, as an eccentric teenager in a poor mean town, particularly if you currently have a brilliant cosmopolitan lifestyle.
But we had drinks, then dinner, and then he showed me around his amazing flat, featuring many of the objects I am most obsessed with. I offered up a few morsels of breathtaking gossip about those who have gone astray, but mostly we talked about the years we haven’t known each other. We talked about living in Europe, and the experience of leaving home.
There is something tremendously valuable in knowing a person who remembers the same stories, and has a similar perspective on that beautiful wretched town, without needing to talk about what happened.
The most important thing is that we left.