Head and Mr. Smooth

My first memory of Gary is from his birthday party when he turned 4.

I must have known him before that, as I lived around the corner and had been invited to his party, but I remember Gary on that birthday, intensely and nervously partaking in Pin the Tail on the Donkey, bobbing for apples and the opening of presents.

That intense, anxious guy and I became best friends for the next 16 years. My family moved to a different neighborhood and we went to different elementary schools from grades three through six, but our friendship remained. When we went to the same junior high and high school, our friendship became even tighter.

We did everything together. We ate lunch together, hung out together, played football together and ran track together. We even ran the same events, the sprints, although Gary was much faster than I was. But the truth is Gary, who nicknamed himself “Mr. Smooth,” ran faster than almost everyone.

We also did a lot of stupid stuff together, idiotic and illegal things for which we got caught a few times. Our parents, though, never made us stop associating. They knew we were too close to pry apart.

Gary gave me a nickname that stuck with me through high school. When we were being outfitted for our freshmen football season, none of the helmets at the junior high fit my enormous head, even though I weighed maybe 145 pounds. So the coaches walked me to the adjacent high school, where none of the helmets in the junior varsity equipment room fit my gargantuan melon. I was next taken to the varsity equipment room, where again none of the helmets could wrap around the virtual planetoid that is my head.

I was walked to a tiny equipment closet for most extraordinarily big/fat kids on the varsity team. Finally we found a helmet that fit me – a 7 7/8 size helmet. The problem was the varsity wore gold helmets and the freshmen wore blue helmets, so I practiced for weeks with an off-colored helmet, until the equipment manager painted my lid before our first game.

Gary immediately coined me

“Head,” a nickname that stuck with me through high school. A couple times young ladies at our high school told me they were shocked and offended by the nickname and that I should make people stop calling me such a horrible thing. I told the girls it didn’t mean the salacious thing they were thinking; it just meant I had a Saturn-sized cranium, and I was okay with the nickname.

Part of the reason I accepted the nickname was Gary gave it to me, and he was my best friend and would never do anything to hurt me. Gary, in fact, was such a good friend that he would be happier than I was when I made a hard hit or good run in football. He would go bonkers on the sidelines or jump all over me if we were on the field together.

Gary always gave me his full attention whenever we talked. He would concentrate on every word I said, reacting visibly to the ups and downs of what I was telling him. He cared about all things in my life. That’s the kind of friend Gary was.

I went off to college in another part of the state, then moved to another state, then lived in the opposite end of the state, while Gary stayed around our home town. We gradually drifted apart, and I hadn’t talked to him in a long time. I tried to reach him a few years ago and couldn’t find him. He was off the grid, and mutual friends didn’t know how to contact him. In retrospect, I should have tried harder.

I found out last week that Gary had died of a heart attack, and my heart has been hurting ever since.

I know the pain is psychosomatic, a sympathetic heart attack for my best friend of my youth.

But it still hurts, horribly.