Growing up in the suburb of Mamaroneck, I never really had a mortal enemy. What I did have was a house, a scooter, and a street in which to ride it.
He was, to put it quite simply, a mean little brat. He beat me up a when I was trying to play with him. His parents made him apologize, which he did under great duress, and even my five-year-old mind knew that he was phoning it in. Even worse was the fact that he had an older brother, Brian. He was just as bad, if not worse, and the combination of the two made my life miserable. Every winter, I’d at some point run into them, and they’d ask me if I wanted to play in a snowball fight. Thinking they finally decided to be nice to be, I warmed up to the idea just before the beaned me in the face with fiendishly icy snowballs and I literally ran home crying to my mother. I finally decided that I would avoid him at all costs, eventually cutting off any and all contact with him. We ended up hanging out with the same people in middle school, and we finally became friends when we were brainstorming ideas for theatre class sketches.
Jeff had mellowed out. He realized that his brother was a deplorable human being and began living his life by one simple rule: before he did anything, he would ask himself the question, “What would Brian do?” Whatever the answer was, he would do the exact opposite. Jeff has always been this painfully analytical, which actually defines our friendship. We compliment each other well. Whereas he is thinking and calculating, I am impulsive and “let’s-do-this” oriented. He is an old man trapped in a seventeen-year-old’s body, I am a little kid trapped in a seventeen-year-old’s body. So, if you think about it, when we hang out, he’s pretty much stuck babysitting me. (And the rest of our friends.) That’s a burden he’s willing to take. Whenever there’s a bad storm coming when we’re at the diner, the rest of us throw our money down and make a futile attempt to outrun the rain while Jeff pays the bill and grabs his umbrella.
We turned out to have a lot in common. We both were born and raised on classic rock. No matter where we were, if there was a good string of songs on the radio, we would keep driving around until a crummy song came on. That was the universe telling us it was time to go home. We both ran cross-country, and we’d run together over the summer and take turns giving lectures to each other. I’d lecture Jeff on comedians and their styles, and he would lecture me on films. (His lectures were always longer.) He loved movies. He turned it into a science. Like everything he did. You never had a simple “yes” or “no”, he always backed up everything with his opinions, analyzing every possible outcome or aspect of his argument, until you were half asleep and forgot what you asked him in the first place. When he was lecturing, he had a habit of placing his first three fingers of his right hand on the back of his jaw near his neck. I joked that it was his way of checking his pulse to make sure he didn’t bore himself to death.
He is one of the funniest people I have ever met. He was born and raised Jewish and wielded it with a vengeance. He loved playing the Jewish stereotype, and it was the source of most of his jokes. Any time anyone dropped a penny or a quarter, he yelled, “MINE!” and would fight tooth and nail for it. For a cross-country banner, he wrote out his “full” last name “Robinowitzsilversteingoldberggefiltefishlatkescohen.” When he was ten, he dressed up for Halloween as a Rabbi and took pictures of himself in his costume; some in which he was holding hummus. He then brought the pictures to school and charged $3 for a picture without hummus and $5 with hummus. He escalated every situation to hilarious effect, constantly one-upping everyone.
He parked his car in front of the school exit so I couldn’t drive out.
He got out of his car, ran onto my hood, reached down and tried to strangle me through the sunroof.
He did come off to many people as kind of an asshole, but that was just due to his brutal honesty and his legendary apathy. As far as Jeff was concerned, the only person whose approval he needed was himself. He wielded his sarcastic sense of humor with a vengeance, and whenever people got offended, he’d say, “It’s your fault for being offended. It is entirely up to you whether or not you get offended.”
“Well, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
He didn’t speak for two whole days.
To this day, I consider Jeff my best friend. And to think that he was once the kid that made my life miserable makes it all the better.
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