In the summer after my 4th grade year of elementary school, my parents bought a home way out north in Albuquerque (at the time) and moved us to a street that was near the edge of town. The development was new enough that the land on the south side of the main road we took to get to ours was undeveloped, just untamed mesa. It was a crazy experience, moving across town. I had had a best friend in the world for the first time in the neighborhood we had lived in. Paul Hagenloh was the eldest son of an Air Force dad, and somewhere along the way in elementary school, somehow, we had become friends, and Paul was the guy I ended up wanting to spend all of my time with. I was tall for my age, but Paul was even taller than I was- as observable in elementary school kids as that can be. Paul was crazy smart, and yet for some reason he was my friend for a few years. Well, that came to a halt when I was 9 or so. My family moved across town, and my connection with Paul faded.

In the new neighborhood we lived in, in time we came to discover that there were kids around us that we could get to know ad then play with. It turns out quite a few families on our block had kids. Our neighbors to the south, the Rhodes’ had a son and a daughter that were in the age range of me and my siblings for hanging out and playing. Johnny Furber lived half a block up the street to the west, and he came out to play off and on. There were a couple of other families with kids on the street: the McNeil’s, and another family with some younger girls. And right across the street from our house lived the Jones boys.

In time, the Jones’ front yard and driveway became a hub for a lot of neighborhood activities. Eric, the older son, was two or three years older than I, and he was regularly found hanging out with Johnny Furber, because they were the oldest guys on the block. Throughout my midschool and into my high school years, the Jones’ driveway, with a basketball rim hung on over it squarely in the middle of the home’s two-car garage, became one of the major hubs for neighborhood meetings and neighborhood play. I developed many skills and played in many epic basketball games on that driveway. In whatever sports season the world was in, that sport was usually played or practiced over by the Jones’ house, because Eric would see to it that pickup games were made and played. Eric was the sports guy who, along with Johnny, kept the rest of the kids on the block active playing games, and attentive to athletes doing big things in the college and professional ranks.

Eric had a kid brother who was my age, and who was less sports-minded than his big bro. Oddly enough, I don’t remember as much abut Chris than I do about Eric, except for a few specific memories tied to my eighth-grade year of junior high. Chris was thin and lean with blonde hair and big anxious, active eyes, and my mother pointed out that he would have been pretty if he had been born a girl. Eric was heavier set, and for much of the time I remember him from middle and high school, he had hair kind of like Jim’s from “The Office”- a little longer and over the ears. Sometimes he feathered it in the younger years. Sometimes it kind of stuck in the odd way Jim’s does around his head, like he had been wearing a hat, and the bottom hairs had felt free to reach out toward the world around them.

Eric and Chris were entertaining neighbors, but when we weren’t playing sports, there seemed to be something off in their relationship. In junior high, Eric and Chris used to get fights regularly when the neighborhood kids were all out playing. At times, it was Eric egging on Chris, trying to push him to anger. At other times, Chris, who had a short fuse, would hear something Eric said ad be offended, and it was go time. Eric would tackle Chris, or Chris would jump at Eric with a punch, and the fight was on. Often, because Eric was older and bigger-bodied, the “fight” would end with Eric pining Chris on the ground and holding him there, farting on him or spitting on him until Chris calmed down. Chris would get worked up and then come back down after being held down for a bit. And then things would settle down.

What added to the periodic discomfort of hanging with the Jones kids and their periodic fights was also simply being outside near their house in the evenings when they were home. Occasionally, into the quiet evening air you would hear a high and loud shriek, followed by muffled belches of yelling come from within their house. The shrieking voice would continue and elevate in town, and then deeper booms accented the noise, occasionally followed by a crash or a banging sound. We kids outside knew that one or both of the Jones boys were getting chewed out by their parents, often uncontrollably. It left us feeling anxious.

In time, as all the neighborhood kids grew older, hanging out with Eric and Johnny continued to involve sports, but the conversations became more peppered with expletives and discussions about women’s bodies, and girls they knew and magazines they’d seen. I was still young enough to not know what a lot of that stuff meant for a while, but it made me uncomfortable, nevertheless, and I shied away from just hanging around those guys, unless we were playing basketball. That didn’t keep me away.

Chris, however, over time grew into a teenager with an edge in his voice, and a glint of crazy darkness in his eyes. He would join us when were out playing, but he often seemed absent, or preoccupied on something else going on in his head, or in his heart. Chris was smaller than I was, so I wasn’t physically afraid of him, but I remember feeling nervous around him for much of my pre-teen years.

Life went on. After getting out of elementary school and moving into junior high, our family lived close enough to the school that I, like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, walked everyday back and forth to it.

I don’t remember seeing Chris much walking to and from school my 6th and 7th grade years there. I don’t remember seeing him at all, really. Which makes it surprising to me that something changed in my eight grade year.

Near the end of the summer between seventh and eight grade, I started to hang out a little with Chris, and for some reason, when school started, I started walking to school with him.

The empty land south of the main street we lived off of had begun to be developed about this time, and in one place on it which was near the path we walked on to school, all the dirt grated and leveled from the bulk of the development had been bulldozed into a 20 foot high pile. For whatever reason, on our walks to school, Chris and I used to go climb that pile and throw dirt clods off of it. In time, we would walk back around behind the pile and gather a few tumbleweeds, and because Chris had a lighter, we would light them on fire. For about a week we did this routine, going behind the giant mound and setting tumbleweeds on fire, until this one day we did it and the fire got away from us. It leapt from our pile to several other dry tumbleweeds nearby- and then a few more. We tried to put the main fire out, and then we spotted the smaller ones starting flaring up, and we froze. And then we saw a man running nearby turn and run towards us, and we panicked. And we ran.

On the way home from school that day, we went back around and looked at the blackened earth blotches where our fire and the little fires had been. We hadn’t burned down the mesa. But I had a sense then that I shouldn’t be doing that. Chris and I quit walking to and from school together.

The turning point in our friendship happened a few weeks later when I was feeling good after school, so I was jogging from the school grounds on my regular path towards the home. About a hundred yards off of campus, I saw Chris walking home with another friend, talking and gesticulating, and I saw his hip hair comb sticking up out of his left pant pockets, so as I ran by I grabbed it out of his pocket as a joke. At first surprised, Chris tried to figure out what happened, but soon he realized I took his comb, and he came after me. So I thought it was funny and kept on running, holding on to his comb, headed towards home.

In a short while, I thought the joke had been played and turned in a good nature way to, I to give Chris his comb back. As I returned to round the corner onto the main street the school was on, there was Chris approaching me in a walk, with a scowl on his face. “Hey, man, I was just joking aro…” At that point, he threw a punch that hit me in the neck and then doubled back to do it again. At this point he started swearing at me with whatever he could thing of saying, and I dropped the cone to try and meet his fist. After he landed a second strike, I was big enough that I could charge him and knock him down, which I did, but he popped back up and tried to hit me in the face. I was fast enough to avoid his swing s and strong enough to push him away from me. Stunned because I was in a fight, I watched as a cluster of other kids gathered around and tried to fan on the fire. It was shortly near this time that I repelled another of Chris’ punches and backed up away from him, to hear him call me something that pierced my heart. “You’re just a goddamned Jesus freak! You f***ing Jesus freak!” And at that, for whatever reason, my heart hurt, and I turned from him and started running on home. And when I got there, I went in and cried in my bedroom privately for an hour. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t take what I did as a joke. And I couldn’t understand why he cursed me for my faith. Physically, the fight did little to hurt me. I could have hurt him badly if I had wanted to. Emotionally, I was pierced.

As expected, in time, our paths separated. Chris had started smoking at the end of junior high. I rarely saw him much after that, until my college years.

Once, when I was a junior at UNM, he got in touch with me somehow out of the blue. He had been in a halfway house and had just gotten out, and he needed a place to stay for the night. There was a hotel off of Eubank and Constitution he was hoping to stay at- would I help him? So I drove over and met Chris, a kid I had rarely talked to at all during those high school years we had lived on the same street. He was thin and his face was gaunt, and his eyes were listless. I met him and talked to him for a little bit, about where he had been, and where he was going. He didn’t have much to say, except he was trying to leave town tomorrow. I gave him $40 and a New Testament, telling him he might find some answers in it. He was thankful, gave me a curt goodbye, and I left him in the hotel lobby.

A few weeks later he contacted me again, asking if I could help him again with a little money. I apologized and said I didn’t have any, but could I take him out to eat. Nah, that’s alright, thanks. And I lost track of him.

In time, I heard he had been in and out of prison, and then at another point in time, he had died, a young man struggling with drugs and displacement.

I was sad to hear that.

*Some names in this story were changed to protect the privacy of real people. But Paul Hagenloh was really my first major best friend.