Planning an outing

I did some looking online and found an old friend's grave. He died twenty-four years ago of a drug overdose. I don't know if he ever really counted me as a friend. We only saw each other at school. He was very nice. When another kid started talking about the party they had over the weekend, he subtly gestured to him to shut up because I was standing right there and hadn't been invited.

But I was the one who came to hear his band twelve years later after he had gone through treatment for drug addiction.

I had gotten in on the ground floor of his drug problem. He was at school at age 14 or so. I had given up hanging around him by then, but I happened to be there while he talked to another kid about the set up in his bedroom. There was a built-in desk with drawers. He had taken out the drawers and glued on false drawer fronts and in the empty space put some marijuana plants and some grow lights. I wonder where he got the money. I was impressed at the amount of work he put into it. He said his mother came into his room to put his clothes away in some other drawers. I don't know how it worked out, but he didn't think she'd suspect a thing.

Like a lot of drug addicts, when he got off drugs, he was stuck at the emotional level he was at when he started using. He was in his late twenties and was losing his hair, but he was in a punk rock band with four teenagers. The oldest was fifteen. The youngest was their singer who looked thirteen and could have passed for twelve. That kid was the band's Achilles' heel. It turned out he was a runaway. He had a brush with police and they sent him home to his parents who lived in the South. That was the end of the group.

My friend relapsed some time after that. When he was on drugs, he was in a constant state of rage. Someone who worked at the treatment center saw him digging through a dumpster. He waved and said hi, and he yelled obscenities back at him. I only saw him once at that stage and it was the same thing, this look of intense anger and disgust on his face.

Poor devil. Died at age thirty-three. I didn't know about it until several years later. I'd look for him online from time to time and found nothing. I finally searched for his band. I found their old My Space page and learned what happened to him.

Now, another several years later, I did another search and found where he was buried.

It's at least a forty minute drive to the cemetery if I can find it. It's in farm country southwest of town. I'm thinking about driving down there.