(First published in Medium in December 2019):
Kev and I go way back, decades before he went all-in on the MAGA thing.
We became fast friends as 8th-grade classmates in catholic school back in Florida in the late ’70s. His family had just moved down from New Jersey like my family had done the year before. There was much to bond over. We particularly enjoyed highlighting the stark differences of catholic school life between Florida and back up North.
For one thing, there weren’t militant and insane ruler-wielding nuns at our quaint little catholic school in Daytona Beach. No mandatory rosary sessions, where you’d find yourself kneeling for hours every other afternoon, or class masses more than once a week or so.
There were no forced, awkward weekly confessions. Best of all, no being drafted into altar boy service. Compared to what we were used to, catholic school life in Florida was a fucking cakewalk.
We then attended the same catholic high school for the next two years. That was when Kev decided to transfer to the public high school on the beachside closer to home. Nonetheless, we would still manage to stay in close touch and hang out often.
It helped that we had social circles that were interconnected. We’d run into each other on the beach pretty much every weekend. We’d also end up at the same parties and beach keggers. Alas, we managed to keep the good vibes going long after graduation.
We attended the same local community college for the first year. Kev then transferred off to UCF in Orlando. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that option. I was quite broke and received little or no family support for my higher education. It also didn’t help that I got shafted from getting any further financial aid after my first year. I had Reagan to thank for that.
I ended up joining the Navy, hoping that it would help me finish college when I got out. I was stationed aboard an aircraft carrier with Jacksonville as its homeport. So I managed to stay well-connected with Daytona during my Navy years.
Despite being deep into college and frat life in Orlando, Kev and I were still able to keep things going pretty well. Whenever we’d be in town at the same time, we’d inevitably hang out. We’d hit the waves or go biking down the beach to check out the scene.
A couple of years after getting out of the Navy, I decided I needed a change. I headed down to the Caribbean. I worked as a bartender on St. Thomas while getting into the yacht charter trade.
Kev had graduated about the same time that I got out of the Navy. He got on the fast track with his sales and marketing career. He also married his college sweetheart. They settled in their new beachside abode within blocks of his childhood home. There, they would raise their family over the next two decades.
After I got married, my new wife and I moved back to Florida so she could finish her degree. And yes, whenever we were in town at the same time, we’d meet up somewhere.
There were always the classic catch-up sessions, accented by many laughs (and beers). Keeping the same easygoing rapport and longstanding friendship even after all those years was impressive to both of us.
Sure, we had our respective friends and cliques by then. Nonetheless, we had a unique bond that neither of us could deny.
When we moved to California a few years later, the meetups still happened fairly regularly. Kev would go there on business fairly often in those days. We would meet up in Laguna Beach, San Diego, Hermosa, or wherever else in SoCal that he would be.
Whenever he was on the coast, my cell phone would ring. Within a few hours after that, we’d be having beers at some waterfront pub. We’d get caught up on all the Florida gossip, friends’ news, our work lives, boats, surfing, traveling, and all our other usual topics.
Through the years, our rapport stayed fast, loose, and comfortably familiar. Despite the changes that were happening between us, we always managed to respect our differences.
Kev had remained a staunch catholic his whole life. In fact, his belief only became stronger over time. I, on the other hand, walked away from it all when I graduated from high school. I was most certainly done with catholicism and never looked back. I had considered myself an agnostic most of my young life, until going full-on heathen in my mid-30s.
Kev’s christian conservatism maintained its crescendo. He became a regular on the missionary circuit in Central America and even Africa. Oddly enough, it was the same kind of missionary work that I had come to loathe. After spending several years in the developing world, I could see the lasting havoc that usually well-intentioned missionaries were wreaking on poor and relatively-uneducated people.
All of that just turned me into even more of an outspoken atheist. Kev and I would often discuss/debate about the “good” that he thought he was doing in places like Costa Rica and Nicaragua. More often than not, the factual points that I would cite would abruptly end our discussions.
Despite the ever-widening philosophical chasms between us, we still somehow managed to keep the friendship chugging along.
We maintained the status quo over what was now over three decades by that time. Surely we’d see each other less often, but still had plenty of opportunities to get caught up. We often called or chatted with each other on Facebook or Skype.
We’d meet up at reunions, alumni parties, and other events whenever I was in Florida. We’d always uphold our longstanding vow that we would meet again soon somewhere new. Hopefully, in a great place with great scenery and killer waves.
I was in Florida for the last time back in Spring of ’13. As always, I ran into Kev at one of our usual beachside watering holes one April weekend afternoon. Oddly, the conversation shifted quickly to politics and race relations. It was a topic that we hadn’t covered in a long while.
It was also probably the first time that I heard him go on a rather vitriolic anti-Obama rant.
Despite knowing his GOP-happy politics, I still found myself somewhat surprised. The level of disdain that he was displaying this time around was unsettling to say the least.
All I can think of at the time was that Kev must have been watching Fox News more in recent years.
He kept saying that it was Obama who set U.S. race relations back a few decades to the point of ad nauseam. There was never any mention of the racist/obstructionist GOP, the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, the Heritage Foundation, or anyone else. Nope, everything was Obama’s fault.
Naturally, I found myself quite put off by his unfounded critique. Especially since he should remember what it was like for someone like me growing up in Florida. A mixed-race kid from Chicago who ended up in the deep South, just over a decade after the Civil Rights Act passed.
I couldn’t understand how he could say shit like that with a straight face to me of all people.
To be sure, Kev had seen and heard for himself how I had been on the receiving end of racism, both subtle and blatant. Knowing this only compounded my confusion even more.
At one point in his anti-Obama tirade, I brought up a particular shared memory…
One night back around ’85 or so, he, a couple of other friends, and I were driving back to town from a party. We were in my car. I was sober, while Kev and the other guys were not. We drove past a bored deputy whose cruiser was parked on the shoulder of the SR441. As usual, his driver’s side search beam was pointing across the road.
In the South, cops often did this so they could see the faces (read: color) of people driving by at night, for reasons that should be obvious.
He quickly started up, turned on his lights, and pulled us over. He came to my window with a sense of urgency. With his flashlight glaring in my face, he asked for my license, which I already had in hand.
He looked at the picture, then over at me with a rather confused smirk. With his backwoods Florida drawl, he asked, “Boy, what are you?”.
I shrugged as if I didn’t understand his racism-laced question.
He then panned the flashlight inside the car. After a clear look at the faces of all the other guys, it was now his turn to shrug.
To his disappointment, I must have been “white,” too. At least my license said so.
He then asked me if I had been drinking, to which I answered no. He gave me back my license and told us to be careful before driving off. Apparently, there were just too many white guys in the car to ruin my night.
Kev was clearly shocked at what had just transpired. Never mind that this kind of thing had only happened to me several times since high school.
“Did he think that you were black?”
“Welcome to my world, brotha.” I dryly answered back.
Fast forward back to our lively Obama discussion. Kev admits to remembering the entire incident. Yet he downplays it. He writes it off as a fluke. I retort that it’s easy for him to say that. He has never been on the receiving end of any cop’s racist bullshit like I have. It was classic white privilege in grand display well before that term ever existed. And yes, it was sad to see coming from him.
He then tried to tell me that things have gotten better since then. At least until Obama came along, that is. He said this not fully understanding the most prominent reasons we left Florida in the mid ‘90s. He apparently couldn’t grasp why my then-wife (who was also mixed-race) and I decided to move cross-country after she graduated from UF. Why we decided to get out of the South for good.
To be sure, the incessant racism that we witnessed or dealt with almost daily was a significant factor. Driving by roadside KKK rallies on the way to/from Gainesville didn’t help things much either.
Since that rather touchy conversation, Kev seemed to just keep going further and further to the right. He eventually fell lockstep into the insane anti-Obama GOP narrative that was being perpetuated by Fox News.
By the time the ’16 election came around, he was all-in on Trump. A quick scan of his Facebook posts and comments would remove any doubt about that.
Our ever-widening differences, notwithstanding I tried to get Kev to rethink things. At least when it came to this particular issue. We would have lengthy discussions and debates on social media. I tried to appeal to the kind, good-hearted person that I knew he was.
It’s one thing to be a “christian conservative,” it’s entirely another to subscribe to a blindly racist ideology. I couldn’t for the life of me accept that Kev would even want to align himself with such people. And yeah, I took it somewhat personally.
I had come to the understanding that Kev was a good guy, who just took a wrong philosophical turn somewhere. We’d known each other since we were 13. I knew that he was better than this.
Whenever our arguments would hit an inevitable wall, he would just cop-out. He’d say shit like, “We shouldn’t let politics get in the way of our friendship,” “We can always find common ground,” yadda yadda.
Oddly enough, I usually agreed with him on that. But this time, things were different.
Nazis supported Trump.
Racist KKK assholes supported Trump.
Opportunistic theocrats supported Trump.
Why in the FUCK would he want to be on the same side as any of those people?
Did I have to remind him that Trump was wholly-owned by Putin?
How does someone like Kev find common ground with racists, morally-decrepit assholes, oligarchs, and other social miscreants? To say that I was dumbfounded would be an understatement.
I did my damnedest to get Kev to think more while caving in to blind ideology less. It eventually became futile. Before long, I reached the point where it was clear to me that he just wasn’t the same person anymore.
Sadly, he had imbibed far too much of the MAGA koolaid.
Painfully, I severed the last remaining ties with him once the shitshow ’16 election was over. He wasn’t the only one, I found myself jettisoning quite a few other “friends” and even a few relatives over it.
I was shocked at how many people I cared about had chosen to be on the wrong side of history. In any case, I was done with all of them.
Before I ended things with Kev, I sent him a final message.
I told him that someday, hopefully sooner than later, we would revisit this whole ordeal and have it out. I hoped that he would opt for the “good” that I knew was in him and find his way back out of the MAGA darkness. That he would let the good in him take the lead and bring him back from the brink.
I gently reminded him about something key to our longtime friendship and easygoing rapport:
Throughout our many lively discussions and debates, I never tried to change his mind or convince him of anything. My sole purpose was always to get him to think more about what he believed and why he believed it.
Unlike Kev often tried to do with me, I made it a point to never preach to him.
I ended my solemn goodbye note looking forward to our day of reckoning, whenever it would come to be. Even if it meant having to endure hours of heated discussion and debate to get there.
I thanked him for the decades of friendship and wished him and his family well. Then I ceased all communication with my friend of over 40 years.
Kev tried to break the ice with me a few times since then. He’d send me a happy birthday message on Linkedin, email me, wave on Skype, etc. He even tried to re-friend me a couple of times on FB.
But more than anything, I only became firmer in my stance. I was more committed to my blacklist than ever before. As time passed after the shitshow went full bore as of January 2017, I just became more validated in my decision. I was most certainly done.
I was in Manila when I got the news.
On Halloween afternoon of this year, Kev felt some strange chest pains. He went to the hospital to get checked out. After several tests, doctors apparently couldn’t find anything serious or life-threatening. They decided to send him home.
While waiting to get released later that evening, he suddenly went into cardiac arrest. Tragically, despite their efforts, he didn’t make it.
Kev died a few hours short of the stroke of midnight. Which ironically, would ring in his 55th birthday on November 1st.
Needless to say, when I got the news from some former classmates, I was devastated. I was consumed in a whirlwind of guilt, loss, sadness, and anger, all at the same time.
I was sad for all of the obvious reasons. Crushed that someone I had known and considered a close friend for over four-fifths of my life, was suddenly gone. When I said my “goodbye” to him back in ‘16, I had totally banked on it being temporary. I was sure that we would meet again and settle the grievances at hand, once and for all.
Now it was permanent. I hadn’t anticipated that possibility and that feeling burned me from the inside out.
I was utterly heartbroken for his wife and three kids, who were all college-age now. I ached for his younger brother and the rest of his family.
Then, I became furious at myself. I was utterly livid for not talking to him just one… more… time.
I should have answered when he reached out to me.
I should have at the very least acknowledged him.
I didn’t know that we were going to run out of time.
I didn’t know that we weren’t going to have our chance to get things sorted out between us and get our time-tested easygoing rapport back on track.
I even visualized us having beers and laughing about this whole insane chapter of our lives when we’d be well into our eighties.
How I can ever let myself off the hook for even thinking that we had that kind of time? I suspect that guilt is going to be unkind to me, for years to come.
Then, I found myself even angrier about the mere existence of that human abomination who somehow became “president.”
Why couldn’t the fat orange dipshit have just stayed in his fucking stupid-ass tower in Manhattan?
I was convinced that if he hadn’t run, or if he hadn’t “won” because of an archaic electoral system, things would have been vastly different. The dynamic between Kev and me might have been rocky, sure. But at least we’d still be talking, debating, ranting, raving, and still be friends at some level.
Then on top of all this, I came to another painful realization. I was angry at Kev too.
Angry for letting that caustic ideology get the best of him.
Angry for letting it take precedence over our friendship and just plain common human decency.
From my standpoint, he never took stock of what the consequences of his choices and ideology would be. To blindly support a band of greedy and evil demagogues. Monsters who have fucked the country beyond all recognition.
The country that we both called “home” despite our diverging experiences, while growing up in the same places.
Then strangely enough, I found myself in a somewhat better place after processing it all.
Amidst all of those volatile and conflicting emotions, I came to realize something that opened my eyes.
That somehow, I can still look back at everything that I shared with Kev with a special kind of joy and warm reverence.
Barring the painful shit that transpired over just the last few years of our 40+ year-long friendship, one thing was crystal clear. Kev had still been a major plus in my life.
To accent this, I thought back to a particular time when we met up in Miami 15 years ago.
I had just bought a 50′ sailboat that was docked in Coconut Grove. We had come over from L.A. to outfit her. Preparing for what was to be our long-awaited full-time cruising life.
A couple of years before, I had cashed out of my successful “dot-com” business, which almost killed me. Now, I was ready for a new, exciting chapter—a new adventure that I had been working towards my entire life.
Kev was in town for a client meeting. He headed over to Dinner Key Marina for lunch and beers. It was just a few weeks shy of my big 4-0.
Sitting at the terrace of a dockside bar, it was his turn to bring up a memory from our youth.
He reminisced about watching me in class. He would observe me whenever I was bored or daydreaming. He’d watch me draw sailboats, palm trees, island silhouettes, and sunsets all over my notebooks and textbooks. He remembered this from way back in our 8th grade school days.
Needless to say, my jaw dropped. It never even occurred to me that anyone would be paying attention while I was doing that. Hell, I barely remembered it. Let’s not even mention that it was such a long time ago.
How could he possibly remember that about me after all that time?
With his trademark grin, he told me that he knew I was nurturing my life’s dream, way back then.
And now… here I was about to embark on it.
I glared at him in awe. There were even some tears. He positively floored me. I was past speechless, moved far beyond words.
“Ya’ made your dream real, Tony. And I’m fuckin’ proud of ya’,” he raised his Red Stripe to tap mine.
That’s the Kev I will fondly remember and forever miss.
That’s the spunky kid from Jersey with a big heart, whose friendship I will always treasure.
