Old friend

STIPIMM: “Surfer Girl," by the Beach Boys

I wrote a friend of mine from Houston, Wynn Martin, an e-mail on March 12, trying to catch up:

Are you still at this address, old friend? If so, let me know!
Chris Mc.

I’ve written him an e-mail like that every year for the past 10 years or so, ever since we both lived in Houston, Texas, while I was going to Rice University. Since I left undergrad, our friendship has been limited to these occasional e-mails, which one of us will send checking in on the other, followed up with a couple of friendly e-mails back and forth. And then, for another bunch of months, we wouldn’t write, for how much is there really to say when you’re not involved in another person’s life anymore?

When I was at Rice University, however, it certainly wasn’t that way. He was the only real friend I made in my freshman year of college, and I would go on to become his housemate sophomore year. Indeed, he would be the last person I would ever share a room with until Miss O’Leary came along. Many of my best memories of Rice involve him in some way: he was my lookout when I stole the head of the school mascot from the keeper’s wide-open dorm room; he and I together waged an unsuccessful campaign to have Beavis and Butthead elected homecoming queen and king (respectively). He was the first person to comfort me when my high-school sweetheart broke up with me, and he vociferously protective of me when I was dabbling in the dating waters of Rice during my sophomore year. So many memories, some good, some not-so-good, some awful, but all fundamentally involving Wynn. I spent my junior year overseas, and when I returned, we had both sort of moved on. Nevertheless, we have remained friends ever since, and my memories of Houston and Rice University will always be vitally linked to him.

Wynn’s an odd cat, though; anyone who meets him will figure that out in about 30 seconds. He’s as outgoing and outwardly comfortable as anyone I’ve ever met. He has a sense of humor that only a few people, including myself, really completely get. He has a tendency (that many thought was weird) to seek out friends who are considerably younger than him; for instance, when I met him, I was 18 years old, and he was 24. I guess he was one of those people who didn’t quite like the fact that he had to leave campus once he graduated from Rice. Another unusual thing about him: he prides himself (sometimes a bit too much) on being an expert on the life and work of Theodore Geisel (he once taught a class at Rice on the subject). I should also mention that he's always been a very bendy fellow, in part because of a childhood injury that left one leg shorter than the other and his skeleton just in a general state of flexibility. The thing about his bendiness of which he was most proud? Auto-fellatio. He came out of the closet while I was away in France, which was a relief to all of us who knew that there was something awfully repressed about his sexuality. After that, though, he was fiercely proud to be gay; coming out was clearly a turning point in his life, and those who cared about him were very happy for him.

I’ve lost track of a lot of the details of his life post-1996. I know he worked in a small computer business (which I think he partially owned), and then, several years ago, he changed course and went into nursing (he just became a registered nurse earlier this year). I stayed with him in 1999 when I went down to Houston for Beer-Bike, but since then, it’s just been those scattered e-mails that have kept us in touch. When I wrote him on March 12, I was looking forward to telling him about my marriage to Bridget and moving up to Boston. I was sure that the e-mail address I sent my latest message to was good (it has worked for the past 8 years), so I was surprised when he didn’t write back.

Every so often, I do what I call my “stalker searches,” when I get nostalgic or curious or whatever and do Google searches on just about everyone I’ve ever known. I did one of those today for people I had known at Rice; for some reason, today I was remembering the failed homecoming campaign and it triggered curiosity into where everyone I knew from those days was at. Wynn was first on the list.

And as you can probably guess by the tone of this post, I found an obituary. Wynn died on February 22, three weeks before I sent my e-mail, and just a month after he became a registered nurse. I’m not sure what the cause was, but it seemed to be a natural death, perhaps related to some chronic problems he had.

The feelings I have are new to me. I do feel very sad for Wynn and his family. He was still a young man, and he was certainly someone who deserved happiness, because he was so free about giving it to other people. But what I'm feeling is not out-and-out grief, per se, for this loss of an old friend. Like I said, our remaining contact was fleeting, and I won’t pretend that he was an important part of my life any more. But he was a very important part of my memories, and as all of you who know me know, I’m nothing if not excessively nostalgic. I can remember my great-uncle Hank reading through the daily obituaries in the Daily Oklahoman, looking for people he knew when he was a kid; I always wondered what it would feel like to find someone you knew from your childhood, someone who was perhaps important to you back then, and then learn that they were just gone. Now I know.

It feels weird to say this about someone whom I haven't seen in over seven years, but I will miss Wynn dearly.