friends

Over the years I’ve had many friends, but only two that stood out.
There have been plenty more: none in the tailor-shop, none at the bank (well, maybe one), hardly any at Transit, and only a few at the mighty Mezz.
Houghton had a few: Charlie Gardiner, Ron Johnson, and to some extent Al Repko. Charlie stood out because we could shoot the breeze about philosophy and values. But I tired of always being the bumbling acolyte.
The mighty Mezz has Marcy Dewey, my number-one ne’er-do-well. But Marcy and I are two very different people who share the common bond of being “weird.” What makes Marcy great is she always gets my snide remarks.
But the ones that stand out are Brooks M. Parker and Albert Stokes.

Parker was a fellow-senior at Brandywine High School, like me “just passing through.” He came on board in tenth or eleventh grade; me in eighth.
Parker was a phenomenal jazz-trumpeter. I stumbled across him in the instrument storage-room at Brandywine. He was playing his own improvisations for St. Louie Blues.
I joined him on piano. We both were smitten.
Thus began “the Commanders;” a non-school rock-and-jazz group. Parker was the incredible improviser and me the leader. We managed to get Ted Immediato to be our drummer after angry intimidations from the rock-group he was in (a gang of thugs: threats of switch-blades and zip-guns). We then gained two others, both dreamers that were in the school jazz-band with Parker.
One was Jack Kinnamon, who brought his baritone-sax (dreams of Jerry Mulligan). The other was Lee Tashjian, who played trombone (dreams of jazz-trombonist J.J. Johnson, and also composer Henry Mancini, who did all the Peter Gunn music, making the trombone very popular).
Tashjian and Kinnamon couldn’t improvise nearly as well as Parker — each set had improvisations by each player; I held my ears when they played.
What would happen is I would set down some riff, Immediato would pick up the beat, and Parker would improvise on it.
Tashjian and Kinnamon would write some sort of background arrangement to go along. A lot of stuff got created that way.
Brooks and I flowered into far more than membership in the Commanders (that was Tashjian’s name — a takeoff on “Jazz Commanders”).
Brooks and I shared our 12th-grade Problems of Democracy class. We began passing notes full of steamy bombast — discussions of philosophy and “true nothing.” (“How can a vacuum be true nothing?” I asked. “It’s at least something.”)
The teacher, William Patton, pointed us out, and declared we would never amount to anything.
This was despite our proposal to revolutionize philosophy by publishing “Philosophy for the Masses;” what would now be called “Philosophy for Dummies.”
Brooks and I had long-winded discussions about philosophy at his house, and on the stage at Brandywine under the blue lights. (His parents were Baptists — maybe even Bethel.)
Brooks and I were the only ones that could drive in the Commanders — the others were too young. So we would rat-race through Fairfax, me in the Blue Bomb, and Parker in his parents’ ‘57 Plymouth wagon (the only car that would swallow a string-base).
Parker once T-boned my bumper-guard on the cratered, semi-dirt access-road behind Fairfax Shopping Center. The Blue Bomb wasn’t damaged at all, but the entire left-front corner of Parker’s Plymouth was bent back; including the bumper. (We feigned ignorance.)
I also got the Blue Bomb stuck cutting across an old orchard near Parker’s house. Parker was with me. There was a lot of muddy tire-smoke and pushing, but we got it out.
My friendship with Parker ended after we graduated Brandywine. He was going to Rice University and me Houghton. The Commanders collapsed soon after we graduated, as we knew they would.
The last time I saw Parker was at a community end-of-summer bonfire behind Bush School. I wrote him while at Houghton, and he wrote back, but we never saw each other again.

Albert Stokes and I both worked for City/East Newspaper — he as a weekly columnist, and me as their motorsport reporter.
We stumbled across each other in Maryanna Towler’s front yard. Maryanna was the editor, and her husband Bill was the Publisher/Business Manager and only ad-salesman. City/East, at that time in its infancy, ran out of Towler’s house in the funky Park Avenue district in Rochester. (They were the creators.)
Now it’s a lot bigger — City Newspaper — and has an office on Goodman St. in the city.
Albert was from Wildwood, son of a junk-dealer. I guess he had graduated Kent State — I never knew. He had at least witnessed the Kent State Massacre.
Albert was leading a wild life — the antithesis of my stolid conventionality. During the time I knew him he moved at least twice — apartments he could barely afford.
He also got booted around into various menial jobs — City/East was only a sideline.
He tried mightily to get me to try drugs, but I refused. A room full of pot-smoke was a room full of smoke — I’d need air. I had him royally when I suggested his worship of the Grateful Dead was a form of religion.
Since it was the time of Nixon’s Watergate, Albert visited often to have supper and then lob dirty socks at the TV News. Albert and I were on the same wavelength when it came to politics.
But Al was becoming frustrated. His mighty efforts to convert me were going nowhere, as was his writing career.
I convinced him to attend the 1972 U.S. Grand-Prix at Watkins Glen, a muddy bacchanalia that blew his mind. But in a few months he moved to California. (The last time I saw him was groveling in the snow at some junkyard in Webster to remove parts for his pranged Saab 96.)

And of course I married someone very similar to Parker and Stokes. She isn’t that eager to discuss philosophical issues, but can. And like Marcy, she gets all my snide remarks.