SOME RAIN MUST FALL

Several years ago, my friend Chuck Weidner’s father Dane died suddenly at the age of fifty-eight. Chuck and his father had been best friends, would talk every day. During the reception after Dane’s funeral, Chuck discretely consumed an ungodly amount of vodka, slipped out of the house unnoticed, and sped away at high speed. Within fifteen minutes, he plowed into a eucalyptus tree and died instantly.
        I thought of that now as I left the house. My circumstances were not as dire as Chuck’s, but just the same, a disturbing black grief gnawed at my insides. I was on my way to meet my closest friend and confidant Kyle Spangler and wasn’t sure what to expect. Things had soured between us of late. I kept envisioning our relationship dissolving into nothingness, leaving each of us with one less friend in the world. Yes, only one less friend but one less friend can create a vacuum. Just ask Chuck Weidner.
        I lived outside of Sacramento, in the sticks really, worked from home, didn’t see a lot of people face-to-face, and seemed to always drift instinctively toward solitude. Kyle’s story was not much different. He was reclusive, intimidated by people and people were intimidated by him, always found life safest and least threatening when independent and alone. Not surprisingly, he was almost always alone.
        We would meet at coffee houses, usually twice a month, a different place each time, three or four hours hashing through selected personal snippets, memorable events, and happenings from recent days, sooner or later moving to sports, art, and the perplexities of the human condition. We discussed things there was no one else to tell. It was always freewheeling, relaxed, a time to let go of insecurities, talk about observations, accomplishments, and anything that must be conveyed to someone. One unplanned side effect of the arrangement was that over ten plus years of our friendship, each of us had come to know the other better than anyone else in the world. Kyle, for instance, knew that I, the small, wiry one, was married to Stoddard, lived in a ranch house on an acre of land in West Sacramento, was self-employed, dealt in computers and social networking, the business thriving and evolving, I’d been at it for years, always working out of the house, often complained about being a shut-in; that unlike him, I’d had a rich and colorful history with women, lots of alliances, scandals, escapades, heart breaks, a previous marriage, and Stoddard definitely stunning; my mother lived in LA but my father was dead, had been in the movie industry in Hollywood, something to do with editing, apparently a genius in his field and highly sought-after, part of the Hollywood crowd, hung out with Joan Crawford and Humphrey Bogart and Frank Capra and other Hollywood luminaries of the 40s and 50s, lived with a beautiful black woman but never had kids because he didn’t want