An open letter to my high-school best friend

by David Benjamin 

 

Dear Dick:

At long last, I’m writing to apologize for mooching my way, uninvited and unwashed, into your life and the bosom of your family. 

If you recall, it all started one summer day in 1964, when I mounted my bicycle and pedaled the three miles from a cramped, cluttered and sort of scary apartment on Simpson Street to your charming home and grocery store—with yard, garden, garage, two cars, nuclear family, not to mention your exeedingly cute sister, Lois—on Buckeye Road. You never asked me over that day. I didn’t call ahead. I just showed up, begging for friendship, exploiting your good manners, mooching on your very emotions.

You might have been puzzled. You might have thought, “Why has this putz shown up? Where did he come from? What does he want? Why me?” But you took me in, and from then on, my sibling surrogacy snowballed. I can’t recall whether I stayed for supper that day among the genial and generous Albrights. But within the week, and for the next three years, I elbowed my way into a space at your dinner table, appropriating the chair that rightfully belonged to your mother who—when I was present—graciously stayed on her feet for the whole meal. Voraciously, I wolfed down every chop, Swiss steak, burger, drumstick, potato, pea, carrot and kernel of corn your mother served, and then clamored for more, snatching the last chicken wing from Lois or devouring little Ronnie’s wedge of apple pie. 

And did my intrusions end with plucking provender from your family’s mouths? Hardly. I prowled your father’s little neighborhood general store, running my sticky fingers over an eternally replenished supply of Milky Ways and Almond Joys, coveting Eskimo Pies and hungrily studying bins full of shiny apples and fresh bananas, peaches, pears and apricots. I’d arrived in Madison two summers before, well-schooled in the Seventh Commandment by the Dominican nuns of St. Mary’s, but I have to confess that when your father stocked those orange-flavored Hostess cupcakes with their delectable glucose/formaldehyde icing, I succumbed to temptation. I took some without paying, thus devolving from mere mooch to outright crime. 

As a faint gesture toward atonement, I ask this favor.

Please, calculate if you can, the cost of a dozen-odd two-packs of Hostess cupcakes, with 48 years of interest, and send an invoice. If need be, to lift this burden of guilt, I’ll float a loan or start a “Dick’s Cupcakes” you-fund-me page.

Of course, as you must vividly remember, I didn’t just mooch off your mom’s electric range and your dad’s enterprise, I cadged transportation from you, almost everywhere, in a yellow ’57 Chevrolet Bel Air that spoiled me, forever after, for anyone’s car and any vehicle I might ever drive in the future. Oh yes, I tried to balance the scales, borrowng from my mother—whenever I could—our family car, a ’61 Fairlane with bad shocks, worse tires and a dead heater that Ray Keener derisively nicknamed the Brown Bomb. But, let’s face it, Dick. For most of my high-school, you were my ride. Your Chevy, and my shameless parasitism, spared me from exile on Simpson Street and the company of Mom’s alcoholic boyfriend. 

Did my intrusions end there? Hardly! I depended on your brother Denny’s subscription to Playboy, with its glimpses of naked women, snatches of carnal education, passages of hedonist philosophy, party jokes, “Little Annie Fanny” and ads for English Leather and Brut—none of which I could long hope to get past Mom, nor could I successfully hide it from my nosy big sister Peg and kid brother Bill in our little cookie-cutter fourplex.

We did graduate, of course. This should have ended my career as a moocher. But I had become too skillful in my limpetry. Over the next few years, I mooched my way into higher education, exploiting my indigence to wheedle lavish financial aid packages from two private colleges and finagling NDEA loans from a permissive and gullible Uncle Sam while he was distracted by a war in Vietnam.

Later in life, however, I ended up wasting my talent for social vampirism. Perhaps out of guilt, or sloth, or the sheer absence of Albrights, I ended up fending for myself, making a steady wage in various capacities and living within my means. This lifestyle change, of course, reveals a dual shame. On the one hand, I used my friendship with you to suck sustenance and affection from your family, which would have been otherwise beyond my reach. But if I had not depended on you, I would have had to accept a well-deserved deprivation This would have likely strengthened my character and steered me the away from, and above, the wretched ranks of moochers, spongers, scroungers and panhandlers amongst whom I had sunk. 

Perhaps my fatal flaw was that I lost my nerve. I lacked the audacity to continue on the trail I had blazed in your household. Had I persisted in my parasitic vocation, I might today be worthy of a pedestal in the pantheon of great moochers…

… right next to Clarence Thomas.

You see, it’s the example of Justice Thomas that awakened me to my insidious dependence on you, your parents and your Chevy. In my moment of epiphany, I felt bad not just because I had mooched on you guys, and not only because I had been so oblivious to my petty venality. I felt, in a way, cheated by my own timidity. At a turning point in my life, having cultivated mooching as a potential career, I forsook the great promise of my apprenticeship and went legit. 

Of course, I cannot imagine ever attaining the heights to which Justice Thomas has soared. He is, after all, black and therefore, the object of as much pity as he can squeeze from every well-meaning white person toward whom he oils his way at cocktail parties. But he has long since transcended mere race-guilt. Justice Thomas has refined mooching to a level that can only be called Olympian. He has mooched not cupcakes, but yachts, both seaborne and roadborne. He has gone ten times ‘round the world on a billionaire’s dime. He has accepted honoraria of five and six figures for spouting egocentric drivel into microphones while sitting sphinxlike and mute for 32 years in his day job. He has inveigled a plutocrat into building his mother’s house and paying for his grandnephew’s tuition at Hidden Lake Academy. He has wheedled fortunes from dozens of rich white men—desperate for at least one black friend—to underwrite his wife’s therapeutic hobbies. He is a man—a great man, a hero to every mediocre American—who has spent a conscience-free life in the pursuit of revenge and the art of obeisance. Doggedly, tenaciously, Justice Thomas has erected a towering career and a bitter celebrity by kissing every ass that has a dollar bill poking out of its gold-buttoned pants pocket.

Like me mooching my way onto Dick’s mother’s seat at the dinner table, Clarence—shamelessly, deviously, enviably—mooched his way into Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court of the United States, where he clings like a lamprey on the belly of an anemic shark. 

So, Dick, I hope you can understand both my embarrassment and my remorse for being the Clarence Thomas of the Albright family.

And I hope you can bring yourself to forgive me.

Sincerely,

Benj