I sometimes think about my old friend Danielle, whom I have not seen or really spoken to in many years now, and feel a sadness at it.

I wrote of her back when I met her, which was several lifetimes ago. Danielle is one of my favorite “randomly befriending someone” stories. It is, as my biographers would tell you . . .

CLASSIC STARSAILOR

See: I was sent down to Los Angeles by a magazine to do a writeup on some godawful annual expo that was killed by the pandemic. But I didn’t have a press pass, nor had anyone informed me that I would need one, so I couldn’t get inside. And so now trapped in LA along with my cousin and our decommissioned cop car and a snuffbox full of Schedule 1 controlled substances, and utterly penniless, we wandered that neon nightmare for days without purpose. During that haze, I met a cashier at Trader Joe’s during a pit stop on the way to Griffith Park where my cousin and I planned to ingest mushrooms and have a wild night beneath the stars.

It went like this:

At one of the express lanes, I caught sight of the back of a young woman’s head. Her hair was the color of Mars. She had a tattoo of a sinister multicolored butterfly on her death-pale bicep. She had the complexion of a ghost. She was wearing high-waisted jeans. I couldn’t see her face or look into her eyes to determine if she was a Feeler or a Feel-Nothing, but I myself had a good feeling. I walked across the length of the store and got in her line. I dumped a pile of fruit onto the register and stood back.

When I did look up at her, I got nervous as hell. I don’t usually get nervous around anyone. Lord! Those cat eyes! That beautiful face! Those high-waisted jeans! Those witch rings! I thought to myself, “Sweet baby Jesus, infant savior of this cruel Earth!”

What I said aloud was this: “Uhhhhhh. Lord. Hello.”

“Hi!” she said. “You have a lot of fruit. . . .”

Just before my cousin and I left to meet our fate within the hills (which later turned into Venice Beach), I gave Danielle a little note upon which I had written my phone number. I told her if she were ever up in the Bay Area, she should hit me up, and then we could hang out. It was a long shot . . . I figured nothing would come of it. But I always want to Know, or else I’ll Always Wonder.

To my surprise, she texted me hours later and asked if she could visit in the next few weeks, and stay at my house. I saw the text early the next morning as Jack and I were waking from our waking dream, when I finally turned my phone back on during our long drive back up to Oakland.

I told her to come on up. I was surprised she would trust a complete stranger like that, but I was all about it. Her trust was strengthened a week later when she randomly met a girl I had once dated at a party in LA:

I was, of course, touched that Emily, seemingly dressed like an anime flight attendant, had vouched for me. I reckon if you are a woman and another woman vouches for a dude, there is some real weight to that.

I wrote about this at the time:

At the party Danielle had been telling Emily how she was going to Oakland the following week. She said a strange thing had happened to her at work. A guy named Ryan from Oakland had given her his phone number. She told Emily that Ryan drove a cop car.

Emily had said to Danielle, “Oh, Cop Car Ryan! I know him!”

I figured maybe there weren’t too many of us in the world. Emily told Danielle that I was not a serial killer, and that she could trust me. I thought it was nice of her to say that.

And so Danielle did indeed come visit me in Oakland. She hopped on a bus in LA and rode up I-5 for six hours to get to me. I picked her up in the cop car from a parking lot in downtown Oakland. She had brought with her two hits of acid. We immediately drove across the Bay Bridge and parked across the street from Golden Gate Park, and then walked through the trees to get to the center of the place, where we dropped acid in plain view of families and a little league baseball team. I had known this woman for twenty minutes, and now we were ingesting hallucinogens together in broad daylight. But she had been burned: it was bunk acid. Quite by accident, a dude in a Ghostbusters T-shirt approached us and asked if he could bum a smoke, which I gave him. He leaned in close and whispered: “Y’all trying to get some bud? Some doses?” I said, “Doses—like acid? Yes, actually!” I explained our story. He felt a sympathy for us and led us to his encampment where the leader of his acid tribe dosed us via a vial full of the stuff right under the bright California sun. They only charged us $5 a hit. I gave the guy ten cigarettes and a pack of matches and departed.

Danielle said, as we walked through the grass toward the trees: “Um. Ryan, had you ever done anything like that before?”

I said, “No!”

“Oh my God,” she said. She laughed like hell. “We just let a bunch of strangers dump an unknown liquid into our bodies.”

After a while, we walked into the Haight-Ashbury so Danielle could find a restroom, which ended up being in the back of a comedy club. I waited nearby and listened to the comic go through his set and felt utter despair. I decided finally, right then and there, that I basically detested stand-up comedy as an art form. Hah!

Back outside, Danielle and I drove my decommissioned cop car back across the Bay Bridge to Oakland. I’m just going to tell you something nobody else will: driving a car while on one hit of acid is very easy.

We took the Lake Merritt exit and parked near Ruby Room, which was my favorite bar in Oakland. Inside, everyone was having a real good time . . . a dude holding a chihuahua gave us each a banana. We sat in the back and ate our bananas and drank our Pabst tallboys. Across the way, Danielle pointed out a couple who were making out and wearing the same clothes, had the same haircut, and appeared to have the same face.

We concluded that such a thing was odd, but they looked like they were having fun, so who cares. Danielle said: “Hey, you do you do. Uh, literally.”

At last call, Danielle and I got back in the cop car and drove up to Grizzly Peak in Berkeley. The entire place was covered in a thick fog . . . as though we were in Silent Hill. We cracked all the glowstick bracelets I had bought for Acid Day and lined the interior of the car with them. And then we exited the warmth of the car and stepped into the cold and foggy limbo of the peak with a fistful of glowsticks.

At three in the morning, we descended from Grizzly Peak going about ten miles per hour with the heat on blast and Boris’s FLOOD playing in the background. There were stretches of that slow ride down where we did not speak, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence . . . we were both coasting on the fumes of the big acid comedown, which in many ways is the most-fun part of the whole thing. And once we returned to the safety of my fortified compound in West Oakland, we watched a movie and then fell asleep in my bed just before sunrise. I did not know it then, but I had just had one of the best and most exciting nights of my life with a random girl from LA who was Down For Stuff, and I felt a platonic affection for her.

Next night, she stayed with a friend in San Francisco who was in town to visit her boyfriend who lived there. She told me she would return the following day, and I dropped her off at 19th Street BART Station and sped off into the night to do whatever it is I did at night back then.

A few hours later, well past midnight, she texted me and asked if I could come get her in the city. She told me her friend had essentially abandoned her for her boyfriend, and she was alone and lonely in his living room while they were off somewhere without her. She hadn’t even been invited. I was already driving around the Lower Bottoms chain-smoking and blasting Iggy Pop, and so I headed for the Bay Bridge and picked her up on some side street off Market. She was crying when she got in the car. I squeezed her shoulder and gave her a cigarette and we rocketed back to Oakland.

My roommates and I had been trying to leave our house on account of the increasing insanity surrounding our neighborhood. And so next morning, after having breakfast at Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe in downtown Oakland (RIP), she and Hali and I drove to a lavender house beneath an overpass along MLK in West Oakland. The upstairs unit was enormous and had more rooms than we needed. Danielle asked if maybe she could move in to one of the extra rooms, and Hali and I said: “Yeah!!” I have wondered in the intervening years what that would have been like. I’ll bet it would have been great . . .

Later that night, we went to McCune’s for DUDES DONE WRONG, our weekly movie night in celebration of the only real truth: mighty tragedy. Everyone was very kind to Danielle. She said something sad to me on the ride home: “You have so many good friends. Being with your friends makes me realize I might not have real friends.” And I said what I always said back then, and still say to this day, which is an essential statement about my own personal mythology: “Well, now that you know me, my friends are your friends too.”

Danielle went home to LA two days later. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and drove her to the bus station, and off she went. She did not feel like a stranger to me. I knew I had met a person who would continue to be important to me. I suppose she could have got on with her life and thought of that weekend as some strange and pleasant detour through a dude’s life. And yet our friendship endured for many years after that. I visited her in LA regularly, and she came back to Oakland once or twice a year. And even when we weren’t in the same city, Danielle became a constant part of my life. I liked knowing she was out there. We spoke all the time. Sometimes she would call me to just to hear my voice. In my head, I can still hear hers.

During the winter of 2015, when I was in self-exile in my hometown and feeling rotten as hell about a few things, and supposing once again my life was over, she texted me out of nowhere and said something that brought me back into classical reality:

“I’m at a bar with my dad, and he told me he likes you because you’ve always been very nice and protective of me.”

Sometime later, when I was in LA with Gayle and Laura, we went to her parents’ anniversary dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and I thanked him for having said that. I met her new boyfriend too. As we were leaving, and a little tipsy from all the frozen margaritas, I gave this guy a hug and said, “Love you, baby. But if you hurt Danielle, I’m going to kill you.” And then we departed back to the Bay Area, with Gayle driving, which made me nervous on account of she seemingly did not know how to drive very well.

Last time I ever saw Danielle was with the LA Angels (Gayle, Laura, new member Monty) during our annual trip down there. We met up with her at Echo Park . . .

And she invited us to a party at her house later that night, which was two blocks away . . .

After we left her house that night and headed back to our hotel, I never saw Danielle again. Our friendship deteriorated a few months later, never to return. You never really know when it’s going to be the last time you’ll ever see someone. And eventually a seemingly mundane event can carry enormous psychological weight, which can tear you asunder. It has haunted me that when I hugged her that night at her apartment, it would be the last time. I have missed her dearly ever since.

•   •   •

AN ASIDE ON THE NATURE OF FRIENDSHIP . . .

I very much tend to keep people around for a long time, and always make a point of doing so, and people tend to keep me around too. I have friends I speak to every single day whom I have known for 10–20 years, if not longer. Some of them I have never even met in person, yet we remain friends. But when I do lose a friend for one reason or another, it is very painful to me.

In movies, robots are usually given a primary directive . . . their core objective around which all their behavior follows. Hopefully that directive is something like: “Do not harm humans.” In TERMINATOR 2, Arnie tells John Connor: “My mission is to protect you.”

As far as I know, I am not a robot. But as human Ryan, my primary directive is . . .

PROTECT THE BOND

To me, a bond with someone is sacred. Its valuable cannot be measured. And so I protect the bond at all costs. And were the bond to be damaged in some way, either because of something I or the other person did, my primary directive then downshifts to . . .

REPAIR THE BOND

Sometimes repair is impossible. If there is a major rupture involving betrayal or deception, I have a difficult time reconciling it. Because then the bond becomes unsafe to me, and I have to walk away from it. I forgive them immediately, but I cannot keep them in my ecosystem anymore. Every now and then, after some time, and so on . . . someone comes back around, and I let them back in. Usually it’s because their boyfriend had given them an ultimatum between them or Ryan, their platonic friend, and the boyfriend generally always wins out. Once the boyfriend is gone, they come back and apologize and I say, “Yeah, OK . . . just please don’t do that to me again! Your boyfriend sucked!” and we get on with it.

If I am able to restore the bond to its previous state of security, whatever the reason for its former near-endangered state, my primary directive shifts from repair back toward the protection of it until . . . the end of time! I gladly spend a lot of my life maintaining and sustaining my friendships with people. It’s like watering a plant . . . you got to nurture the thing! You can’t just sit around and take it for granted. Like any relationship, it’s work. But it’s good work!

During the pandemic, I had reached out to three or four people from my past whom I had Done Wrong, and who deserved a sincere apology from me. A sincere apology, in my opinion, is one in which you do not seek exoneration nor forgiveness for the harm you caused someone, nor some expectation for reconciliation, nor the hope that someone will tell you that you are not a bad person. In other words, the apology cannot be self-motivated: you have to say it purely for the benefit of the other person without hoping for any response at all, or else it isn’t any good.

Everyone whom I contacted back then did in fact reply, and they were extremely gracious and forgiving of me, even though I didn’t deserve it, nor had I anticipated it. I will always remember how good that felt, even if that wasn’t the point of my gesture.

•   •   •

BACK TO DANIELLE . . .

I am not going to write about what happened between Danielle and me. At the time, I was hurt by something she had done, which I considered a sort of betrayal . . . but rather than hearing out her side of it, and Repairing The Bond, I childishly cut her out of my life. I betrayed my own principle. She had done something that was neither nefarious nor unforgivable, but I was younger then, and frankly pretty emotionally immature for my age. I had felt slighted, and yet my reaction to this was to do something ten times more painful to her, which was to abandon her. I’m sure that hurt. I should not have ended our friendship and I have regretted it ever since.

And so years passed and occasionally I would think of Danielle and feel a sadness at the loss of our friendship. It had been very important to me. And yet she was the one person I had not reached out to at the time, though I don’t know why. There was a sort of mental barrier I could not get past. But eventually it really began to bother me that she would go the rest of her life without ever getting a fair explanation or apology from me, and so just before I moved back to Berlin in October 2022, I sent her a message and apologized to her. She responded the next day and was very kind to me. She said she missed being my friend, but that for reasons I ought not write here, that wasn’t possible, at least for now. I accepted what she had said and then I let it alone. We have not spoken since.

Four years have passed. Now it is five in the morning here in Berlin and alone in my apartment, older and scarred and beat down by the world, I recall Danielle once again. I have spent all night writing about her with affection for the first time in a long time. She had been special to me. I miss her so much I feel like crying.

A memory appears in my mind:

The night before Danielle left Oakland, a million years ago now during that first trip to see me, when we barely knew each other, she had asked for a T-shirt to sleep in. I gave her my favorite shirt, which I had got when I still lived in Austin. It was black (duh) and in the center was an image of two shadowy raiders on horseback beneath a blood-red desert sky. And before them, in the sand, was the skull of an animal that does not exist. So obviously I loved this thing. On the bus back down to LA, she texted me and said she realized she had accidentally stolen my shirt and was still wearing it. I told her to keep it.