One of the great mysteries that mesmerized me as a child was wading through the ocean. Have you done that? Sure, ‘course you have. But that wasn’t the mystery: the intrigue was encountering those pools within the ocean, those places where the water was so much warmer. You’d move from a chilly wave into a space where the water seemed warm, heated even, by comparison with where you had been. And I’d stand in that pool and wonder how this one place, this point in the middle of the expanse of water cloaking the earth—how it could be different, so pleasant to stand in.
Alan used to say it was warmer ‘cause someone had just pissed there; and he’d swim away, laughing and pointing and calling me a “piss-o-phile.” But what a wonderful feeling it was. Knowing how cold the ocean was, and yet, here seemed a place set aside for someone to inhabit, someone to be warm, just standing.

I used to think that the place was just for me; but as soon as I would leave it, swim out twenty yards or so—when I’d look back at that space someone else would be there. Most times. Not every time, but just about every time.
Seems to me that life’s like that. Find a place you like, but you sense that it’s kind of stupid—with everyone else moving around you—to just stand there. So you move too, and once you do you find someone has taken your place.
I really didn’t expect that to happen with Alan. We’d been friends for so long that I couldn’t conceive of someone else usurping my place. Just taking it so easily. And Alan just acquiescing. I probably shouldn’t have said “usurp” ‘cause it was my idea to leave, so to speak. It just seemed so stupid standing still. Every day was the same: he and I would go to classes, and then meet for a drink at the Pub, get a bite together, study together. We were just too much together. It’s not like I loved him or anything, although he did say he loved me. But I just waved that off: I mean I couldn’t take him seriously when he said that. You know, you talk about standing still—well that kind of love is surely static. It doesn’t produce anything, does it?
So one day I said to Alan: “Don’t you think we spend too much time together?” And he said Cathy, his girlfriend at that time, had asked him the same thing. So I asked, “What did you say to Cathy, then?” And he said, “I didn’t say anything. I threw a glass of water in her face!”

“What? Were you drinking a glass of water at the time?”

“No. When she asked about you and me, something just made me get up and get some water from the kitchen. And when I came back, her glaring at me through all the silence, so obviously waiting for some sort of assuring answer, I just threw it in her face.”

I never understood Alan’s relationship to me. I mean, he had Cathy—she stayed with him even after getting splashed—but he seemed to want some intimacy with me as well. It wasn’t something physical he wanted; at least I never believed it to be so. But he used to talk like a mystic, a visionary, of our own souls hovering together.

He seemed to have this illusion that he and I were inextricably bound together forever. And almost as though we’d one day write each other’s biographies, we’d chronicle the events of our lives to each other, making notes while we talked, feverishly jotting down phrases that seemed to sum our feelings.

Alan was convinced we were capable of some great work, some accomplishment that others would honor as angels honor the Creator. His work no doubt would be literary—some epic transcending the petty concerns of mortal men; he used to joke about writing sequels to all of T.S. Eliot’s works. He’d already started “The Graced Land,” which he began “April is the coolest month…, playing off the slang use of “cool” as in hip, with-it, and all those other code phrases of our era.

It was never clear what my “great work” would be—after I failed to get a second invitation to the Detroit Tigers’ baseball camp (at the first I had been impressive in the field but miserable at the plate!), we ruled out a sports career. I have no great artistic bent, and although Alan would shush me when I would say it, I often thought my own life would be marked by a relatively blissful ordinariness, a sort of sequel to Philip Carey’s tale in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage—an embrace of the orthodox vision of how a man finds fulfillment: steady job, wife, children.

Alan would rarely let me articulate any of this, and when I’d hint of the “ordinary,” he’d say that was enough “honest plundering” for one day (that’s what he called these musings of ours, “honest plunderings”) and we’d go off and have a drink or go for a swim.