Bromance
A love letter to the bestie
A couple weeks into my freshman year of high school, the dean of students pulled me aside and said, ‘Gawain, there’s someone I want you to meet. He’s starting late, but I figured since you’re new here too, you could show him around.’ A portly kid with braces sidled up and examined me reticently. ‘Hey man,’ I said. ‘Hey,’ he said. I extended my hand and he shook it. I adjusted my school tie and gestured for him to follow me.
For the next fifteen minutes, I gave him a half-baked tour of where everything was, and then said, ‘Let me know if you have any questions.’ He nodded and thanked me. I left him and sauntered off towards my guy group. ‘Who was that?’ One of them asked. ‘Oh, he’s new.’ They shrugged and we walked off to class.
A month or two later, while I was waiting in our school’s chapel for morning assembly to start, the new kid sat next to me. He looked around stealthily. ‘Dude, can I tell you something?’ ‘Yeah man, sure.’ We were the only two in our pew. ‘Yesterday, I accidentally shot a hunting rifle in my neighborhood. It wasn’t loaded or anything, but it made a noise. I’m sure I freaked some people out.’ He eyed me with a mixture of pride and anxiety. ‘Wow, yeah, that’s um… that’s wild, man,’ I said feigning interest. ‘Yeah, dude.’ I began to wonder if this kid had sociopathic tendencies, like those children who spent their days sprinkling salt on slugs and tearing limbs off insects. Other people started filing into our pew. I motioned for one of my guy friends to sit in the spot next to me. I glanced over at the new kid and smiled at him reluctantly.
The new kid and I had a study hall together, where we’d work on our geometry homework and infrequently chat about life. One day, in the middle of running through some convoluted theorem about supplementary angles, he asked me if I wanted to have a sleepover at his house. He said he had already asked one of my guy friends and that he’d said yes. I felt like a pretty blonde girl who had gotten cornered at a bar by a nice but overly talkative man, the only way out being to nod along and then slip through the first crack that opened up. ‘Um, yeah… yeah, sure, I mean, I’d have to check with, um, my parents,’ I said. The girl I had a crush on was sitting behind us and witnessed the whole thing. ‘That was really cute,’ she told me later. ‘He wants to be your friend!’ I smiled anxiously at her. ‘I guess so.’
He lived in one of those suburban developments inhabited by families that straddled the boundary between upper middle class and rich. It was a world away from my family’s inconspicuous home in a country town an hour away. My dad and I walked up to his house and rang the doorbell. I could see a chandelier through the glass panes bordering the top half of the doorframe. He opened the door. We looked at each other for a moment. ‘Hey, dude,’ he said. ‘Hey man.’ Our other friend wasn’t there yet. My dad introduced himself. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Semlear,’ my new friend responded.
He led me down to his basement, where we’d all be sleeping. I saw several couches, a TV, a giant beanbag, and a ping pong table. There was a sterility to it that kind of freaked me out. It reminded me of a funeral home. There was an unfinished part of the basement that he pointed out but didn’t show me. I eyed it suspiciously. Part of me suspected it might contain a collection of taxidermy or some other obscure novelty.
‘Cool house,’ I said while we were walking back upstairs. ‘Thanks. Let me show you my room.’ His room looked like every other teenage boy’s room. Baby blue walls. Navy blue sheets. Sports trophies. A shapeless pile of dirty white socks. Clean clothes that still had a residual smell of body odor. A giant wall sticker of a professional athlete. A football helmet. A baseball glove. Tissues. A half-empty water bottle. Wrappers. An uncapped stick of deodorant.
Later that night, as we lay in our makeshift beds down in the basement, we creeped our way up to the subject that lives rent free in the young adolescent brain: Masturbation. ‘I always feel a bit guilty after I do it,’ my new friend confided. Our other friend stared at the ceiling blankly and said, ‘Really? I don’t get that.’ My new friend blushed. ‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘It probably has something to do with organized religion.’ My new friend and I locked eyes and smiled gratefully at each other.
I know it may sound stupid, but that moment in which we bonded over our post-masturbation shame is what inaugurated our close friendship. From thereon out, we were like ship mates braving the tumultuous storm of adolescence. I began sleeping over at his house nearly every weekend. Before the end of our freshman year, we were fraternally linked, so much so that we even started to smell like each other.
Like most close friends, we had our fair share of volatility. There were times when we fought like scorned housewives on reality TV. There were times when we’d both be laughing so hard we’d start coughing and falling on the floor. We were like weeds in a lake that drifted apart in the wind only to find themselves entangled a couple seconds later.
During those formative teen years, we had a lot of firsts together. We smoked pot together for the first time, under the auspice of our other friend who was already a bona fide stoner. We snuck into our first bar together (though we couldn’t convince the bartender to serve us without identification). I was the first person to learn that he lost his virginity, and he was the first person to learn that I lost mine. He was the first guy who wasn’t my father that I cried in front of.
I could be vulnerable with him in a way that I couldn’t with a lot of other guys. More often than not, men treat vulnerability like the fruit in Tantalus’s punishment: Something perpetually out of reach. Our emotional appetites are rarely sated. But, with him, I was able to feel full.
The tail end of our college years and the beginning of Covid found our friendship in somewhat of an inert state. We hardly saw each other anymore, and when we did, it felt like our paths were headed in opposite directions. We’d conjure up old memories, warmed by their ephemeral glow, and then hug and say, ‘See you when I see you, homie.’
In September of 2022, right after I finished my master’s dissertation in London, I came back to New York for a month. I stayed at his apartment for five days. When he picked me up from the train station, we leaped into each other’s arms and started giggling. Just like old times, right? Perhaps. I hadn’t seen him in a year. We texted occasionally since then. I was afraid that this trip would be the deciding factor in our friendship. It would either reveal that our lives had become too bifurcated for any kind of real connection, or that, despite our differences, we still had some common root grounding our friendship.
For the first couple of nights, we roved around his apartment like squalid animals. We left the bathroom door open while we peed; we walked around in our underwear, burping and farting without restraint. We were still brothers, that much was clear. But was he still my best friend?
We took a road trip one day to a town a couple hours away from where he lived. It was then that we finally started to talk like we used to. I explained how unhappy and lonely I was in London, but how everyone thought I was ‘living the dream.’ He told me about all the women he’d dated and how empty he still felt. It was like we were back in his childhood bedroom, prattling on about our most intimate feelings while playing Call of Duty and eating goldfish. ‘It’s nice to talk like this again,’ I said to him. ‘Yeah man, it is.’
We spent the rest of that day wandering around a little New England town high off our asses. At one point, we found a creek, took off our shoes, and started clambering upstream. ‘I need some advice about my future,’ he said to me. ‘Hit me with it, homie.’ Just like that, we were those two teen idiots again, mapping out our lives on an imaginary chalkboard, with the erased lines of our past still vaguely perceptible. ‘I feel like we’re going back to our roots right now,’ I said. ‘Yeah—’ He passed me the joint. ‘Totally.’
Two days later we were in Manhattan for a charity gala. We passed around a bottle of peanut butter flavored whiskey (it’s better than it sounds) while getting ready at my hotel room in Chelsea. We had spent the better part of the last hour primping our hair and talking about our past romantic entanglements. He turned to me at one point and said, ‘Gawain, man, I love you. I can’t exist around other people the way I can with you.’ It was too early in the night to start crying, so I mustered a grin and said, ‘Yeah, I feel the same.’
The gala had an open bar and we took advantage of it like a gang of bandits pilfering treasure off a dead king. By hour two, we were comfortably sedated. After the event was over, we went back to my hotel room, accompanied by two of our other friends. ‘So,’ someone said. ‘One more drink?’ There was only one bar open near us and it had a 20 dollar cover. ‘What kind of bar charges 20 bucks to get in?’ I complained. ‘Let’s just see what it’s like,’ someone said.
Through a prodigious execution of feminine guile, one of my friends convinced a random guy to pay for all our covers. ‘Let’s go,’ she ordered. ‘Okay,’ I thought, ‘time to see what’s behind this 20 dollar fee.’ And as soon as I stepped through the black curtain, I saw it—or rather, them: Tits. ‘This is a strip club?’ I asked. ‘More burlesque,’ someone said. ‘Right.’
My friend returned from the bar with four G&Ts that he got charged 120 bucks for. ‘This is my first time in one of these places,’ I told him. ‘Well, welcome.’ We looked at each other and tacitly agreed on what this night meant: It was another first in the repository of our friendship. Not only that but it recalled all our other firsts—the indelible mark we had left on each other’s lives.
After I got my first ever lap dance, he sidled up to me the way he did when we first met and asked, ‘How was it?’ ‘Great. We talked a lot about my writing. She said she was looking forward to reading one of my books one day.’ He grinned. ‘Gawain, I’m asking about the dance, not the conversation you had.’ I smiled sheepishly and then laughed. ‘Right, yeah that was nice too.’ We walked out arm in arm, giggling like schoolboys.
That night, albeit a tangle of dissolute revelry, solidified that he and I weren’t leaving each other anytime soon. With old friends, people often coast along on a raft made entirely out of the past. But the past has a waning buoyancy. Eventually you’ll sink. What keeps a friendship afloat is the ability to grow around each other in a way that doesn’t discredit the discrepancies that have arisen between you over the years. The fact that he’s still in my life, even after we made it through the storm of adolescence and paddled apprehensively into the murky depths of adulthood, goes to show that our bond, at least right now, is inexorable.
There’s this moment in the season three finale of White Lotus where Carrie Coon’s character Laurie looks at her friends, friends she’s known since she was nine, and says, ‘I had this epiphany today. I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning because time gives it meaning. We started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together, and I look at you guys and it feels meaningful. And I can’t explain it, but even when we’re sitting around the pool talking about whatever inane shit, it still feels very fucking deep.’
Be it a tête-à-tête accompanied by a generously poured glass of bourbon, a debauched 3 a.m. in some dive bar off of MacDougal Street, or a crude joke made while sipping a Starbucks macchiato, the moments in our friendship are impressed by the gargantuan weight of all that we’ve been through. Sometimes, when I look at his broad, herculean frame and pearly white teeth, I can’t help but think back to that portly kid with braces. As I’m sure he can’t look at my long hair and miscellany of jewelry without recalling that preppy, straight-laced twerp who showed him around on his first day of school.
The other day he sent me a text that read, ‘I was just thinking about you and me reading philosophy books down by the river in my van.’ I told him that he’s shit out of luck because the LA river is pretty much dry. ‘Gawain we will find a river. I have been riding a wave that only you can surf with me,’ he texted back. It made me laugh my ass off. And that laughter felt meaningful. It signaled a connection that felt real and rich. To be able to laugh with someone today as you were able to a decade ago is invaluable and something you should never take for granted.
Some time ago, I asked my friend if he remembered when he told me about how he accidentally shot a hunting rifle in his neighborhood. ‘Oh God, I think so. I can only imagine what must’ve gone through your head.’ ‘Yeah, I kind of thought you might be a juvenile serial killer.’ We both laughed. He raised his eyebrows and said, ‘It’s funny, when I invited you over that first time, I wanted to become friends with the other guy, and thought he’d only come if you were there. But then it was me and you who clicked, not me and him.’ I eyed him somewhat derisively. ‘Oh, you bastard.’ He chuckled cartoonishly and patted my back. ‘But look at us now,’ he said. I grinned. ‘Yeah… yeah.’
Every now and then, I think back to that first sleepover we had and his parents’ basement, with its preternatural vibe. The last time I was down there I was 23. My then-girlfriend and I were visiting New York from London. My friend invited us to stay at his parents’ house for a weekend. We slept on a futon in the basement. One night, before we went to bed, I looked around the room, scanning all the ephemera from years past. The first time I went down there it reminded me of a funeral home. However, at that moment I looked at it a bit differently. That basement was a mausoleum for our youth; that, while cold, still held the eternal warmth of a life well lived. I smiled stupidly at the thought. ‘What is it?’ My girlfriend asked. ‘Nothing,’ I chuckled. ‘Just memories.’