Less than two weeks before he died and little more than a week before he became uncommunicative my old friend Aris performed his final impression. Aris, who I met in sixth grade, had a gift for mimicry and especially accents. Whether it was the workers in the mailroom at Union Carbide, one of his first jobs out of college, or his fellow programmers and bosses at the porn website where he settled for several years, Aris’s impersonations weren’t just unerring; they also managed to capture the human comedy.
His final impression was at the expense of Maxine, a hospice aide who sat in his room for several hours each day staring off into space or scrolling through her phone. In Maxine’s defense there wasn’t much she could have done for Aris by that point. The caregiver, at least to me, seemed unobjectionable. But her strange basso profundo voice apparently got on Aris’s nerves. I don’t think it was intentional or affected but whenever she opened her mouth Maxine, rolling her R’s and elongating her vowels, sounded as if she were a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company performing a soliloquy.
I can’t recall whether Maxine had just left the room or gone home for the day but Aris nailed her delivery, his genius fueled by rage at what his life had become and the knowledge that he was never going home. I think he simply projected his despair onto the aide, employing her as a focus for the futility of his situation.
I mentioned a couple of Aris’s random jobs for a reason. He was an epic underachiever. He blamed it on his parents. He blamed it on depression. He blamed it on an allergy to authority. Third in his class at our high school and a graduate of Vassar College he never found a career that tapped his talents, or even tried very hard. He was a gifted photographer, in particular he had a way with color and celebrating the human condition, whether he was photographing the musicians at the New Orleans Jazz Festival or the weekend tumult at Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain — but he never managed to finesse that into a living.
Our bond was based on humor. He was, at moments, one of the most amusing people I’ve ever met. But he couldn’t corral his talent. He once tried standup but it didn’t go well. He took the mic at some downtown restaurant or club — I don’t recall the venue; it was so long ago — and performed approximately thirty seconds of brilliant, improvised comedy. Unfortunately, he went on for another five minutes.
New York City provided the backdrop for our friendship since the days that he commuted to school in Manhattan from his home in Queens. In middle age we’d meet in Central Park on spring and summer evenings. I’d drink, he’d smoke — throughout his life but especially more recently cannabis served as a lifeline — we’d watch runners hellbent on the self-improvement that Aris passively mocked and then we’d walk to dinner at some nearby Upper West Side restaurant.
When someone dies the places where you once rendezvoused assume a special poignancy. Santa Fe, a Mexican eatery that served excellent burgers; Raku, a Japanese restaurant where Aris, whose appetite had always been prodigious, ordered the generous sashimi deluxe, delivered not on a platter but in a wooden boat, and then often finished what remained on my plate.
But in a friendship that spans most of a life my memory coughs up more than restaurant meals. I remember his Greek father furtively spying on Aris, his only child, at a school dance to see whether he was successful with girls. Before that I remember Aris at summer camp in the Adirondacks losing his temper after weeks of bullying and emptying the bunk by wildly swinging a broom at his adversaries.
He wasn’t especially coordinated, let alone athletic. To say he wasn’t in touch with his body is an understatement. It may as well have resided in another state. While driving across Canada the summer after college with Maggi, a mutual friend and budding scientist who years later would become his health care proxy, I foolishly allowed Aris to take the wheel of my car. After all, we were literally in the middle of nowhere, on a strip of highway in Saskatchewan that stretched to the horizon. Nonetheless, Aris almost managed to kill us. Traveling at no more than five miles an hour, he unintentionally jerked the steering wheel so violently back and forth that it was all I could do to wrest it away from him before his driving induced whiplash.
Yet Aris’s good fortune was to find a soulmate in Carol, a writer and tarot card reader who died a few years ago, perhaps precipitating his own demise, but whose deep, appreciative laughter at her husband’s humor still echoes with me.
If there was one area in which Aris excelled it was in the consumption of drugs. He sometimes reminded me that there was no lethal dose of LSD and set out to prove it. Trying to come to terms with Aris’s unfathomable life — he’d still be alive today if he hadn’t waited until the age of sixty-five to get his first colonoscopy and, once diagnosed with cancer, if he’d taken his doctors’ advice and promptly gotten a colostomy — I’ll take solace in the remarkable circle of friends that gathered around him, responding to Maggi’s sometimes daily medical updates with love and encouragement. They brought snacks to the nursing home where he spent the final months of his life, delivered the mail, massaged his feet, and spent hours on the phone with Apple when he locked himself out of his phone. They saw past his peculiarities to the singular person beneath. Or rather they loved him, as did I, for those same peculiarities; perhaps even for his inability to negotiate the world.
After he died I tapped the photo app on his phone and discovered it open to a photograph of the bar at the Dublin House, a landmark drinking tavern on the Upper West Side where we often met. Aris took the image on one his last outings. I don’t much believe in messages from the hereafter but just in case we’ll convene in the bar’s back room after the holidays to memorialize his life. That’s where we retreated so that I could amortize the cost of a scotch by secretly refilling the glass from my flask out of sight of the bartender. Once we returned to the street, Aris’s gait slowed in recent years, it was my opportunity to return the favor. I’d slacken my pace while he took furtive hits from his vape and we headed off to dinner.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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