Barry

I’m never sure why nostalgia decides to take hold at times. Like with a lot of things in life, it’s best to go with the flow of it and see where it might take you. In my previous post, I was drawn back to memories of my third grade teacher; a few months back, I was haunted sweetly by memories of my long-lost friend Leslie. And now, for some reason, Barry has come into my mind often during the past few days.

His name wasn’t really Barry, we* called him that because he had a rather remarkable resemblance to the erstwhile king of easy listening pop, Barry Manilow (some of us were given nicknames…including and especially the very tall, casually beautiful, sweet-natured redhead whose nickname…given her by Barry…ended up naming the group as a whole; some of us were not…I was not and that was fine with me since I had accumulated a fair number of nicknames during childhood, high school, and college and I really didn’t need any more.)

Our Barry, with his multi-ethnic genetic makeup, looked like a young Manilow who had been dipped in creamy caramel.

Barry was the life of the party wherever he went…the original “good time Charlie”, who could charm almost everyone he met…but it was a façade, of course. Behind the façade was a melancholy that he, out of habit or fear, rarely slowed down to acknowledge.

He was always searching for something but never really sure what that something was. He liked the “good life”…all-night partying, fine restaurants, expensive clothes, endless drink and drugs…but he didn’t really care for the workaday world as a means of getting it (especially not doing the kind of mind-numbing paperwork we were doing deep in the administrative bowels of the cosmetics company where we toiled at the time.)

He said that he longed for love but wouldn’t stop prowling the bars of West Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley in search of newer conquests (for many years he had the devotion and support of a long-suffering partner…a brawny, grounded, quiet-spoken, quiet-living fellow who looked to be of solid Nordic heritage…but Barry managed push his patience to the point of breaking with years of dedicated effort and casual neglect.)

As all of us moved on and moved apart…our carefree years giving way to new jobs, new cities, new partners and new families, new responsibilities…Barry resisted the notion that growing up was part of the deal and drifted away from all of us (even before we all drifted apart from each other.) Last I heard, he had quit the west coast to return to his beloved New York City…hopefully he found the something he was looking for there.

* * * * *

*”we”, in this case, being the fairly tight-knit (for a good while anyway) group of friends who referred to ourselves, with seriocomic archness, as the “United Mooses of Max Factor” (therein lying a tale that may or may not be told at some point in the future.)