Chris

Chris Cooper was one of my best friends through high school. We rekindled that friendship over the years, first when I was in my last year of college, and then whenever we crossed paths.

We all had pimples in puberty. No matter how carefully we washed, no matter how much deep cleaning astringent used, they found a way to make their presence known, usually within twenty-four hours of a school dance.

Chris was not so lucky. Chris had acne. Chronic acne. I discovered through him that acne was a curse and that one stricken with it was not dirty, not unwashed, and that those afflicted sometimes took medication to combat the condition. Chris had medicated cream. It was rarely effective. I’m sure the acne took its toll on his self-esteem. It must have. Luckily for Chris he had friends that saw beyond those abscesses and pustules. There were days we might be taken aback by them after seeing that day’s fresh batch, but those spots faded rapidly to nothing in our eyes because we had our own fresh batches too, didn’t we.

What we saw was Chris. Smart Chris. Clever Chris. Chris, who breezed through high school while we studied and studied and studied to keep up with what seemed to come naturally to him. Yet Chris was not the pocket protector sort, either. He was one of the first to drive, he fished, he had a phenomenal album collection, far better than mine, far more inclusive, far more diverse. I give thanks and praise to Chris for unknowingly guiding me in my evolution of choice.

Chris participated in track, too. He wasn’t fast. He knew that. But he could go the distance, able to run distances that had me laid out like a gasping corpse. He was a complex, diverse, interesting person. As we all were. But he was likely as unsure of himself as we all were, too. John Lavric and Marc Charette would know far better than I would though. As close as I was to Chris, I spent more and more time at the pool and we drifted apart some, even if I didn’t realize it then. I can’t say that I knew what was going on in his life in those latter high school years. I don’t recall Chris dating much, if at all. That may have been due to the acne. That may have been due to Chris’s inner response to that acne. He began to date some in university. He married some time afterwards. I suppose Chris and I were much alike in that aspect.

But where I seemed to slowly gain steam as a student, Chris was faltering when we reconnected in Sudbury, he at Laurentian and me at Cambrian, if you can call his still getting higher GPAs than me faltering. But I didn’t want to be a doctor. Chris did. His father was a doctor and he wanted to follow in his footsteps. But no matter how hard he studied in pre-med he couldn’t make the cut. Competition was fierce and the bell curve defeated him, so he changed course and focused on bio-chem and life labs. He did well at it. He always did well in chemistry, but then again, Chris always did well at every subject, as I recall.

Then I left Sudbury for London and Chris disappeared from my life for a while.

Then one day I was hanging out in the humidor room in Finn McCool’s when I saw what I thought was a familiar face walk in and toss a backpack into the space between the coffee table and comfy couch he flopped into.

He took a pull from his beer before I said, “Chris?”

He seemed startled, as one does when not expecting to hear one’s name in a strange place, because this was a strange place in a way. He’d been away for years and when you’ve been away for years you don’t expect to run into someone you know; indeed, you expect that everyone you knew had moved on, much as you had.

He spun. He recognized me. We both beamed. He shook hands but that wasn’t good enough because we drew one another in and hugged like brothers. He was up to visit his parents for the long weekend, he said, and had just stepped off the bus, he said, and was waiting for his old man to finish work, so he thought he’d have a beer while he waited.

We caught up. I told him about Kidd and what I’d been up to, my travels, a little about my off and on stumbles at I called a love-life, because he asked, and Chris told me a little of his. He never became a doctor. He finished bio-chem and life sciences and landed in Ottawa, working for the government. He had a girlfriend. I was jealous and very happy for him, what with the misery he’d endured back in school.

I asked him what his plans were for the weekend. There was a concert in Hollinger Park the next day. I asked him if he was interested and wanted to go, if he wasn’t that busy with family throughout the weekend. He thought on it, said that it sounded great. We decided to meet at Finn’s again the next day before heading over.

I bought two tickets that next morning. I was already going to go, but if he were going too, I thought I’d save the time and him the money and not have to wait in line when the time came. Then I got a call at noon.

“Dave,” Chris said. I heard an apology in his tone. “You’ll never guess where I am; I’m in Gore Bay and it’s beautiful.” His parents had decided that since Chris was up, it would be great for the family to head down to their cottage just off the Island.

I told him that sounded great, feeling my stomach drop a little, realizing that he was probably not going to go to the concert with me.

I had no idea where Gore Bay was. I looked at a map. It was six hours away. Needless to say, Chris did not make it. I didn’t see Chris again for years.

When I did, Bev and I were together. We had made our second trip to Manitoulin and decided to stop into the Little Current Beer Store to drop off our empties after our week at her family’s camp. We were just leaving when we spotted Chris pulling in. He got out of his vehicle and hailed me. We shook hands and hugged like brothers again.

We introduced our wives and asked the usual questions. They’d just arrived and were stocking up. We had another five hours ahead of us. We spoke for no more than ten minutes. The clouds were gathering overhead, ominously indigo as though night was falling. The wind was picking up. We shook and hugged again and were on our way. That was the last time I ever saw Chris.

A few years later, Bev brought me the paper and handed it to me.

“Isn’t that your friend?” she asked.

I stared in disbelief at Chris’s obituary. He’d died after a courageous but brief battle with lung cancer.

He was only forty years old.

I felt tears well up. My throat closed off. I had to leave the room for a while and be alone with my grief.

I miss him still.