Bud & The Jean Genie

“We always had shortcake for my birthday when I was a kid,” the Jean Genie told me.

“For as long as I live, I’ll always associate strawberries with you,” I said to her the day after her [redacted] birthday, getting older something she claimed to have given up for Lent.

The woman in question used to be known as Mrs. Moore, the mother of my best friend, but several years into knowing her I did the most obvious thing possible and bestowed upon her a rhyming nickname first established as a (great) David Bowie song. Her husband, Bud, the nickname one his son had called him since childhood, awaited our return to the basement television to abstain from eating dessert with us as he clicked between two baseball games and the final round of Connecticut’s prized golf tournament. Visiting with Moore’s parents had become a biannual ritual during his incarceration, my primary reason being that his parents had long treated me with love and kindness, no judgment aside from my devotion to the New York Yankees (which merely rankled The Genie, Bud having spent some formative years in the Bronx), but also because it selfishly afforded me the opportunity to savor time with two parents, a gathering that couldn’t happen with my own folks, a missing dynamic that sometimes made me wistful when ruminating about my father’s death.

My father’s father (the man from whom he acquired his name) and my great uncle had undertaken the role of father figures after my father died, each of them bringing me on separate trips to the same golf tournament that was now on television as I took a bite of a whipped cream-covered, juice-stained biscuit. Bud said how he’d parred the seventeenth hole during his one round playing the course years ago, a mock celebration of self from a humble man who was regimented in how he chose trips through his memory, rarely repeating himself or hyperbolizing his observations. On occasions when I re-heard a story voiced in his endearingly gruff manner, it was too good to object, like how he’d attended a Jimi Hendrix concert in San Antonio or his peculiar eating habits when stationed in Japan during the service.

I’d long believed picking one’s parents or loved ones as heroes was a cheat, but upon reading a Vladimir Nabokov essay a couple weeks prior to the visit, an essay about the author’s own father, a fearless Russian who died while defending his best friend from fascist gunfire, I cried and emailed Moore afterward about how I wished that I had a father who was my hero, Bud long having been Moore’s model for dignity, stoicism, and a positive outlook. Now, I was enjoying time with a worthy second option, a man who also shared my father’s name. True to form, the woman he favored for a lifetime of companionship complemented him in the necessary ways, her telling me that he’d become a bit slovenly in their basement, to which I, a very committed organizer, replied, “The best couples require a slob and a neat freak otherwise you end up fighting and blaming one another while not accomplishing anything.” For the record, I do not condone defending slobs unless you already love them.

If The Genie was strawberries, Bud was sandwiches, the man’s love of mayonnaise on bread among his motivations to arise each day. Together, I pictured them drinking mugs of creamy coffee and smoking cigarettes at foliage-accented rest stops when the four of us took our annual autumn trip to West Point to see Army college football games, a long-abandoned tradition kind of resuscitated when The Genie handed me a rectangular white box upon my arrival. Inside it was a photo taken by Bud featuring Moore half-smiling in an Army hat and jersey on the left side of the frame, The Genie in an Army hat, gold blazer, and black shirt with two round pendants hanging from gold chains in between the lapels in the center, and me in an Army hat wearing a New York Jets sweatshirt, a team she loathed almost as much as the Yankees, on the right. I mentioned how I’d recently found a spot in my house to showcase a photo of Moore and me, but now she’d gone and invited herself to a featured locus in the museum, an addition welcomed by a curator thrilled to celebrate the people who imparted immense joy to his life.

There were many other things that defined Bud and The Genie on display in their home’s open floor plan, among them: rabbit figurines (Moore’s one pet in their previous home was a bunny); bountiful Boston Red Sox paraphernalia; images of lighthouses (a regular road trip destination); Moore’s art he’d crafted during his sabbatical from the real world (especially a masterful rendering of a wrinkled Willie Nelson in a cowboy hat, the one man capable of reviving his parents’ interest in attending a concert for the first time in nearly forty years); and even a drawing The Genie’s father penciled in color of Augusta National Golf Club’s clubhouse, a direct link between us and welcome memento of my favorite place in the world while in the company of two people I’d spent more time with than most of my own family members. Some friends had questioned if my visits were somehow a chore, unaware that many of my most cherished conversations involved the wise ears of my elders, consistently a journalist at heart who loved asking questions to people who falsely concluded that their timeworn stories had lost their luster.

Sitting in a basement stacked with Revolutionary War books, another one of Bud’s obsessions, conveniently reminded me how Moore and I had built our friendship in his parents’ old basement while viewing sports and cinema as we cracked absurd and offensive jokes, two only children who’d each found an elusive brother in a guy who closely mirrored himself and contributed the crucial missing nudge to help inchoate behaviors bloom. I never heard criticism concerning how unempathetic I was about our peers, about how I drank too much, about how I disrespected perceived intellectual inferiors, or a score of other unenlightened flaws I’d since worked to revise, considerate behavior Moore learned from Bud and The Genie, behavior it took me, an unapologetically judgmental dickhead, time to comprehend was a worthwhile approach. Of course, irony didn’t care as two decisions Moore made would destroy his life each time, the sequel far worse in wrecking his parents’ lives, recrudescence they worked to forgive as their loyalty remained tethered to the same unconditional love that innumerable people prior to them also perceived can have devastating consequences.

“What’s a chanticleer?” Bud asked me about one baseball team’s nickname.

“I think it’s a knight,” I said.

“Huh,” he said flatly. “You sure about that?”

“It’s a rooster!” I said upon my return after looking up the word during a bathroom break. “I was way off.”

“I didn’t know what a palmetto was until recently,” The Genie divulged to cheer me up.

Words: who needs ‘em? Bud and The Genie had a rooting interest in Coastal Carolina’s baseball team following a recent trip to South Carolina to see The Genie’s younger sister, her family relocating not far from Myrtle Beach, an area ablaze when they landed at the nearby airport to begin their visit, and also home to a baseball team that would finish as the runner-up in the College World Series an hour later. We also chatted about their recent trip to Maine, including their inability to find soft serve ice cream, nonetheless still as enamored with the state as I’d become during my bygone travels with Sue, the same extreme loyalty we reserved for select people also abundant for specific places and things that repeatedly sparked intrigue. The Genie then shared some childhood anecdotes about Moore, like when he would sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” because he thought it was “the basketball song,” learning it from Boston Celtics games Bud watched, along with his questionable attempts at success on the baseball diamond and soccer field, proof that our failures can enshrine us on happier terms once maturation makes peace with the illusory nature of the ego.

There’s a temptation to elude Moore’s falls from grace, The Genie’s unresolved feelings ones I’ve instructed her many times to share with me wholeheartedly off the record, which we whispered about when Bud departed to grab pizza and chicken wings, worried his hearing aids could be fine-tuned to eavesdrop from miles away. It may seem crass and precious to invoke now but when reckoning with behavior that seems incomprehensible, the default scene that plays in my head features a character named Mr. Poopybutthole delivering a monologue at the conclusion of a Rick & Morty episode: “But I guess things went downhill from there. Started isolating myself from Amy. Used to tell her everything I was feeling, but then I guess I stopped cuz I wanted her to love who she thought I was, not who I felt myself becoming. Ever think about how horrified the people we love would be if they found out who we truly are? So, we just dig ourselves deeper into our lies every day, ultimately hurting the only people brave enough to love us. Wish I didn't do that. Wish I was brave enough to love them back. I don't know. Maybe you should try it. We don't have as much time as we think. Ooh-wee. Did you get any of that?”

I did and continue to. And Moore had no choice but to own his darkest failures, burying his shame for the two people he didn’t want to harm more than he already had. The realest resolution is acceptance, not that the lives we live in our minds can be turned off like a television or our appetites once enough strawberries begin digesting. Since we’re all, in scientific application, one half our mother and one half our father, I can’t help but see The Genie’s impact on Moore, the way she pauses almost premonitorily to begin sentences as if unwelcome news will strike on the opposite side of her ellipsis; the way she wears jeans inside her home like pajama pants, the same way Moore did, and will again; the way she…you get it. Moore had adapted her influence so clearly in his own comportment that Bud became his aspirational figure, not to be ungracious to his mother, but because, as hindsight gives a glimmer, it’s more noble to chase the intangible while reckoning with behavior his father wouldn’t indulge but would consider with less outward scorn than anyone else.

Bud escorted me to the back patio to show me his potted tomato and pepper plants, the latter roughly the size of tennis balls on the vine. He’d maintained a substantial garden at their old home, including hops he grew when he and Moore brewed beer in the garage, but now found comfort in a simplified process that echoed the same begrudging acceptance I’d shared with his wife when he got us dinner: that less can be enough, a realization more onerous to attain if, or so I sarcastically surmised, one’s surname is its opposite. I inquired if he’d been listening to the spring’s birdsong, the warblers cooing Everly Brothers-level harmonies in my backyard for two months straight, one of the things the man had missed most before getting hearing aids, Bud confirming he sometimes stood in the same spot we were standing to admire nature’s soundtrack while stretching his legs. Whenever they raced to mind, I extracted carefully stored details shared by Moore that I knew would enliven his parents, the simple act of remembering the little things an attribute most people regarded as a way of making them feel special, attentiveness to details a characteristic I’d inherited from my parents.

Moore and I grew to know one another even better on an emotional level via our nonstop email communication during his prison sentences—“Ninety-five percent of my several thousand emails are from you,” he wrote—as he routinely provided me insight when I couldn’t see outside myself, too familiar with my own machinations to temper expectations in certain moments or not get riled up about minor offenses, sacrificing the pride I had in my own integrity when it ultimately didn’t matter as much as I once thought it did. Strange as it may scan, he had almost become like the son I won’t have, all my other close friends asking when he was getting out, how he was doing, and what plans he had to restart his life, an image of him freely running into my arms as I rubbed his head like a proud papa bouncing through my imagination, a cartoonish and purposely ridiculous image that put me at ease about trusting him a second time, one that I hoped my proxy parents, people who can’t be here for him forever, knew was sincere, that I’d do everything in my limited power to ensure their baby boy fulfilled at least part of his promise, something he earned for doing his time and declaring his penitence, outlining the methodology of his remorse for me in one vital email as if to say, “I will not fuck up again, brother.”

Bud had coined my house a “museum” following a Christmastime visit, and each time I hung a new framed drawing celebrating Moore’s lifelike portraiture, I flashed forward to his forthcoming first visit aware that he’d likely go overboard in animatedly praising the aesthetics in a shrine dedicated to the loves of my life, all of it documented in advance on a blue and white application where I sent Moore a barely watered down version of my own journal and impulsive ideas, my finest audience a literal captive man who felt more human when given glimpses of an everyday existence marked by passionate hints of the treasures he’d soon begin rebuilding for himself with unencumbered zeal. At times, I had to encourage him to absorb more of Bud’s optimism than The Genie’s cynicism, not that they both didn’t have valid points. Any decent journalist can’t refrain from considering the mutually beneficial merits even if siding with idealistic inclinations is more humane. In seeing the fortitude throughout his suffering, I knew Moore earned it.

Ready to head home, Bud and The Genie showed me their blooming purplish hydrangea bushes (she sprinkled coffee grounds in the soil so the acidity would metamorphose the already fetching blue petals) and dying hosta, The Genie in disbelief that the sturdy plant could wither. Were they thinking of their son during these moments wishing he stood in my place? I couldn’t blame them if they did, nor would my feelings be hurt, but I doubted it, both more likely to wish he and I stood there together for a visit, one their new home would continue anticipating patiently. Each time I drove by their old home, a home that helped anchor my teens and twenties and one now owned by a former high school friend, I liked to envision one of that woman’s children befriending a person so meaningful that he or she made something akin to the incomparable memories I had formed in that basement and shared them in adulthood with the friend’s parents, the circle not unbroken as power continued being ascribed to a place that would also yield the inevitable tragedy or two, the home’s power strong enough to impel misfortune from the foreground as life’s highs defied the inexorable pull of its lows.

Maybe I’ll grab a quart of off-season strawberries when I return to see them in December. Bud can eat his inside mayo-slathered white bread while The Genie and I settle for convention, disdaining him with a healthy layer of silliness. Moore will be spending his final birthday away from the seasonal festivities, but the real celebration will occur six weeks later. We won’t scold him or stress what he's missed—he knows. All we can do is bravely pull out a chair. The only nostalgia the four of us will need to care about is the kind we’ve yet to create together.