Best Day Ever

humanityAs I set a paper bag containing some clothes and a bulky winter jacket on an unadorned table to my left, a barely visible man standing in a shadowy area behind Plexiglas informed me to keep the coat hanger. Prepared to sit in the adjacent lobby filling in the blanks of a crossword puzzle, the man politely asked me to wait in my car. Now, like always, my biggest concern materialized: How long could I go before losing the battle with my bladder?

Having planned to be a bit distracted when determining the first name of “Singer Horne” (Lena) and the “College town nicknamed A2” (Ann Arbor), I paused to glimpse a distant man wearing tan clothing inside the building washing windows while I read a text message my friend Rick sent to salute the celebratory day. I impulsively called him.

“How long until he’s out?” he asked.

“He called a few minutes ago and said it would be about an hour,” I said. “I haven’t been this excited since I attended The Masters nine months ago. This is a major event.”

Along with many of my closest friends, Rick had been given periodic updates in the buildup to this day for months, a day I’d discussed and envisioned in such specific detail that I believed I might be able to execute it flawlessly while blindfolded.

“I wish they told me an exact time,” I said. “I’d go home, crank my hog, and get back with time to spare.”

“Should just do it while you’re sitting there,” Rick said. 

“When he comes out, I’ll toss him the keys and say, ‘We’re switching places—I’m going in!’”  

Rick began relaying the comically absurd fallout from a seasonal job he’d quit two mornings prior until a blast of breath fogged up the exterior of my window.

“He’s out! He’s here! I gotta go!”

I opened the door to greet my best friend, his dark hair twisted in a man bun as he panted like a dog in the heat. He extended his hand for a shake, one I bypassed to wrap him in a hug. Nearly seven years after he’d been incarcerated, Moore was now a free man. For one day nothing else mattered.

“Can you pull up to the curb over there, bud?” he asked me. “I’ve got a few boxes of property and I’m too out of shape to carry them.”

“Don’t pull the rear handle,” I said when I stepped out. “You press a button and it goes up on its own now.”

We loaded the car as he handed me an abstract painting a fellow artist-inmate had gifted him, a psychedelic memento to commemorate his departure. Then he ripped off the jacket I’d brought and began fogging up the inside of the passenger seat window, cortisol freely flowing through him, a mix of overstimulation, anxiety, and pure joy about to begin fueling a day he requested I chaperone.

“Where’s your phone?” he said as I handed it to him to call his folks and began the drive to my house, the place I’d insisted we stop first, not to give him a long-awaited tour, as he assumed, but to let him, a guy prone to eating in the car, decompress for a half hour and savor some plain Greek yogurt, the lone food on his wish list when I offered to buy him anything for his first free will breakfast in ages.

He said hello to Sue’s poster-sized image on my living room wall and acknowledged two framed film posters — a duo documenting humanity destroyed and humanity rebuilt, a duo he knew well — stating how my home felt more like a museum than any one he’d ever set foot inside, too hesitant to touch anything for fear it would initiate a Rube Goldberg-like chain reaction of destruction.

“Let’s go down cellar,” I said. “It’s the best part of the house. After you, bud.”

“Oh…wow! Jesus, I forgot it was finished! Look at all this vinyl.”

“There’s a gift for you over there,” I said while pointing at the chaise longue. “I’ll keep it here until you’re ready to take it, but I wanted you to see it today.”

He opened the square white box to find a vinyl copy of Holst’s The Planets, a famous classical composition he’d enjoyed prior to his imprisonment, and one that fascinated him even more when listening to it on a tablet with headphones during his time away. I sent him a lengthy article composed by a Planets historian who had ranked the finest recordings, waiting months to locate a copy of the number one-rated album until an email alert I’d set fortuitously notified me that it had surfaced weeks in advance of Moore’s release.

“How’d it sound?” he asked after thanking me.

“Waited to play it with you,” I told him. “We’ll get there. Feel free to look at that Bo Derek book while I get your yogurt. You deserve to see some nice titties today.”

My one error when administering his Freedom Day to-do list was accidentally buying a bag of medium roast coffee beans, not ground coffee, so I vowed to treat him to a cup when running his imperative errands, the hazelnut sitting in my pot a flavor he wouldn’t touch. I’d visited him a final time nine days before his release, hashing out the plan for his first day out, one I assured him could only be derailed by a blizzard.

“There is something incredible about forming a plan, seeing it through, and relishing in the accomplishment afterward,” I said to him as he seemed visibly manic, later confessing that he’d been willing himself to lighten up a little. “I have nothing else going on that day. I do not care when I get home. We will get everything you want to get done, no matter what.”

His parents had met me in my driveway two days ahead of his release as we transferred a few boxes from their car into mine—one full of toiletries, another with more clothes—and his father shook my hand farewell with a foreign object stuck to his palm.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“That’s a rare 2025 penny,” he said. “Out of circulation.” 

“I’ll put it in a safe place for good luck.” 

“Can I get another hug?” his mother, bedecked in sunglasses and a fluffy purple sweater, asked me.

“I’m never not in the mood for a hug,” I said as we embraced while she began crying.

“He’s gonna be alright. I promise.”

Moore and I couldn’t head out without completing a requisite project, one that emboldened him to use his hands worry free. I grabbed the large pile of orange-ish envelopes from behind the bar and set them out for him to peruse, his drawings from the previous seven years stored inside. He flipped through then halted to comment on how much his shading had improved (tracing around a nose and cheek on one piece with his fingertip in self-admiration), got surprised by a few he’d forgotten about, and set a Shania Twain rendering aside, one he drew for me that I’d mistakenly failed to store with a few others that didn’t get framed, a half dozen of his drawings decorating my personal museum, including a colorful, chalky depiction portraying us as LEGO figures smiling at one another that had long scanned as perfectly innocent and thoroughly homoerotic.

Setting foot in Walmart, a store I hadn’t patronized in twenty years—I did a dry run with a carless friend in need of a favor ten days beforehand while marveling at the brightly lit store’s cleanliness and eavesdropping on one black man who unpersuasively accused three staff members of racial profiling for putting expensive headphones under lock and key—I handed Moore his list of essentials I’d handwritten per an email that he’d sent me. Unsuccessful at unearthing the kind of transparent ruler he required when drawing, he purchased the most vital item, a flip phone, too apprehensive to get a smart phone in case his probation officer disallowed it. I’d spoken with a woman from the probation office about how impossible it would be for ex-convicts to function in 2026 without a phone, Moore having steeled himself to live an analog life if they commanded him to do so, but she confirmed he could have a phone, his clearance to use the Internet still unknown and causing him to take no chances by purposely disabling the Wi-Fi until further stipulations were provided.

He called his friend Alison as we drove to the probation appointment, his garrulousness in overdrive when outlining what we’d done since turning left out of the prison parking lot. At one juncture, he noticed “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” pop up on the console screen in my car and upped the volume, the one song we actively listened to and sang along with during the day. We dished about our surroundings, too, like what registered as geographically misplaced marsh-like lands to the side of the highway as well as a frozen lake where I’d spotted people ice skating on a recent drive, small talk the hallmark of our almost thirty-year friendship.

“Oh yeah, I meant to tell you about our final group meeting yesterday,” Moore said. “I had three farewell points for the guys. One: To always show gratitude. Two: To seek wisdom as often as possible. And three: To use perspective. I admitted that as much as I was excited about today, I also couldn’t deny how afraid I was. Yet my grandfather was on a boat in World War II about to face an unseen enemy with his life on the line. There’s no comparison. That’s what I think about to remind myself that I’m gonna get through it, especially with my support system. I can’t let them down.”

“And you can’t let yourself down. You earned this.”

“I know, bud,” Moore said in response. “Thanks for being with me today.”

“Of course. The greatest thing any of us will do in this life will be to love the people who matter as deeply as we know how.”

I’d told Rick in the morning that if I had been sentenced to seven years in prison, I would’ve inserted a loaded gun in my mouth. It’s an unlikely thing to be proud of someone for, but surviving seven years in prison struck me as a monumental achievement worth honoring. Another friend had instructed me to blast Kodak Black’s “First Day Out” as Moore’s entrance music to the free world.

“Wait,” the friend said moments later. “Isn’t this his second time out? Then you gotta play Gucci Mane’s ‘First Day Out’ instead! Show some respect to a re-offender.”

Humor had been the unifier for Moore and me throughout our friendship, and right on cue, he followed up my heartfelt statement with a silly anecdote about Rotag, an inmate who had endeavored to nickname himself Gator, a bold action that was met by his fellow inmates permitting it if the letters were reversed. It made me laugh whenever I heard Moore say “Rotag.”

“I know I already told you this, but I loved your final ‘Did You Know’ for the group meeting,” I said.

“You can’t be a Navy Seal if you’re ticklish!” Moore said, quoting a stand-up comedy line that killed just as hard in person.

We parked at City Hall and rode the elevator to the probation office, a tiny room literally perched outside the elevator door. The wall was enhanced by a board displaying many handwritten aphorisms, such as: “You are the artist of your life. Don’t hand the paintbrush to anyone else.” One sixty-ish, rough-looking yet affable man freshly released from jail sitting opposite us explained how he anticipated soon driving his remodeled 1985 Oldsmobile, a drag racing car his son had excised the heater core from, one that would’ve come in handy on a thirty-four-degree Friday afternoon. The officer at the desk, a tan man with glimmering earrings in both ears, brandished his insecurities when I jokingly complimented the kitten calendar beside him as he protested that it wasn’t his, a fact he’d already made clear earlier when I did some tongue-in-cheek investigative reporting.

Thirty minutes later, Stan, Moore’s new probation officer, was about to leave the building when he realized he’d overlooked the intake appointment, rushing through the major questions and proposing a follow up meeting the ensuing Thursday morning because he was about to execute a manhunt for an AWOL client. I shook the man’s moisturizer-deprived hand and thanked him, Moore’s therapist checking in and disclosing to him that he knew the officer well and applauded his methodology: “He’ll give you enough rope to hang yourself, but if you mess up, expect severe repercussions.”

“That guy at the desk was an asshole,” I said to Moore in the car.

“Dude, you gotta remember that people like him are not used to dealing with intelligent, witty people at probation, never mind ones with your level of sarcasm.”

“Fair enough. But still, though…”

Moore’s primary culinary demand had been to eat a grinder, specifically one with roast beef, provolone cheese, crunchy lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, bell peppers, olives, mayonnaise, and mustard on soft bread, an easy entreaty to implement since a beloved nondescript deli sat a mile from the probation office. We occupied one of the two faded yellow-colored booths as a nearby radio played ‘50s music, Moore recognizing all the songs while analyzing everything in sight, most importantly how much he adored that each side of the sandwich was stacked with several slices of roast beef with the accoutrement wedged between them, the couple in charge becoming the stars of his wish fulfillment, a fact he would announce directly to the smiling, diffident brunette lady on our way out the door. We attempted to eat slower than usual when together—I had a meatball sub with peppers and onions solely because the marinara sauce smelled too good to pass up—the inevitable failure to pace ourselves hinting that we might share a second meal at dinnertime.

Our next stop was at the sober house where Moore would be residing, one his parents had visited to make the first rent payment and meet Lester, the friendly, caramel-skinned black man sporting a pencil thin mustache who managed the property. Lester gave us the obligatory tour, the wide open first level home to polished hardwood floors in the impressively vast kitchen and dining room, Moore repeatedly stating how his mother had undersold the place’s beauty. He would be sharing his bedroom and accompanying closet with a middle-aged black man we met at night, the overall vibe inside the home marked by organization and tranquility. Incapable of ignoring it, I found a crate of records in a corner of the room facing the front deck, holding up one disco album and asking Lester, “Are you a fan of the Wu-Tang Clan?”

“Sort of. I like some hip-hop, man.”

“Well, there’s a fantastic song on here that was sampled on a Ghostface Killah album.”

“This man has an affinity for the Clan,” Lester joked to Moore, earning boisterous laughter.

“This guy owns over, what, two thousand records,” Moore said in a semi-inquisitive tone, a kind-hearted loyalist unashamed to laud extremist passions I try to be humble about when in the company of strangers.

“This whole Dr. Buzzard album’s great,” I said. “Where is the turntable, by the way?”

“Here,” Lester said as he removed a lava lamp and paperweight from atop a large wooden fixture, lifting the spring-loaded panel to reveal a 1950s Magnavox HiFi with an AM/FM radio and a stylus in need of replacing, not that the Ohio Players album on the deck sounded too rough when we tested it.

We sat by the living room television for a bit—muted local news reports in the background bracing viewers for a weekend snowstorm—as Lester candidly divulged the particulars of his past mistakes, the time he’d done, and how he’d become the house manager via pure serendipity, quickly moving from the south to Connecticut to rebuild his life. He emphasized his daily devotion to prayer (arising each morning at 4:30 to immediately thank the lord for another day) and desire to be a decent person, the worthiest goal any of us can aim for. Moore got a grasp of how things worked in the house as Lester stressed that celebrating one’s freedom was necessary along with maintaining respect at all times, adhering to the less than extreme curfew, and cleaning up after oneself, etiquette that, as Moore claimed, the bulk of former prisoners had drilled into them so repetitiously that they tended to remain faithful to the habit on the outside. When showing us the basement gym equipment, Lester poked Moore’s slight belly that pushed against his white tee shirt, a fit man fearlessly challenging a newcomer to get back in shape, another goal Moore, a one-time gym rat, devised to undertake once his nagging hernia was remedied.

“What happens if I’m asked why I’m here?” I overheard Moore say to Lester as I left them alone to chat and flipped through the LPs again. “I think looking a man in the eye and telling him the worst thing you’ve ever done is the most honest way to be.”

“And maybe it is,” Lester said matter-of-factly, “but I wouldn’t go out of your way to let anyone know too soon, you know. You’ll get there.”

“Roger that.”

“Don’t feel like you owe anyone here favors either,” Lester said as they walked toward me. “It’s okay to say no cuz once you do it once, it’s easy to get taken advantage of. You’re not a bad guy for saying no, okay? Like how I need to say no to these,” Lester said as he pulled a Lucky Strike from his pack. “I’ve gotta quit.”

“You will when you want to,” I said. “I did. You can do it.”

“How’d you do it?”

“Patch for three months. Didn’t drink any alcohol and didn’t hang out with anyone who drank or smoked until I knew I was good. I promised my girlfriend I would quit when she quit drinking. Took me three years after she quit. You’ll know when you’re ready.”

Moore and I swapped anecdotes from the previous hour when back in the car, any stress I had regarding his new living situation assuaged by Lester’s calm, fair, and undeniably uplifting demeanor. Now it was time to do my favorite thing when joining a friend in public: make puckish jokes with strangers to see where it took us, natural and frivolous behavior that allowed Moore to feel like a normal member of society, the people around us unaware that a mere seven hours prior his entire identity was tethered to a six-digit odd number tracking him in the penal system.

“God, I love grocery shopping,” Moore said as he decided which bags of dry beans to toss in his cart.

“Yow!” I said. “Incoming.”

“Oh, sorry, sir,” Moore told the elderly veteran in a Navy hat.

“He doesn’t mean it,” I said to the man. “All of his contrition is fake.” 

At the register, he was mystified that shoppers now brought their own bags as he stared down inflationary prices he’d been cautioned about countlessly, his long overdue taste for parmesan cheese, boneless chicken thighs, frozen tortellini, Saltines, flavored seltzers, and ample produce and legumes scanning as a highly respectable level of indulgence, Moore patting himself on the back for avoiding sweets since I was the one who forced him to grab a single beloved Cadbury egg. He struggled to swipe then insert his debit card as I observed from the bagging area.

“Just extracted this guy from a cult this morning,” I said to the teenage cashier. “Please bear with us.”

In the parking lot, I told Moore how whenever Sue fumbled with her debit card, I joked to cashiers that I’d bailed her out of prison that morning, and now when confronted with the exact scenario I’d rehearsed in jest interminably, the line’s literal-ness disarmed my own psyche, the idea of saying it aloud a bit too poignant in that moment.

“Before we hit Staples, there’s a great record store about six miles from here according to Nancy,” I said referring to the name of my GPS. “Would you mind? I mean, I can’t be this close to records and not buy any!”

“I’d be honored to go to a record store with you today.”

Preoccupied with his power to text friends again, Moore intermittently browsed while imploring me to take all the time I wanted. “What am I going to do instead, watch The People’s Court?” he joked. I even tasked him with finding a Kylie Minogue record, one search that ended empty-handed, although I snagged a couple other gems, the standout being a first edition hardcover book written by an author Moore had done his most superlative work when drawing for me, enshrouding the negative space surrounding the man in black, a rare diversion from his standard approach, the image one he’d viewed framed in white in my mudroom in the morning and assessed in self-flagellating form by saying that he hoped to reattempt it more successfully with a paintbrush in the future. When we exited the store, I showed him the office a block away where he would begin working for his cousin in a few days then snapped photos of him flashing a peace sign beside a prodigious black and blue-hued Willie Nelson mural painted on a towering brick wall, texting one shot to his mother, the woman almost as massive a fan of the musician as she is of her only child.

“Are you wearing musk?” Moore asked in a new parking lot.

“A mix of lavender oil and musk. I usually wear lavender, but I add in a small blob of Sue’s Egyptian musk on special occasions.”

“Dude!” Moore said. 

“Denny’s!” I said.

“My treat if you wanna go.”

“For sure, brother!” 

“Sit wherever you’d like,” the hostess-slash-waitress apprised us. 

“I assume the ashtray is already at the table,” I said.

“What?!” she said as I too easily gave up the ghost.

When I bitched to Moore about how much I loathed people texting in restaurants, he momentarily felt bad and readied to close his phone as I instantly regretted it, apologizing and avowing how I’d happily made an exception for him as he reacquainted himself with more loved ones.

“Do they still have skillets?” 

“I would imagine so. At least, they did when I last ate at a Denny’s on July 4th, 2024, in Oxnard, California.”

“Refresh my memory: Why the fuck did you go to Denny’s out there on your birthday? Actually, who cares, doesn’t matter right now.” He went quiet for a second. “There it is. Chorizo, yes! You saw me. I was pretty good at the grocery store, but I gotta indulge myself here.”

“I’m not judging you, man. Today’s your day.”

“What’re you gonna get?”

“Veggie omelette. Have to get a side of hash browns with it, though. I love their hash browns so much.” 

“I need some of your discipline, but good call on the hash browns. I also love how heavy their coffee mugs are.”

The day was akin to hanging out with Helen Keller if her missing senses rushed back simultaneously, Moore’s affinity for details probably most comparable to someone a week or two removed from a coma beginning to get a grip on what it’s like to transmogrify into a citizen of the world again. We chatted with our waitress whenever she swung by, and for half the meal nobody else was in the diner, so we learned that her son played for the high school football team and heard her singing along with the cook to classic soul music they blasted in the kitchen, Moore and I briefly praising how exquisite the drums on Al Green records sounded. We could talk about anything together, and if one of us got bored, the segue would be intrinsic to prolonging the conversation, the dots on the ellipsis from his 2019 banishment finally meeting some fresh letters in the morning and continuing uninterrupted now that we’d resumed our friendship back where he belonged.

I dropped him off at his new home, Lester appearing in the kitchen and urging me to take a loaf of whole wheat bread from the two enormous bagfuls on the counter. Moore once again extended his hand as I opted for an exultant hug, the brother I never had about to embark on fulfilling his most significant goal: living a rich life where his triumph would be not repeating his past actions. When I’d visited an art museum at Christmastime, I bought a postcard in the gift shop featuring a painting of a timid boy walking in a bucolic neighborhood at nighttime with a terrifying dragon lurking behind him.

“This sums up your pending release,” I’d written in the card I mailed to him. “You can use it as a motto to not go back: Don’t Chase the Dragon.”

As I headed out, Moore asked that I text him upon arriving home. I replayed the day in my mind multiple times on a mostly silent ride north, the resulting exhaustion ready to set in after I first raced to the bathroom. 

“I’m back,” I texted him from the toilet. “Perfect day. Glad I spent it with you.”

“Best day ever, bud,” he replied.

There would be no more screened phone calls or emails, no scheduled visits, nothing to hinder our ability to do what we do best: live in the moment while entertaining one another. Like Moore said when quoting Neil Young earlier in the day, love and only love will endure. The time has come to keep proving him right.