Do or Die

autobiographical fiction by Michael Mohr

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

*This is a re-post of an auto-fiction story I published 16 months ago. At the time it went out to only 31 readers. Please go paid to read the whole piece and ALL of my writing from the past 17-plus months.

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My friend Matthew died of bone cancer at the age of 24, in 2008. I was living in San Francisco where my girlfriend at the time, Janine, and I had just moved. Janine and I had met a year prior, in San Diego, where I’d lived for a couple years, in Pacific Beach. When we met I’d been 24, Janine 20. We met through work, a tourist surf-related shop in the San Diego harbor. We both worked behind the register.

I’d been born in Ventura, 90 miles north of Los Angeles along the coast, and raised in Ojai, a small mountain town surrounded by the Topa Topa ranges and orange groves 12 miles east of Ventura off Highway 33. Highway 101 ran parallel to the Pacific. We moved to Ojai in 1991, when I was eight. My father was a computer engineer—formerly a math and chemistry teacher at the community college in Ventura—and my mom had been a nurse and now taught a master’s nursing class at a university south near LA.

Ojai had a population of about 8,000. There was very little to do there when you were an antsy, energetic, attracted-to-trouble pre-teen. The town was covered with expensive private schools; there was one public school with about 2,000 kids. I went to a Catholic, college-prep institution. I hated it but I fell in love with literature through one beloved English teacher, and I met a couple older punk-rock guys who brought me into that world.

There was also Luke. He was my best friend. We’d met in Little League when we were ten. We practiced at Nordhoff, the public high school. I was terrible: Left Outfield. I often screwed up. My teammates clearly did not like me. Even then I felt like an outsider. Just as I did in my own little family, which was just my parents and me.

Luke and I became instant friends, despite our obvious differences. He went to Nordhoff; I went to Villanova. He had a younger sister and brother; I was an only child. His family was strongly religious and went to church every Sunday; my parents were atheists. (Yet they sent me to parochial school because, they claimed, those were the schools which provided the “best education.”) He was relatively good at sports; I was not. He appeared set-up to be fairly well-adjusted; I, most certainly, did not. (While his parents screamed a lot, they provided emotional stability. My family had an unstable, family history of alcoholism and clinical-depression.)

Luke was my link to meeting Matthew. This would have been in the mid-nineties. I lived on a street called The Moon in Spanish—La Luna—an uphill, somewhat steep, busy street which my mother didn’t want me near. Luke’s house was about a mile away, on the flat, safe Rice Road. It just so happened that Luke’s next door neighbor was Matthew. We were all about 12, 13. Luke and I had gone through various young male phases—BMX, surfing, skateboarding, punk rock—and were currently into skateboarding. (“Skating” as we called it.) One day, while Luke and I were rolling around on his parents’ slightly-inclined salmon-pink driveway, the sounds of hard plastic wheels rolling and scuffing along the asphalt, his neighbor came over from next door, out of the blue, skateboard in hand, smile on his face.

Matthew was tall. He looked sort of like a mix between a beach-bum, a surfer, a skater, and a rock musician. His hair was big and puffy and dirty-blond, with lighter-blond highlights. He wore beige Dickies. He jerked his chin, seeing us, hurling his board onto the salmon-pink driveway, rolling over to us slowly. Luke made the introductions. Matthew’s voice was distinctive, as was the way his lower lip slightly hung down. He wore a black T-shirt that said, Dead Kennedys and had the DK symbol, red, white and black. I can’t quite describe his voice other than to say it sounded sort of like concrete being mixed with marbles, yet simultaneously clear and intelligent. A perpetual half-grin was plastered eternally on his lips. He confused and intrigued and intimidated me. It seemed as if he were from another planet, another dimension, another reality. He was cool, that was obvious.

By the time Luke and I reached time for high school—1999—we had stopped being friends. This was ineluctable. As if written in Athenian stone millennia before. Luke and I were different, as I have said. Despite the fact that we’d done Little League together; had learned to surf together; I’d become baptized at his church (to my parents’ certain horror); we’d become obsessed with MtV together; we’d skateboarded together; we’d gone on countless trips with his family to their cabin up in Lake Nacimiento, in Monterrey County; We’d gone with my family to several Baja trips, as well as whitewater rafting trips; etc. None of that mattered at 14, 15 years of age. He was going to public school, I was going to private. We knew the seams of our friendship would tear. And they did.

Once, when we’d been 13, Matthew had come along with us to the cabin. It had been Luke’s parents, Luke’s sister and brother, and me, Luke, and Matthew. I remember the small room the three of us boys shared. I remember sitting out on the deck, seeing the huge trees and a tip of the shimmering blue lake. I remember endless, 100-degree days out on the water, fat sloppy smiles on our faces, nothing on but swim trunks, Luke’s dad guiding the speedboat, one of us being pulled on water skis or on the tube, all of us slathered absurdly with sunscreen. (I’ll never forget that chemical stink, Copper Tone, SPF 50.)

I remember the meals we ate, the TV we lazily watched in the evening, the vulgar jokes we told when the three of us were alone and in the dark in our room. I remember Luke’s cousin, Ashley, arriving for a few days on that trip, with her father (Luke’s uncle), and thinking she was hot, and Matthew, his serious blue eyes grinning, pulling me aside one morning and saying, “Dude: Go for it, brother.” I remember he used that specific word: brother. And I remember making out with Ashley, on the couch in the living room, in near total darkness, from midnight until 4am one magical night, silent except for the smacking of our innocent, teenage lips, horny and alive, hearts pounding, in secret.

We were at different schools now, with different friends. We were stuck in the slow-moving amber of teenage coolness. Our egos throbbed like fists smashing a punching bag. With the severing of my bond with Luke, I lost contact with Matthew. He’d always been a peripheral friend, known solely through Luke.

The sifting of the sediment of time, however, worked on its own nature. After high school, when I was about 20, by then seriously into punk rock—not just buying the punk CDs but actively living the lifestyle, dressing the part—I had made some friends who knew Matthew. This was the surfer/skater/punker circle. I’d discovered alcohol and drugs in high school and had barely graduated. I was going to community college, half-assing it. I lived with an old buddy and his girlfriend on Ventura Avenue, near Main Street in Ventura.

This was how Matthew and I reconnected. Luke and I, despite the fact that our mothers were still close, had not talked in years. Matthew still lived next door to him, on Rice Road. One day, a buddy of mine who played guitar and wanted to start a band—and knew I was good at the drums—said we were going over to Matthew’s house. He still lived with his parents. I think he might have still barely been 19. I hadn’t seen him in years. He played the bass. I remember being in my buddy’s car as we drove east on Highway 33 from Ventura. I was nervous and excited and uncertain.

When we got there it all looked the same. We knocked and Matthew answered the front door. He looked exactly the same as when we were 13, 14, except he was now well over 6’0 tall, his head had grown larger, his hair was wilder, and his lowe lip hung down a tad lower. He wore a clean, blank white T-shirt, and somewhat tight stone-washed blue jeans. He looked 80% punk, 20% philosopher. He jerked his chin at me, grinning like back in the day, and snatched my palm with his, shaking it vigorously. His palm was much bigger than mine, sweaty and warm. He still intimidated me. I wanted to impress him. I wanted him to think I was cool. But I’d never been cool. I’d always just been me.

We walked through the house and out the back door into a huge, unkempt yard. Weeds rose two feet into the air, mildly swaying in the breeze, as if praying to God. There was a little shed. Matthew led us inside, opening and then closing the steel door. It was tiny inside. Barely room for four or five people, tops. It felt instantly crowded with the three of us. It reeked, too, of body odor and sweat and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. There was a red Pearl Roadshow drum-set sitting in the center. Matthew looked down at me, seeming slightly doubtful, and, as he lifted his bass over his shoulder by the wide black strap, and plugged himself in, he said, “So, I hear you can play this thing?”

I felt the red creeping into pale cheeks. Well. Here it was. Do or die. Now or nothing. Somehow this moment felt profoundly crucial, as if everything else in my existence depended solely on it. My heart thudded in my chest. A loud ringing noise burst against my ears. I felt my blood pulsing through my veins. I looked behind me at my buddy, who had his green Stratocaster slung over his stomach already. He and Matthew had plugged in. The buzzing noise of their instruments seemed like violence.

Matthew jerked his chin. He said, “Let’s play Dead Boys, Sonic Reducer.” This was an infamous 70s punk band. Everyone knew this song. It was, like most punk tunes, very simple.

I sat down at the drum kit, on the little leather swivel stool. I gazed one last time at Matthew. I swallowed. I looked at my buddy. I said, “On three,” and my voice cracked.

Matthew did the countdown and then we launched into it. I hit the mark. Everyone did. We played the entire song through. Matthew sang the lyrics into a microphone on a stand near him, yelling into the silver bulb with miniscule holes.

After playing for an hour, nonstop, Matthew looked down at me, his hair sweaty and plastered to his head, chest expanding and contracting, and said, “Holy shit, brother. You can play.”

Between that experience and when I moved to San Francisco, at 25, Matthew and I saw each other maybe half a dozen times. A party here and there. A local Ojai punk show at The Women’s Center. At 22 I’d moved with a friend to San Diego. But I’d be in town, in Ojai, during Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. Sometimes we just acknowledged each other without speaking, other times we chatted for a few minutes, catching each other up on life.

One night I remember well. I must have been 23. I was hanging out with some punk buddies at their house on Lyon Street in Ojai. We were drinking forties, listening to The Lower Class Brats on vinyl. Someone brought acid and soon several of us were frying. We heard voices our age next door. High, we walked to the wooden fence between the houses and looked through little holes. We smiled, laughing, seeing kids our age. One or two looked vaguely familiar. And then, just like that, from inside the house out into the backyard came Matthew. We ended up walking over there, knocking on the door. We came in. Matthew and I hugged. He grinned, that ape-like lower-lip thing he did, which I’d always admired and respected.

Beers in hand, The Chronic album playing loudly, I followed Matthew outside, into the backyard, where five minutes prior my buddies and I’d been peering like weirdos. For about fifteen minutes it was just me and Matthew back there; everyone else had gone inside suddenly. We sat down at a rectangular glass table, facing each other. He jerked his chin at me, his blue eyes greedy and sparkling, his lips twisted up, and he said, “Dude. Brother. You’re on something. That I know for sure.”

I laughed, outrageously. “Acid.”