Request Denied

I got a Facebook request to add a friend last week from Joe, a guy I haven’t seen in 20 years. Twenty years ago we hung out together. Twenty years ago, we were friends. If I got a friend request from the man I was 20 years ago, I’d click the ignore button. Just like I did with the request to add Joe.
Joe’s calling himself Jose, now. He’s listing his profession as poet and described himself as a biker.
He lists college degrees I know he doesn’t have. He couldn’t finish anything, but he could usually bluff for the first fifteen minutes.
Through the conversations he’d posted on other friends’ walls, I gathered he had a daughter now, one he’d discovered 10 years ago. One he’s been in touch with only since she turned 18 two years ago.
She’s a tattoo artist in NH, he says and getting into trouble with the law occasionally.
He adds that if he’d raised her, things would be different.
Yep, I thought. She wouldn’t have a job at all.
He was nothing but trouble. Police chases. Jobs lost for bad on-the- job behavior. Letters from deans asking you to stay off college property. I was best man for him for one ill-advised marriage and its subsequent divorce. He was an accident waiting to happen and I was a witness waiting to see it.
I hung out with him because no one else would let me. He interpreted our friendship to be one of student and teacher. The only thing he could teach was how to be a loser. I was hungry for guidance and he took me under his wing.
We were thrown together by fate and we were both drinking so I didn’t leave. Until I stopped drinking and left.
He stopped a few years later, he said. There was no reason for us to stay in touch, really. Alcohol was the only thing we ever had in common. Tried to replace it with cleaning up together, but it was too late for any kind of a friendship.
I have a wife now who didn’t know me when I was that lump. I have a son who won’t even need to hear about it unless someday there’s a reason for me to tell him.
I’m not closing the door on my own past. That will always be with me. I just don’t need someone showing souvenirs of it to my family.
Click