Kevin's Ghost and Batting at Bats

Swinging at Bats at dusk in the summer with baseball bats with Kevin, many years ago.

Kevin D was my first real friend, male or female. When I say 'first' friend' I mean the first time that you truly establish a close relationship apart from the deep interdependencies your self/ego naturally has within the deep influence from your family - your siblings and your parents. Your first close friend allows you to explore and experience an identity that is not controlled and defined by the often oppresive and determinsitic influence of your family relationships. With your first friend, you begin to become an individual, though it's oddly paradoxial that the only way to become unique and independent is to have another, non family member understand you.

Kevin was my first friend, and also the first person I became friends with when our family moved to the desert. Moving to the desert for me was perhaps my first real traumatic experience, emotionally speaking. I had not known previous to then what a sensitive lad I really was (and maybe still am), for when it came time for me to enroll in school inthe 6th grade, I became physically terrified, to the point where I would cry incessantly and become sick to my stomach. This was, I think, a big step for me into selfhood, though at the time all I knew was that I was afraid, and truly feared having to be around new people and start a new life and make new friends. Truthfully, I don't remember being able to understand it, other than I felt depressed and horrifed. My mother was helpful and gave me the push to go to school and to stay there. This was not only a new school with new people and new friends to make, but I think part of the shock was that we had moved from a highly dense and urbanized city to the dry, hot, harsh and severe desert world: the dirt and rocks, the green-less hills and over-like heat, the open spaces and panoramic skylines, which I think made me a bit weightless, as if the small little identity I had started to develop was upended from its urban, people=filled enviornement and tossed head first into an abtract alien world of the desert. My ego was still quite unstable and fundamentally inchaote and chaotic, due to youthful depressions and a few nascent existential crises as a young child - though more on that in another rechercher.

Getting to school wasnt even easy, as I purposely missed the bus and refused to go. My Mom convinced me to ride with her to go, sometimes through persuasion and sometimes in desparation by bribing me five dollars. I would eventually get to school all in tears and trying not to cry (I was a crier), only to fake sickness and get sent to the nurses office, where it was obvious after several visits that I was simply sick with fear and could not be treated with any medicines.

The image I have of Kevin, the last image I can remember, was driving home one night from somewhere, some late night from partying somewhere, extending my own pleasure ego into some dark night, cold and windy, dry on not wet but chilly with a sharp night breeze, bundled up and drunk in my big white 60 'Oldsmobile, driving down some desert road, when I turn a corner and see a body walking on the side of the road, a tall figure with shaggy long hair, and as I get closer I slow down and see Kevin, his cold black eyes staring at me, with what I think is recognition but I cannot be sure.