Should I feel bad about my old mate Hank? Well, he’s not helping any

Most friends lift your spirits. At a beach you look up from your book and here comes Fi, and you break into a smile. But some friends bring you down. Into the pub walks Hank. I haven’t seen him since the pandemic started. I feel my heart try to lift; like a fat man attempting a push-up, it quakes and grunts and its veins bulge, but it fails to launch. This makes me feel guilty, disloyal … but the heart can’t be asked to tell a lie, it’s an organ sworn to truth.

My friends, and yours, are on a spectrum starting at one end with Fi. Fi is navy-strength Prozac. At the other end is Hank. Hank’s a total f—ing downer. Fi loves life and is so infectious no amount of social distancing can keep her friends from catching her joie de vivre.

At the other end of the spectrum, old mate Hank is a gloom-monger, he’s an x-ray that can find cracks in my most watertight dreams. He comes around, he calls, he drops in, and it’s, “What are you up to?” “Working on some short stories.” “Pointless writing fiction these days. Doesn’t tell us anything. Doesn’t sell. It’s podcasts now. They’re the future. But you’re too old for podcasts.”

Hank’s sky is forever falling. But his gloom-mongery isn’t clinical depression, it’s curdled stoicism, a fatalistic lifelong commitment to worst-outcomes, it’s an attitude, a world-view. Maybe it’s also a defensive shroud; expect nothing good and you won’t be disappointed. I’ve come to realise that he’s tangled inside his gloom by now, and that it’s like any other mental condition, like being a moron, or a genius – you can’t help it, nor can you really know about it. The stupid don’t know they’re stupid, the mediocre think they’re sharp, and the gloom-mongers never know how sour they are.

Fi’s a single mum with financial problems. But whenever I’ve been with her I go away with my mind attuned to the bright possibilities in the air. Not because her tough circumstance makes me appreciate my own good fortune. Because she laughs at the world and plays music. Battalions of ghouls are kept at bay by those rude angels – laughter and music. And both are choices.

Loading

Why remain friends with Hank? When I look at him now I see the ghost of better times hovering over his left shoulder. Our friendship has faded into a ritual whereby I go through the motions, sipping my wine while he catalogues the diseases and failures in my future and explains how his cards were marked from the start. I always feel worse for having seen him. Sometimes it takes days to recover. Partly because he’s a super-downer, partly because he’s a friend and seeing him should make me feel better, and partly because he doesn’t know he’s a super-downer and I feel guilty because maybe I could cure him if I kicked his arse and shouted in his face, “Cheer up, Hank. You have a choice. The whole damned thing is whatever you think it is. If you think it’s a blast … it is. If you insist it’s a drag it can’t be anything else.”

Sometimes it’s right to cut ties before the golden age of a friendship passes. But, like euthanasia, it’s a thing you always put off until tomorrow, hoping for a cure.

On Wednesday I took my oldest friend out of his aged care facility and we went to lunch at his RSL club. They made a great fuss of him there, as he’s the last surviving member who fought Tojo. He got to reminiscing and told me he still suffered numbness down his left side, nerve damage resulting from a Japanese bomb that blew him sideways in 1942 in PNG. The Mitsubishi came in so low over the palms he could almost touch it with the muzzle of his .303, he said. In the RSL club he reached one arm up above his head to touch that bomber, still as clear as day.

As we were leaving the club the hostess bent down to his wheelchair and gave him a hug and a kiss. In the car park he said to me, “Wasn’t that nice. I wonder if she’d give me her number.” He’s never met my friend Fi. They’re different generations. But I reckon when they look up they’re both able to look past the bombers and see the giggling pixies riding the ozone.