For Kim, my friend

THE punching bag swung back and forth, a fat pendulum hanging from a tree, mocking, tempting me to strike - so I did.

Again and again I drove my fists into it, trying to pound it into hell. The fury focuses my mind. The violent pulses take me beyond the place where my feet are rooted.

This day, each punch catapulted my mind back through the years until I was 12 years old and standing on a snow drift in a backyard in a new neighbourhood.

I had been meeting my world, wading through tall snowdrifts in strangers' backyards, looking at their homes with curiosity and suspicion. As I stood on the biggest snowbank with my breath falling in front of me, I surveyed my territory and finally felt strong. It didn't last.

I was tackled from behind. As I fell, my attacker slammed punches into my head. They didn't hurt at first, but then the beast began hitting his targets, my nose, my ears, my lips. My senses reeling from the assault, I yelled nonsense. A kid yelled something back.

"You bastard," I heard myself yell.

"You bastard," he yelled back.

Twisting around, I began flailing back at him. I had been beaten up in my old neighbourhood and wasn't going to let it happen here.

My wild punches moved him back. I got a look at him. He was a tall, skinny kid with blond hair and big eyes. I saw fear in those eyes. I punched him square on the nose, drawing blood. I punched him again and again. Nobody was going to ruin this new life. He turned and ran. I chased him, swearing at him. He ran into a house.

Later, the other kids in the neighbourhood told me his name was Kim. They said he was weird.

I would fight Kim two more times and win, but his heart wasn't in it. Those big eyes gave that away. I realized now he had his reasons for scrapping with me. He felt he could prove something to others in the neighbourhood by kicking the new kid's butt. I had something to prove too, though, and one of us had to fail.

Kim and I grew close.

In the summer when we were young, we would sit together in the rain and laugh and watch lightning storms pass across the sky. We would take long walks under sunsets which blazed on the horizon. We marked our evaporating youth.

Kim grew to be a hippie who lamented that he missed Woodstock. He grew his hair long and wore headbands. There was an innocence still in him - an innocence most of us lose quickly.

He didn't play street hockey much or any of those other rough games. He told me that he didn't like sports because they brought out the worst in people.

Kim loved music, especially the Beatles. His room was decorated with posters and albums and flags. But there were lots of books, too. Not muscle-car books or girlie magazines, but books about things most teenagers avoid, like religion and science fiction. He would talk to me about these subjects for hours and hold out his books for me to see, but I ignored him.

I had grown in a different direction. Girls and beer. I had started to listen to others and had become a follower. It had just happened.

Over the years, Kim and I drifted apart. He lived within view of my living room window. But we drifted apart. No that's not true. I avoided him and whispered against him with others.

Sometimes I would watch Kim walk by my home. He would look my way and I would duck so he wouldn't see me. When we did meet, I would mumble something about meeting somebody and walk away. This went on for years.

Then came that day in 1985 when I heard the news that he had taken his life in a South End Saint John apartment - the day I felt nothing about a friend's death.

I FINISHED pounding the punching bag. The sweat dripped in to my eyes, stinging them. A realization spread before me like a quiet lake. I had not acted honourably when Kim killed himself. As an adult, a man, it was time to do something. I had been angry when I heard he had taken his life. It was all his fault, I had reasoned. I was no angel, but Kim had been hanging around an unpredictable crowd, the type of idiots who would smile at you one moment and then beat the hell out of you the next, just for a laugh.

Kim told me about them one night as we paddled for hours in a canoe on the Kennebecasis River looking for a beach party some acquaintances were hosting. We had met by accident and all my friends had gone somewhere else, so I had decided to go with him in search of the party.

He told me much that night as we moved on the river. I nodded a lot, but offered nothing more. It was his life to screw up and, in my mind, he was doing a fine job of it.

I went to the cemetery the day Kim was buried, but I did not feel anything. I was a robot, uncaring, barely making the required motions to his family and friends, shedding no tears.

I did not talk about my friend much after that. In my mind, he had been a damn coward and a loser.

Now 13 years later, I found myself driving to the cemetery to see Kim.

I thought of a day years ago when teenage angst had hit me hard, and I had to take a walk alone. Moments into my journey of self-pity, I saw a familiar shape approaching. It was Kim.

We had not talked for months. When we got close to each other, Kim smiled at me. We talked. I told him my problems. Once, I could always tell him everything. He was the only one.

Kim had chuckled and his head bobbed like it always did when he laughed and he told me that I should not worry about what people thought of me, that I should be myself.

"Look at you now," he said. "You've got your right hand in your jeans and your left hand in your Jacket. That's cool. That's different. That's you, man.

Those simple words meant something to me, but I told him nothing. I knew he was waiting for me to say something in return, but I did not, even though I saw fear in his eyes - the same fear I had seen years ago during our fights.

I wonder what he saw in my eyes.

THE clouds were dark and the breeze was cold, but I opened the car window as I drove. A school bus stopped in front of me and a couple of young boys tumbled out. One took a mock punch at the other.

A nice woman at the cemetery found where my friend was buried. Yes, I realized, he was my friend. The woman walked away from her computer for a moment. I saw Kim's name on the screen. When he was born. When he died. Twenty-five years old. Jesus.

There was something strange about seeing his name. I almost left, but the woman came back.

As I followed her car into the graveyard, I waited for a feeling to hit me. It did not. I looked at the graves and the sky and then the trees with naked, crooked branches which reached to the sky. The woman stopped her car and got out and looked around. But I had already spotted his gravestone. The name leapt out at me. I marvelled at the whiteness, the clearness of the letters that formed Kim's name. The lady left.

I stood in front of my friend's grave and felt nothing again. I walked over and touched his gravestone. No tears. No anguish. No confession.

I waited. I realized I had one hand in my jacket and the other in my jeans.