It's a Randy Newman Thing

A couple of weeks ago, a shroud of disillusionment having settled on the evening one Sunday night, my best friend called suddenly and invited me to a movie. It’s the same sort of thing that’s happened a hundred times before, but I came to realize what a sobering effect it tends to have on me. And on the way home afterward, thoroughly recovered from what I had been feeling earlier, I began to reflect on exactly what had occurred the two or three previous hours. A guy’s best pal is a cache of leaning, a kind of muted trust. The connection often acts like subtext—unspoken but totally understood, totally true. I’m not talking about machismo or golden parachutes, secret handshakes or scandalous secrets. No, I mean true friendship, which doesn’t vanish or seem disquieted by delicate matters or moments of vulnerability. My best friend has stuck by me no matter how I might act or sound. He’s let me pour out my deepest concerns and still paid truth for truth, offering frank but compassionate feedback mingled with a tasteful hint of flippant irony, a curious brand of counsel that might seem like teasing one minute and resonant wisdom the next. Does it reject candid trust or moments of cathartic grief? Not at all. I’m talking about something so deep that nothing need be said much of the time. But when something is said, it is received,
though with a rather impish sincerity neither of us would trade for all the world.

Throughout elementary school, my best friend was a pearl of a kid named Bryan Motzel, and thick as thieves we were—a friendship full of countless guffaws, homework stints, lofty imaginings on the playgrounds of Pinecrest Elementary School, sleepovers that poured an arresting delirium of late-night absurdity into the crisp and sober air of Saturday morning cartoons. Through junior high and high school, it was a great guy named Danny Menther, with whom I had some of the funniest moments as well as the most insightful conversations of my adolescent life. And as an adult, beginning with a four-year turn as projectionists and assistant managers for Edwards Cinemas, Andy Yocum has been not only my greatest friend, but also one of the best and coolest guys I’ve ever known. He’s shared in some of my ugliest moments of weakness or despair. For example, if I spent half the night in gloom and lamentation over some girl, despite his own understanding that she was a twerp who wasn’t a bit deserving of me, even when he would try to cheer me up and I just smeared my depressive trauma over the whole thing, he would simply shrug patiently, never letting his frustration get the better of him. In return, I’ve offered a mindful ear to his tales of discontent and tried to edify him with honesty and encouragement. I believe each of us often ends up providing sound advice in areas where the other may be either inexperienced or insecure. In this way, we pay each other the compliment of sharing issues neither of us would likely bring to another guy friend. And yet, truthfully, I don’t tell him everything. I confide quite a lot, but what’s best about it all is what happens when I simply take in his company, listen to his crap, and he listens to mine. It’s really just the hanging around each other that’s so valuable, in many ways, so vital. It seems like so much of a deep and lasting friendship is in the mortar between the bricks. He’ll never know how many jams he got me out of by calling me out of the blue and asking me to go hang out or take in a movie. Emotionally speaking, that stuff is like a hundred thousand little rescues that add up to one enormous blessing, a psalm of life that ferries you across troubled waters in a thousand tiny oar strokes. He’ll never know the solace and how he made it that much better, when I had hit a rough patch, by sitting next to him in a darkened theatre and laughing till it hurt, or standing in a parking lot discussing something totally unrelated to whatever I was dealing with, but knowing, in my heart, he would understand if I told him.

We met in the summer of 1994 as co-workers at a movie theatre in Simi Valley. And while we were friends almost from the very first, one interesting factor poured into the foundation that was laid in those early years was the camaraderie built around satirizing—secretly of course—a common supervisor, a man we both worked under at the same time and whose flair for ridiculous and imbecilic self-importance had been unmatched in our lifetimes. It sounds terrible, but it feels as though we built a sort of comic empire out of making fun of this horrifically pretentious man, whose management style quickly became the stuff of legend and lived gloriously in our hearts somewhere between the tempestuous desire to rip out one’s hair and the mad hysterics that make you feel like you might be swallowed whole by a laugh too big for your soul. The rest, of course, is history—15 years of jokes and innuendos that could never be uttered except between us; bouts of simulated and/or unrestrained flatulence; sarcastic badgering tossed back and forth between sleeping bags the morning after freezing all night in a camping tent; terms of endearment that parade as insults and looks of disappointment; countless rants in the middle of parking lots on everything from politics to feeble and incompetent retail cashiers; and of course sincere confessions comingled with tender or pithy accusations of effeminacy. Oh it’s a grand thing, a best friendship, a choice stew of the mindfully charitable and the ferociously witty. Though deeply rooted in the former, how can we resist the primal urge to make a merry farce of how well we care?

In the end, what we say in reference to our own friendship, albeit in jest much of the time, is still a deep and brotherly affection that simply likes to profess incivility, love in a leather jacket you might say, a facetious fete wherein a good box on the ear, verbal or actual, is as good as a tender hug or a kind expression of sympathy. So ironically, when Andy eventually reads this, something like “Dude, that’s so gay” can be translated, in fact, as "Dude, quite right"; "very cool"; or "excellent, now moving on." This curious grade of synchronicity is the mortar I mentioned. Best friends are quirky pairs, like oddly-matched socks, book-ends, or salt and pepper shakers. He’s like Lennon to my McCartney, Sam to my Frodo, Sheriff Woody to my Buzz Lightyear. You know, as ridiculous as this might sound, it’s absolutely worthy of that little jalopy of a song from Toy Story. Imagine a slideshow of all the sacred and profane moments throughout the last 15 years of friendship scored with the delicious medley of equal parts gleeful randomness and sincere devotion that permeate every line of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” Can you hear him crooning his way through it with that silly, sauntering voice of his? “And as the years go by, our friendship will never die…” Even if I had no other way to describe it, let’s just say, it’s definitely a Randy Newman thing.