The summer I was 15, the only thing I really needed was “normal”. In the twelve months prior, I had lost my mother to her own vices. I was put in foster care because of my dad’s drug problem and violent tendencies. So, by the time I was living with my aunt and cousin, I was pretty far from living a regular adolescent life.
I met Opie because he was the good buddy of someone for whom I had a crush. Honestly, the first time I really noticed him was at a softball practice where I was running from third to home, and literally rolled right into him as he was playing catcher at home plate. As was generally the case with the guy, the look he gave me was worth about a hundred-thousand words, many of which he colorfully shared over a post-game Budweiser.
It didn’t take long though before we were fast friends, doing ‘normal’ things—playing softball against nearby small town teams, fishing, hunting, and just generally hanging out. Every time I have ever been wholly stuck on a dusty back road in Shingletown, it was with him. Every. Damned. Time.
To this day, I don’t hear the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Gimme Three Steps” without thinking of him. Or anything by Dire Straits. Or the Bangles. He borrowed my Bangles tape in 1987, and never gave it back, though throughout time, whenever I saw him, that was the first thing he would say to me, “Doh! The tape! I bet you want that tape…”
He was one of those guys who gave everyone a nickname. He called me Susie-Q. I called him O-P-Q. We had hours-long friendly arguments as to whether it was Opie-Q or O-P-Q.
Because of Opie, I learned how to hunt squirrels, drink Southern Comfort and OJ, and fix cars on dusty dirt roads with virtually no tools.
He came off as a slow country boy a lot of the time, but Opie was an eerily smart man. Fire science, nature, and components of physics were a regular source of our more intelligent conversations. He had a vocabulary that rivaled mine. I liked that about him.
And I liked that he liked that about me.
Finding complicated ways to say simple things was another of our pastimes together. It wasn’t that “we got drunk,” it was, “we sought a Nirvana somewhere proximal to optimum or maximum toxicity.” It wasn’t that we were going boonie bouncing, it was that we were, “triangulating the mechanics of metaphysical sequestration.”
That we shared conversations like that was sort of the hallmark of his existence. Opie could be excruciatingly complex in his own simplicity. It was not a surprise to me when he got tangled up in drugs and other assorted debauchery. It was a life-long sorrow for me that he let stuff like that separate him from friends, family, and opportunities in life.
Once, when I was about 28, he and I had a conversation about Heaven. He told me, “Some people think that it’s a literal place, and maybe it is, but mostly, I think it’s a place of acceptance. People with big words get to use them. People get to love each other without all the effing hassle.”
Over the weekend, I learned that he died in an ATV crash, unhelmeted and intoxicated. While I am not surprised at the circumstance of his passing, I am shocked at the reality that he is gone, at just 49 years old. Though we haven’t talked in a good number of years, I can’t help but feel like a part of me has passed on, too—a part of me that he helped nurture when I needed it most.
Here’s to you, O-P-Q.
