Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

Back in my young and crazy days, gone more than forty-five years now, I had a best-buddy I ran with. Brothers-from-a-different-mother kind of thing, I really admired the guy, would have gone to help him bury a body.

Make a long story short: He wasn't what I thought, and we went our separate ways. I'd say no hard feelings, but that wasn't so; I despised the man for a long time. Eventually, that passed, but much later.

For a while, I thought he was outright sociopathic; later, I came to believe he was probably just completely undeveloped emotionally. He was kind of like a brilliant two-year-old. It was always all about him, and he wanted everything he wanted right now, and fuck the consequences. 

And, really, don't we all know people like that … ?

So he went off and hooked up with a young woman in a band, and hung out with them on the road for a time. That didn't last long, and later, he bedded her sister. 

Of course, that didn't last, either. Dude ran through women faster than snowballs melt in Hell, and it wasn't until he was much older that he mellowed enough for one to stay with him for any significant period.

Turns out that the second woman in the band he hooked up with has written an autobiography, those early-seventies figure in her story, and my old buddy is featured.

When he hit the road, he was on the run from the law and using an alias. Bad boys always seem to find women who think they can save 'em. For her, for a while, he seemed quite the magic man.  

It was more than a little interesting reading about my old pal from the viewpoint of a young woman taken with his mystique. Some of the stories she told sounded awfully familiar, and some of them had me shaking my head. Yeah, that was him, all right. Guy lied reflexively. Every story he told was spun like an atomic-powered gyroscope ...

Karma took its time, but eventually it came round, and my old friend died young from his excesses. By then, we had reached a kind of deténte. Not friends, but not taking potshots at each other.

Reminds me that one man's floor can be another woman's ceiling. Plus if you are adept at fooling folks, you can do it for a while, but eventually, some of them catch on. And, of course, last one standing gets the last word, too ...

And so, as Vonnegut was wont to say, it goes ...