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I got another email today from someone else who read my site. Funny how excited it made me. I saw the return address in my emailbox and thought "hey�cool! Diarymail!" It made me happy. Feeling like someone else understands what you�re trying to say is a powerful thing.
She gave me the link to her journal site as well. I spent part of this morning reading through it. One entry in particular hit me hard. It was about a friend of hers who killed himself. 8:32 a.m., and I was crying at my desk, full of sympathy for someone I�d never met and his friend who cared so much about him.
It got me thinking, though, about dead friends. Not a great subject, I suppose, to start my day off with. I have five of them. Well, four and an acquaintance. That�s a lot, I think�to have buried five friends in my first 30 years. Actually, it was five friends between my 17th birthday and my 29th.
The first one was Michelle, a few scant weeks after high school graduation. She was driving home with a friend late at night. The friend was asleep in the passenger seat, wearing her seatbelt. Michelle fell asleep behind the wheel, not wearing her seatbelt, and veered off the road. The car went over the guardrail and tumbled into a ditch. Michelle hit her head on the windshield, landed in her friend�s lap and died pretty instantly. The friend ended up with a broken arm and collarbone, and a lifetime of guilt.
The second was Greg. He and I were students together at Northeastern. He was a sweet kid, a little overweight, tried too hard, but nice. And he was a great friend. Maybe too great. I bordered on uncomfortable with Greg, as he harbored a huge crush on me, but he was smart enough to not push it, so we remained friends. The last time I talked to him was the day before my 21st birthday. He and I talked for over an hour that night. He was going to be in Boston the next night, having dinner with his ex-girlfriend at the Top of the Hub (trying hard to win her back), and wanted me to come up on our travels through the city and let him buy me a birthday drink. My best friend and I took the elevator up to the restaurant, unsure whether we wanted to interrupt or not. The doors opened, people crowded on, and we decided it was a sign to continue on our way.
Three days later, his aunt called to tell me he�d drowned. He was swimming with his brother, having some kind of race. His brother started to falter in the water, so Greg signalled to shore that they needed help. His other brother and uncle came out to them in a boat. One went to help Greg, but he sent them to help the brother, saying that was more important. When they turned back to Greg, he was gone. His mom, a registered nurse, was watching from shore. When they finally found him, pulled him into the boat and got him to shore, she tried to perform CPR, but it was too late. Greg was gone. She and I still keep in touch sporadically. She likes hearing from me, she says, because too many of the other people in her life never mention Greg in fear of upsetting her. She says it�s like he never existed.
Next was Scott. He was more of a friend-of-a-friend, but we spent a summer hanging with the same people almost every night. He worked at McDonald�s, and went to take the trash out shortly before closing one night. He startled the assholes who were hiding by the dumpster, full of plans to rob the place after hours, and they stabbed him for his trouble. I was working as a nanny when it happened. My boss got mad because I took the whole day off for the funeral.
Then came Glen, the Artboy�s (and my, really) roommate. Glen was an amazing guy. One of the most genuinely friendly people I've ever met. Always smiling, wanting to share whatever he had. He was a big lover of ska music, particularly Steady Earnest and Bim Skala . Everywhere Glen went was a party, because he made it that way. We all went to the movies one night. Glen sat down in the theater and pulled out of his coat pockets a baggie of cereal, a spoon and a small tupperware container of milk, and proceeded to fix himself breakfast. He was just a lot of fun to be around.
With the story of Glen, comes the story of the Glen sticker. The first one was made as a joke, about ten years ago. Our friend Mike made them up to aggravate Glen, and it worked. Mike started sticking them up all over Florida, where he was living at the time. Somehow, Glen started to spread. Then Mike moved back to Boston and started spreading the stickers in earnest. It was a regular occurance to go out somewhere with Glen and have someone stop and say, "Hey, you're that guy--on that sticker! Cool!" Glen started to be less annoyed by the stickers. He told his girlfriend when he first met her, "You know, I have my own fan club."
One summer night, Glen was just finishing his shift as a valet parking attendant on Lansdowne Street, home to a string of Boston nightclubs. He and the other valets were discussing whether to go home or to head out to get some late-night food. He was straddling his bicycle, walking it over to his friend's car window. The friend's girlfriend, not seeing Glen in her rear view mirror, backed up and trapped the front tire of Glen's bike under her rear tire. The bike tipped, knocking Glen to the ground. He wasn't wearing his helmet, as he wasn't yet riding. He hit the ground and fractured his skull, suffering a brain hemorrhage.
The paramedics brought Glen to the hospital I work at. We got the call at the Artboy�s house at about 5 a.m. All of us gathered in the SICU waiting area until the doctor finally came out with Glen's dad and told us he was brain dead. There was nothing they could do to save him. They shut the life support off the next day, after his mom had a chance to get back to MA from visiting her mom and say goodbye. A sharer right to the end, Glen was an organ donor. His death saved several other lives. Eleven people in all received organ donations from him.
At the funeral, his dad stuck a sticker on the casket, saying, "Now, Glen, you've been stuck up everywhere!"
After Glen died, we started spreading the stickers more widely, as a tribute to someone we lost way too soon.
Finally, there�s the story of Melissa. She�s the hardest to write about, the one that still wakes me up at night, shaking off the fear and negativity to wrap my arms around the Boyfriend and thank God for what I have.
Melissa was the Artboy�s roommate�s girlfriend when I first met him. We stayed friends long after she and the roommate broke up. She was spacey but fun, the girl who says the thing that makes everyone laugh but who doesn�t quite understand why you�re laughing. In the time I knew her, she worked as a rape counselor, a child abuse hotline worker, an English teacher in Costa Rica through Teach America and a substitute in the Boston school system. She was an idealist who hadn�t yet found the right place to put her ideals.
Melissa decided two summers ago to participate in the Boston to NY AIDS ride. In training for the ride, she went to the Cape one Sunday to ride along the canal. When she finished riding and returned to her car, parked at the Sagamore bridge, she couldn�t get it started. She called AAA and sat down to wait for the tow truck.
A "seemingly good Samaritan" stopped and offered to help her start her car. No luck. He called his friend the mechanic to try and get it started. No luck. He let her use his cell phone to call her mom while they waited for the tow. While Melissa talked to her mom, he offered to drive her to meet her mom in Brockton if she�d pay for the gas. Melissa accepted. Her mom gave them a place to meet, and they hung up.
According to the man who picked her up, they left the Cape and started driving. At some point, they stopped, smoked pot together and had sex. At that point, she started bleeding (menstrual blood, he said), and freaked out. She started hitting him, he got mad and dropped her at a Dunkin Donuts in Halifax. He never heard from her again.
The real story�the one the police have pieced together, goes more like this. Melissa left the Cape with this man. She called home from his cell phone repeatedly on the drive. The last call her family got was from nowhere near where she was supposed to meet her mom. He drove her to the middle of a strange place. He undressed her, tied her to a tree, raped her and then stabbed her in the neck with such force that he shattered two of her vertebrae. Then he dressed her again and buried her in a shallow grave and left her there like a piece of trash.
She was supposed to meet her mom at 9. By Midnight, the police had picked up her "good Samaritan". By the next night, he was in jail on kidnapping charges. The police found blood (hers) and semen (his) samples on a pair of wet pants they found rolled up in his truck hidden under newspaper. They also found twine in his car that matched the twine they eventually found on her wrists and the tree where she�d been tied. And a knife, the same kind that made the stab wounds in her neck. They found that he�d called his boss from his cell phone and told his boss his truck broke down in Boston and he wouldn�t be in. The call was traced to the Bridgewater cell tower.
After three days, the search team started finding her stuff in a marshy area in Halifax, not far from the asshole who picked her up�s boyhood home. It took them a week to find her body. It poured the day they found her, which moved the recently-loosened soil enough that her foot surfaced.
This past May, Michael Gentile was convicted of murder in the first degree, which in Massachusetts carries an automatic sentence of life without parole.
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