My Friend Charlie: A Lot Like George Bush

My friend Charlie's wanton obliviousness to consequences and stubborn refusal to make concessions to reality, fueled by his own "Influentials" reminds me a lot of a certain president.

My friend Charlie had it all: a great family, a dream career, and a ski home. But there were cracks in the façade. A former party-hard frat boy at a prestigious Ivy League school, Charlie had breezed through just about everything in his life. When he chose to stop partying in his mid-twenties, he just stopped. It hadn't been a completely smooth transition from trust fund party boy to hedge fund serious adult, but it was without major incident. Sure, Charlie liked to vacation a lot. He wasn't that into working. He was a macro-manager, pleased to make the big decisions and leave the details to others. But the demons that Charlie thought he had put to sleep for good with were only resting. He even had a name for the demons. He called them "The Influentials."

As the pace of his debauchery increased, some of us tried to talk to him, and Charlie would always agree that he needed to tone it down. But the "The Influentials" would have none of it. They wanted to rock and roll all night and party every day. In fact, several people who were the most critical of these demons were bounced from Charlie's inner circle. It was as if he were on a mission to demolish any sign of his stable, sensible life.

In the last two and a half years my friend Charlie has totaled two cars, been arrested for possession of heroin, knocked up a stripper, gotten divorced, lost his job, been to rehab twice, gone bankrupt, lost custody of his kids, been dangled out of a tenth story window by a bookie, had 32 stitches in his face, got attacked by a monkey (drunk at the zoo), been thrown out of rehab, and moved in with me, where he was directly responsible for my dog getting hit by a car and causing me to almost lose my own stable, sensible life. At the end of his run, his life looked like the fair grounds the morning after a Dead show.

Here's a list of things my friend Charlie did NOT do. Charlie did NOT start an un-winnable war, enrich his friends with contracts for un-winnable war, piss off the entire world, purposely out a CIA agent, ignore a bunch of starving, drowning black people, hire Arabs to guard our ports, fire U.S. attorneys for not agreeing with him, make it harder for old people to get medicine, or mispronounce "nuclear."

The entire time Charlie was hooking up with disaster, he kept saying that he was okay. Even though he was very convincing, I didn't really believe him, but I felt like I needed to support him.

Charlie is gone now. Nobody has heard from him for over a year. I picture him in some dingy bar somewhere, telling his story to a bartender, narrating his old life from afar. At least I hope it's a bar. It might be a jail cell or the grave.

I think about him often. I look back and laugh at all of the crazy shit he did. But then I feel a sense of loss and sadness because I feel partly responsible for the people he hurt. As someone close to him, I had a million chances to stop it. When the old gang sits around and talks about Charlie, we remember him for what he was: a guy who was in way over his head; a guy who, when faced with make or break decisions, always made the wrong one.

Damn, if only somebody had spoken up sooner.