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Gum | Feb 11 2002

My tenth birthday party

My best friend until the age of eleven was Richard Sauginkan. My mother claims that Richard and I met by crashing our pedal cars together, but I don’t remember it.

In fact I barely remember Richard at all. I have a single photo that includes him—taken at my tenth birthday. In it he sits to my left, holding a slice of pizza in his mouth with his right hand while using the other to form a peace sign. Without this photo I would have no way of knowing what he looked like. He looked like Sal Mineo.

But for all that I’ve forgotten, I do remember this: everyone loved Richard. I recall my mother standing in our kitchen and raving about how gorgeous he was. And it was true: Richard was a looker. And not just a looker, but a sweet-tempered kid; that is, to the extent I remember.

When we were about ten, Richard and I convinced two neighborhood girls, Lisa Rothman and Debbie Pitcharelli, to play kissing games with us. Suffice it to say, these girls were totally hot (for ten-year-olds!) and I would have given anything to kiss either. However it was clear from the start they both preferred Richard.

Not that I minded. That is, yes, I minded the way Lisa kept turning her head to the side during Seven Minutes in Heaven (conducted in her father’s downstairs office). But no, I had no issue with either girl liking Richard. Richard glowed.

Having said this, my only other clear memory of him (not that he actually appears in this memory) is the time I decided in a rage to spray him with a bottle of Fantastic, which I thought of as poison. I remember going into the basement to get the bottle. Did I spray him? I’ve no idea.

When we were eleven, Richard and his family moved to Syracuse. We said goodbye in the street, next to his family’s station wagon, now jammed with boxes. After Richard got into the car, I went around back and stuck the piece of gum I was chewing under the fender. This is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

I don’t believe that Richard and I ever corresponded, and then at nineteen I “disappeared,” completely cutting myself off from my friends and family. In the time I was gone, no one knew where I was or even if I was alive. When I returned, at twenty-five, my sister told me that Richard had come back to Philadelphia soon after I disappeared, and that he had enrolled in college there, at Temple, and that a few months later he had died of a heroin overdose.

That was twenty-two years ago; Richard’s been dead for twenty-two years. And it’s been thirty years since I watched that station wagon drive down our block and make the turn onto Maxwell Street.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about that day. I imagine that it must have been painful for me, an eleven-year-old boy, to lose my best friend like that. But the truth is, I don’t really remember it. And anyway, that’s not really what I think about. What I think about is the gum. Did the gum make it to Syracuse? Is the gum still under the fender? I know it’s awful, but what I think about is not Richard, my best friend until I was eleven, but the gum I left under the fender of his family’s stationwagon.