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185 pages

English

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Robert Penn Warren in his masterpiece All the King’s Men said you never forget the friend of your youth. No matter how he changes, he is always the same to you. This is a story of two such friends.
Robert Penn Warren in his masterpiece All the King’s Men said you never forget the friend of your youth. No matter how he changes, he is always the same to you. This is a story of two such friends. How their lives go down separate paths, but their friendship remains. Even though they change, they are always the same to each other.

Sujets

Theatre

Friendship

Alumni association

Growth

Marriage

Art

Youth

Romance

Love

Fiction

Informations

Publié par	iUniverse
Date de parution	25 juin 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781663253873
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Friend of My Youth

JIM FARRELL

THE FRIEND OF MY YOUTH

Copyright © 2023 Jim Farrell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-5386-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5387-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023910953

iUniverse rev. date: 06/22/2023

Other books by Jim Farrell
Brooklyn Boy (2013)
Kiss Me, Kate, and Other Stories (2014)
The Extraordinary Banana Tree (2015)
Mikey’s Quest for Father God (2016)
The Barge of Curiosity (2016)
The Committee and Other Stories (2017)
Realities (2018)
The Whale’s Tale: Call Me Moby Dick (2019)
The Joyce Girls of Brooklyn (2021)
Kevin’s Inferno (2022)
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my wife, Marianne Collinson,
who has supported me in all my writing
and who is my greatest promoter.
To my sister, Madeline Nixon, who has been the source of
so many of my inspirations
To my grandsons, Maxwell James Farrell,
and
Coda James Farrell,
and granddaughter, Cadence Quinn Farrell,
just because they are my beloved grandchildren.
And to Jim Villarreal, the friend of my youth.
Acknowledgments
As always, I wish to thank my cousin and editor, Patty Gallagher, for all her help in cleaning up the words I put on paper, not only checking the spelling, but, more importantly, suggesting better words or better ideas.
My wife, Marianne Collinson, and I had spent a day with my good friend, Jim Villarreal, in New Jersey a few years ago. That night she said to me, “How can you and Jim be such good friends? You are so different.”
I was reading Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men at the time, and had just read his remarks on the friend of your youth. I showed it to Marianne, and she understood the basis and strength of our friendship.
I have included that quote as an introduction to this novel.
Contents
Chapter 1 The Phone Call (2022)
Chapter 2 Meeting Lee-Pay (1965)
Chapter 3 Lee-Pay
Chapter 4 Summer 1965
Chapter 5 St. Polycarp’s Military Academy – The Early Years
Chapter 6 Josie Russell and Betty Grunfeld
Chapter 7 The Third First Time
Chapter 8 An Early Rift
Chapter 9 Providence College – The Early Years
Chapter 10 Providence College – The Final Four
Chapter 11 The Commitment and the Commission
Chapter 12 Sleeping Together and Eating Cheesesteak
Chapter 13 Monterey and Marriages
Chapter 14 Desdemona Arrives
Chapter 15 The Early Years of Marriage (1972 – 1977)
Chapter 16 The Dissolution of a Marriage
Chapter 17 Holly’s and Johnny’s Married Years
Chapter 18 Back to Philadelphia
Chapter 19 Sacred Writings and Dream Therapy
Chapter 20 Florida
Chapter 21 The Funeral

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face that does not exist anymore…
And perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moonflower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant…
The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he hasn’t the slightest concern with calculating his interest or your virtue.
Robert Penn Warren
All The King’s Men
1
THE PHONE CALL (2022)
I t was early morning, the time of darkness when policemen and criminals dominate the streets. I was sleeping with my right arm around Holly’s middle, my right hand cupping her right breast, pressing her warm body against mine. I had adopted this sleeping position around Holly forty-five years ago, and from the night of its adoption, I never had any desire to change it, either the position or Holly. We spent every night in this loving intertwinement until the sunlight streaming into the room awoke us––we sleep facing a wall-length, floor to ceiling window that gives us a view of a white sandy beach and the Atlantic Ocean, never closing the curtains which would obscure that glorious view of beach and sea––but this morning our peaceful slumber was interrupted by sound and not sunlight. At two thirty, the cell phone on my night table cried out to be answered. At first, I thought it was a sound emanating from my dream world, a world populated by me and Holly in our younger days, lounging on a sandy beach somewhere on the Gulf. Even at my advanced age of sixty-nine, the vision of the younger Holly in a bikini delights and arouses me. I didn’t bring my phone to the beach, I thought. I do not even own a cell phone at this stage of my life…No one does…Cell phones have not been invented yet…What is that ringing?.. Then I was wide awake. The ringing was not inside my dream, inside my head, but outside of me, in the realm of waking reality. The Holly next to me was not in a bikini, but in one of my T-shirts and cotton panties. Her cotton panties, not mine. As I said, I still delight in her. She is still a work of art, but young Holly was a masterpiece. I quickly reached for the phone, trying unsuccessfully not to disturb present-day Holly.
“Hello. Who is this?” I whispered into the phone. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Who is it, honey?” asked Holly.
I held up my right index finger toward her. How she hates that. She frowned at me.
“Uncle John?” inquired a female voice, a vaguely familiar female voice.
“Yes,” I answered. Could this be Dezzie, Lee-Pay’s daughter?
“This is Dezzie Martinez…”
“Dezzie!” I shouted. “Is anything wrong?” I had not heard from her in almost thirty years. “It’s Lee-Pay’s daughter,” I said to Holly.
Holly sat up, now wide awake. Lee-Pay, Filipe Martinez, has been my best friend since I, and he, were thirteen. Dezzie, Desdemona, is the daughter of his first marriage, to Josie Russell. His first and only marriage actually; he and Rita, although together, off and on, for thirty years, have never married. Lee-Pay and I met Josie when we, and she, were seventeen, ages ago it seems, but only yesterday. She was a wild filly back then, a filly from Philly. She hooked Lee-Pay the day we met. I think he hooked her too. They rode an emotional roller coaster for the twenty-three years they were together. Wild sex; wilder fights. Josie was, is, an artist, but their greatest creation was Dezzie. Now there is a beautiful and talented young lady. I’m sure you have read her books; she writes under the name Desdemona Russell. She will always be Dezzie to me.
As we aged, Filipe and I have grown somewhat apart, and now rarely see each other. The ardors of travel combined with the disabilities of age have made our get-togethers more problematic. But he will always remain my best friend, the friend of my youth.
“Is it about her father?” Holly asked.
Again, I raised the right index finger; again, she frowned.
“What is it, Dezzie?” I asked.
“Dad passed away last night,” she said.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, no. We talked last month on the phone. He sounded fine….”
“Heart attack,” she said. “Rita found him in the kitchen at ten when she got to his house after a showing at her studio. She called Mom, assuming she would want to know. I answered the phone, and we rushed right over. I was visiting Mom in Philly.” Lee-Pay always loved artists, Josie the painter, Rita the sculptor, now gallery owner. And others, so many others. We are so unalike. Since the day I met Holly, I have had sex with, and slept with, no other woman.
Dezzie and her father have been estranged since Lee-Pay and Josie were divorced, back in 1992. That estrangement has been the knife that he has never been able to dislodge from his heart. He called her every year on her birthday, but she never returned her father’s calls. He would call me whenever she had published a new novel. God, how he loved her. Enthused over her work. Lee-Pay and Josie have remained friends––friends of their youth. It is difficult to sunder a connection that strong. They could not live together but could not live without each other either. A lifelong tumultuous relationship. Josie and Rita had unbelievably become friends; let me say, rather, friendly acquaintances. Occasionally the three of them stopped for a drink or a sandwich after a show. I w