Reunion

"Rudy" was just a dumb kid back then. Fresh out of basic and tech school(s). A child of money. His first duty station was at Wüschheim Air Station in what was at the time West Germany. He was my roommate. We were three to a room in the dorms. My other roommate -- let's call him "Floyd" -- and I had gone through the most recent bout of training enroute to this duty assignment in the same class, which was where we had formed our friendship. We were two of a kind -- a couple of goofballs. We were experienced, veteran airmen for we had each been in the Air Force for a full two years. Yes we were dumb kids back then, too, but what dumb kid KNOWS he's a dumb kid? We were older than "Rudy," and that gave us the occasion to think we were smarter than he.

Almost from the start "Rudy" got on our nerves. He was gifted in many ways. He was endowed with great looks that he didn't have to cultivate or fabricate -- with the restrictive military regulations regarding appearance, there was only so much a young man could do with his hair, yet "Rudy" could walk into a room at a club, and within seconds be in conversation with two or three women.

And he was endowed with a natural charm: what his looks attracted, his charisma won over.

And he was just plain ENDOWED! (He was my roommate. There are certain things you never want to see, but you see them anyway!)

He was talented. He could do with his hands and a pencil or pen or paintbrush things we couldn't even picture in our minds. The "back office" took advantage of those talents and put him to work not out in the elements like the rest of us hardened, experienced airmen, but in the squadron office, painting murals and unit logos.

This kid seemed to have everything I did not. Needless to say, I was envious.

Not long after he had arrived in our room, he had a favor to ask of me since I had a car. I obliged. Without going into detail, I will say it involved going out "on the economy," or into the town just off base. The directions he had been given were erroneous, and finding the store meant asking a local. I had a limited understanding and vocabulary of German, but I managed -- with much difficulty -- to speak to and understand an old villager. "Rudy" seemed in awe of me after that incident.

"Floyd" and I worked the night shift, sleeping through the day. "Rudy" would come in after his painting and artwork shift ended at 5:00pm, turn on the stereo, converse with friends at the door, and generally disrupt our sleep. We asked him to stop it, but he just didn't seem to get it. After several failed efforts to get him to consider our needs, to consider the importance of a full night's (day's!) sleep, "Floyd" and I lobbied the dorm chief to have "Rudy" relocated. The request was honored. "Rudy" was out.

"Floyd" and I, from that day forward, harbored a resentment toward "Rudy." I know that my resentment was more for "Rudy's" gifts than for his inconsiderate attitude. Nonetheless, I participated in daily trash talk about and to "Rudy." Yet, as mean as I felt I was toward the kid, he always seemed to like me. If he saw me in the club on base, he always came over to my table, two drinks in hand because one was for me, and he would join me, if only for a few minutes. To the two or three women who would always stop by to talk to him, he would introduce me as "the coolest guy" he knew. It never rubbed off. When he left the table, the girls left with him. As always, my resentment of him magnified with every reminder of what he had that I did not.

My time in the Air Force came to an end when my tour at Wüschheim was finished. I went home, moved on with my life, losing track of all of my friends but one, a guy I had known since tech school, almost at the very start of my service. About three years after I got out, I received a phone call out of the blue from "Rudy." It goes without saying that I was actually dismayed that he had found me. Why was this guy calling me? Didn't I abuse him enough? We chatted for a while, and he told me of the trouble he had gotten into in the Air Force and out, all of it to do with drinking. The thought in my head was "Stupid 'Rudy.'" We finished our chat, and I hung up the phone and all but forgot about him.

Nearly twenty years after getting out I've found myself thinking about "Rudy" a lot. It started off with an e-mail to "Floyd," who's still in the Air Force and facing retirement soon. We shared a few memories, and "Rudy's" name came up. We trashed him, as always, but afterward I realized that while I trashed him in the present, the person I saw in my memory was the nineteen-year-old kid who had come stumbling into my relatively comfortable world twenty years ago. That bothered me about me. So I tried to imagine what he could possibly be doing today, but the only image I could conjure was the scrawny, wiry kid with the stupid smile on his face and a drink in his hand. I projected that forward twenty years, and the only difference was that he had a few wrinkles on his face.

Then I found myself on a plane, for a business trip, touching down in "Rudy's" home town. The wonder stirred up in me again, and I knew I just had to try to look him up, see if he remembered me, and see if he would care to get together for old time's sake. Much to my surprise, he was there. It took a simple search online, and one phone call. Two days later we sat facing each other across a table, chewing the fat enthusiastically, poring over old photos he had brought along. And I saw that he was a lot like me. He still has his hair (I don't), but he's stacked on the pounds in the past few years, just like me, a testament to the good life he lives with his wife and daughter. The former ladies' man has been married for twelve years. He owns his own business(es). What shocked me to learn was that he admittedly had probably not been sober for more than eight hours straight for practically his entire four-year stint in the Air Force. The party boy straightened out and got his degree, and he now does for a living the thing he loves more than anything else to do: art. Seated across the table from me was the "Rudy" I wished he had been back then. I can't help but think that his undiscovered drinking problem while in the Air Force was the sole reason why he was so unbearable back then, as well as why he was so oblivious to the indifference and thinly veiled hostility we sent his way.

He had been a talented, intelligent, "dumb" kid whom I believed had everything, yet didn't know how to behave in the world around him, and it took a couple of really hard knocks to get him to learn. But it took twenty years and an impromptu reunion for me to learn that, for everything he had that I didn't, "Rudy" envied qualities and talents I possessed of which I was never aware, or which I would never acknowledge.

What's the lesson here? I can't seem to put it into words. It's all about self-worth and envy and using what you have to make yourself more than what you already are rather than to make others seem less than what they are. But I can't seem to put it into words.

To "Rudy," my new old friend.


dassall