Ode to a Friend

After college, I worked at an advertising agency where I became friends with a long-haired art director who had a dangerous monkey on his back.

When I met him for a beer one Saturday night, I found him nodding off at the bar and he was incoherent when I woke him. His paycheck was usually spent long before he got it. One morning, he hobbled into the office and told me that some drug dealers had bashed his knee with a baseball bat because he owed them money.

My friend was addicted to heroin.

Despite his serious dependence issue and all the problems it caused, I liked this guy. He had a gentle way about him and he was extremely talented and fun to be with when he wasn’t under the influence of the drug. At work, he and I always started our mornings by joking around together over coffee to get our creative juices flowing.

During one of our lighthearted coffee chats, I drew a doodle of a pointy-nosed dog with wings. My friend thought it was funny and he polished up my drawing into a character he called Zeet the Flying Dog. Everyone who saw the pointy-nosed dog with wings fell in love with him, and we had visions of syndicating Zeet cartoons to newspapers everywhere.

But we never got the chance.

Before long, my friend was fired from the ad agency — not for any lack of creative talent, but for increasingly unreliable work behavior related to his drug use. After he left the company, we fell out of touch and I never saw him again.

Looking back on our brief time together, one night stands out for its playful camaraderie. My friend brought a roll of reflective Mylar to my place, and for the sheer fun of it we used my camera to take pictures of a Rubik’s Cube and other things distorted by the shiny reflective surface. He was totally lucid that night, the way he was during our morning coffee talks. Laughter filled the air and the creative muse was zipping around like Zeet the Flying Dog.

That was a long time ago. Curious to know whatever happened to this troubled artist, I did an online search recently and learned that he died more than 20 years ago at age 53. No cause of death was given.

I was thinking of him last month when I ordered a roll of Mylar and photographed this series of distorted flower images in the reflective surface. Some friendships, like fragile flowers, are meant to last just a little while. But the impression they leave on us can linger for a lifetime.