Dear Aaron,
You are my best good friend. In many ways, you are the brother I never had. I’m not sure that’s a title you want to bear. I’m sort of a degenerate.
But I love you, brother. So help me, I do.
I met you while we were playing music, years ago. Which is typical for me. All my friends are musicians. Because, you see, from birth I was damned to be a hapless musician. It’s a blessing and a curse.
A blessing, because there is nothing more gratifying than producing music; the cadence of a good tune, throbbing in your brain and bones, is like a narcotic. A curse, because being a working musician sucks; a musician without a van or a girlfriend is, essentially, homeless.
My life has been lived out on plywood stages, in tobacco-fogged rooms, playing songs I hate, for drunk people who can’t dance, at 1 o’clock in the morning, as I beg for tips over the mic.
I met you in Tallassee, Alabama. You were playing the fiddle like your
face was on fire. I was playing guitar (poorly). We were in the band together, at the Mount Vernon Theater.
We hit it off. I admired the way you sawed on your Stradivarius like the Paganini of South Alabama. You liked me, heaven knows why. And that was how our friendship started.
It turned out you were from Slocomb, Alabama, making you my one and only friend from Slocomb.
The closest I’d ever come to Slocomb was when I got my picture made with the Slocomb Tomato Queen at the Peanut Festival—that was a wild night.
So anyway, I liked you, you liked me. And that’s basically how friendship works, really. You meet someone you like, then you just go around doing stuff together.
We did stuff. We’ve played a bunch of gigs together. We’ve shared many a malted beverage. We’ve been on…