Sometimes We Begin at the End

I was seventeen years old when I met the best friend I would ever have. It was September, the first week of my senior year of high school, and I was sitting with my girlfriend in the cafeteria before the start of class. A longtime friend stopped by the table, accompanied by a tall, severe-looking young man with an intense, thoughtful gaze. My friend pointed to his companion and exclaimed, “you have to meet this guy. He just transferred here. He’s like your twin.” “Conor,” the young man said, extending his hand to me. In return, I raised my own hand, and my future was forever altered. It’s a shame we can’t always know the moments in our lives that will truly change us, those that will stay with us until we die. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the course of my young life was being shifted, and from it, a new person would one day emerge.

It wasn’t long before the two of us became inseparable, our shared interests in guns and all things military helping to form an instant bond. I’d already seen him in the halls, of course. At 6’5″ and well over 200 pounds, he was hard to miss. But it wasn’t just his striking physical presence that caught the attention of my classmates and me. He wore combat boots and an old US Army fatigue jacket to school, at times completing the ensemble with a pair of camouflage pants. He appeared as a spot of olive drab adrift in a sea of pastel Izod shirts, Levis jeans, and Docksider’s, the de rigueur uniform of my preppy, wealth-obsessed school. He strode through the halls, utterly unconcerned with the stares and whispers of his new classmates. Getting to know one another over the ensuing weeks, I quickly learned that he hated the suburbs of Western New York, much preferring his former home outside Newark, New Jersey. He would tell tales of taking the train with his friends to New York City on Saturdays, riding the subways all day, prowling the mean streets of Manhattan at a time when I was barely allowed out in my own tame suburban neighborhood past 10 pm. His casual sophistication and total disdain for the so-called popular kids of my senior class was intoxicating, especially to me, never a member of my school’s elite crowd. 

On most weekends, when I was not with my girlfriend, we would cruise the streets of our quiet town in his car, a Pontiac Bonneville station wagon somehow blessed with a 454 V8 motor. Anything from a trip to the Mall to a stop at McDonald’s could become an adventure, his larger-than-life personality and ebullient sense of humor charging the air with an energy I had never experienced before in another person. My own home life was a constant stream of stress and discord, and I came to love spending time at his house, which he shared with his parents and two younger sisters. I quickly noted how his family seemed to revolve around him, his outsized energy working its same magic on them. Their love for him was palpable, and I spent as much time there as my schedule would allow, astonished at the free flow of affection that ran between all of them, most notably between father and son. I marveled at the effortless communication and mutual respect he shared with his dad, which stood in stark contrast to the fractured relationship I had with my own father.

I would soon learn that holidays were of paramount importance to Conor. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve each was to be celebrated as if it were your last. Birthdays were also treated with special reverence. Conor was one of the most generous people I had ever met, and gifts large and small were an essential part of every holiday. A few days before that first Halloween, I walked into his kitchen, his Golden Retriever Murphy padding over to greet me, to find him seated at his kitchen table, hacking away at a pumpkin with an enormous Bowie knife. I hadn’t carved a jack-o-lantern since grade school, and I marveled at the somewhat childlike wonder Conor brought to nearly every encounter with the world. All of the following holidays would be met with a festive zeal I have yet to see matched in my life. 

Still very much a virgin, I would listen in quiet awe as he regaled me with tales of his sexual conquests at his former high school. My initial doubts quickly dispelled as I watched the girls of my class timidly enter his orbit. It would not be long before my newfound friend would begin to command the attention of the young women of our senior class, his disinterested attitude towards them seeming to draw them to him. Girls who had barely spoken to me in years would ask me about him as if he were some sort of celebrity, afraid to approach him despite their fascination. I watched in wonder as he turned one after another down, eventually setting his sights on a less popular senior girl who had caught his eye. Tall and willowy, she made a perfect complement to his enormous frame, and they made a striking couple as they walked the halls. Soon after that, we began double dating, and our friendship was cemented even further. 

As our high school careers approached their end, my classmates and I began the process of deciding where we would be spending the next several years of our lives. I had been accepted to SUNY Syracuse College of Environmental Science and Forestry, with the eventual goal of becoming a conservation officer. Conor, who had spent his Spring semester as a police explorer, had set his sights on more traditional police work. His tales of ride alongs and the larger-than-life personalities of the deputies he met from our local sheriff’s office intrigued me so much that I began to question my own path. I eventually elected to attend community college to pursue a degree in Criminal Justice with the eventual goal of working as a police officer. Our lives soon became focused entirely on achieving this as we entered college together that following Fall, our sights set on joining the ranks of law enforcement. 

College was a mix of classes, part-time security jobs, and nights spent bar hopping and testing our tolerance for alcohol. As he grew older, Conor’s wild, almost uncontrollable energy seemed only to grow in force, his eagerness to experience everything that life had to offer at times almost terrifying in its intensity. On one memorable evening, while out celebrating my 20th birthday, we fled successfully from the police after Conor passed a traffic cop running radar on the expressway, his speedometer pinned at 120 mph as we somehow managed to elude the officer. We learned to box in the college’s police education gym class, pitted against one another by our humorless instructor, who only saw the two largest boys in the class and not best friends. We circled one another for a bit, poking halfhearted jabs at each other until the instructor screamed at us that we would keep going for the duration of the class if we didn’t fight. Conor, by now almost 275 pounds, shrugged his shoulders and nodded at me as if to say, “let’s just get it over with.” I surprised myself by knocking him down with a hard right to the chin, and the last thing I saw as he rose was his enormous gloved fist filling my vision. I awakened a moment later to our instructor laughing as he helped me to my feet. I would not be able to touch my nose for a week. Leaving class, we both laughed about it as we examined each other’s bruises. Our conversations now centered around what we would do with our lives, the significant cases we would be involved in, how wonderful it would be to wear the badge and enter the world of the men we have come to so admire.

Our lives continued on this way until a summer morning in 1986. I was awakened from sleep at 8 am on my day off by my phone ringing. I answered, hoping I was not being called into work, and heard the voice of a mutual friend, a parole officer Conor and I often worked part-time security jobs with. “We lost him'” he said, his voice breaking. “We lost Conor.” Unable to process this information, I sputtered out something incoherent. My friend continued to describe the 4 am accident, Conor a passenger in a car driven by another friend, a recent graduate of the police academy. They had been coming back from a night on the town, having celebrated our friend’s completion of the field training portion of the police academy. The accident had been a rollover, the car crushed like a beer can. The driver had escaped with only a few broken ribs. Conor had been killed instantly, his large frame a liability in the crumpled confines of the relatively small SUV. Within an hour, I was at Conor’s house, where I sat with his stunned family in their grief. The next four days would be a blur of calling hours and sad first meetings, several of his New Jersey friends making the trip to Western New York to honor him. I remember standing with the funeral director as we prepared to enter the church with his casket as a pallbearer. “Be careful fellas, he’s really heavy,” he said, my friend’s colossal size following him even into death. That night Conor’s many friends would gather at his grave where we buried Matchbox police cars, pizza slices, and beers under the newly laid sod. I do not remember much of the rest of that summer, but I remember the promise I made that day to myself and to him that I would wear a badge one day and make both of us proud. Two years later, I would be sworn in as a police officer, and each day of my life since, I have thought of Conor. Each milestone, plainclothes assignments, SWAT, and my eventual promotion to Sergeant were silently dedicated to his memory.

There are times when I mention Conor, and my wife or my son will ask me to try again to describe him so that they can really see and feel what he was like as a person. I am often at a loss for words during these moments, but the story that most often comes to my mind is from our first semester together at community college. We were sitting in our Psych 101 class, participating in a discussion about love led by our professor, an amiable old hippie with a striking resemblance to Burl Ives. As the students sat in a large circle, the professor pointed to Conor and said, “What does the word love mean to you.” My friend sat back for a moment in his chair, then looked around the room, his gaze settling first on Sara, his girlfriend seated to his right. “Well, I love my girlfriend,” he said, smiling as he pulled her close with an enormous arm. He then turned his gaze to me, seated to his left. “And I love my buddy,” he said, wrapping his other arm around my shoulder and pulling me close. I have never forgotten that moment, steeped as we all were in the attitudes of the early 1980s, and the arcane beliefs of our parents, unable, unwilling, or perhaps just afraid to show anything but romantic love. With that single unselfconscious gesture, my friend told us all everything we ever needed to know about life. Love has many definitions and many faces. All of them are to be celebrated and cherished, for nothing, nothing lasts forever. Sometimes the people who enter our lives are like the North Star, steady and constant. But there are others, their flames too beautiful to last, who blaze through our timeline like shooting stars, their magnificent energy simply too great to remain for more than a brief instant.