The Man Who Never Showed

Over the years, as I have moved across continents,  changed residences and jobs, I have lost track and forgotten many friends, co-workers and acquaintances. Names, faces, stories, all gone.  But there was one friend,  whom I cannot forget and whom I've never really known.  I say "friend", because our mutual friend whom I do know has always considered the two of us, myself and the "friend" I've never known, friends.

Jason and I worked together.  In fact, I hired him, and two years later after I lost my job, he hired me at another place.  Jason lived with a fellow he always referred to as Woodridge, his old college pal. They had a specious apartment which they could barely afford and after some time a fellow named Lance joined them there,  a tall, highly intelligent, neurotic and probably homosexual young man, whom I also had hired and introduced to Jason.

I visited them a number of times in their apartment block which had a swimming pool on the roof where we would relax, drink beer and smoke weed.  It just happened that Woodridge was never there when I was visiting, he was either at work at a phonograph record distributor, or was playing golf with the ambassador of some banana republic, or taking flying lessons, and while he was absent, Jason always talked about his many exploits.   That phonograph record distributor was we all agreed a mob organization, as was the jukebox jobbing business in those days, and thanks to Woodridge we were all able to acquire recent chart hits.  Sometimes, at my request passed on via Jason Woodridge would obtain for me some rare 45RPM records that were unavailable through record stores which carried Top 40 national and Top 40 local, while the records I sought never reached the top 50 in our area. I still have some of them, Doug Sahm, Delbert and Glen, Emitt Rhodes.

I never learned Woodridge's first name (was it Neal?), and never met him in person.   Later, the trio, of if you prefer the quartet, broke up when Lance moved to Boston to work at a public television station there, Jason married a nice Jewish girl who drove a two-seater English convertible that kept breaking down and moved to New York City with her, I moved out West, and Woodridge, according to Jason, went to join the French Foreign Legion.

I lost contact with all of them, until some five years later Jason found my listed telephone number and called me to announce that he was coming on a honeymoon.   This was the honeymoon with Jason's second wife, we met, I showed them around and Jason told me about Woodward's newer adventures. After a stint with the French Foreign Legion he joined the Peace Corps from which he was thrown out because of some hanky panky with the female natives of some African nation. Now he was running a bar in the Bahamas and smuggling diamonds.

Over the following years Jason would visit me occasionally on business or pleasure, sometimes with his newest spouse, whom he once introduced a "you two have already met", which wasn't true, but neither of us myself or the wife said anything.  More news of Woodridge who settled down in Florida, had triplets whom he named after the three of us friends from the old days, naming the girl a feminized version of my name.  And during last year's visit with a wife whom I had in fact met, Jason passed to me greeting from Woodridge, a friend whom I've never to this day met.