Tyler and I were 14 the summer Canada’s Wonderland, the city’s first amusement park, opened. We saved from many of our allowances in order to check out the place the whole school kept buzzing about.
More than anything, we wanted to ride the roller coasters. The Mighty Canadian Minebuster, a fierce wood and steel beast, hungry for the screams of children, seemed like the ideal candidate to be the first one that both me and Tyler would try in our lives.
We’d never been anywhere as exciting, surrounded by candy and snacks, rides on every corner, cute girls, mazes, games. Tyler brought his Polaroid camera to document the whole visit, but by the time we got to the Minebuster’s line up he’d already run out of film.
“Thank God” I exclaimed, “I was worried we’d waste the whole day taking pictures.”
“Chill out, you’ll be glad when I give you your copy” he assured me as he put his camera away.
We waited almost a whole hour to discover that all the stories were true: roller coasters are one of the pinnacles of human invention.
My friendship with Ty (how I called him back then) went so far back I don’t even recall meeting him. He was there from the beginning, when we still had so much to discover together.
That wonderful afternoon was the last one we shared before Tyler got introduced to alcohol.
We had our first drink at my oldest cousin’s get together. We pretended, as so many kids do, to love the taste of beer, and spent the rest of the night taking sips from the same bottle, even as it got warm and became flat.
But after only two more parties, Tyler seeked to get inebriated. By the end of the year he’d already earned the reputation of being the school year’s drunkard: the one who truly gave himself to the party, with the least inhibitions. The one with the most audacity and cojones.
It’s curious how addiction slides into our lives. We grew up with a superficial idea of what every “alcoholic” is: dirty, violent, a good for nothing. But Tyler never looked the part, which is why we would jokingly call him that, without allowing ourselves to believe he was becoming an addict.
He was actually an incredibly hard worker, garnering quite a bit of success as a landscaper. The biggest damages were inflicted on his personal relationships. He would spend his scarce free time switching from continuing to work, to drinking once again.
We all assumed that, as we started building our lives, Tyler would cease behaving like a clown; he’d take off the costume, reveal his true nature and get in line with the rest of us, the responsible adults. But it seemed like he got stuck in a pool of liquor, adrift in it like a castaway without a home, while he slowly lost contact with most of his childhood friends.
Nonetheless, Tyler and I maintained our close friendship throughout the years. He was an only child, and his parents, who always granted him another opportunity, died relatively young.
From some point onward, not taking into account his occasional girlfriends, I became Ty’s only family.
A few decades had passed and I was in the midst of a sabbatical year, and had decided to accompany my wife Laura abroad, where she’d get a certificate. Tyler was furious, mainly because that meant we would miss out on fishing season.
“You didn’t give me a heads up” he mumbled drunkenly. “No… you… you’re leaving, and now I know: I don’t have time to find another friend. Dumbass.”
I’d always been patient with him, so my feelings dodged the other insults he hurled at me. I wished him goodnight with a request: “Go to sleep bud. I’ll let you know as soon as I’m back.”
And so I did. I reached out to him the day after my return, and promised that we’d see each other very soon. It was summer, so our schedules were already filled with plans. But, not satisfied with that reasoning, he still called me numerous times a day, for many weeks on end.
“Ty, I need you to relax” I texted him eventually. “We’ll see each other soon enough, just give me a chance.”
Days passed before I got his reply text:
“You are a bad friend, and you will regret treating me like this.”
I ignored his threats, thinking that he would eventually calm down.
Not long after, an awful stench began to fill our entire home.
At first, we managed to ease it by opening up all the windows, but after a few days not even the fresh air could hold a candle against the reek. We emptied the cupboards, checked the inside of both our fridge and freezer, and did a deep clean before hiring professional carpet cleaners. But the bad smell remained there, and even made Laura faint while in the shower.
Her cousin invited us to stay with her, so that we could catch a break while a team of exterminators turned our place inside out. They assured us that the intensity of the odour came from a pack of rats or some other rodent which had died inside our walls, and whose decay had accelerated as they were baked by the season’s blazing heat.
It was during those days, as we waited for the verdict of the inspection, that I remembered Tyler and gave him a call. I wanted to see how he was doing.
The phone rang all the way to his voicemail. I left him a text message.
The next day Laura and I woke up distressed, sniffing the same putrid smell, but now at our host’s house.
Intuitively and without major explanations, we knew we had to leave before contaminating her family’s breathing air. When we got home, the team of exterminators looked defeated. After days of searching they were unable to find anything out of the ordinary, and what's worse: not even them could stand the stench any longer. They preferred not charging us over remaining at our house.
We checked into a motel, and shortly after I gave Tyler another call. His memory kept chasing me.
Straight to voicemail, without a single ring. I sent him a second text, asking whether he was ok, when I reread the last thing he sent me:
“... you will regret treating me like this.”
I was suddenly enraged. Could Tyler have anything to do with all of this?
I mentioned it to Laura, and she surprised me with a revelation: for days she hadn’t been able to stop thinking, and worrying, about my friend.
“Barry… I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think something happened to him. Tyler always gets back to you.”
And with that, I also began to worry. I phoned him one more time, but was dead ended once again by his voicemail. Something was wrong.
“We should go” said Laura. We immediately went down to our car.
As soon as we pulled into Tyler’s driveway I asked my wife to stay behind. Something told me she didn’t deserve to witness what I was about to find. Just by stepping onto the porch, my nostrils could presage the familiar reek that was barely kept at bay by the front door.
I opened it, and was forced to step back and cough. I’d been trampled by a wave of steam that carried the same foul odor that had invaded our lives. A cloud of flies occupied each and every one of the rooms.
I went in, covering my nose and mouth with my hand. There were cans and bottles all over the place: on the floor, on the shelves, on the couch.
“Tyler! Are you here?!”
I knew the answer to my question, but couldn’t prepare my eyes to see it.
I found him in the kitchen. Things were already growing on his body.
I stormed out of the house and fell to my knees at the front lawn, puking. I cried like I hadn’t since I was a little kid. Laura came over to comfort me, and I confirmed our suspicions to her: Tyler was dead. Later on, the autopsy would reveal he slipped a few weeks back, and received a wound to the head that forever stole his consciousness.
So he laid there for over a month, not having anyone who’d ask themselves what was up with “drunken Tyler”. Whether he was well, safe and sound.
But that morning, before the police arrived and despite my wife’s complaints, I went back into the home of the guy with which I’d grown up.
“I need to open up the windows and close his eyes” I insisted, knowing full well the impossibility of the second reason. I clearly noticed earlier that the body no longer had eyelids.
Those were simple excuses to verify that I hadn’t imagined what his hands were holding. Once I returned inside, the acidity in the air no longer affected me.
No one, not Laura, my family or any of my friends, will ever know what was being held by Tyler’s body. Nor the reason why it brought more tears to my eyes.
It was a small polaroid photo. The last from its roll, and which Ty had promised, and forgotten, to give me a copy of.
A picture of us as children, about to ride our first roller coaster.
