I’ve known Bad Leon Suave for close to thirty years now, and despite what I may have thought when I first met him, he became one of my best friends, and eventually one of my brothers (the other being Fed, of course). Despite being a native Californian (from the southern part of the state, at that), he’s actually a decent human being, and I’m glad we got to know each other all those decades ago. We were in the same Cub Scout troop (with his mom as our Den Mother), contributed to the same book in the third grade (“The Raddest Book By The Raddest Kids In The Raddest World”- can’t you just feel the 80’s?), suffered in the same fifth grade classroom, and somehow survived middle school (which I’ve been informed, is also sometimes referred to as “Junior High”), before making it to High School, where we actually became good friends. Our group in High School was not really one comprised of friends, but rather, a group of malcontents who simply hated everybody else more. We mostly smoked a lot of pot and mocked the athletic department and their “Anti-Drug Pledge.”

After I declined to finish out my public education, and join the ranks of the working man, Bad Leon still came to visit me at my girlfriend’s house, mainly, I think, to use the bathroom. He’d show up around lunchtime, grunt a hurried salutation, and walk directly to the restroom, locking himself inside for at least a good eight minutes. When he was done, he quickly shut the door behind him, lit a cigarette, and chatted with us a couple minutes, before noticing that it was time to go. He then would hurry out the front door, flying down the stairs, returning to his beat-up car and driving back to class. After about a month of this, we all began referring to the bathroom as “his room”, and, on more socially oriented visits, would jokingly remand him to its confines the moment he entered the door. What’s funny about the whole thing is not that he wanted to avoid taking care of business in a public facility (that, at least, is understandable), but that his own home was about two more minutes distance down the road.

Far too soon, it was time for him to take his leave of us, and make something of himself with a higher education. He packed his things and drove across the mountains to the poorly-ventilated cow town of Ellensburg, WA, to throw himself into a confusing hodgepodge of freshman year curriculum, all so he could build a life for himself and his High School sweetheart he’d left waiting back at home. Of course, like we could have all predicted, she wasn’t the really the type of person who understood the concept of fidelity or patience. To give her credit, though, she waited, if I recall correctly, at least a month or two into the school year until she cast him negligently to the side so she could seek out greener pastures. I love my brother deeply, and have had more than one relationship end suddenly upon my birthday (Surprise!), but he really wasn’t even close to prepared for dealing with such fundamental heartbreak 117 miles away from friends and family and the quiet comfort of his home. But life wasn’t done with him quite yet:

Having stuck it out for who knows how many loveless years until the kids were grown, his parents finally ended their relationship, and poor Leon spiraled further downward. The keystone to his future had suddenly been ripped away, and with no hope of happiness before him or behind, he just sort of drifted on a lessening wave of societal momentum until his apathy finally brought him to a full stop. I, on the other hand, was having a marvelous time of mental illness and chemical dependence, but I mention this only to briefly draw the focus away from Mr. Suave. We’ve all shambled through extended patches where nothing quite makes sense, but some of us are luckier than others in the duration of the melancholia.

I like to make fun (at some great length) of my good friend Leon Suave, but the truth is that we were there for one another when the world was falling down around us. I mentioned luck a moment ago, and you may have thought that it was mine, but actually Bad Leon recovered sooner (for the most part). He left school, and found a job, and an apartment, and decided it was time to maybe start acting like the adult that people had mistaken him for those past few years of training-wheel independence. At the same time, I was going through a nervous breakdown, and trying to simply gain a handhold on reality. I’d been lucky to point (as lucky as a guy who camped out in Mid-November in the Pacific Northwest because he didn’t have anywhere else to go can be), but had found myself working at a minimum wage job and living in the woods behind my hometown’s Safeway. Were it not for his compassion, I might never have escaped, and well… We were roommates for a bit, and though I had to leave my job to live there, and therefore couldn’t pay my share of rent, he always made sure that I had a bare minimum of nicotine, and something in my belly.

I’ve got hundreds of snarky anecdotes about the man, which I’ve yet to mention. Like the time his girlfriend and I went to one of his wrestling matches in High School, and watched him grapple with other sweaty adolescents wearing spandex until one of them submitted. Or how his very presence is entropic to the average motor vehicle, and should the world need saving from the abominations of Michael Bay, he stands alone as our last line of defense. And, knowing all of that, he still planned a drive from Tennessee to Alamogordo to join up with his friend’s band, and when he broke down outside a crack house somewhere in East Texas, he refused to answer my calls, as he didn’t want to hear me say, “I told you so.” But I won’t mention any of these, because of how much I respect him. He is a noble, if sometimes foolish, man, and he deserves to be remembered so.

-Tex