Being the Bad Guys

I was seventeen, and I hadn’t seen him in years. 

He wasn’t quite what I remembered. Looking back now, I guess I always knew Derek was strange. Or maybe not strange, but definitely different. And not just different from me—different from everyone else I knew too.

We lived two houses down from each other in a cozy little subdivision, where tree-lined streets and cul-de-sacs weaved around modest homes that crawled with all manner of kids and dogs. There were bicycles and rollerblades and trampolines everywhere. In the summer, kids would gather in a few well-known yards and driveways playing football and basketball until dusk. In the winter, packs of bundled hooligans would convene on the few houses that sat on a slope to go sledding down the front lawn. It was paradise for a boy my age.

Derek was my best friend, and he liked being the ‘bad guys’ when we played X-Men. 

Action figure games with other kids never amounted to much—we’d simulate a few fights and then get bored and fire up the Nintendo. I suspect it was because we all wanted to play the heroes. Of course we did. The ‘good guys’ were always the ones who eventually win the fight, get the girl, save the world. 

Not Derek. He and I would have these epic X-Men campaigns that would last for days on end, leaving action figures strewn across three rooms of his house. We had collected more than 50 figurines between us, and our games had all kinds of complicated story plots and character arcs, complete with alliances, betrayals, detailed backstories, physical borders, imaginary lairs, romances, injuries, recoveries, and lots and lots of death. They weren’t simply comic book figures to us—they were people with extraordinary abilities, yet they had real depth and emotion and other concepts that aren’t top of mind for typical 10-year-olds. 

I remember our parents would take us to a local waterpark in the summer. We’d spend the morning enjoying standard kid activities like the wave pool and waterslides, but after lunch, we’d head over to the lazy river to spend the rest of the afternoon literally floating in circles as we planned our next X-Men campaign in an embarrassing level of detail. When we’d get home, sometimes just the setup of that single game would take two hours. Building the world was half the fun.

I had never met any other kid whose imagination was as active as my own, but Derek could match me and then some. His brain operated on a different level, wired so abnormally that he actually preferred playing the villain role. We never took turns. He would even do different voices for all the characters, with varying levels of sinister whispering as he laid out whatever complicated evil plan his figurines had concocted for me to inevitably vanquish in the end. I mean…who does that? 

Derek and I met at soccer practice, and we became friends because our parents started sharing rides when they realized we were neighbors. I think his parents liked having me around because sometimes I could convince him to go outside and do ‘normal’ kid stuff. I liked riding bikes and playing on swing sets and catching toads. I loved sports and competition, and I was always itching to explore more of the world beyond my own backyard.

Derek played the clarinet, and he hated soccer. To be fair, he was pretty bad at it. I never understood why he played in the first place, but I always suspected his parents made him try it and then pulled the classic ‘you’re not a quitter’ routine at the first sign of trouble. He wasn’t a very athletic kid, and even though I was nearly a year younger than him, I could beat Derek at just about any sport without much effort. 

In fact, the only sport he was any good at was karate, which as far as I knew, wasn’t truly a sport so much as a hobby that helped nerdy kids feel fake tough. 

A year into our friendship, Derek earned his black belt, which he claimed meant he could beat up damn near anybody. At first, I remember I was skeptical that this lanky kid could hold his own in a fight, so one day he took me down to his basement and showed me how he could break a thick board using nothing but his bare fists. I watched carefully as he setup the board between two chairs, concentrated intensely, and then let out a guttural “heeya!” as he smashed right through, breaking it cleanly in half. Derek punched through three boards that afternoon—I went home with a very bruised hand and nothing to show for it. That’s when I decided karate was pretty cool after all. No bullshit.

Whatever Derek may have lacked in athletic physicality, his mind made up for in spades. He liked reading long, complicated novels and collected geology rocks and was in drama club. He liked horror movies—I remember we would stay up late watching old films like The Pit & The Pendulum in black & white. He would spend hours researching and planning the weirdest, scariest Halloween costumes in the neighborhood. 

One year he dressed as a one-eyed hunchback—I had no idea what that meant, but I quickly learned the costume consisted of taping a pillow to his upper back under a ratty old shirt, plus he had an eye patch, a mangy glue-on beard, and a strange looking cane that he called his walking stick. He spent the entire evening trick-or-treating through our subdivision totally committed to his character, with a fake limp and his body all hunched over and contorted at the waist. 

I went as a football player. 

We moved away the summer before I entered the sixth grade to be closer to where my mom worked and I went to school. The good news was I already had some friends in the new town, and I knew I’d make lots more once we lived there full-time. The bad news was it meant leaving Derek, and even then, I think I knew I’d never make another friend like him for the rest of my life. 

We had a few visits back-and-forth that first year, but our worlds inevitably drifted apart. We quickly moved on from our boyhood friendship in that emotionless way familiar only to children. 

I was busy taking on the new challenges of junior high—it meant more school, more friends, more sports, and not nearly enough girls. Among my friends, the bulk of our time was spent trying to decode the complexities of the adolescent female mind. Girls were notoriously tricky, and it was a puzzling time of note-writing, three-way calling, school dances, and lying to your friends about how many you had kissed. The world was mysterious and exciting and impossibly tragic. God help anyone who has ever had the misfortune of trying to teach horny seventh grade boys. 

Eventually, the birds and the bees sorted themselves out, and the rhythm of high school life took over. Girls were still high on the priority list, but notes and dances gave way to movies and cars. Sports became more important than ever, and even school finally started to matter a little—good grades supposedly meant preparation for college and an eventual ticket out of the middle class.  

In the spring of my junior year, we received an unexpected invitation in the mail. Derek’s parents had invited my mom and me to his high school graduation party. She asked if I wanted to go, and I shrugged my indifference, playing it cool like any self-respecting seventeen-year-old.

Of course I wanted to go. 

We arrived in the middle of the afternoon. His house and its huge backyard were exactly how I remembered them, minus the swing set. His parents looked different. They looked older, more weathered than I remembered. But their smiles were as big as ever, and they enthusiastically hugged us as we exchanged the usual small talk that people do after not seeing each other for many years. I looked around but was surprised to see almost no other kids my age. 

Finally, Derek’s parents told me the high school kids were downstairs, so I excused myself and went searching for my long lost pal. I recognized his younger sister standing by the pool table with a couple friends, but there were far fewer kids here than I had expected for a graduation party. I eventually found him at his dad’s basement bar, holding court behind it while another guy and two girls sat laughing on stools in front of him.

Woah.

He looked different. His eyes were the same, but his hair was long, greasy-looking, and much messier than I remembered. He wore a black t-shirt featuring the name of a band I’d never heard of. Ripped jeans. Lots of hemp strings and black spiky things on his wrist. Some sort of black choker at his neck. A nose ring. 

“Hey! Thanks for coming,” he said with an easy smile. “It’s good to see you.” 

“Good to see you too,” I said uneasily. He probably has tattoos.

“Want a drink?” he asked. “My dad says the beers and alco-pops are fair game, but he’ll be pissed if we take down any of his nice wine or the hard stuff.” 

I hesitated a moment too long. 

“Or there’s other stuff too, if you’re not into—“

“Beer’s great,” I stuttered. “Thanks.” 

His friends introduced themselves—they all looked similar, with subtle piercings and tattoos and band logos adorning from head to toe. They stared on amusedly as we made awkward small talk. Yep, we’re still in that same house we moved to. Sister is doing well. Yes, Derek’s family still hosts the big New Year’s party every year with the whole family. Remember that time your dad had that huge tree cut down in the yard?   

Later on, Derek’s mom sent him to get something from a store in town. I can’t remember what, but I do remember he and his friends asked me to come with. He tossed the keys to one of the girls who hadn’t been drinking, and the five of us crammed into his beat-up old Chevy. It was rusted red, that shade you only get from years of neglect, and it smelled of exhaust fumes. We drove with the windows down. I sat in the middle back seat while the other four smoked cigarettes, and I vividly remember listening to a punk rock version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow that I had never heard before. 

His friends were nice enough—they looked a little scary on the outside, but they were polite and seemed fairly easygoing. I’m sure they were wondering what some white bread kid with a straightedge haircut and Abercrombie t-shirt was doing there, but they never made me feel judged.

I stared at the new Derek in the passenger seat in front of me and tried to take stock of the situation. He was clearly not what I remembered, but maybe he was exactly what I should have expected. And I was warming up to the idea that it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

New Derek was certainly different, but New Derek was undeniably…cool. He seemed relaxed, more assured of himself than the boy I remembered, the one who would get nervous and look at the floor a lot around other children. This Derek smoked cigarettes, drank fancy alcohol, and listened to obscure music. His friends were interesting too—there may not have been many of them, but it was clear they were a fiercely loyal tribe, and I got the impression they looked up to him. He told me he was planning to go to UCLA to major in cinematography (I had to google cinematography later that day). Most of all, he had this devil-may-care demeanor that struck me as somehow totally authentic. No bullshit. 

I knew all about the imitation brand version of cool you see so often among teenagers—my friends and I had strived at it for years. We were imposter cool, the kind where you dress in stupid teen brand names, act tougher than you are, and treat the high school social hierarchy like it’s something to be conquered and looked down on from above. 

Derek’s version of cool had none of that. Perceptions of social status seemed nowhere near his consciousness. Our type of cool was loud and outspoken. His was so quietly confident it almost went unnoticed. We boasted and bragged. He squinted and smirked. Our cool needed constant validation. His needed only space to exist. 

My memory of the rest of that afternoon has long since faded. I remember my mom and me in the driveway with Derek and his parents. We thanked them for inviting us and promised we’d all keep in touch and get together at some point soon, even though deep down we all knew it would never happen. 

There are moments in life that feel like endings because that’s what they are. And that’s what this was. That book, and its chapter on my greatest friendship, had closed. It had just taken me six years to realize it.  

Many years later, I would find myself in my mid-thirties when I had a dream about him. In fact, it wasn’t the first time this had happened over the years. I guess certain people from our childhood create such a lasting impression that our subconscious still credits their importance well into our adult years. What are our brains telling us? I’ve never believed in interpretations or placed any real significance in the concept of dreams, but even if they are just random patterns of cobwebbed thoughts, in this particular case I was curious. I decided to consult the interwebs to find out. 

It didn’t take me long to find him. Social media’s chief benefit and most damning curse is its ability to find almost anyone at a moment’s notice. I needed to see if New Derek had become the Real Derek. Adult Derek. 

In his profile picture, he wore white face paint along with a red velvet corset, fishnet pantyhose, black platform boots, and a red & black print cape. It was evidently taken during a stage production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

His other pictures and posts were varying degrees of normal and, well, Derek. He likes dogs with narrow faces and lots of whiskers. He wears fedoras, and sometimes his hair is pink with large earrings, but other times he’s wearing a tie and could pass for an accountant. He’s still very close to his mother, and he recently took her to get her first tattoo. He gained a decent amount of local notoriety as a highly regarded mixologist and bartender, and in his mid-twenties he suffered a nearly crippling bout of depression. He still owns a clarinet. 

Five years ago, Derek got married. His husband is one year older than him and looks totally normal, a somewhat stocky man with a beard and glasses. They collect vinyl records and drink red wine together. They post about politics, fight Neo-Nazi groups online, and rail against the patriarchy. They support drag shows, collect weird sculptures, and attend fundraisers for artists with disabilities. They enjoy the symphony, and they go to film festivals together. They like a wide variety of indie flicks, but horror movies are their favorite. They appear to be madly in love. 

Of course, none of that may be true. It could all be a carefully crafted production, a less-than-accurate reflection of his life. And the skeptical part of me says it’s probably a sanitized, overly positive portrayal of a happy home. That’s today’s online world—highlight the gloss, skip over the messy stuff. 

But a bigger part of me knows it’s true. X-Men taught me that. 

It took me years to figure out why our games were so different than other kids—I used to chalk it up to a perfect mix of two stellar imaginations, but that was naive. Looking back, it was obvious that Derek was the driving force in all our campaigns. He was always the one creating plot complexities and building interesting new storylines. He loved playing the role of the villain, because it meant he got to setup the game and play it by his own unique set of rules. My job, as the good guys, was simply to negotiate and overcome the challenges he had so carefully laid out. I think that’s why he never wanted to take turns. Why be a hero when you can be a god? 

It never bothered me much. I was just happy to be included in his orbit. And the truth is I miss it, even all these years later. 

Sure, I could reach out to him. We live halfway across the country from each other, but technology has made reconnecting easier than ever. Maybe we’ll catch up again someday. We’ll make awkward small talk about growing up in that little neighborhood, strive to find common ground discussing the ways our lives turned out similar, and politely ignore the many more ways we’re different. 

Maybe it will happen one day, but probably not. And that’s okay. 

I just needed a little reminder of what it looks like. A reminder that unapologetic authenticity is far more valuable than faux heroism. A reminder that sometimes stepping into someone else’s worldview is the only way to truly discover your own. And that the stupidest thing in the world is to live your life by someone else’s made-up rules. 

No bullshit.