Unfriend

Today I decided to block a friend on Facebook. At this point, I guess I can call him an ex-friend.

We've known each other for as long as I can recall. He and I grew up on the same street about a block and a half away from each other. I can't recall how we came to meet for the first time other than that at that time—the 1960s and into the 1970s—everyone seemed to know everyone else within a couple of blocks of home. He's a year older, went to different elementary and high schools that I did, so we didn't have age or school in common, it was more than likely the overlap of friends.

Regardless, we became pals during high school. He had a 1950s vintage Pontiac or Chevrolet or Buick and I recall him driving us to one of my classmates' party in Genoa, Ohio one weekend, and having to drive home in a pretty thick fog. After high school, we went out drinking together, often to Charlie's Blind Pig near the University of Toledo (which everyone knew as Toledo University—or TU—at the time), or to a pizza joint in north Toledo. In 1973, I believe, he suggested I apply for a job with Commercial Aluminum Cookware in downtown Toledo, where he worked. I was working only part-time at Big Barney Auto Wash, just up the street from home at the time, but it was time to move on, so I applied and got hired.

We worked together at Commercial together for a couple of years-plus (he would retire from there), continued going out drinking together, and regularly golfed together, whether weekly with a bunch of guys from work or just the two of us on the weekend. We go to the driving range fairly often. There was a group of us from our neighbourhood that at one point or another worked for Commercial, also probably at his behest. The bunch of us listened to music a lot together, talked about our new stereo gear, went to concerts and one music festival. All pretty typical stuff that neighbourhood friends do. I became a pretty serious fan of Bob Dylan thanks in large part to having borrowd a copy of his Greatest Hits record from this person, a story for another time.

Pretty much all those relationships fell away, however, when I went off to university in the mid-1970s. I developed new—albeit not particularly long-lasting—relationships while at school; I fell in love a few times (ultimately with the woman I would marry and be divorced by) lived briefly in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Columbus, Ohio, and except for a few years right after getting my degree, I've lived in Michigan and now, California.

Now, I know that I am not the best human being on the planet. I try to be helpful and useful, kind and generous; I endeavour to not purposely hurt people. That said, I know that I have let many people down in my lifetime. One thing that I haven't done, though, is to baldly lie about a friend. But that's what this person did. The lie was work-related.

We were paid hourly to produce cookware, whether spinning pots and pans on lathes, creating baking pans on presses, stamping aluminum with the company name and product number... just a few of the myriad tasks that went on at the factory. I probably spent most of my time trimming the burrs from the edges of saucepan covers. If you worked forty hours a week, you were paid a base wage, but if you worked forty-eight hours a week, the hourly wage went up. I can't recall the specifics, but it was a pretty significant increase from the forty-hour rate to the bonus rate. Our usual starting time was 6:00 a.m., and each day, we would punch in at that time and punch out at 5:00, with an hour lunch usually at noon. I don't recall anyone who didn't opt for the forty-eight- to fifty-hour week. We were given six or seven minutes grace on our clock-in, meaning that if you punched in outside of that grace period, say at 6:08, you were docked an hour. There were many times that coming in late would have meant losing my bonus pay for the week, so I'd call in sick instead. Everyone did this.

One morning, the floor supervisor, Bill, called me into his office. I liked Bill for the most part. He was a golfer and part of the golfing group I mentioned, he played euchre with us during lunch—smoked like a fiend—but he could be a son-of-a-bitch when he put his mind to it, and on this morning, it had come to his attention that someone was punching in other employees' time cards so that they wouldn't get docked, and that somebody had accused me of doing it. I denied doing it, of course, because it hadn't been me. When I asked who had accused me, he told me my, uh, friend had accused me. When, of course, he had been the miscreant.

At the time, I completely severed ties with him. I didn't speak to him for at least a year, despite that I saw him five days a week at work. I can't recall why I lifted my year-long silent treatment, but I did, and things basically went back to normal. I think that the rest of the employees saw us as a Laurel and Hardy or some such inseparable duo since we hung out so much together during and after work hours. We pulled practical jokes together. But the lie should have been a warning.

I missed another sign I probably should have seen at the time. One night, we drove to Bowling Green, Ohio (about twenty miles south of Toledo and where I would eventually go to university) to go to the bars. We must not have stayed too long because on the way back home, President Richard Nixon was giving an address to the nation, which we listened to on the radio. I despised Nixon, who would have been embroiled in the Watergate scandal the night of our little drinking sojourn. I recall mocking almost every single word that came out of his mouth because I knew to the depth of my being that he was a nasty, lying son-of-a-bitch. I was told to shut up. It didn't hit me until recently that he had to have been a Nixon fan, too.

Fast forward to 2015: I helped to organize a reunion at my elementary school. Originally, we had planned it to be just our 8th Grade class, but other classes caught wind of it and wanted to attend. We decided to make it an all-inclusive reunion, allowing anyone who had gone to school at Good Shepherd to come, and almost five hundred people showed up. As did my, uh, friend, who took photographs during the event, which was great because the niece of one of the organizers, who had volunteered, must have screwed something up because I didn't see a single picture she'd taken. As one of the organizers, I allowed him to attend even though he didn't attend our school. But since he lived right across the street, knew so many of the attendees, and had played hockey for years with one of the other organizers, I said OK. It was great to get reacquainted after so many years and to meet his wife. We had already connected on Facebook, but hadn't engaged with each other all that much. We spoke on the phone at length later that year and I learned he'd nearly died due to issues with his heart—the physical one.

Fast forward again to 2024, an election year: I should not have been surprised to find that that he's a Trump supporter. I have family members that are Trump supporters, so it's not like I live in a totally protective political bubble. I guess I was surprised by the vile, ugly, mean, viscious, disgusting, untruthful crap that he would share about Kamala Harris not only to his page, but as comments on my page. I deleted them, of course, just as he deleted my fact-based reminders that he supported a lying, cheating, convicted fraudster, adjudicated rapist, and seditionist. A couple of weeks ago, I changed my share settings so that he couldn't see my new posts, particularly if they had anything to do with the election.

His ugliness didn't end, of course, on election day. Something he shared on his page popped up for me to see (to be clear, this was not something he posted to my page) and I began to question why I bothered staying connected to someone so hateful and hurtful who supported someone so hateful, hurtful, and self-serving who was going to yet again be the most powerful person in the world, who had vowed to hurt people for no reason other than that he could. After a few days of thinking about it, I unfriended him on Facebook. I didn't block him, though. I saw that he "followed" me, which meant that he could comment or Like or see some of what I had previously posted, including a photo I had taken of Kamala Harris when she was running for the Senate in 2016 because he had once commented on that. He was not one to comment very often anyway, so I thought I could just quietly disappear from his feed.

Today, though, he commented on the photo of Harris again. I assume he discovered I'd unfriended him, because it was a nasty comment about me and my choice to live in San Francisco. I didn't even read the whole thing before deleting it, to be honest. I should have done a screencap of it to include here but I decided to get rid of the ugliness before anyone else had to see it. I recall he used the word sissy (or sissified) and something I think was supposed to suggest that I was gay, either because he believes it or that I'd be hurt by it. And it was then I decided that yeah, I'd made the right decision to unfriend him.

And then I blocked him.