I’m thinking tonight about my friend Sonny from high school. I don’t remember most of the people I went to high school with, but Sonny isn’t the sort of person you forget.
He was, even at that tender age, just completely fried. He had smoked so much pot that his mind was on a kind of permanent bake. Even when he wasn’t stoned, he seemed stoned.
For example…we’d be sitting around on Monday morning discussing a party we had all been to on Saturday night. Sonny would sit and grin, and occasionally he’d add things like, “Oh, that must’ve been cool,” or “Sounds like a great party, man…wish I’d been there.”
And finally, we’d have to tell him, “Sonny, baby, you were there.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, I bet it was a blast,” he’d say.
I used to hang out over at his house, and we’d get wasted and have these deep philosophical discussions (well, they seemed like deep philosophical discussions at the time). One day we proved, logically and conclusively, that the Earth was flat. We even plotted all the arguments that round-Earthers might try to use against us and came up with unassailable responses. It was all watertight and undeniable. We were very clever boys, you see.
I wish I had written all of that stuff down.
I’m trying to picture him as he would be today. I see him living in a shack along the river, a little west of town. Probably he built the shack with his own hands; he worked as a carpenter in VoTech, and he was always clever about things like that anyway. I bet he does random work for people, building furniture, repairing gutters, to pay his meager bills, and spends the rest of his time on books and music and pretty girls sunning themselves on the banks of the James. I see herb gardens in his windows, a small vegetable garden out in front, and a bit of marijuana growing discreetly out back. I see him with a big stupid friendly dog whose color is impossible to guess, ‘cause he’s always covered with mud from the river. I see Sonny sitting on the front porch in a Pink Floyd T-shirt, taking a toke and playing his guitar and diggin’ the sunset over the city, like we always did back then. I don’t know if that’s what his life is like now, but that’s how I picture it. It would suit him.
Anyway, Sonny had this strange habit all through high school of constantly predicting the end of the world. Now, this was during the waning days of the Cold War, so it was at least possible; and Reagan was President and we were pretty sure that he’d push the button in a fit of cognitive dissonance sooner or later anyways. So the end of the world was something we all thought about, kind of casually. We weren’t worried about it…we were living each day as if it were our last, anyway, so the apocalypse wouldn't have mattered much.
Sonny worried, though. Well, I don’t know if it would be correct to say that he worried...on the contrary, he was very serene about it. I’d ask him if he wanted to come over and watch the basketball game and he’d say, very evenly and calmly, “Well, since the world’s gonna end this evening, I don’t think it much matters where we decide to watch the game.”
He was wrong over and over for years, but his faith was never shaken. He would always predict universal destruction very simply and in a very matter-of-fact way, with tremendous conviction.
“Hey, Sonny, there’s a warehouse party" [they were not yet called “raves”] "down on Leigh Street this weekend. You wanna come?”
“Maybe. But it looks like the world’s gonna end tonight, so I’m not making any plans.”
And it was all a big joke to the rest of us. I mean, the first couple of times it could be maybe a bit unsettling (especially if he did it while we were all wasted), but once you got used to it, it was fun. It was just a Sonny thing, you know? And conventional wisdom in our circle said that it didn’t pay to spend too much effort trying to figure Sonny out. He was like a Rubik’s Cube, and you liked him better with his colors jumbled.
In fact, he really became a sort of rallying cry. “Drink, screw, and be merry, for Sonny says that tomorrow we die!” Sorta like that.
So one night, after a couple of years of this, Sonny and I were sitting around his house. I was drinking cheap wine (Sonny liked having me over ‘cause I didn’t smoke up all his pot); he was taking endless bong hits and sipping on his mom’s beer. And I asked him about some event coming up and, as usual, he said that he’d be happy to attend in the unlikely event that anyone was left alive by then.
“Sonny, dude, I gotta ask you this. Why are you always so sure the world’s about to end?”
“It is gonna end. It’s gotta happen sometime.”
“Yeah, but why now? I mean, every day you say we’re all gonna die tonight, and you’re always wrong.”
“But if I keep saying it, sooner or later I’ll be right.”
“What the hell good will it do you to be right after being wrong all those times?”
“Hell, I’m wrong all the time anyways. We all are. Almost everything I’ve ever done or believed in or thought has been wrong. Prob’ly all of it was wrong; I’m not sure. I might never have been right about anything, ever, in my whole life. The things I think I’m right about, those are just the things I haven’t found out how wrong I am about yet.
“But someday the world is really and truly gonna end. And when that happens, it’s gonna be an incontrovertible fact. There ain't gonna be no mistaking it, there ain't gonna be two ways of looking at it, it's gonna be the real true end. And I’m gonna know, right then, absolutely and without any doubt, that I was right about one thing.”
“Okay," I said, "but I still don’t see what good it’ll do you. You’ll be dead. And everybody else’ll be dead, too. What difference will being right make?”
“Sure, we’ll all be dead. But you know what? Everybody else in the world, their last thought is gonna be ‘Oh, shit!’ But me, my last thought…well, it’s prob’ly gonna be ‘Oh, shit!’ too, but mixed in with that will be a lot of satisfaction. For once in my life I will KNOW that I was right.”
That’s pretty silly, really, even though his rationale is similar to that advanced to bolster belief in most major religions. I laughed at him at the time, and I laugh at the story now. It was just Sonny; it was typical of him, really. It was a simple idea taken to fantastic extremes.
But strangely enough I find that, as I get older, I really kinda treasure the memory of that conversation. I’ve come to realize what Sonny somehow had already figured out when we were 16: that we don’t really know anything, that we can’t believe anything, that nothing is absolutely true. It would be a great comfort to me to know for sure, just once, that I was right about anything important.
I’m not gonna go as far as he did. I don’t think the world is gonna end tonight. I’m pretty sure it’s not, in fact; and if it does, I’ll be as surprised as you are. I’ll be out running wild in the streets, maddened by the horror of it, just like everybody else.
Except Sonny. I don't think he'll be scared. And I know he won't be surprised. Wherever he is, he’s gonna sit and stare at the coming apocalypse, and have one more hit, and smile.
