A love letter to Phillip

The thing about Phillip is that he was born one month before me and has maintained his lead ever since.

Every Easter our mothers would litter his back yard with sweet shiny things meant to distract us from the true quest. The Hallelujah Egg was our Holy Grail, concealed in the most creative hiding spot that could be imagined by the extreme eccentrics who were raising us. You could have twenty baskets overflowing with chocolate eggs at the end of the day, but whoever found the Hallelujah Egg pretty much won Easter.

Phillip found it every fucking year. He didn't even bother picking up the lesser eggs. When all of the kids were finally released from the kitchen, most of us ran crazed around the landscape of the lawn.  But Phillip paced the perimeter slowly, scoping it all out.  His eyes were on everything.

After he inevitably found THE EGG, the eldest left the scavenging of the remaining booty to the small kids. We shuffled inside where Phillip publicly relished the act of undressing his prize, peeling the bright cellophane from its smooth chocolate body. He cracked it open to pull the cheap plastic toy from its insides, and then abandoned the shards of chocolate in front of us.

The winner of Easter didn't even like the chocolate that the Hallelujah Egg was made of. The tastiest part for him was the victory. That bastard.

I once accused him of winning simply because it was home turf. I said that he probably memorized the placement of every single object before the hunt and simply inspected the ones that had a look of being handled after the adults went out and made the magic.

I was just trying to make myself feel better. The truth is that Phillip is more alert than I am, and always has been.

The photo albums on my shelves are full of him growing up. Our mothers had been best friends since they were teenagers, which made us best friends by proxy. In half of my childhood pictures my features are made even muddier by proximity to Phillip's glowing angel-face.  Me: freckled, brown, compact and sneering. Him: blue Austrian eyes, a soft pink mouth, an expression of benevolence. For every picture of me scowling at my brother or screaming from the top of a swing, there is a photo of him sitting calm and intelligent, his focus honed on some point maddeningly out of view of the camera. He was a beautiful boy.

The last Easter in that era was when we were 16. Phillip's mother had announced that she was a lesbian two years earlier and her new girlfriend busied herself circling the house, compulsively taking photos. Everyone sort of knew this was it. Our collective siblings were aged 14, 12, and 11 and in the last stages of growing disinterested as far as egg-hunting went.

At the time I was really into tracing the shape of my lips in black eyeliner then shading them with red lipstick. I wore my hair straight down my back with curled bangs above my overly plucked eyebrows. I looked like a Puerto Rican girl who had spent the last decade away from the sun and any kind of fashion news.

Phillip's hair had come in brown. He wore it straight and greasy to his chin like every other boy in those years who had learned to skateboard because grunge was big before they could drive.

I was overjoyed to be finished growing at 5'8" and he was praying for a little bit more to top off his 5'6". None of us thought he was ever going to get there.

What was most bothersome was not our shared ugliness (and all of the work we had put into being that unattractive), but rather the attendance of his first girlfriend, who was not at all ugly and who did not even try to be. In fact, she was perfect in her loose blonde curls and her tight pink sweater. You're getting it now: he always got the best prizes.

After the chocolates had been hunted and his youngest brother had triumphantly found the Hallelujah Egg (ensuring that the dynasty lived on), Phillip announced that he was dropping out of High School and moving to Europe to be a jazz musician.

And if you believe it, Phillip left his high 1500's SAT score, his offer at MIT, and his lifelong friend, and he did just what he said. For years, he was gone. 

I finished High School and went to college.  Easter fell out of fashion. I heard rumors about Phillip from time to time. His younger sister moved into Manhattan while I was living there and I visited her a handful of nights, each time towing along a couple of guy friends who all panted over her. She told me he had moved back home, gotten his GED, gotten into college, left college, gotten into drugs, got back out of drugs, and so on. She showed me a picture of him at 21 and it was shocking. His hair was short and the rest of him had gotten tall and he was still a beautiful boy, except that he was a beautiful man.

Two years went by without me blinking, it seemed like.

My mom called to tell me that she had just gotten back in touch with Phillip's mother, and could I believe it but they still have the same phone number after all these years? I believed it. Part of my mom's self-rehab program seemed to be contacting her friends from more joyous times and seeing how well they had kept up with happiness, that long-legged thing.

She spoke of Phillip like he was her own lost son, lamenting softly but fondly about the failures that failed to defeat him, then gushing about his latest accomplishments. These turned out to be living and teaching for two years in China, returning to college, and moving in with his sister in Manhattan. I immediately ended the call with my mother, scrolled through my cell phone, and dialed that apartment.

While the phone was ringing, I set myself up for disappointment. It had been at least 7 years, a handful of failed relationships, and two dozen countries since we saw each other last. He would be aloof and disinterested. Worse, he would be stupid and boring. Worst, he'd struggle for a memory of me and come up grasping only an image of my black lips and veil of dark hair made more macabre in an ocean of round pastels and happy wrapping.

We spoke for two hours, and the years pulled back like orange slices. 

The following weekend, back in 2005, my cousin and I sat down with Phillip at his kitchen table.  We proceeded to drink whiskey and smoke enough cigarettes to lend the room a soft sort of filter. It was in the light of secondhand (and firsthand) smoke that I admired my oldest friend and fell back in love with him.

Phillip at 23 was fiercely intelligent with the dry delivery of a young Christian Slater. He dressed as though he had raided his Professor father's closet -- brown slacks belted around neat hips, a couple shirts of varying muted earthtones, and a soft tweed blazer that had actual patches on the elbows.

He spoke slowly but passionately, and I found myself agreeing with him with alarming regularity. As an experiment I tried disagreeing with him, and I even found that to be a rather pleasant experience.

Phillip said that he was going back to school to get his PhD, and I believe he that will do it someday as surely as he played saxophone across Poland. But at the time he was working one night a week at a bowling alley distributing worn-out size 10s to dads and 5s to kids who refuse to put the bumper up.  Somehow I found this not repulsive or pathetic (as would be with other men), but admirable and fascinating.

(And let me just mention that when he delivers a speech or a joke, he looks at you through those same clear Austrian eyes and lenses of such understated sophistication that you would also be inclined to call them spectacles instead of glasses.)

We have seen each other many times since then.  But it was on the night of that first reunion two years ago, as we traveled the city and got drunk enough to make bumping together a common occurrence, that I learned about how my oldest friend is the owner of delicious cologne, a shameless singer of karaoke, a charmer of strange crowds, and the perfect man.

The thing about Phillip is that I was born a month after him, and I have loved him ever since.

Comments

[kelsi]

this is really, really, really beautiful. is that enough "really"?
it's the best kind of love letter, too, one which allows a bit of the darkness to creep in around the edges.
lovely.

[meg]

Jesus, you're good.

I'm kind of in love with both of you right now.

[littlewhiteliar]

Aw, and to think I almost didn't post this because I thought it had too much of a "sentimental vagina" vibe going on. Thanks ladies, loving you as always.

[Matt]

I looked like a Puerto Rican girl who had spent the last decade away from the sun and any kind of fashion news

Nice.

[MeMa]

I am a Puerto Rican girl who has spent the last decade trying NOT to look like I spent the last decade away from the sun. The fashion missed us in PR. Go figure.