In AGNI 67, lit journal hosted at Boston University, born at Antioch College, there is a Roland Merullo gem, "Visions of Gerard:"
Gerard and I were friends for thirty years, from a September afternoon in 1973 when he broke a tube of toothpaste against the door of my college dormitory room--a typical Gerardian introduction--to a July day in 2003 when he was dying in his bedroom in Arizona. I called that day and happened to catch him in a lucid hour, and we had the last in a long series of talks...
So begins Roland's courageous essay about his best friend and himself. The cracked toothpaste tube has stayed with me since reading it (similar to the toast in In Revere, In Those Days). Walks through the years of their friendship, Gerard's many sufferings and irresponsibilities, Roland's disappointments and persistence, one spiraling down, the other never giving up, Gerard's dependence, R's growing up, their difficulties in connecting.
...There was just too much trouble there, in him, and in slightly diluted fashion, in me. The trouble was like static on a phone line, growing louder as the conversation went on, two brothers laughing and fighting and pointing out the misery in the world, trying, via different routes, to come to terms with the pain inside them, to make contact, soul to soul, or to sustain a contact that had been made, struggling to do what it is that we have been put here to do: sort through the mess in us and learn to love.
That's how it ends. Honest and squirm-making as you (I) see your(my)self. Thanks, again, RM.
Readers: Search over in the next column for posts on "Roland Merullo."
AGNIans: I hope you put this one online.
Update: Turns out today happens to be Gerard's birthday.