It wasn’t until you said my four favorite words and walked away from my car that I realized something was different. “Cough up a buck, you cheap bastard,” you deadpanned, quoting from Reservoir Dogs, a Carlat family film festival staple. You were always kind and courteous to servers in restaurants and insisted that I tip at least 20 percent. I don’t remember what else we talked about, but I do recall how nice you were to our waitress, who was wearing a “trainee” tag. Then you mentioned something about going backpacking in Europe with your cat, Biscuit, or maybe joining the Navy. I knew you were having a rough time and owed a bunch of money to the kind of person no one should owe money to, but you uncharacteristically insisted that you didn’t want my help. We ate soup dumplings and talked about the usual random bullshit-how we were both rooting for Tyrion and Arya to be the last two standing on Game of Thrones and how we both loved new songs by Watsky, Boogie, 2Young, and other names I’d never heard of before your brother Zach, ever the family DJ, turned us on to them-and though you looked exhausted from juggling three minimum-wage kitchen gigs, it felt like just another day. Which I didn’t see coming when we had lunch at our favorite Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles the afternoon before you did what you did.
There was a whole lot of “the worst” those last few years.