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Other essays on this theme
Essay: "Friendship"by Andrew B.
... On the subject of friendship, once again, I've been luckier than most, despite my fairly demanding definition of 'friend'. You see, if someone shows me a room full of people and says that he invited all his friends to the party, I begin wondering what exactly he means by friendship. To me, true friendship is not very different from love, except for the element of sexual attraction. Love as defined in that famous passage from Corinthians (although I am hardly a Christian): selfless devotion, ultimate sharing of values and goals. You must agree that even under the ideal conditions of free life true friendship is about as rare as true love. If you are very lucky, you may experience it three of four times in a lifetime, with another half a dozen people in your life who almost make the cut. I have been lucky, honored, blessed if you will: I still have a few friends outside and a very good friend inside. A colleague writes me from Kiev, Ukraine, helps out my mother, tells me about his life and his family. I still have a couple of friends in L.A.: I call them a few times a year, we exchange letters, a couple of them come to visit once a year or so. I am engaged in very interesting correspondence with another one of my friends there, and our discussions of game theory, semiology and information science keeps some cogs in my brain from rusting all the way through. I was in love once; she stuck with me through the trial and held on as long as she could, until the first of the nine-month lockdowns turned me into an even more inaccessible specter -- miraculously, she and I remain friends and occasional correspondents. Prison, especially this prison, makes it very difficult to maintain a friendship with a free person, and this makes me admire my friends' dedication even more, with gratitude and humility. As for prison friendships -- well, I am a bit of an oddity here, from cultural and educational standpoint, so you can imagine my amazement when I met a man whom I can honestly call my friend. It's my cellie, Ray. Despite all the differences in age, upbringing (he grew up in various correctional institutions), culture (I've never seen a Roadrunner cartoon), somehow we ended up arriving at the same place at around the same time -- intellectually, psychologically, morally. We met almost six years ago, moved in together soon after that and shared a cell ever since. (By the way, again, contrary to another media image, gay sex is not a part of prison life, at least not since I came to prison. And, in case you are wondering, Ray is my friend and cellmate, not my lover.) You cannot imagine the value of his friendship. It is one of the major reasons why I managed to build a world largely independent of the deprivations of prison, why I am comfortable where I live, and of course why being stuck in a small cell for months at a time with another man isn't quite the hardship it should be for me. We are still different in many ways, but we respect our differences while sharing common interests and ideals. We do law together, and our little " firm" (we are both mail-order paralegals) benefits from occasional division of labor and long, sometimes heated, discussions where every point is tested against the Devil's advocate. We work together, play together, and help each other get over the inevitable bumps on the prison road -- sometimes backing each other up against a threat. And one of these days the system will separate us, either on a mere whim or because one of us would run out of luck and find himself in the middle of a riot or some other problem that warrants transfer. That will be a black day, but there is nothing to be done about the impermanence of being, and when that day comes both of us will be richer and stronger because of the shared years. That, I call friendship. Now make a mental list of your friends and ask yourself with which of them would you be able to spend nine months locked in a room the size of your bathroom. And then, maybe, revise the list.
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