My parents were strict.

During my early teen years, I went places with my older brother, who could drive, or—rarely—with a cousin or family friend. If I wanted to do anything with my peers, though, it had to be school-related, which explains why I spent so much time at basketball games and other school events. They were my social outlet.

The first instance I can recall of getting into a car driven by one my own friends and going anywhere without adults was when I was 15, in the hot, drought-scorched summer of 1980, when Marion Eugene “Skeeter” Mallette pulled his pampered and souped-up Chevy Chevelle into my drive, to take me not to some happy, parent-free event, but to the funeral of our classmate, Chris Bollen. On July 4, Chris had fallen out of a boat on Kentucky Lake (boating with friends was exactly the kind of thing you would never have found me doing at 15) and was struck by the propeller. It was days before searchers found her. Neither Skeeter nor I was particularly close to Chris. She was lovely, and had blue eyes of the sort that are now Photo Shopped onto makeup ads, so, even though we shared a table in one class, I doubt she could have called me by name (Skeeter she would know). Still, her death traumatized my friends and me, the first loss of its kind we experienced. Only with reluctance did my dad consent to let me attend the funeral with my good friend, whom he viewed with some suspicion.

My rigid and well-meaning father is long-dead. Chris Bollen’s gravestone, sadly, is sinking into the soft earth at the Stockdale Cemetery on Lick Creek Road. That boss Chevelle is gone too; I know not where, and, presumably, in a few days, I will drive myself to Skeeter Mallette’s funeral.

Though we were close friends all through high school, I could never really be in Skeeter’s inner circle, simply because his lifestyle was too free-wheeling and independent for a boy who lived as I did, with rules, and structure, and lots of parental intervention. I was the kind of popular that would show its value later—well-liked, a little too good for my own good, dependable. Skeeter, who was six months older than I and lived with shocking independence, was the kind of popular that mattered then, which is to say that girls adored him, he knew where all the fun was, and people welcomed him everywhere he went. I thought of him as an adult; I was wrong, of course, but that was how I saw him then. I was envious. Given the social stratification that governed the teen code, I was honored he was my friend at all, but he was. He, in turn, respected my intellect, my loyalty, and my judgement, and, despite his wonderful demeanor, he would have beaten someone to a pulp in my defense.

It is not my intent to eulogize Skeeter Mallette the actual adult; that would be presumptuous. After I went to college we grew apart, and our lives became radically different from one another’s. We got together a few times in 1984, and maybe into 1985. After that, I had U.T., Phi Kappa Tau, my own girlfriends, and a life he knew nothing about and maybe would not have understood. The last real fun I had with him was at our twentieth-year class reunion, in September 2003. I stole the show, because about five minutes before I walked in the door, Leslie told me she was pregnant with Quinn. Skeeter was there to make a fuss and congratulate me, despite having given up on high school just a couple of months before graduation in 1983. He took the G.E.D test instead. It didn’t matter to the class; he was always one of us. Still, I guess I should have seen, way back then in the early 80s, what was happening.

Over the years after 2003, I ran into Skeeter on a few other occasions. Each time, it was clearer that life was exacting a heavy toll. He always acted almost as though I were a celebrity, calling me “Mr. President,” telling anyone who would listen that I was the one who kept him “in line” in high school. This embarrassed me on two counts: I had accomplished little relative to my own early ambitions, and, though no one assigned me the task, I had also failed to keep Skeeter “in line.”

The last time I heard from him was just this past September. Out of the blue, in the dead of night, he wrote me on Messenger, barely intelligible, and called me his “brother.” Then he immediately apologized, fearing that he had hurt me in light of my brother Tim’s death in 2000. I assured him that the apology was not necessary and that I was happy, after more than three decades, for him to call me his brother.

I never heard from him again.

“Marion” Mallette (To us, if he wasn’t “Skeeter,” he was “Eugene.” No one dared call him “Marion” when we were kids. How that change came about I have no idea), my childhood pal from the fourth grade on, died a violent death last Saturday night. The circumstances are bizarre and tragic, and there is no reason to recount them here. The plain truth is I don’t know that much about it and even less about the man he was at the end. I know only that he was always happy to see me; that he thought of me as a dear friend long after we had ceased almost all contact; and that he struggled with a demon he first encountered at far too young an age, and, by all reports, could not vanquish.

I wish I could talk with Skeeter one more time—the kind of serious conversation we used to have at Doherty’s Exxon while he changed tires and pumped gas, and I, probably in the way, stood around in his shadow, amazed at how he earned his own money, made his own social plans, went where he wanted when he wanted, and seemed to do it all effortlessly, never paying the piper. I, who now do all of those things (somehow not enjoying them as much as I thought I would, or as much as Skeeter seemed to), would tell him that graduation mattered; that he was too young to live alone; that a seventeen-year-old maybe should not be out until 3:00 a.m., night after night; and that a happy, healthy “Marion Eugene” could emerge in the future only if young, popular “Skeeter” took better care of himself in the present.

He always listened to me, and that’s what I would tell him.

“Youth,” I am told, “is wasted on the young.”

Wisdom, likewise, is wasted on the old.

K.B.