That was my friend Eric. There was this crazy connection between us from the moment we met. We started as friends and then dated for a while. We didn't break up; things just returned to friendship, and we had random fucks along the way. Other partners came and went, but we always had each other as friends. I spent more time at his place than mine, but we sometimes crashed at mine on the way home from a bar...usually when one of us picked up a twink. We moved in together and shared his house with a lesbian friend. The parties were legendary, and it wasn't unusual to have 60 people show up. It wasn't a success until the police showed up. The six-month age difference between us was a big deal. I was older, so I always received birthday cards that said Happy Birthday, You Old Bitch. Sometimes, we could communicate without words, and when friends were being dramatic, a single look would tell the whole story and crack us up. Then we got our shit together and started our careers. The late-night bar hopping stopped. The lesbian found a man and moved out. There were no more twinks to share. I moved cross country several times, but we still talked on the phone regularly and laughed about old times. Somewhere in those years after I moved, he met someone who wanted to be a tattoo artist, so she bought herself all the equipment and started doing tattoos - without any training or knowledge of sterile protocol. An undiagnosed liver condition, in addition to acute hepatitis from a dirty tattoo needle, killed him days after he was approved for a transplant. He was 41. I have all of these crazy memories of our times together, which exist only with me.