Will Schwalbe and Chris Maxey got together in the summer of 2012 to celebrate their 50th birthdays at a restaurant in the West Village. They were old friends from Yale University. You understand, Maxey said. “I had two things I wanted to say to you. Happy birthday, first. You’re a freakin’ s-thead, too, I should add. Schwalbe was shocked, but Maxey persisted.
“You’re an s-thead because you never say that when I say ‘I love you, brother,’ you know? Simply say “Bye” or nothing at all.
The two, who are now in their early 60s, did not exactly have a traditional connection, as Will Schwalbe writes in “We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship” (Alfred A. Knopf).
Schwalbe, a bookworm from New England who worked at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis center in New Haven, Connecticut, where they both went to college, had a hairdo reminiscent of Prince, an appearance that was ripped off from Adam Ant, and several pictures of Matt Dillon on his wall. Meanwhile, Maxey was a well-known wrestler from Berwyn, Pennsylvania, who had his heart set on joining the elite Navy SEALs following graduation. The jocks and I were moving in opposite directions but not colliding, like planets in different orbits. The author of “The End Of Your Life Book Club,” a 2012 best-seller, writes: “I thought that if we did, I would be annihilated.
In Schwalbe’s junior year of college in 1983, they first connected at a covert Yale society that provided free food and beverages, a pool table, and cable TV. The society’s objective was to gather the 15 most diverse children they could locate so they could interact with others who weren’t like them.
When they first met, Schwalbe wasn’t impressed.
Maxey was the most vocal one of us. He was consuming copious amounts of alcohol while taking up space and knocking stuff over, the author adds. The high fives, the immediate nicknames, and the questions about everything he asked everyone were all signs that he was trying much too hard, which I thought to be a little excessive.
I would move to a different area of the hallway whenever he did.
The beer described before served as a kind of “lingua franca” for the two guys as they eventually warmed up to one another. When Maxey offered a drunken Schwalbe a lift back to New Haven on his Yamaha 850 motorcycle known as The Bitch, their relationship was solidified.
For once, I wasn’t overthinking anything since the journey itself was so thrilling and dangerous. My identity. I had no idea who I would turn out to be,” says Schwalbe. I was only a passenger on the back of a motorbike being driven by a daring jock who wanted to push his vehicle to the limit but didn’t seem to want to perish at the time.
The two would often drift away as their careers diverged in the decades that followed Yale, sometimes lasting as much as a decade without speaking to one another.
Nothing had changed between us; we had just let a few weeks without speaking to one another to evolve into a few months, then into years, according to Schwalbe.
There is a lot of fun as the book progresses over the decades, but there is also a lot of sadness as well.
Schwalbe’s narrative is also viewed through the pervasive dread of AIDS, which was a concern for homosexual men in the 1980s and 1990s. Schwalbe met David Cheng, the man who would become his spouse, while residing in Hong Kong in the middle of the 1980s, despite the fact that homosexuality was illegal there and the maximum penalty was life in prison. The illness caused him to lose many friends.
In the meanwhile, Maxey, who had established the Island School in the Bahamas’ Eleuthera island, was mourning his own losses, including the drowning death of one of his son’s closest friends, who was 12 years old.
Maxey had lost his biological father, who was 28 at the time, to a brain tumor when he was a little child. In 2016, Maxey also received the news that he had a tumor of his own. The removal of this tumor took six hours, and Maxey was left with a six-inch scar that ran from his ear to his neck.
Schwalbe had moments when he believed they may never talk again.
However, Maxey’s near-death experience had altered their ground rules, and they now spoke once a week. “I realized then that for the previous thirty years of my acquaintance I had always thought I needed an excuse or a cause to contact Maxey,” Schwalbe writes.
Schwalbe was also susceptible to illness.
Small fiber neuropathy, a persistent neurological disorder that may impact everything from digestion and glandular function to breathing and circulation, was identified in him in 2018. No, he didn’t tell Maxey.
Maxey phoned him in May. He said, “I’m pretty angry with you. I have often asked you how you are doing, but you never respond. So that’s sort of BS, I suppose.
In that instant, Schwalbe, who had been by Maxey’s side throughout his brain surgery, saw that what he had previously mistaken for stoicism was really just selfishness on his part. “He had exposed all of his vulnerabilities to me. I had trusted him with nothing, even though I was struggling with some of the same worries at the time,” he says.
The next year, while the two were still struggling with their recoveries, Schwalbe paid a visit to Maxey in Eleuthera. They sat on a wharf, enjoying beers while gazing out at the ocean. Maxey said Schwalbe goodbye once the event was ended and added, as he often did, “Love you, man.”
Schwalbe yelled after him as he ran off. I adore you as well, Maxey.
After knowing Maxey for over 40 years, “that was the first time I’d ever stated that,” he writes.
And for the two of us, just having each other and breathing at that very time was wonderful.
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