Chris Pardino

Cafe Wyrd, Mpls

Chris Pardino and I met when I was eighteen. I was working part-time while attending college in a caged hat kiosk within the center of the downtown Minneapolis Gaviidae Common Mall. The job afforded me ample time to make personal phone calls and wear $300 Eric Javitz hats.

Chris was the all-American and blonde front desk concierge.  Everyday he would flash me his perfect toothpaste commercial smile as I would duck hurriedly in the mall -- hoping my tardiness blended itself unnoticed within the muffled waterfalls and expansive marble. One day, Chris gleefully bounded toward my kiosk with unusual purpose, smiling his smile and wearing the navy blue “GC” uniform blazer awkwardly on his wiry frame:

“Hi-eye! I'm Chris!"
Instantly, I was blinded by red lips, white teeth, and electricity-charged blue eyes -- a human canvas of the all-American flag.

"Patrick called the front desk again. I told him you were in the bathroom…"
(High-pitched, goose giggles ensue)

"You’re always late!" This was our very first exchange.

“Well, don’t worry - if he calls looking for you, I’ll just say you’re in the bathroom.”

With a wink and a sort-of skip, Chris was gone and we were instant-friends. I can't believe this happened almost 20 years ago.

Shortly after we met, Chris and I crossed the line to best-friends-friends. I remember his cramped, eclectic and comfortable studio apartment in Loring Park, complete with piles of Details and Esquire magazines, cheap drugstore make-up (“Just in case”), eighties New Age dance music and random ladies high heels, size eleven. Out of nowhere, he would ebulliently jump up from his seat and dance around maniacally and make me underage cocktails, while I chain-smoked his Camel lights at the fold-up card table by the window. To me, Chris was exoticism exemplified: he was The Cure! Duran Duran! Boy George/Culture-Club-cool! He ran rampant in a world that my comfortably-middle-class and suburban, Caucasian-homogeneous upbringing could never offer. I followed him to gay night clubs and gay coffee houses (Cafe Wyrd) where he would disdainfully point out the dirty-old men circling the young, newly-out, boys.  I would sit in his apartment and drink his homemade more-vodka-than-cranberry juices and eat his spaghetti-from-a-can with gusto. It was all blissful and fun.

Chris was my first friend of adulthood and in retrospect and pride, I was the only girl allowed in his gay-boy Brat Pack. Sure, there were other girls he preened and chummed with, but none of them were one-of-the-boys or insider-insiders. I remember vividly...Chris, Jason, Sage and I: meticulously under-dressed in flattering white tanks and baseball caps; flush with suntans, cocktails and gaiety in the back of a taxi cab, heading toward the blinking theater lights on Hennipen Avenue. "We are thin and gorrrr-geous!" was our spontaneous, ever-obnoxious rant. 

 Our cab driver glared at us in the rear-view mirror, clearly disturbed and miserable. 

We didn't have a care in the world.

Years later, we would laugh about how I naively thought he was into me when we first met as I would console him on his abusive and married on/off boyfriend, Jim, and he'd put make-up on my unsuspecting, sleeping, and in Chris’ words, “beefcake” ex-boyfriend-almost-husband, Andrew, as I placidly watched, eating Doritos. We were inseparable for seven years.

As all loved ones of addicts do, I struggle to put together the pieces and the dates. When the hell did my friend, the humanitarian, effervescent and caring person who rode his bike religiously and performed yoga headstands in the living room begin to fall apart and mold into the red-eyed, nasty, mood-swinging, mad man who would not get out of bed? When do socializing and drinks and friends and fun morph into the lonely and alienating ill abuse of alcoholism/addiction? When, oh when, did he ever have the chance to sneak the vodka bottle out to spike his morning coffee, as I sat beside him, wearily eating egg whites?  And since when did booze and drugs make him hate/throw away a corporate insurance career that he so pridefully got licensed for?

 I was blind to it all, apparently. There were destructive patterns, of course: The taste for unattainable, inexcusable men; the high/low energetic spurts with no follow-through or in-between; the family who could provide an endless supply of six-packs and not much more. The utter loneliness masked with countless friends and going-outs...

But Chris was gone before he was gone.  Years later, I discovered beloved CDs missing: desperately and numbly sold for crack, cocaine, whatever. I saved the handwritten note over-pouring on the errant envelope, haphazardly explaining his utter contempt for our friendship due to his addiction, and his unrelenting pain in feeling it so helplessly. 

Chris left The Loft, our last apartment, together, in the first of many treatment attempts. His belongings were moved out by unseen hands and his phone was turned off. I was forced to give up our once-in-a-lifetime, inexpensive luxury apartment with exposed brick and whirlpool (!) in the pre-bustling Minneapolis warehouse district. It was the beginning of the end of things and our friendship.

A couple of months later, there was the one and long-awaited call made from a pay phone: The hour-long confessional complete with tears, recounting the good times and bad; the "I’m sorries" - thorough and clear.

Chris then again, disappeared, and that time, I erased him completely.  We had our closure and frankly, he had put me through the ringer.  I had nothing left to give: I couldn't be anxious or disappointed each and every time I heard from him in a good moment; he refused to be medicated or finish a treatment program, so bad things inevitably followed.

A couple of years later, I ran into Chris on a downtown Minneapolis street, exactly two weeks prior to my New York departure. I remember being irritated by his airy nonchalance of what was to be the biggest step ever made in my life; no more run-ins, no more nothings.  I was moving... and he just breezed by. Eye-level, one could see the red eyes, mottled skin. He was just high.

My biggest regret is that I didn't get to see the original face I remembered when we parted. Or the bounce in his step.  Nor hear the goose laugh that made all laugh.

I never saw him again.