Of Album Sleeves, Young Love and a Dead Friend

His parents fled Fidel Castro in the early 1960's. We met in fourth grade, 1968. Forty-one years and I still remember we liked the same girl that year. After school we sometimes walked together, Humberto turning down 22nd Street, me on to 19th. I remember a birthday party at his house around this time, his mother's dogged insistence on Spanish spoken in the house and Humberto Sr.'s quick wit. I also developed a crush on his big sister the moment I met her. These memories are precious to me.

Seventh grade stormed upon us, a whirlwind of new friends, higher interest in sports, music and girls. A conversation about Bachman - Turner - Overdrive's stuttering on the song You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet and Elton John's Bennie and the Jets lead to a lifetime connection between Humberto, myself, a wonderful girl named Dawna and a record preserved in a white paper sleeve with no cover. Even after these forty-plus years, even after these fifteen years since his death and certainly after all the life I've worked through, the connection remains vivid, bittersweet and special.

Christmas 1974. Humberto and I decided to exchange gifts. BTO's album climbed Bert's personal-favorite chart like an Apollo rocket. I loved the Stylistics (I'll go into why in a moment) and I knew he preferred the stiffer rock-n-roll. After making the purchase, I took BTO's album out of its cover and slipped it in my The Best of the Stylistics cover. I wrapped it and gleefully handed it to Humberto one cold December day. With his entire family looking on, he opened the gift, checked out the album cover and graciously thanked me.

At his families prodding, he pulled the album out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable. A familiar grin spread across his face, a smile that all his friends knew and loved. I got him. The moment still gifts me his smile.

The Stylistics. A couple years earlier that girl (Dawna) we both owned crushes on and I were to meet at a seventh grade sock hop for a date. Fear ate at my heart like a starved piranha. All night as music bounced around the school cafeteria, strobe lights flickered and diffuse colored lights lent magic to the room, I avoided Dawna. I feared my mouth would say something stupid. No girl on this planet sailed the seas of my heart like Dawna. Finally, the call for the last dance came and two friends literally shoved us together. We slow danced to the Stylistics' You Are Everything.

.

She swayed in my arms - MY arms - and the world stopped. The rotation of our planet had to have stopped. No other explanation would satisfy the reason for the dizziness, tingling through my arteries and veins - through my nervous system - through my brain and straight from my heart. Thirty-nine years later I cannot listen to You Are Everything without thinking of Dawna. And Humberto. He never returned my Stylistics album cover. I'm glad.

Humberto could be described as a young man with integrity and class. Of course, I would never have described him as such in high school. I would have said that he was a good friend. Life teaches you what integrity and class requires of a person and how to recognize this trait in others.

Fast forward a couple years to high school. Humberto, our friend Tom and I are fourteen. Tom and I throw Charleston Gazette newspaper routes at 1:30am every morning. One snowy Saturday, Humberto spends the night at my house and goes on the route with Tom and I.

We swipe my father's station wagon and tool around South Charleston. We decide it's time to go throw the route and go home but we need gas, so I let Tom drive (I was afraid I couldn't unlock the gas cap and the gas station attendant would notice our age due to my fumbling around). Tom filled the tank and headed for home.

Everything would have been fine except Tom was unfamiliar with the brakes on my father's car. We were on McCorkle Avenue, a four lane, behind a truck with a camper on the back. The truck was going too slow for Tom's taste and he decided to pass. As he pulled around the truck, a red light greeted us with and accusing glare. Tom hopped on the brake like he would his own father's car and we skid to a stop, side-ways, directly under the light.

Across the street, headed the other direction? Of course, a South Charleston police officer. We were pulled over, my father was called (he had to walk over a mile in the snow to get to us) and we were released to his custody, no charges. Tom's parents were called, but Humberto was pretty much let off the hook. It was determined this whole affair was me and Tom's machination, which it was.

The next morning, when Humberto went home, he told his father everything. I don't know if I would have done that, especially knowing my father's reaction. Humberto did not hesitate. I'm not saying Bert was a saint, but at that age to be that honest remains one of my strongest memories of my friend.

In Spanish class our sophomore and junior years he taught me how to curse fluently. I still don't understand why Mrs. Melton allowed us to sit together two years and in the back of the class to boot. I'm not sure he ever learned to conjugate verbs and I certainly cannot speak Spanish well at all, but we had a lot of fun flirting with Christina and Judy, two upperclassmen majorettes that sat in front of us. The girls all looked at Humberto as cute. His dark Cuban eyes, dashing good looks and quick wit attracted them. His only shortcoming was his height. He was not tall.

His father, Humberto Sr., possessed a wit that amazed me. The man tickled cleverness with his tongue anytime he opened his mouth. He played basketball with the gang and he made the game more entertaining with his heavily accented trash talk. He would say something hilarious and as soon as you laughed he would steal the ball or shoot or pass to an open man. The funny thing was, he got away with this often. Humberto Sr. was my favorite father out of all my friends' dads.

I was a very shy kid all the way through college. The summer between our junior and senior years of high school, Humberto went through a growth spurt. All the sudden, he came to school nearly six feet tall. Now he was tall, dark and handsome, full of integrity and had a quick wit as well. We drifted apart. We still hung out on occasion, but his popularity skyrocketed and I did not handle attention well.

Even though we ran in different circles that senior year, a couple things stand out. One was the mount of trust the two of us still had and the other was his insight into my ability to write which I wouldn't be conscious of until my sophomore year of college. The incident that still brings a smile to my face occurred fairly early in the year. Girls were swooning over Humberto which caused no small amount of jealousy on the part of myself and some other friends. In the hallway between classes one day, Humberto asked me to write a love poem for him because in his words, "you're really good with words."

In those days, math was my forte`. I have credited my English professor in college for my love of writing due to her recognition of my abilities, but Humberto had seen this in me in high school. For him to ask me to write this poem is still an honor. Even then I felt good about myself because this dashingly attractive friend asked me to take on this writing task. My first thought, and I remember this clearly, was to say, "Humberto, the only poem you need is the word 'hello', because as soon as you speak, these girls' eyes light up." I didn't say that, of course. I wrote the poem. Now, all these decades later, I would love to see what I wrote. I know how my writing has progressed over the years, and I'm certain I'd view the poem as adolescent today, but another part of me wishes for one more connection to my good friend.

Dawna went on to be homecoming queen. She was and still is gracefully beautiful. I never acquired the nerve to ever ask her out, a fact that saddens me to this day. My shyness back then is almost foreign to me now. I could wish to go back and do it over again, but I don't think I would ever trade that dance for anything. That dance with Dawna thrilled me enough to buy the album. The album connected me forever in a poignant way to my good friend Humberto, and despite the bittersweet and melancholy aspects of the whole thing, I can still smile, sigh and remember with passion two significant moments in my life and the two friends who inspired them.

Humberto died about fifteen years ago. Our 20 year class reunion (1997) was somewhat muted by his death. I pulled out my Stylistics album the other day and smiled. Track four on side one, the cover-less sleeve and the smiles that pass across my heart bring back the memory of a good friend and a first love. That's a double blessing