I spent most of High School in Central Park.
Well, to be honest, it was mostly just in my [I would say] final three semesters that had been taken over by a mild depression I liked to call apathy. This is not even wholly true. These days I remember probably only really took place in the spring of my last semester, however the antithetical and anarchic behavior patterns clearly were seeded sometime after I stopped speaking to my father in the early summer of my 16th year.

I hated almost everything the world had to offer and my personal philosophy began to drip with the sort of Nihilism that could only be the product of an increasingly religious household and a severely Jewish high school education. This is where I developed my penchant that bordered on absolute skill for sitting in one spot for hours. This is not to say that for those hours I was not occupied. I mean, mostly I smoked a lot of pot as I let my headphones sing me songs no one else appreciated, or maybe I read, or maybe I spoke of world issues with the kind of bleak sarcasm that always made my friends chuckle. I don’t really remember a winter happening in my senior year. I can remember my very cool Swede bomber jacket that was never quite warm enough and I remember that I let the faux fur collar convince me otherwise, but mostly I remember warm days that begged me to sit idly on the grass.

If I were sleeping with a depressed alcoholic who seduced me one late night after I’d baby-sat her children for, well, drug money, then one might be instantly reminded of the scene in the Graduate where Dustin Hoffman slides idly across his parents pool baking in the sun while the soundtrack plays The Sound of Silence and the montage reveals a distinctively more subversive form of indolence. And this would be a discouraging image of today's graduating youth if I had not also spent these afternoons with my friend Kansas.

All of my memories of Kansas take place in some independent filmmaker’s utopian vision of New York as some sort of beautiful idlers paradise. The birds chirp on cue, it rains only plot permitting and mostly its just nice enough to sit by the river and debate philosophies we neither understand nor really even care about. And usually one of the two of us is holding and thoroughly enjoying a burrito. It may or may not be because we are stoned. Invariably one of the two of us is humming an overly emotional yet never trite indie rock song that just has to be about some sort of love and/or loss.

In dealing with Kansas as a subject matter, I could relay the time we hopped on a train to Washington D.C. for a rock show and how we got a ride back with one of the bands, but sitting silently squinting away our afternoon in one of the Smithsonian gardens after getting high on the great Mall would capture the trip better. I could talk about how our crazy ideas always seemed to work themselves out and how these ideas made for fun New York nights, but these are not at the core of my friendship with Kansas.

There are these moments in my life that no matter who was there are seemingly bound to a specific person. The two are connected cosmically in a marriage between friends and memories to the point where even the noun that becomes time passing bares their face. The afternoons I spent sitting under sun or shade behind the great wall of limestone that surrounds Central Park [and sometimes, when we were feeling cheeky, Riverside Park] all are glazed with roughly rendered Warhol prints of Kansas’s face.

I remember one day in particular. By noon, after 3 hours of solid school, the mass of our classroom’s concrete walls and our religion’s lengthy and obscenely depressing history began to weigh on us. And the sun was shooting off the windows on the top two floors of the one-family upper-east side brownstone that faced our Bible class. If the windows in our classrooms had been designed to open, we could tell that the air outside breathed the kind of fresh that New Yorkers only see on perfect spring days and trips to the Hamptons. I was staring at a girl I would never sleep with and jotting down notes for a poem. Kansas had his head comfortably on the desk until Rabbi Moskowitz yelled, “no sleeping” jarring my loafing friend from his classroom-corner slumber. Rabbi Moskowitz, a holocaust survivor, was on his fourth pass attempting to explain the book of Job, but I was pretending not to notice. I asked to go to the bathroom, and waited outside for the duration of the period talking to two girls from the suburbs who I didn’t care to know and never saw again. Exactly 11 minutes later Kansas found me in the lounge and we walked slowly out of the building like we were Bruce Willis and the building was exploding and we were too cool to care (although not before Kansas made an only half ironic pass at both of my between class conversation partners).
Our first was the only thing that resembles a Korean grocer on the east side. It was a store we like because it was on Madison avenue and its actual name was Gentiles. We also like it because we had found out at some point that year that Gentiles as a respectable grocer was way too posh to card high school kids trying to buy 6 packs of Heineken. Sometimes it was Sam Adams, sometimes, when they had it, Brooklyn Lager. We would never drink the kind of bitter alcoholic water that became a staple of my college years.

Out in the Park we favored the top of Cedar Hill as the base of our operations. Only the people we wanted to could find us there. Cedar Hill was the top of the long sloping lawn that ran from the Park’s entrance at 79th and 5th down and then up to the east side drive. We sat in the spot out and to the left at the top of the hill where a small clump of trees made a very inviting circle that was always partly shaded and partly sunny. That day I was listening to Built to Spill. Or maybe it was the Beach Boys, I don’t remember, but I do recall that Kansas was on a Belle and Sebastian kick after seeing their concert. I saw the concert too, but on a different night. And anyway, I was very in the mood for the childish love songs and off-key guitar solos that always seemed to make me nostalgic for a simple Midwestern (or possibly southern California) life that I don’t think I ever led. When we made our way to the top of the hill I sat, my back against the medium size rock that lived there and had become a sort of pet and rolled a joint. I was in the shade. Kansas sat 3 feet away from me in the sun and preceded to outline a movie short he had been working on that was going to make him great. The film was going to be about 5 high school kids playing Hacky-sac badly with an invisible ball. He said I could play the lead role. Everything Kansas thought of, he always assumed was going to make him great. This I liked, because Kansas had the kind of optimistic views that you could tell came from his unconsciously bleak world-view. And anyway, here on Cedar Hill these things didn’t matter. The kids Inside may have been learning of God’s beauty, but they were not here with us sitting in New York’s April sun. This elitism was also always part of the fun. Anytime Kansas was enjoying himself he would take the time to deem himself cool. He made it seem like we were the only 17 year olds cutting school to drink beer and get high on a grassy knoll. But if there were others, they did not treat the activity with the kind of intent and purpose it deserved.

Kansas gingerly passed back the joint and took out his 5-inch copy of Nausea. He favored pocket-sized existentialism because it he could take it out when he thought girls might be walking by. I inhaled the final coals of my cigarette and took my copy of Goodbye, Columbus out of my backpack flipped to Conversion of the Jews and started half-heartedly leafing through its familiar pages. Kansas looked up from his reading to chuckle and pass me a freshly opened green bottle, I threw the Belle and Sebastian liner notes I had found in his blue Dickies messenger bag back in his direction watching them slide briefly on the low brown grass. We sat like this for what was probably an hour.

Kansas turned to me. “Hey.”

I looked up and lowered the volume of my mostly broken Discman.

“Wanna roll another joint and hike to Burritoville?”