Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play
Authors: Danny Wallace
Tags: #General, #Personal Growth, #Self-Help, #Biography & Autobiography, #Travel, #Essays, #Personal Memoirs, #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Essays & Travelogues, #Family & Relationships, #Friendship, #Wallace; Danny - Childhood and youth, #Life change events, #Wallace; Danny - Friends and associates
Also by Danny Wallace
Yes Man
Are You Dave Goreman?
(with Dave Goreman)
Join Me
Random Acts of Kindness
Copyright © 2008, 2009 by Danny Wallace
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2009
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette
Book Group, Inc.
ISBN 978-0-316-08199-3
For Greta
My best friend
And in memory of the
great and loved David McMahon
“If a man has no tea in him, he is incapable
of understanding truth and beauty.”
J
APANESE PROVERB
Contents
Chapter One: In Which We Experience an Earthquake…
Chapter Two: In Which We Learn That
Nobody
Moves to Chislehurst…
Chapter Five: In Which We Learn That Daniel Has Lost His Youthful Menace…
Chapter Six: In Which We Learn That Quite Often, the Truth Is Rubbish…
Chapter Seven: In Which We Learn That Where There Are Acronyms, There Is Hope (WTAATIH)
Chapter Eight: In Which We Discover That for Every Hitler, There’s a Shitler…
Chapter Nine: In Which We Learn That When You Look Back, Most of Your Mates
Do
Work In I.T.…
Chapter Ten: In Which We Learn That Every Day, a Million Coincidences Nearly Happen…
Chapter Eleven: In Which We Learn That Often, the Future Takes Ages…
Chapter Eleven-and-a-Half: In Which We Learn the Power of Persuasion…
Chapter Twelve: In Which We Learn That a Friend Is Worth a Flight…
Chapter Fourteen: In Which We Learn That Hardcore Rap Is Seldom Romantic…
Chapter Fifteen: In Which We Learn That Sometimes Secrets Should
Stay
Secret…
Chapter Sixteen: In Which We Learn That Not Every Thing Can Go Your Way, All the Time…
Chapter Seventeen: In Which We Learn How to Stop…
Chapter Eighteen: In Which We Learn That
No One
Ever Dreams about Cabbage…
Chapter Nineteen: In Which You May Be Surprised to Learn That Daniel Is Not at HOME…
Chapter Twenty: In Which We Learn That It Is Better to Travel Hopefully Than to Arrive Disenchanted…
Chapter Twenty-One: In Which We Meet Someone Unexpected…
“I
think you should get a will,” said the man.
“A
will?
” I said. “I’m only twenty-nine!”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re nearly thirty. Statistically,
most
people die above the age of thirty.”
“
Do
they?” I said, horrified.
“Statistically, yes. Do you own a house?”
“I’ve just bought one!” I said.
“A car?”
“Yes!”
“Do you have a wife?”
“Only a small one.”
“Doesn’t matter. You should get a will.”
“Do
you
have a will?” I asked.
“No,” said the man. “I’m only twenty-eight.”
This was just one of many similar conversations I would suddenly be having on my way to turning thirty, during a time in which
I’d begun to question the way my life was going. I’m not saying I was unhappy—I wasn’t, I was very happy—but I
was
beginning to feel
unnerved.
Growing up is a strange thing to happen to anybody. And it does. To almost
everybody.
And for me, the way to cope with it became quite simple—to look back.
I was worried, when I wrote the following pages down, that you might not be all that interested in the people I met. That
perhaps they might be too specific to me for them to matter to you. But then I realized—the more specific I was being, the
more general everything was becoming… childhood, for example, and adolescence, and hopes and wishes, and friendship, and maturity…
but if
they
don’t strike any chords, there’s a car chase and some ninjas for you, too.
The people you’re about to meet are some of the people I grew up with, in ordinary schools, in ordinary places, in ordinary
times. Wherever possible, and in the vast majority of cases, I’ve kept their names and details real—on those rare occasions
where someone’s asked me to change a name or detail, I’ve done so, and in one case in particular I’ve taken the decision myself,
in the interests of privacy. Sometimes I’ve also had to move a date or event around a bit, but this is just so that you don’t
get bored and fall asleep too easily. I know what you’re like.
Hey, wow—I’ve just noticed—what
excellent
shoes you’re wearing. They really set off your eyes.
This, then, is the story of a summer in my life that came to sum up all the summers of my life, and perhaps prepared me a
little for all the summers to come.
I still don’t have a will, by the way. But I think I
did
find my way.
See you in there.
Danny Wallace
Augsburger Strasse, Berlin
IN WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AN EARTHQUAKE…
T
here are moments in life when you come to question your actions. Moments of outstanding clarity and purest thought, when you
look around you, you take in your environment, you work out what brought you here, and you decide that something is wrong.
For me, it was happening right now.
Right now, right this very
second,
in the middle of a harsh and sparse Japanese countryside, a little over a week before my thirtieth birthday, past a town
I didn’t know the name of, full of people whose names I couldn’t pronounce.
My address book—a battered black address book with just twelve names in; an address book that had taken me around Britain,
to America, Australia and now here—had proved useless this time.
It was four o’clock and I looked around me. I took in my environment. I worked out what had brought me here. And I decided
that something was wrong.
Here I was, standing in a rice field under a mountain in the afternoon sun, a Westerner in the far, far East, wearing grubby
sneakers, mud-flecked jeans and a T-shirt with the face of a small Japanese boy on it.
And I was lost.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out the document I’d brought with me.
I looked at it.
An Investigation on the Influence of Vitreous Slag Powders on Rheological Properties of Fresh Concrete
I stared at it for a moment, then put it away again. It wasn’t helping.
But there—there, in the distance, just beyond a scattering of houses and a girl on a bike, I saw something. A hospital. A
vast, bright white block. This was what I needed.
This
was what I had come for.
Because in that building—in that
hospital
—was a man I needed to meet. A man I had traveled ten thousand miles to shake hands with. A man who went to my school for
six months in the 1980s, who I’d last seen twenty years ago in a McDonald’s in England’s East Midlands, and who had absolutely
no idea whatsoever that I was currently tramping through a Japanese rice field a quarter of a mile away to meet him. A man
whose face I had on my T-shirt.
In the past few months I had met royalty. Rappers. A man who thinks he’s solved time travel. I’d dressed as a giant white
rabbit and I’d fought off a ninja.
And now… now I was going to meet Akira Matsui.
And I was going to meet Akira Matsui whether he liked it or not.
My decision to track down a Japanese man I hadn’t seen since the days of Autobots and Optimus Prime started with a text message,
six months earlier. A text message telling me there was some important news. Important news I could only be told face to face.
I didn’t know it then, but it was going to be quite a week for important news.
I’d recently moved house. Only a few miles on a map, but in London terms I had moved to a whole new world. No longer was I
in the East End—an area I’d lived in for six years, where I’d become slowly and subtly used to the deafening thunder of the
trains and the police sirens reminding you every few minutes that somewhere not too far away someone’s been naughty. I was
no longer living in the shadow of the apartment blocks which hid the sun from me four times a day but stood guard over me
all the same. No longer a short walk from one of the nicest pubs in London, where Wag and Ian and I would spend long and lazy
Sunday afternoons trying to flick peanuts into pint glasses or comparing notes on our important philosophies and ideas. Brick
Lane, with its mile upon mile of curry houses, was now just out of convenient reach. Spital-fields Market, once round the
corner, became somewhere we’d go
next
weekend, rather than this. And, perhaps most harrowingly, I was now no longer within free delivery range of Mr. Wu’s World
of Meat. My world had been turned upside down.
I knew I’d miss it. And I was right. I missed it. I’m just not sure I
knew
I missed it.