Butch

25 years ago, death slapped me right in the face.

I don’t know how else to describe the life-changing moment when I learned that a dear friend of my family, the father of one of my best friends, had suddenly died.

His name was Thomas Guthy, but my parents and I knew him simply as Butch.

His passing was a profoundly disturbing moment in my young life. Until that time, I had only experienced the passing of people whose time had come. While their losses certainly caused great sadness, in many cases it was expected. They had lived long, full lives that had reached their natural end.

Butch was cheated. At 44 years old, he had so much more ahead of him. He had so much love to give his wife, so much more to teach his son and so much laughter to give his friends. We were all cheated.

I was nearly 14 when Butch died, and his loss affected me more than anything else up to that point. I became acutely aware of my own mortality and, more importantly, that of my parents. I was crippled by the notion that my father or mother could die, and when two more fathers died within the next two years, one as young as Butch, I was literally terrified it would happen to mine.

I can’t believe it’s been 25 years since we lost him, and now I find myself not quite as old as he was when he passed, but I can see it on the horizon. I find myself thinking about him a lot more now, and I felt it was important, especially in this year, to take a moment to remember this good man, and not just that intensely sad moment when we lost him.

Who was Butch? He was a husband and a father, a son, a brother and an uncle. He got his nickname from his trade, one he worked very hard at, one that sometimes betrayed him despite his excellence with it. To my family, for the decade that we had the pleasure to know him, he was a dear and loyal friend.

What do I remember about Butch after so much time without him? He was short and stocky, with a slight Fu Manchu style mustache, and in the years I first knew him, I was a little intimidated. While he could be soft spoken, he was not a man to be trifled with. I glimpsed him in moments of anger, like when he was mad at his son, and always knew it was time to go home when he bellowed Eddie’s name (“Ed-WARD!!!”) But in all reality, he was a pussycat to those he loved.

Butch worked hard to support his family, and wanted his son to have nothing but the best. I remember how hard he worked to please Eddie, to make his life easy, and give him the things that all young boys want.

It is true Butch intimidated me at first. One afternoon that all ended and he became the coolest Dad ever. I was watching television with Eddie (a common custom) and Butch joined us. I got a little tense, maybe thinking I didn’t belong, that I was infringing on his relaxation time. He asked me what was wrong, and told me he wasn’t going to bite. That was it. We were cool. Nobody else’s Dad assumed that level of familiarity with me, joked around with me, or made me feel as welcome.

When my parents and I moved to Mineola, the Guthys were already there. We had no friends, and there were very few young couples for my parents to associate with. When Eddie and I started school, our mothers met (how exactly I couldn’t say). They became fast friends and soon introduced our fathers, and again an instant connection was made. The Guthys were like the pied pipers of fun, and they welcomed my parents with open arms.

What do I remember most about those days? Laughter. Raucous, hysterical laughter. When our parents got together, either as a foursome, or in larger groups, that’s all I heard. When you consider they didn’t know each other all that long, it amazes me how quickly they bonded. They got along so well that we vacationed together two years in a row, and of all the trips we took with other families, those were the best.

The Guthys insisted I call them by their first names. They welcomed me into their home as frequently as I was able. They cooked meals for me, allowed me to sleep over, encouraged my friendship with their son in every way possible.

My relationship with Eddie was not as immediately wonderful as that of our parents. We were like oil and water, and while we had our good moments, in those early days, we had more bad ones. We argued. We brawled. We had two completely different sets of friends, but we had enough common interests to link us together and keep the friendship going as we matured.

As grammar school was coming to an end, Ed and I started becoming closer and seeing past our petty differences. There was something inexplicable to our relationship, but we fed off that. Our differences made us stronger. We still argued fairly frequently, but that did not define us. We were bonding over a love of just talking about anything and everything. That would carry us through the tragedy ahead.

One late June afternoon, I was watching television as my mother went about her chores. School was out, and I was learning how to use my cool new VCR that I had gotten as a graduation present. The bell rang and, after a moment, my mother emerged from the foyer, crying inconsolably. I immediately asked what was wrong.

Butch was gone. He died suddenly that morning after a massive heart attack. A dear friend of the Guthys had come to tell us the awful news. She left after a few moments, leaving my mother and me in stunned silence. It was about noon. I asked if she would call my father and she opted to wait for him to come home.

As we waited, I realized that every preconception I had about life was shattered. Some people did not live to old age. Life was not fair. In fact, it really sucked. How would I face my friend? I was 14 years old. I could barely process this information, much less be supportive of him. I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. I only saw Butch a day or two before, washing his tricked out 80s van that we rode together in to Washington D.C. How could he be gone?

When my father arrived, he knew something was wrong immediately. The fact that I was downstairs with my mother and not in my room playing video games was an immediate clue. We were somber, and my mother could barely compose herself as she told him the bad news.

My father’s instant reaction was anger. All he could say was, “That is terrible,” over and over again in the tone of voice usually reserved for chastising his students. It was almost as though he was chastising God for doing something as stupid as a teen-ager would do without thinking.

We went to see the Guthys later that day. It was a surreal moment to be in a house so often filled with laughter now so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. By the time I saw my friend, he was tired of all the endless phone calls and visits from people expressing their sympathy.

The days that followed were equally surreal and equally difficult. I will never forget the principal of our grammar school, who despised Ed, trying to offer clichéd words of consolation to him at Butch’s wake. We both broke out laughing when she walked away, and it broke some of the tension.

The day after the funeral my mother asked me when she thought I would hear from Eddie. I figured maybe a month. He called the next day, and I went over, not really knowing what to expect. His mother, despite all the hell she had been through that week, put on a brave front as she slogged through paperwork and other nonsense, and appeared just as happy to see me. At the wake, she said to me, “He needs you.” I took that very seriously. In that moment, maybe I started to grow up a little.

Over the next three years, our friendship intensified to a level that I could never have envisioned. It’s not as though we talked about Butch constantly. He came up from time to time. He was a presence in that house and I never had to be shy about saying his name. Ed and I were always with each other, and while our lives were already starting to follow wildly different paths, we still had that bond of communicating about everything as mundane and superficial as movies and music, to something as profound as what the future held for both of us.

In 1987, Ed moved to Florida with his Mom and grandparents, and it was devastating for me, partially because I was losing someone so important, but also because I had so much invested in him that I had ignored other areas of my life. In the end, it had some positive value because I needed to start living my own life, instead of living vicariously through his. I started growing up when Butch passed, and I grew up even more when his son left.

Over the years we visited. Ed moved back to New York and then back to Florida. Like his father, he faced challenges and hardships in his own life, and like his father, he battled, and never gave up when it came to supporting his family. Ed grew up without a father, and lost Butch when he needed him most, but he became a son his father could be proud of, and more importantly, he became a father his father could be proud of.

If I had my way, Butch would have lived to see his grandchildren, and somehow his son would still have met and married the same girl (who he only met because he moved to Florida), and that we would have become just as close, without having Butch’s passing be the defining moment of our friendship.

Who was Butch? Butch was the guy who told my Dad he was “knocked off the throne” when a local garden center exploded in the middle of the night (they both met to see what happened at two in the morning). He was the guy who could make my mother hysterical just by looking at her. He was the Cub Scout leader and baseball coach. He was the Dad with all the cool toys. He was the guy who drove Eddie and me to a comic store ten miles away when we asked on a moment’s notice, who took us to Toys R Us and movies all the time.

Some people reading this might think it’s a bit strange for me to be writing about Butch. He wasn’t my Dad. He wasn’t my uncle. We weren’t related. All I can say is, that when you grow up the way I did, without much extended family, friends take on an entirely new meaning. The Guthys saw that and brought us, especially me, into their family.

Butch wasn’t just my friend’s Dad. He was my family’s dear friend.

I loved him, and I still miss him.