June 02nd, 2026

                                              Three Shades of Black:
​                   An Exploration of Three Men and Their Darkness
 
An old friend of mine came to town recently, let’s call him Bill. Bill and I have been friends since childhood and we’re both now in our early forties. During our time together, we toured the sights intown, hitting restaurants and revisiting old haunts, while also spending a fair amount of time watching the tube at his Airbnb.
Bill preferred lighter fare, like sketch comedy shows, while I mostly watched war films and horror movies. After a while Bill turned to me and said, “You’re a dark motherfucker, you know that?” Then he shrugged, and said, “Maybe it’s the War.” By which he meant the Iraq War, which I’d unfortunately participated in as a young man. Apparently he thought the War had left some kind of stain on my mind or soul (or both) and this was reflected in my taste in movies.
Bill’s words hurt me a little—should I take offense? But then I just sort of shrugged them off. Okay, then, I thought. I guess I’m just a dark motherfucker, and we left it at that.
Here’s the thing, though. When Bill and I weren’t driving around town or watching movies, Bill was drinking, a lot. In fact, as soon as I picked Bill up from the airport, he asked if we could stop at the nearest liquor store.
“That one looks good,” he said, pointing out the first one he saw. It was in a bad part of town, and had some shady men congregating outside its door, but Bill was unfazed. And since he was going in and not me, I just shrugged.
As soon as Bill got back in the car, he had a big smile planted on his face. “Man, prices on the Mainland are so much lower." He pulled the liquor bottle out of the bag, ripped the seal off, and had a drink right there in the passenger seat.
I didn’t mention that his act could get me thrown in jail, nor did I tell my friend that he might have a problem. I knew it was something he didn’t want to hear, something he undoubtedly already knew at some level, and something that, were I to mention it, would ruin our reunion, maybe destroy what remained of our friendship.
So I let Bill drink, and I let him continue to rag on me for my dark choice in movies. But I silently wondered to myself what the hell was going on, both with me and with Bill…
Okay, Bill was an alcoholic, and considering his mother was a bad one and he had a rough childhood—bouncing from one reform school to another while his parents went through a messy divorce—some of this was maybe inevitable. But every time I had talked to Bill on the phone before our reunion he had sounded like he was doing well. He was living in Hawaii (hence his previous reference to “the Mainland”), in a paradisiacal bamboo house on stilts surrounded by palms. His place had a swimming pool, but if he grew tired of the smell of chlorine the beach was within walking distance. He had several million dollars in the bank and he lived mostly from collecting rents on various properties that belonged to his stepdad, a multimillionaire many times over.
In our phone conversations before our reunion Bill talked a lot about his tiki bar in the basement of that house. He mostly spoke about the décor, the potted palms and the cups hand-carved from coconut to resemble Olmec heads, or the cool neon signage hung on the barback.
He also talked about the various parties he held there, and the people who attended, many of them attractive women eager to sleep with him. But he never talked about the actual drinking.
The only sign that anything was wrong in our phone conversations were his occasional complaints about his love life, women using him for his money and abusing his love then leaving him.
When my week and some change with Bill were over, I drove him back to the airport. His next stop was Vegas, where he claimed he was going to get into baccarat, after, like Dostoyevsky, having fallen madly in love with the roulette wheel.
That surprised me, too. Bill was smart, and good at poker besides, and probably could have beaten house odds finding some sensible play at blackjack or craps. Only fools and carefree highrollers would play roulette, where the only supposed strategies were derived from the old “Gambler’s Fallacy,” which is to say seeing potentials for a statistical edge where they simply could not exist. And baccarat, while slightly less fiscally suicidal, was not much better, and mostly attracted Chinese “whales” who could afford to blow $250,000 a hand without batting an eye.
I didn’t bother saying any of this to him, though. Like his drinking, I thought it was his business.
Instead I just got out of the car with Bill at curbside drop-off, helped him get his luggage from the trunk, then gave him a parting hug. I also told him to watch his ass with the ladies, and to watch his wallet in Vegas. I wanted to tell him to watch it with the drinking, too, but I knew how he would have reacted, and how it would have soured all our time together, which was not, in toto, all bad. We’d had some fun in a sports bar watching a hockey game and eating wings (though Bill snuck off to the car a few times for nips) and I’d also shown him a few architecturally impressive structures around town.…
Now, though, I’m feeling a little guilty, and am asking myself (in an afterschool special narrator’s voiceover voice), “Was I a bad friend to Bill?” “Was there something I could have done for him?” Maybe slipped a pamphlet on AA into the outer zip-up pouch of his suitcase?
Speaking of friends, I had another friend, this one in the Army, we’ll call him Dunphy. Dunphy and I have not seen each other in over a decade and it’s entirely possible that we will never see each other again. We haven’t talked in at least ten years and I’m not even sure where he is, or if he’s even still alive.
The last I heard (after a quick online check) he’d returned to his home of record in Missouri and was working there as a janitor at the VA.
Regardless of where he is now, Dunphy and I share a deep and unbreakable bond, one that may go deeper than any other I’ve experienced in my life. We come from entirely different worlds, classes, religious backgrounds, but the time we spent together in Germany, Iraq, and Texas has fused us spiritually in a way I can’t quite articulate.
Dunphy was a metal head, played electric guitar (quite well), having developed a shredding style influenced by the ill-fated but insanely talented “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott of Pantera.
Dunphy wore headphones plugged into his amplifier when he played. That dulled the sound but I could still hear a muted version of his soloing, but that didn’t bother me, since I liked hearing him play.
Sometimes, either in the barracks room we shared in Germany or in the little singlewide trailer we shared in Iraq, Dunphy would cease shredding, kick back and play some metal on his stereo system. This included everything from Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” to Morbid Angel’s “Domination.” Most of the cover artwork for these albums featured pentagrams, demons seated in the sky blowing ill winds, goat-headed satanic gods perched on blood-soaked thrones. The singers in these bands tended to growl and the guitars were sludgy and strangely tuned but when I could make out the lyrics over the fray of clashing instruments they were usually about grisly subjects: damnation of souls, Nazi doctors vivisecting innocent children sans anesthesia, unholy congress between satyrs with giant prong penises and their mortal female victims.
Once I turned to Dunphy and asked him, “Doesn’t all this heavy, dark shit kind of drag you down?”
Dunphy, unlike me, was not offended when he was accused (albeit a bit more indirectly) of being a "dark motherfucker.” He was pretty Zen and hard to rile, despite his Satanic taste in music, or maybe, strangely, because of it. He merely smiled at me and my impertinent question, then said, “No, it doesn’t bother me, because I feel all this chaos in me all the time anyway, so when I hear someone else going through it or expressing it, it makes me feel a little better.”
Fair enough. But it makes me wonder: who among the three of us—Bill, Dunphy, and yours truly—carries the most darkness in his soul?
…