Misery Loves Fried Chicken, Too

Nate was my breakup buddy. We were introduced at Scruffy Murphy's Irish Bar by a mutual friend who thought we'd like each other. And I liked Nate instantly. With his tight crew cut and animated features, he seemed transplanted from another generation. You could easily imagine him as a bit player in a 50's war movie, yelling out lines like "Hey Sarge! Over here, he's inna hole!" or "They shot me, Ma! I'm bleedin'!"

We hung out that summer evening in support of a favorite local band. But when our mutual friend left Florida for Boston, and Nate started seeing a woman, our fledgling friendship stalled out.

I was in a relationship then, too. She and I had been together for more than two years and even had begun to talk about marriage, which both excited and terrified us. We were approaching our 30's, so it seemed like the logical next step. And then it all unraveled rather suddenly, leaving me angry and bewildered.

It was during this aftermath that I bumped into Nate again. At first I didn't quite recognize him. In the year since I'd seen him, he'd packed on a good 20 pounds and grown a scruffy beard. Gone were the once animated features and zippy one-liners. Something about his hollowed-out stare and shellshocked appearance told me his relationship hadn't worked out either. No surprise, then, that the place we ran into each other was the self-help section of Barnes & Noble.

This time our bonding was instantaneous and absolute, the kind shared between shipwreck survivors on a bobbing yellow life raft. While no model of mental health myself, I at least had a couple of months' head start on Nate. For him, only weeks after his breakup, the world was still a minefield of painful associative memories: a sudden whiff of jasmine or an innocent radio jingle apt to produce in him bouts of demented laughter or uncontrollable crying.

Over the next couple of months our friendship flourished. Favorite recipes for chili were exchanged, along with Patsy Cline records. We swapped our many self-help books, which we referred to with titles like "Men Are from Mars, Women Are for the Birds" and "Cohabitating No More." I gave Nate the entire collector's edition of the Three Stooges; he gave me a cactus.

"These prickly little bastards is some tough hombres," he explained. "Just like you and me. We may be in the desert right now, but I'm here to tell ya that we'll get through this."

Over time our anger and despair gave way to confusion. Just what happened anyway? Where did we go wrong?

Like a crack team of F.A.A. investigators we scoured the crash sites of our respective disasters looking for clues. Details and timelines were relentlessly hashed over. But the cause of Nate's midair explosion remained as mysterious to us as the forces that had caused my own relationship to belly flop into the Everglades like a jumbo jet with the wings sheared off.

Our futile search for answers only deepened our depression, but the great thing about depression is that it's not one size fits all but comes tailor-made to suit our particular personalities. For me it's about insomnia, skewed priorities and loss of interest.

Food, work, correspondence, even the Three Stooges: all lose their luster. The big picture fades, as minor details assume gargantuan proportions. CD's will suddenly beckon to be rearranged, from alphabetical to reverse chronological order and back again. I simply have no choice.

The only real consolation is found in pop music: Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello, the Smiths: a never ending cycle of misery and heartache providing grist for our mill of self-pity. Pop music has the amazing ability to make you feel depressed and hopeful at the same time: depressed that you identify with the sentiment and hopeful because someone feels more miserable than you.

For me that someone was Nate. The only brightness to my day was seeing my breakup buddy and feeling marginally better that he was even more depressed than I. He'd show up at my door carrying a family-size bucket of chicken drumsticks. If I'd lost all interest in food, Nate had gone in the opposite direction; he gobbled up anything that wasn't fastened to the floor. Even so, he couldn't figure out his weight gain.

"I just don't get it," he'd say, wolfing down his third cheeseburger. "I mean, where did it all come from? It's like you turn 30 and boom! You're a pumpkin."

I suggested a little exercise. There were tennis courts near his apartment, and so it became our habit to play once or twice a week. Neither of us played well, but with a lot of sweating and grunting, it proved therapeutic.

When I aggravated an old shoulder injury, our tennis came to an end. After that I didn't hear from Nate for a couple of weeks, and I assumed he'd found another tennis partner or become busy at work. But when my phone calls and e-mail messages went unanswered, I decided to drive over to his apartment and check up on him. His car was there, but the blinds were drawn. After I pounded on the door for a good 15 minutes, Nate finally poked his head outside, like a giant mastodon awakened from a thousand year slumber. Something about his glassy-eyed stare and the greenish orange hue of his skin told me he'd taken a turn for the worse.

Walking into his darkened lair, I understood that Nate had not found another tennis partner. Instead he had crossed over into Joseph Conrad territory; he'd journeyed up the Nang River into "The Heart of Darkness."

Without air-conditioning, the apartment was a good 10 degrees hotter than the 90 degrees outside. The fetid hum of sweat, unwashed clothing and rotting food hung heavy in the air. A chicken carcass lay on the kitchen floor, stripped to the bone as if by piranha.

Walking to open a window, I noticed there were vegetable peelings all over the floor. Nate appeared moments later from the kitchen, mechanically shaving a carrot. When he finished, he chomped on the carrot and started peeling another.

"What's with the carrots?" I asked.

"Oh nothing," he said. "I just quit smoking."

"And you took up carrots?"

"Gives me something to do with my hands."

I filled three garbage bags with chicken bones and pizza boxes and took them out to the Dumpster.

Smack in the middle of the living room, directly in front of the television, was a shiny new bench press and giant barbell. Glossy brochures and bright plastic folders about how to become a real estate millionaire in 10 easy steps littered the floor.

Gradually a picture began to emerge of a man who hadn't slept or washed in days, spending his time alternately lifting weights, watching late-night infomercials and eating fried chicken.

Alarmed and anxious to get out of there, I suggested we go see a movie. He was game, and after stopping for two bags of carrots, we pulled into the theater.

The event movie of the summer was "Cast Away," starring Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland, a clever chap who washes ashore on a desert island after his plane goes down in the Pacific. As his hope of rescue fades, he begins the long battle for survival and, more important, his sanity. Something about the story spoke directly to Nate and me.

While I don't think "Cast Away" was intended as a comedy, we never laughed so hard in all our lives. It was like watching ourselves up there on screen. People in the audience glared disapprovingly as we laughed in all the wrong places. We howled when Chuck knocked out his tooth with an ice skate. While the rest of the audience sniffled as he selected the tree from which to hang himself, we clenched our sides with hilarity.

Hopelessly isolated and lonely, Chuck develops a relationship with a volleyball, giving the ball a face, even a name: Wilson. It was Wilson, more than anything, that helped preserve his sanity, allowing him to mount a last desperate bid to escape his island prison.

I thought about the strange set of circumstances and coincidence that had brought Nate and me together. I told myself he was fortunate to have me as a friend. And while keeping an eye on him had allowed me to feel charitable and magnanimous, I knew my impulse was anything but altruistic.

IN truth Nate was the yardstick by which I measured my own progress, helping me to feel good about myself and preserve my own sanity. Nate, I realized, had become my Wilson. This overweight, slightly addled person munching carrots next to me was my life raft.

When the movie ended, we shuffled outside with the rest of the Saturday night date crowd: handsome boys and coltish girls dressed in shorts and T-shirts. They wandered outside, laughing and smiling, blissfully unaware of the dangers they courted.

Would they still be happy and smiling in a year's time, knowing as we did that to love is to risk great unhappiness? For them the movie was over, forgotten like the too-large buckets of popcorn left under their seats. For us the movie clung like a lingering dream state. It followed us into the parking lot and beyond.

After getting ice cream, Nate and I sat outside admiring the clear night sky, happy to have company but each secretly wishing that he was somewhere else, with someone else. I couldn't even recognize it for the glorious time it was.

Six months later I finally managed to escape my own desert island by moving to New York. And though I've since lost touch with Nate, I often think about him. When I do, it's not the grief of my horrible breakup I remember but the laughter and friendship that followed.

Don't believe me? Just ask Chuck Noland. I'm sure he feels the same way about Wilson.