After reading a couple of my books, an old friend from my WVU pharmacy school days reached out to me. He said my books opened a ‘floodgate of memories’. We messaged back and forth on Facebook a few times and caught up on each other’s lives. Then not having heard from him for a couple months after that, I was surprised to receive the message below. It made me sad for some reason. I’m not sure why. It was like my whole life just flashed before my eyes. It read like a eulogy. Was my old buddy trying to bury me? Am I through? Has my well run dry? He initially didn’t want me to post the message but changed his mind. And I’m not sure why I am. But here it is–

“Wallflower, wallflower

Won’t you dance with me

The night will soon be gone

Wallflower, wallflower

Take a chance on me

Please let me ride you home…”

– Bobb Dylan

There has always been a curiosity about Jim Antonini. When I first met him, I found him different – not odd, just different from anyone I had ever met. He was fiercely independent. He was a loner but never appeared to be lonely. He enjoyed solitude more than company. But he always seemed to be around. He had a way to make himself invisible. And he liked being invisible. Even though I couldn’t always see him, I knew he was there like a wallflower at a party – watching, rarely interacting, just watching. I could feel his presence. And within the constant chatter and loud music of the crowded places we would go, I could hear that voice of his through it all. He often would talk only in superlatives – “greatest night ever”, “my all-time favorite record”, “my newest favorite place”, “best show ever”, and his most used, “you’re my favorite person”.

              I first met him in Morgantown over a foosball table at a dive bar called the College Inn in the Sunnyside district on the West Virginia University campus. He was partnered with the most beautiful young woman. She had short blonde hair and perfectly tanned skin. She wore a cheery sundress that seemed far too bright for the drabness of the dreary bar we were in. She looked like a model. She moved like a ballerina. Jim seemed out of his league. The Cure song Just Like Heaven loudly played on the jukebox. Jim and the young lady not only controlled the foosball table for hours, beating all teams that challenged them – they also controlled the night. They each seemed happy, but I didn’t believe they were together. He would later tell me that he thinks of that night often. The young woman was from Austin, Texas. She was just passing through. They exchanged contact information, but he never saw or heard from her again. He would always tell me without hesitation, “that was the greatest night ever.” I ended up knowing Jim for many years after that. I was lucky to have been a part of his many so-called, “greatest nights ever.”

              Morgantown during those times was the center of the universe for us.  Sunnyside was a college student mecca every weekend. Not only would there be students from West Virginia University, there’d be college students from Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Morgantown had a reputation as a fun place to visit. But, most importantly, the drinking age was only 18 at the time – three years lower than the limit of the states that surrounded West Virginia.

              In those days, Jim would always talk about writing a novel. He constantly would be scribbling out notes, quotes he had heard in the bars and music clubs, and ideas on scraps of paper he would carry. They would become short stories. He made us, his close friends, all characters. But we were so much more in Jim’s stories. We were taller, bigger, better, funnier, and prettier – a lot prettier. He made us legends. We were heroes of our little world in Morgantown. He tells me today that he wished he still had those stories. That was before hard drives, floppy disks, and digital clouds.

              Then, it was our senior year. Our time in college had quickly flown by. We were about to graduate and scatter into the world, possibly to never see each other again. Jim finished pharmacy school with honors – he never tells anyone any of that. He was being pressured to go to graduate school or medical school – to stay in Morgantown. He wanted to get away. He wanted to do something different, make a name for himself in some other way. He wanted to experience the world outside of a classroom. So, he took a job no one else would – a pharmacist position at a Rite Aid drug store in a remote area of West Virginia. He had just turned 22. The state pharmacy inspector told him he was the youngest pharmacist in the state at the time.

              For the next two years, he had mostly disappeared, working 60 hours a week and hiding away during his off time in a three-story house in a forgotten backwoods of a dying community. No one lived near him for miles. He stayed at the house rent-free as a favor to an older pharmacist in the area who was retiring to Florida. He wanted Jim to buy the house and stay there permanently. The old man had stocked the house with booze and a freezer full of expensive meats and seafood. The house also was equipped with a state-of-the-art stereo sound system. While there, Jim continually blasted Candy Apple Grey, the new Husker Du record at the time. One of his “all-time favorite records”.

              We tried to find out what was up with him after he left Morgantown. We wanted to visit. “You will never believe it here,” Jim would write in letters (we used to write letters then, there was no texting or emailing yet). “Have you ever read the Magus by John Fowles? I am living that book.” He was never the same after those two years. He witnessed what bad street drugs and prescription drug abuse could do to a small community. He was held at gun point. He was forced to do things he didn’t want to do and never talks about now.

              Jim got involved in a dangerous and horny relationship with a young lady who he found out later was hired by the older pharmacist to keep Jim happy and content to stay there. He used his invisibility skills and melded into his new environment. He hung out with his new lady friend and other shady locals in the hollows and at the diners and seedy bars. He was there watching, but most people didn’t know it. He watched his new acquaintances go into a hollow for a fix and never come back. His experiences there became his first novel, BULLETS FOR SILVERWARE. You must READ that book.

              After about 18 months there, he wrote to me saying he was prepared to give himself up to that life and stay permanently. That lasted a few weeks until he was ‘rescued’ by WVU pharmacology professors Drs. Malanga and Craig. They showed up at the drug store one morning when Jim was at his most desperate. He wasn’t sleeping or eating much then. He was working nearly every day. Rite Aid couldn’t find any other pharmacist to sub in for him. Drs. Malanga and Craig had him fill out an application to graduate school while he was on break at the pharmacy that morning. They soon had him enrolled into the Pharmacology and Toxicology program at WVU and got him out of there. After a month-long backpack trip through Europe, Jim spent the next four and half years in graduate school earning a doctorate in pharmacology and toxicology. He refers to that time as the ‘Gene’s Years’. He lived by a small neighborhood dive bar near downtown Morgantown called Gene’s Beer Garden. He would disappear there most nights after long days in the classroom and laboratory.

              The rest of Jim’s life after graduate school is a black hole to me.  That was when we lost touch for a significant number of years. As he was in graduate school, I got accepted into medical school at Marshall in Huntington, got married, had kids, and you the rest of the story – I never really talked to my old friends much again after that. After Jim graduated from WVU graduate school, he accepted a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship from the School of Public Health at Harvard University in Boston. He was there for over four years. He tells me now that he met some of the best people in his life while there. He was a fixture, first, in the little neighborhood bars of Fenway, then later in the music clubs of Central Square in Cambridge. He was friends with ‘minor’ rock stars, hanging out with members of Helium, Clem Snide, Morphine, Green Four, and The Pee Wee Fist. He would meet his wife Jenny at Harvard. One of his “greatest nights in Boston ever” was eating leftover Thanksgiving turkey and drinking Irish whiskey with her in her apartment in the Mission Hill neighborhood. He also spent significant portions of time in New York City and New Orleans.

              As his days were ending in Boston, he had a major life decision to make. One choice was to take a position at a small start-up drug company in New York City and live in a Manhattan loft apartment with members of a former Boston rock band as well as a ballet troupe of young ladies. He often wonders how his life would have turned out if he would have taken that route. Instead, he moved back to West Virginia and went to work with former colleagues as a federal government scientist in occupational health.

              According to him, it wasn’t the same the first few years back in Morgantown. It was a dark period of uncertainty and longing for all the things that made him happy in Boston. He spent his off time and late nights in Morgantown, filling hard drives and notebooks full of nonsensical dialogue of outsider voices and of characters based on people from his past. These writings would become assorted short stories, screenplays, and the foundations for now published novels – LIKE FALLING FROM AN AIRPLANE, WILD BILL RIDES AGAIN, and the soon to be published THE BUTCHER AND THE BUTTERFLY.  He was introduced to Chico softball, a team of misfit but lovable adult men sponsored by Morgantown’s famous music club, 123 Pleasant Street. He soon found himself writing the postgame recaps on the team’s Facebook page that regaled readers with stories of botched fielding, limp hitting, losing games, and epic after game parties at the 123 bar that lasted until daybreak. And that is how we reconnected – through the Chico stories on Facebook (of course).

              I wanted to get this all down on paper. The Jim I used to know would never tell anyone any of this. People should know this. He was the most self-aware person I had ever met. He never took himself too seriously. He never boasted. He never thumped his chest. And there were so many times he should have. Please READ his books. They are fabulous I especially liked BULLETS FOR SILVERWARE – that’s the Jim I knew. I also loved WILD BILL RIDES AGAIN. That’s the aging Jim, I guess, who seems to be trying to figure out what living in this modern world really means. He tells me these times we currently live in are hard for him. He says he doesn’t fit in at all. Being the same age, I kind of understands how he feels.

-RBH