“I walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire, I got a cobra snake for a necktie, a brand new house on the road side, made outta rattlesnake hide…”
I had to betray a friend today (for the first time in my life), and I am heart broken -- to say the least. My soul is temporarily crushed. I am the lowest of lows. The way he stared at me, the way he locked his eyes onto mine, hoping against hope that it wasn’t true, that I wasn’t just another common slug on the planet.
At first, he was as paralyzed as I was, holding his ground, waiting for the punch line. It didn’t come. It wasn’t a bad dream, but it wasn’t the remnant of a good night out with the boys either.
I had a gift bestowed upon my back in the 80’s. I left the desert for a couple of years and went to Los Angeles to work in the burgeoning field of video. I hadn’t abandoned stills at all. I just needed a break. My two years as Director of Photography at Palm Springs Life Magazine ended badly. I needed to shift gears, to try something new.
Through a family contact, I got hooked up with a video development company – one that was in on the ground floor of music videos for MTV. Those were heady days. I got to rub elbows with some high flyers. Working on some of Queen’s early videos put me in with the ‘A’ list. The price paid for that level of creative madness was 19 hour days during production stints. That was 19 hours every day at least 6 days a week, sometimes longer.
I was young and strong enough to handle it. I was closing in on getting my first degree black belt in karate, and that level of fitness gave me more than enough endurance to play with the big boys on the field of dreams. I had an interesting position. Everyone saw me as a ‘gopher’, the lowest guy on the totem pole due to my lack of experience in the technical aspects of this arena.
However, my boss saw me as something else entirely – I was an industrial spy. It was my job to keep track of the director of the video productions. He had a nasty habit of cutting side deals behind the producer’s back – siphoning off money and pushing production costs out to the stratosphere. I was there to help reign him back in by contacting the producer when I saw things going sideways.
We had a very large social circle. And somehow, I became the arbitrator when a dispute arose between two guys inside this circle. For some reason, unbeknownst to me, I was trusted. I could be the friend to both sides of the fence…
I smoothed the ruffled feathers, and we partied on.
This was different. There was no reconciliation to be had. We had just become friends; I had slid onto the trusted list – and now I had to violently remove myself to protect the other side this time. I had to choose sides, and I chose the little guy.
The look of betrayal I got made me shiver. We started out respectfully. We kept a bit of a distance between us but that was OK by me. He looked at me. No. He looked through me. There was a feeling of helplessness before he decided to trust me. I was humbled by his presence. But I had forgotten the real reason he was there, and when I started bouncing that ping pong ball inside my head, I understood how harsh nature could be, because there is most definitely a pecking order, and until you understand that we are truly at the bottom of that order, you will have no peace.
If you think man is an apex predator, think again. Go and swim about two miles offshore into the ocean and explain to me that you are the top of the food chain there. Go into a jungle alone, at night. Sit down and listen. Tell me that you are the apex predator there. The arrogance of man is both foolhardy and unwarranted. Until you can truly find humility inside yourself, you will not find peace.
And now, what was once my friend, is now my enemy. He has lost nothing, and I have lost everything.
Comments