We've all had one at some point, or nearly all of us, at an age when folly masqueraded as cool. The wild friend. We were young when the wild friend burst into our lives -- charming, reckless, energetic, a couch-crasher and a trouble-magnet.
"She was my best friend," says Lita de la Torre. She is 21 now, eating lunch at George Washington University's J Street food concourse. She was 14 during the summer of her wild friend. The friend lived in another state, and de la Torre went to visit her for two weeks. "Oh God," de la Torre says, covering her face with her palms. "What didn't happen?" Her wild friend was popular and knew older boys with cars; she had access to a continent of mischief de la Torre had only imagined. Those two weeks were a crash course in wild. De la Torre plucked off her entire eyebrows and drew new ones on.
The air of someone with nothing to lose: John Belushi as the archetypal wild man Bluto in "Animal House."
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Monday, Noon ET, Washington Post staff writer Libby Copeland explores both extremes of the wild friend.
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"First time I drank was there," de la Torre says. "First time I ever smoked weed was there. First time I kissed a guy was there."
Should we curse or celebrate the wild friend? She is seductive, a siren of adolescent badness. She gets you into things you never even knew you wanted to get into. She parks her car half on and half off the sidewalk. She gets a job at a pizza joint and pretends the whole time that she's British. Or maybe the wild friend is a he. He eats dead june bugs for a $5 bet. He hands you your first cigarette. When you drive naked or steal a sign from the school auditorium, the wild friend is with you. Your parents warned you about someone like this.
The vast majority of us are not wild. We are Nick Carraway at one of Jay Gatsby's opulent parties, regarding our bright surroundings with sober detachment and a sense of awe. But arguably, each of us, no matter how staid, has the capacity for one "Risky Business" summer, one brief period of puerile decadence. Wild friends give us access to this.
When we are 14, we can hardly imagine that the wild friend's story may someday become less carefree. De la Torre's wild friend, she says, struggled with bulimia and crack cocaine. Amy Mazin, sitting next to de la Torre, says she had a wild friend who -- after drinking and drugs and even an arrest -- "became, like, an Orthodox Jew."
Maybe you're in your mid-thirties. Maybe you know for a fact that your wild friend, who once wore a mullet and dated a really hot girl, is now a high school teacher. Do your wild friend a favor: When you remember him, remember him in his prime. Remember how he cheered as you sped your Dodge Aries K-car -- going what felt like 60 mph -- toward some railroad tracks atop a knoll. Remember the moment you and your buddies were all suspended in midair, before you hit the ground and dented your car.
Imagine the power ballad that might have been blasting on the radio.
Don't stop believing / Hold on to that feeling.
Yeah. Remember that feeling of weightlessness.
What was it that Thoreau said, about lives of quiet desperation? Maybe there's an evolutionary advantage to cautiousness, but boredom can be its own kind of death. Especially in adolescence.
"I guess they put me in situations I was afraid to put myself in," says Chris Poche, a 40-year-old screenwriter in New Orleans who had several wild friends in his youth. "I was never going to step on the accelerator until it was going 135 miles per hour." But Poche was thrilled to sit in the passenger seat when his college friend did that on the shoulder of an interstate.
The wild friend possesses an infectious energy and the air of someone with nothing to lose. He attracts trouble. He attracts interesting strangers. He regales you with tales of dubious veracity, and he is often slightly eccentric. Maybe he carries nunchucks in his car. He is charming and intelligent -- the sort of guy of whom a mother might say, If only he applied himself. Instead, he bides his time in detention with a Trivial Pursuit game, memorizing the correct answers to all those questions on all those little cards.
The wild friend is an archetype. He is Mercutio in "Romeo and Juliet" -- plain-spoken, clever with dirty puns, cynical about love. He is Falstaff, a tutor in badness for Prince Hal in "Henry IV, Part 1." He is Ferris Bueller, or Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."
