Understanding Algernon

Joe caught sight of his friend Algernon on the far side of the bar as he entered through the front door.

From across the room, he could tell right away just by seeing his friend that something was very wrong. Al did not look like he was sad or depressed. And he certainly did not appear to be in distress nor did he seem to be in any sort of physical difficulties. But Joe knew the moment that he saw Al, that all was not well with his friend. Nothing needed to be said to convey the message that something was wrong, proximity was all that was required for Joe to pick up the sort of landscape he was in with Al.

Al’s girlfriend had once uttered during a drinking session that it was as if the two of them communicated by looking through the ether at each other’s aura. She was only half joking.

The two men knew each other, and in a superficial way their lives had followed similar paths to deliver them to where they were presently. However, in many other ways, Algernon Winchester-Smyth and Joseph Joplin were very different people who had been fated by their maker to take totally different paths through the jungle commonly known as the legal profession.

Algernon, known as “Al” to his friends (much to the chagrin of his mother who thought it sounded common and uncouth), was born to a family that mixed old money with new. His grandfather on his father’s side owned a lot of land back in the days when real property was the only property to measure a person’s worth.

So, despite the records showing Al’s grandfather to have had been stricken with polio at an early age (and thus had always appeared wizened in all pictures of him), the well-known landowner was always described in the history books as “Tristan the giant”. Thereby proving that in the case of grandfather Winchester-Smyth, size was an immaterial unit of measurement.

The “giant” sired a son, Al’s father, who had no interest in owning more and more land, so he rebelled in the way appropriate to the landed gentry; he left the family estate in the country in order to start a bank in the city. One branch went on to become two, and thereafter like mushrooms in a meadow after the cows had been and then moved on, the son’s banking empire spread far and wide to the point where there was at least one branch of the Winchester-Smyth bank in any town of any noteworthy size.

When it came to Al’s mother’s side of the family, wealth and fame came from less conventional but nevertheless lucrative sources. Al’s grandmother grew up in the “entertainment” business, the child of both a well-known director and a successful movie actress. Thereafter, Al’s mother was herself an actress of note who headed the cast of several well-received movies before a long-forgotten scandal followed by a sensational divorce led Al’s mother ultimately into matrimonial bonds with his father.

That side of Al’s family history was understandably not discussed a lot by anyone around Al, but between Al and Joe, after some late-night drinking sessions, the subject of Al’s mother would come up and from what was said Joe had an understanding of why keeping up a “proper public front” in everything the family did was an iron-clad rule that Al had to abide with no matter what the cost was to shore up the façade, and no matter what sacrifices had to be made to prevent anybody outside of the family from seeing into the mess inside.

Some lines were drawn in the dust and could be crossed at will and without consequences. Some other lines were set down with more substantial materials that pointed to obvious costs if they were ever crossed. Joe found out early on in his relationship with Al that the importance of maintaining a proper public image of Al and by extension, of his family was second to none. So, every time the two of them got into trouble after their heavy drinking sessions or after one of their high jinxes, the subsequent cleanup exercises were the stuff of military precision and ruthless efficiency. Damages were paid for, upset parties were coaxed into compliance and the authorities were brought into line with whatever it took to paper over any cracks in the frontage that the public had sight of.

After they graduated from law school, the two of them became lawyers, but their paths took very different courses.

Joe joined a small firm and his workload consisted drawing up small-scale commercial contracts dealing with the sale and purchase of shops, factories and residential houses. Joe would also spend his time drafting wills for his elderly clients as well as administer their estates when they passed away. Lastly, Joe would occasionally defend small time criminals accused of petty crimes at the local magistrate courts to round out his practice. This was an honourable existence but utterly normal.

However, this was not the kind of practice Joe wanted to pursue, but it was the kind he had to settle for. His grades and connections were not very good and competition for the kind of law firms he was interested in was just too intensive for him to get hired at the firms that most law students dreamed about. So, Joe entered a law practice that he did not seek out nor did he think much of. As days went on to become months, and months stretched out to become years, Joe’s dissatisfaction with his lot became all pervasive, like a dull pain from a wound in the background of his everyday existence.

Joe as he lived his uninspired life dreamed of various things. Of things he would like to do instead of what was in front of him, and what of a life he would like to live instead of the life he had.

Joe’s dreams and thought life included what his old friend Al was doing and secretly the life Al was living.

As a fixture of their monthly calendars, the two of them met up on a regular basis for a night of drinking at a pub in the city’s financial district popular with the executives that worked nearby.

From these meetings Joe knew Al was heavily into international trusts and tax planning work for his firm’s rich clientele. Al told Joe of the various trips he went on to tax havens in the Caribbean and to Latin America for business, and the other trips to much nicer locations for his vacation breaks. Al was leading the sort of existence that Joe only heard of from magazines and popular television shows.

Joe lived for his monthly trips to the city for his meetings with Al where he could listen to his friend’s first-hand accounts of the substance of legends.

It was on just one of these monthly get togethers that Joe spotted his friend looking desperately unhappy in the bar where they normally start their periodical alcoholic binges.

As soon as Joe got up to the corner of the bar where Al had been drinking alone, he asked his friend, “what’s wrong Al?”

Al looked at his friend and managed to crack a smile, “is it that obvious that something’s bothering me?”

“Absolutely, now tell me what’s wrong? Did you get fired or something?”.

Al did not answer for a few long seconds but at long last he answered, “no man….in fact quite the opposite, I was made a partner this afternoon.”

“What the…. you’ve been there for such a short time and they offered you a salaried partnership?!”

“Actually, no… they’ve offered me an equity partnership.”

Joe was so shocked at this news that for a moment he could not speak. The jumble of thoughts went through his mind at the speed of light and he was at a point where he could not speak as he considered the import of what he had just been told.

Joe knew partnership amounted to Al being in a position that permitted him to earn (with his salary and bonuses) the equivalent of a minor lottery every year of his working life. For lawyers, this was what the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow looked like.

Moments passed and Joe recovered enough to ask the obvious question, “if that’s what happened to you today, why are you looking so glum for Pete’s sake?”

Al looked back at his friend but there was a sort of blankness in his eyes as he spoke, “I’m feeling the way I do right now because when the senior partners told me the news today all I could think of was that at that moment I knew that for the next thirty of my life I would know exactly where I would be each working day, what work I’d be doing all day, all the people I’d have contact with, and all the places I’d be going to…”

Al paused for a few seconds, took a big gulp of his drink and then he added, “and all the time this was going through in my mind I kept hearing the line from that old Peruvian song…’a man that gets tied up to the ground it gives the world its saddest sound…”

Then Al turned to Joe and said softly, “this was where the adventure died and the script began…I could see my entrances, and my exits and everything in between stretched out over years. I felt at that moment something…died…”

As Al stopped speaking, Joe looked into his friend’s face and was genuinely shocked by the despair he saw. In all the time he had known Al, this was the lowest point that he had ever seen him fall to. It was with a touch of irony that Al was feeling this way because he had just been granted a fate Joe would have desperately wanted.

Then as Al’s voice trailed off into silence Joe asked, “if this not what you wanted why don’t you just quit?”

“Can’t…my family would cut me off if I walk away from this. My mother would ensure that I don’t get anything from my family trusts…. I’d have to move out of my house and work in a job like yours….”

Although Al stopped himself from going further but what he said was enough for Joe to realize something fundamental about their relationship that he had never known before.

Joe for the first time understood Al instead of just knowing him.

The rest of the evening was to Joe’s mind a blur, nothing stood out in his memory apart from what had been said up to that point of their conversation.

Something between the two of them died that night and they stopped having their monthly get togethers thereafter.

In the months following that night, Joe heard from mutual friends that Al was not doing well and was acting more and more erratic in the office as well as within the social circles he moved through.

About a year later, Joe heard the news that Al had committed suicide.

Shockingly, Al had killed himself one night right after he got another promotion in his firm.

Everyone that knew him; his family, his colleagues, the people who worked for him and all of his friends with the exception of Joe were shocked and at a loss to explain why he did this.

From everyone who knew of Al’s existence, they all seemed to be asking why did he kill himself when he had everything a man could possibly want and live for.

Joe did not go to the funeral and started avoiding everyone to forestall the predicable questions about Al’s passing.

To Joe, there was a difference between knowing someone and truly understanding them, and it was too late to explain, and besides he didn’t have the words.