Wasn't sure I wanted to hear about a decades-long friendship between two men who worked in the movie industry. It's just... you know. That era and men. Anyway, I did. It's David Rabe's 'My Friend Pinocchio' published in The New Yorker on February 2, 2025.
Narrator Donny and his old friend Kenny met in graduate school (theatre studies), and have a long-lasting friendship although they're vastly different people who went through different circumstances, trajectories and difficulties. You see it clearly in them visiting a sex shop that Kenny wanted to check out, then Donny took him to visit an ashram after. Donny remained friends with Kenny till the latter died from a terminal disease at a hospice. It sounded like Alzheimer's or a similar debilitating type of dementia.
Kenny felt that he was Pinocchio, or "like Pinocchio", and that he wasn't real. It was never really explained why and how. Readers are left to surmise that on their own. We are allowed a glance into Kenny's friends' thoughts about him, if we wondered his life was tragic.
He scared me a little. Actually, quite a lot. I’ll admit it. I wasn’t sure what to say to him. He didn’t understand what was happening to him, and I didn’t, either. One call turned into a rant about his mother. Every name in the book, punctuated by “manipulative.” As I listened, I couldn’t help but think about a time when he’d stood in the doorway of his son’s bedroom, looking in on me lying down to sleep in his son’s bed. This was during a visit I’d initiated some years back. Our friendship had lasted for more than thirty years by that point. The visit was impulsive on my part; I cast myself up on his doorstep, seeking refuge. This was well before his brain fog, before his “walk on the wild side.” Before a lot of things.
I stayed for a while. Every evening, we’d say good night. I’d go to bed, but he would stay up. I’d hear him pacing around, maybe talking on the phone. Sometimes he’d bang on the drum he’d brought back from one of the poet Robert Bly’s men’s retreats. I was in awe that he’d actually gone to one of those. That he’d dared to be vulnerable with strangers, talking, playing his drum, maybe dancing.
We are privy to the ups and downs of Donny and Kenny's separate lives, and how their friendship developed and evolved, and managed to hold on strong. It isn't so much of any observation of people in the film industry, thank goodness, but it's a story about a platonic friendship between two men.
The 84-year-old author and well, playwright and screenwriter (father of the Rabe siblings Lily, Michael and Jason) said that this is a freestanding short story. In an interview with the same magazine, the author explained the scene in the story's screenplay that Kenny wrote,
Because Donny is telling the story, Kenny is observed throughout, seen only from the outside. Donny conjectures at times about Kenny’s feelings, and Kenny expresses himself verbally, but we are never inside his mind. The screenplay he writes offers a glimpse into his inner life. It’s indirect, but it resonates, I hope, somewhat like the Pinocchio story. Arturo, the character in the screenplay, is weak, sick, dying. His mother arrives at his bedside and he doesn’t want her there, but she stays. She fusses and, after he asks her not to, she persists, as if his requests were of no consequence. Kenny feels pride and excitement at what he has accomplished by creating the scene—he feels expressed by it.
I suppose the tragedy in long-term friendships is when we have to witness one another's illnesses, trials, decline in health, become helpless, and eventual death. This is something we all have to go through, but no one us wish to think about it much.
We'll all get there. We don't know who's going to die first, and of what. Some of us have already gone ahead. Those, we'll miss. And we wonder when is our turn. Mortality looms huge as we inch closer to 50 years old, or we're already on the other side of the century.
The one thing that irked me a little in the methodology used to write the story, is the messiness of time. This literary device in skipping here and there in the recall of the friendship and its bits and pieces made me roll eyes. In the same interview, the author explained why he chose not to write in a linear way.
The narrator, Donny, gives us the history of this friendship not in a chronological way but jumping through time, forward and backward, circling around and returning to various elements of his friend Kenny’s life. Why was it important that the story line not be linear?
In a sense, the story wants to reflect the patterns of memory. Sometimes its progression from one event to another is directed by logic or sequence. At other times, and maybe more often, the narrative is driven by associations, as memory tends to be. The impetus or emotion of a moment calls up something from the past, even something long past, that needs to be looked at again, rethought. I hoped that by using the patterns of memory I could achieve a certain sense of intimacy—the texture of friendship. One person remembering another and himself with that other.
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