Failing Of The Light

The Quiet Room

When I got to his house several hours later, I sat awkwardly among his subdued wife and children, waiting.

Wrenching as it was, I would wish everyone the chance to have a conversation like the one we’d had the previous Fall. I was out of town as per usual, and had made the call in the parking lot of a hotel in Virginia with tears running down my face. Apologies given and received, hard questions asked and answered, and there was already nothing left unsaid when it was my turn to slip in. The room was quiet and dark, a ’97 Winchester riot gun propped in the corner, and my friend facing the end.

Both in our 40s, we had missed the chance to die young, but in retrospect I can see Doug was never a man destined to make old bones. We had met during a law school internship in a metro DA’s office, serving under the formidable Dana Norman, as good a mentor as a man could hope for and a better one than I deserved. I think Dana also thought Doug, a child prodigy who turned 21 during his second year in law school, might benefit from an older friend. Having noticed we both shared a love for guns and old Corvettes, Dana thought we’d be fast friends.

He was right: Doug drove a black 1980 Corvette and carried a Colt M1991A1, as I did. Mine was heavily customized, having already made its first trip to Novak’s .45 Shop, while his was lightly modified with a beavertail and a pair of Pachmayr grips no one had bothered to clearance for the added ambi safety. Doug stood around six-foot plus, carried some extra weight and a full beard letting him pass for a decade older than he was, and had the sort of merry laugh you would expect from a truly witty man.

Law students are often nothing if not opinionated, and neither he nor I were exceptions. One of the smartest men I’ve ever known — I once told him he was a lot smarter than I, and he responded simply, but not unkindly, “I know,”— Doug reveled in using his intellect to the dismay of his opponent. Despite the inevitable sparks between us, we spent endless hours on the phone or in his home debating cars, calibers and whatever else. When I was sworn in as a lawyer, he came to watch; when my just-purchased 1971 big block Stingray didn’t make it across Atlanta to my home, Doug was the one I called.

He roared up in his black ’80 Corvette and pulled into the gas station parking lot where I was stranded. A passerby asked if we belonged to a Corvette club, enthusiastically adding “I know some girls that would do anything to ride in a Corvette.”

“I’ll bet he does,” Doug commented wryly after he left. A devoted family man, he had zero interest. We’ve all heard the way some men talk about their wives when they’re not there. That wasn’t Doug — he worshiped the ground she walked on and adored his two children.