He came to think not much of himself as a man. I don’t use his given name because he came to hate it. He allows strangers viewing his personal check at UGO, CVS, AT&T, or at the YMCA to use it once before he tells them, “None of my lot uses that name. They adhere to me wishes to be called Roberto.” Yup, even though his accent was as British as his teeth and his ashen skin. Roberto. And not a single piece of Latin American or Spanish fruit had ever fallen from his entire family tree.

His wife Caroline was stoic: “It’s a bit ridiculous, but there you have it.”

Roberto. I found out the why shortly after we made friends some forty years ago. How did we become friends? Not easily. We met by chance at the Embree, Tennessee, YMCA, doing sports, and he asked to be my friend after I almost killed him twice within the space of a week. First time, this Brit immigrant joined our elbows-for-lunch-bunch basketball group, and on our first fast break I rocketed him an unexpected no-look pass. It hit him right in the temple, knocking his head and his body out of bounds where he stumbled into the tangle of electrical cords and switches that maintenance allowed to devolve into greater entropy each week by daisy-chaining power strips to reach the court-side scorer’s table collection of timer clocks, a four-speed fan, phone chargers, a microphone amplifier, and for some reason, this week, a Hamilton Beach toaster. He fell in a shower of sparks and bread crumbs to the crackling disharmony of a cheap fireworks show. On the way to the floor, his head was struck once more by the bleachers that maintenance neglected to retract to a safe distance from the court.

I felt I might like this chap when, before we could act, he freed himself from the half-dozen cables and switches, brushed off his scorched t-shirt, ran to join our opponents’ team, and asked, “Our goal-keep, did he make the save?”

Later that week, our concussed Roberto joined us in the Y’s pool for a round of water polo. Not the greatest of ideas. As he was on the opponent’s team for real this time, I saw that he wasn’t the strongest of swimmers, and yet he endured until I noticed that, after the second time I swam over top of him, he’d not yet risen to the surface. Of course, we halted play and pulled him out of the pool where he sat slumped, muttering “It’s bloody knackered me, innit me blokes?”

Call it a mancrush or whatever you like, but Roberto was now my guy. My guy stood five feet, seven inches tall, a relatively athletic body for a Brit, but it was the look he had of a kid waiting for magic to happen, a smile with no reserve despite the condition of the teeth, a kind of total vulnerability that sealed the deal—a deal that would become the yardstick by which I measured the loyalty of any friends from that day forward.

I discovered both the root of his actual name’s abhorrence and why he loved his new name. His given name was Buddy because his parents reasoned that the labor of his birth began during a monumental live concert by the wonderful and talented Mr. Buddy Guy. After Buddy’s family entered the US and became citizens, he found the name redolent only of weakness brought on by preening American parents who constantly entreated their offspring to perform perfectly routine actions required of children such as: “How about eating your broccoli, okay buddy?” and “Hey buddy, want  to turn off the screen and go to bed now, buddy?”

Roberto said, “No! This is no way to raise the bairn. You never ask them to decide. It confuses and frustrates ‘em because their decision is never the one you want. And yours is never the one they want. ‘You wanna go ta bed now, buddy?’ NO! Now you look stupid when your say, ‘Sorry it’s time because…’ And each time the child learns that his decision is wrong and will be defeated. He or she is not your buddy and not your pal. He’s a little kid who loves not having to decide anything. You put it in front of them and say ‘Eat.’” Said like a man whose parents used ration coupons to buy food after World War II.

I learned that when Roberto, wife Caroline, and son Delbert moved to the US, he encouraged his family unit to become engaged with American culture by becoming huge baseball fans. And so they did. They watched it on the telly; the Braves were only a few hours away in Atlanta, and it soon made more sense than cricket. As American culture also introduced him to the pandering-parent-pal-platform, he shed his Christian name and replaced it with his newest and best hero, the greatest of baseball’s Robertos: Clemente. He visited Roberto Enrique Clemente Walker’s birthplace in the San Juan suburb of Carolina (his wife Caroline immediately supportive), then the bronze sculpture of the man in Pittsburgh, PA, and spent his second patent bonus on the 1960 World Series-winning Pirates baseball card of Clemente, bat cocked, that perfect mouth in a slight snarl, and a body which caused my mother to say simply, “Look at that!”

My mother happened to meet Buddy/Roberto before I did as follows: he was swimming laps at noon and, finding himself next to an older woman, Roberto paused in the shallow end beside her and asked, “So how old are ya, love?”

“Old enough to know I don’t have to answer your question. How long are you visiting the country, my good man?” my mother told me was her reply, and given that Mom didn’t appreciate being accosted about her age in the pool, it was probably the reason I swam over top him twice later that week. One of the few regrets I have in this life.

In my many years of attending to Roberto’s friendship, it became apparent that he quite enjoyed accosting people, but in the British sense of the word: to draw near and keep beside, without the American connotation of bold aggression. Those sidled up to, accosted with a—I hate to say this—charming, British cadence, so much the better if they were young and female. After a moment I would step in, saying, “I have to put up with this, but you don’t,” and be met with, “Oh, he’s fun! Not a problem!” and Roberto would chuckle at my attempt at intervention, and introduce me: “This man is my mate, my best pal!” And the young ladies would train their attention back onto the five-seven Brit, perhaps a highlight of their day, as he asked them, “Do you know how I crossed Dublin without passing a pub? Simple, I stopped in every one!” He then recommended their reading Joyce’s Ulysses, to these girls with phones. All while we were standing in line to enter the Tennessee Theater for a Knoxville Symphony at which I fell asleep until I was roused by Roberto’s “Bravo! Bravo!” and realized I just missed a trio of Maoris perform a kapa haka, transcribed for electric guitar, scrap metal and a wounded wapiti recorded on tape, realized in song and dance. This is why our Knox-Symph boy-conductor Aram had been written up in Pitchfork before it folded and in The New Yorker by no less than Alex Ross.

Last month, when I visited him and Caroline at their home, I asked him if he was getting any exercise and this is what he said: “Now I walk on the grass, get off the porch. Um, the thrower, the one who divorced his wife. You know…?” I make a good guess that it’s something about Tom Brady that’s now on his mind.

Besides extending our lunch hour at the Y playing games, Roberto and I had in common a love for most of the same kind of music. Even though he had his extremes on the right—country’s Toby Keith and worse yet, Hank Williams, Jr.’s “If the South Woulda Won”—and I had mine to the left—Lennon’s “Imagine” and the Dixie Chicks—how can you argue about music? We met at Mahler and Shostakovich, and that’s all that matters.

Our best time together when not listening to music was when we travelled to McKay’s Used Book & Record Store in Chattanooga. I suggested time and again that Roberto bring along some of his old LPs to trade in for credit, but he said that he couldn’t part with any, and any deal from McKay’s couldn’t match the ten for $9.99 he got when he bought most of his from Tower Records and Sam Goody right before they filed for bankruptcy. As Roberto began cherishing his distant past more than his recent one, and even less the present, our conversations to and from Chattanooga took on unusual directions, not the least of which was the time he asked me when I had my first hard-on. I put him off with an, ”I’m not sure, let me think,” to see where he was going with this.

It turned out his end of the conversation was about as innocent as one could be in a discussion of erections. He wanted to go back to Year Three in Blackpool and tell me of his first love, Miss Alison Jinkins, fresh from Manchester Metropolitan, her lambswool sweaters in gray and blue, her eyes emerald green. “I had not a clue what was happening—I thought I had a disease, I did, something I had no conscious control over. It did what it pleased! Was that the way it was with you, Paul?”

“The first time it became a problem, yes, sitting on the retaining wall of North Park Swimming Pool, sixth grade, bedside Janice whose loose swim suit begged to be looked down to where her precociously large breasts lived. When we—”

Roberto interrupted me, strangely not interested in Janice’s breasts but what was preying on his mind. “You see, I always had a decent, good willy. No doubt it would outlast me with all those bits of practice. But now I can’t even…”

I knew what he was getting at since both of us had the same assaults on our “willies” and their connective tissue and nerves. Unfortunately for Roberto, his came before robots did the work; that is, the radical prostatectomy required to remove the cancer festering there. He went under the knife seven years before I did and had to deal with a handheld scalpel, a six-inch incision in the lower abdomen, several hours on the table with significant blood loss, necessary transfusions, and unavoidable damage to the cavernous nerves resulting in incontinence, erectile dysfunction, and pain. The same procedure performed on me by a multi-armed robot being directed by my whiz-kid doctor fifteen feet away at his console, armed with a precision joystick, clipped off my prostate as easily as clipping a Titleist off a tee with a nine iron. And a cheap ten-dollar-a-go generic Viagra had me back in my wife’s saddle six weeks later. Hardly missed a grab.

 I had an idea regarding what Roberto suffered, but not his details, which I must quote: “Listen Paul, it’s got so little without the blood flow, so short that it’s like I’ve never been circumcised, and when I go poo, I can’t even get the dang thing below the lid of the loo, so if I don’t hold it down, it starts to spray the floor, damned little dingus! … ahh- but then, what do I know?  It’s still good to be alive, innit?!”

Roberto quit complaining about his atrophied dick some time ago, yet prefers to keep me up to date on his incontinence, almost as if I were his nanny. I put some leftover Depends (which I didn’t need them more than a couple weeks after the catheter was removed thanks to the robot) in my car for our trips to McKay’s and the Symphony because Rob had sluiced urine across his seat having filled his Depends coming home from a performance of Handel’s Water Music, but whose overflow, however, harmed not the Nordico material of my new Volvo EX90 interior. Rob looked at me with a sadness about his eyes that I hadn’t seen before and said, “Oh, Paul, I’ve had an accident—I’ve filled my nappy—could you pull over at a gas station for some paper towels? So sorry.”

 I must share some of the blame for the “accident” as it occurred when I deployed my Volvo’s Atmos-enabled 25-loudspeaker sound system and Tiesto’s 110 db “Boom!” track exploded, to Rob’s dismay, on and about his person, certainly causing his eruption. I also experienced a rare leakage at the “Boom! Boom! Boom!” After that, the spare Depends came in handy more than once as a precautionary measure but which finally led to Rob’s wife’s decision to restrict his travel to the Embree County area. Caroline, I first supposed, was trying to protect Rob from an acknowledgement of his physical and cognitive decline. I wanted him to come out and play. As time went on, she wanted to limit her own trouble, said my small-minded critical apparatus.

Or maybe I suspected that Caroline became aware that not all the records I borrowed from Roberto were coming back. During one of my visits, she asked, “Did you not take away Dark Side of the Moon?  I quite liked that!” I wasn’t sure how to respond, whether I should remind her that their turntable, in their spare bedroom, broken, in pieces where Roberto fell over it, wasn’t about to play Pink Floyd anytime soon, but she said, “I’m sure I saw the cover’s prism go with you.”

Since Roberto was standing by listening to all this with a “there she goes” look on his face, I decided to pull one off, even though I felt momentarily wrong about taking advantage of Roberto’s advancing condition. “Oh, I asked Roberto if I might keep the Dark Side awhile while I recorded it with a new phono stage that hasn’t arrived yet. Isn’t that so, my friend?”

“Sure is, Paul. Keep it as long as you want. I have it on CD here somewhere if you want to hear it, Caroline. You could make a copy of that, Paul.”

We had just left his couch listening to Ray Lynch where Roberto confided, “I wish I could tell ya how it is, Paul. Damn frustrating, like I get thoughts in my mind like those ideas that pop into your head when you about to sleep, ones you can’t make sense of, and the harder you try, the quicker they go away.”

I didn’t know how to respond—give him my “Downward Path to Wisdom” philosophical bit? No, he was already having trouble using his player’s remote. When I took it from his hand, he looked at me as if I’d stolen his favorite toy.  “Give it back, Paulie, please?” I gave it back and said nothing then and nothing now and let him continue. “I’m getting smaller. There’s not as much of me as there was when we met. I weigh more, but there’s something missing, like when I quit being a kid, and now I’m hardly a man anymore, you know what I’m saying, Paulie?”

He hated what was happening to him, and after a while, was not able to understand or even care what was happening to him. He just wanted to live some more, “to hear a live Messiah once more,” he whispered to me. The drugs restricting testosterone from testes and adrenal glands seemed to accelerate his falling off, and I’m sure the radiation of his pelvis wasn’t working in favor of his GI functions, yet when he listened to music, he seemed to be missing nothing.

Before we knew it, the Easter season was upon us, and as fate would have it, or luck, or the work of ordinary good people, the choirs of Embree’s churches joined to present an early performance of the Handel masterpiece and brought with them a community outreach visit by the Knoxville Chamber Orchestra. We arrived late for the performance, even though I had given Roberto his ticket. He’d forgotten about it and Caroline was too busy with her PBS Masterpieces to remind him, and he insisted on calling me Hal, to the extent that I wondered if a better idea might be a visit to the emergency room to scan for a transient ischemic attack. Then I recalled that Hal was his brother’s name and I didn’t mind standing in that evening for his sole, deceased sibling.

We entered the nearly full Embree High School auditorium just as “Comfort Ye My People” began. The black-tied orchestra became a cohesive whole with the choirs, the unit from our AME church contributing a spice of nightshade, especially when their sopranos hit that high A-flat in the “Exultation” chorus. Carried away, we wished we could hear the complete, nearly three-hour oratorio, but settled for ninety minutes of glorious song, capped by the conductor asking the audience to join in singing the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Roberto knew and sang every word beautifully in his acute tenor: “Hallelujah!”

We talked some on the way home that evening in March, 2020, and as I pulled into his driveway, and the horizon opened up, he said to me: “See how beautiful the moon is tonight, Paulie—look.” He became more lucid than he’d been for months. “I’m like that moon, just half there. Like I’m disappearing, Paulie, like there’s not as much of me as there was before. I love Caroline. I hate there’s less of me for her—and for you, too. What a disappointment I must be.”

What he said was true, but I would not confirm it, and that was the extent of my compassion.  Rob never wanted sympathy; he smiled through his trials. As I escorted him from my car to his door we moved slowly, as if he didn’t want to end this episode of ours. We mounted the steps to his front door, and he turned to me under the porch light, gave me a hug, and said, “You know I love you, Paulie.”

I could not have expected how easily and truthfully I returned his endearment with, “I love you, Roberto.”

It was undoubtedly from the crowd at the concert that Roberto contracted the virus. It found fertile ground in his depleted immune system and sent him to the hospital two days after our confessions of love. The ICU was already full of victims from the local nursing home whose director failed to institute even the least amount of caution in visitations to the elderly that he was appallingly, if not criminally, neglectful in protecting. After all, ground zero in the U.S was a nursing home, right? At any rate, Rob was at least able to be intubated, though this forced him to spend his last days in a hallway where there could be no visitors, no family, no friends, no me.

Yes, these records of his I purloined will stay with me now. Each one reminds me of our time together at the Y, the symphony, the pizza joint where we always ordered the Sicilian, in my car on the way home, in the sanctuary where we sang “Hallelujah!”