the end

chapter 1

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The last time I saw Tommy was during the final hour of sunlight on the last day of summer. We had gone for a run, the last of hundreds we’d done together since high school.

I remember admiring how, even in his lessened, sickly state, he was able to float across the ground as if his body weighed nothing, while I felt labored and strained with every step.

We stopped at the top of Johnson Hill, hands on hips, huffing air that was so easy to take for granted. He turned toward the sunset and closed his eyes, stretched out his arms as if embracing the valley and the little city of Veddersburgh below us, and felt the breeze through his fingers, as if he knew his life was winding down and that he should enjoy it, if only for a moment.

It didn’t have to be the end.

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The beginning was the first day of middle school, when I first saw Tommy standing in the doorway of the cafeteria line, scanning for a place to sit, a book beneath his tray as I had done moments earlier, his eyes landing where mine did, at the table nearest the wall, depopulated but for me and closest to the teachers standing watch, where no other kid would deign to sit.

“Greetings! I’m Tommy Goodspeed,” he said in a way that was far too direct and practiced for someone our age. He even offered a handshake, which I took, stunned and limp. “But you can call me ‘T’ or ‘the Big T’ or drop the article so that it’s just ‘Big T’. That’s what ‘the’ is—it’s called an article. Did you know that? Anyway, that’s what my family calls me, ‘Big T’.”

Tommy Goodspeed might have been one of the most aptly named people on the planet: he was a runner, and a fast one.

I don’t know if his father or the rest of the Goodspeed family were fast, but if they were to collectively be named with another portmanteau, they probably should have been called the “Goodgrocers,” because that’s what they were: generations of grocers who had been successful in the business of selling food in America since the days of Plymouth Rock. Tommy’s father claimed that it was a Goodspeed who supplied the pumpkins for the first Thanksgiving, and the Goodspeeds still supplied pumpkins for the subsequent Thanksgivings through their small chain of family-owned grocery stores that persisted into the new millennium, even as global supermarket conglomerates all but devoured the rest of the family-owned grocery stores.

Their stores were called “Big T Grocery.” No one was sure who the original “Big T” was, because Tommy’s father’s name was Tim, and his father’s brothers were Tyler and Travis, and their dad was Theodore “Ted” Goodspeed IV, and his father was Theodore Goodspeed III, and so on. The tradition went so far back they couldn’t be sure.

The moment a Goodspeed male was born, he became the next “Big T,” no matter how small he was. Even Tommy’s mother called him ‘T’.

“What’s your name?” Tommy asked me, breathless from his own introduction.
Unique as my name seemed to me when I was young, I knew that something as simple as a name had the power to make you seem different, and difference was the enemy of assimilation. The ‘new kid’ should always avoid differences. I fumbled as though starting to say something else, some lie or nickname that failed to manifest itself as I blurted out the truth.

“Jude,” I said, wondering if the clamminess of my hand was my own or transferred from Tommy’s.

I am named for the song—one of the most popular songs of all time by one of the most popular bands of all time—a methodology so basic and derivative that if it were more common, you’d expect half the planet to be named Jude.

Maybe there are a lot of Judes in England, but growing up, I was the only Jude I ever knew. You always hear about women named for songs—Melissa, Layla, Rhiannon, Ruby, Lucy, etc.—any one of those you know might be named after a song, but boys named in such a romantic fashion are rare.

His eyes lit up. “Jude?” he asked. “Like the song ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles?”

I told him yes, of course. He was the only person my age I ever met who knew the origin of my name, who made me feel comfortable without explanation.

“I love the Beatles!” he said, then tunelessly sang a few bars of ‘Hey Jude’.

“And my last name is Harris,” I said, knowing he’d see the irony.

“What! As in, like, George Harrison?!” He cracked up. “Nice to meet you, Jude Harris! What are you reading?”

I was a shy kid. I hadn’t exactly thrived at my old school in Albany, which made the move both easier to swallow and fraught with potential. I had planned to guard myself against such potential with a book—a shield against unwanted conversations, a way to ward off the threat of failure that might come from trying to fit in. But it was useless against Tommy.

I was reading my thick paperback copy of Redwall by Brian Jacques. He pulled his own book out from beneath his lunch tray: Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

“Do you like to read?” he asked, before I could answer. “I’m reading this book about surviving by yourself in the wild, it’s awesome. It’s about this kid, Eric—his plane crashes and—”

The squall that was Tommy blew into my life, and we never read alone at lunchtime again.

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The beginning was not just a time, but a place, the place where we met: a little city in the most eastern, small stretch of the Rust Belt that extends into upstate New York, a place called Veddersburgh.

Veddersburgh was the cauldron in which we were unwittingly mixed, put there by our parents, as most young people are, although our circumstances were very different.

Tommy was there because one of the last three remaining Big T Grocery stores was in Veddersburgh, and his dad was the owner and manager.

Tommy’s great-grandfather was the patriarch of the modern Goodspeed business, which he started as a humble produce cart in Albany, then expanded throughout the region to a total of eight Big T grocery stores, administered by his sons and their sons in turn. Tommy’s grandfather was the one who began the process of selling their locations to the encroaching big-name corporate supermarkets, until he left only three, one to each of his sons, who could decide whether to continue the business or sell when they saw fit. The idea was that each would eventually cash in on his grocery store and retire an even richer man than he already was. Although Tommy’s father was set for life, he must have felt like he drew the short straw when Tommy’s grandfather gave him the westernmost of their stores in Veddersburgh.

The store itself wasn’t a problem; its profitability was ensured because people always needed groceries, and it was the only convenient grocery store on the south side of Veddersburgh.

The issue was that Veddersburgh was a husk of a “city” that perhaps in days past lived up to that title, but was now nothing more than perhaps a big “town,” scarred with garish mills and empty factories, old tenement housing converted to multi-family apartments with absentee landlords, and an elderly populace that voted down every school budget and was being rapidly replaced by a high teenage pregnancy rate. It had the highest rate of state-paid school lunch qualifiers in the state.

When I was in college at a nearby SUNY school, my macroeconomics professor started a lecture by asking if anyone was from Veddersburgh. I raised my hand and he apologized for what he was about to insinuate about my hometown, which was that Veddersburgh was a perfect example of the decline of manufacturing in America, how the changes of the 20th century so negatively impacted certain formerly thriving communities and, in short, made them not very nice places to live.

Tim Goodspeed—Tommy’s father, forever known to me as Mr. Goodspeed—was therefore a moderately wealthy man of upper-middle-class means in a city where such wealth was rare, and amenities catering to people of his class were generally absent, aside from the country club, golf course, and fancy Italian-American restaurants, which are ubiquitous to almost any American city of our times.

It wasn’t always rare to be wealthy in Veddersburgh. In the early 20th century, the number of carpet mill owners and other textile-adjacent industry captains made it briefly known as the “Monte Carlo of the Mohawk” and home to more millionaires than anywhere in the United States.

The Goodspeed family lived in one of the lesser old millionaire’s houses—not a mansion, but a beautiful Tudor in a neighborhood with a grassy median and lampposts, with a slot near the door for the milkman to deposit milk that could now be used to receive Amazon packages, a carriage house that had been converted to a garage, a laundry chute, and a layout that accommodated for servants’ quarters and a pantry kitchen.

Another remnant of Veddersburgh’s golden age was St. Anthony’s, a private Catholic elementary school. They sent Tommy there because it provided an exclusivity they could afford, even though the Goodspeeds weren’t Catholic at all. Their heritage was as WASP as you can get.

Tommy’s fifth-grade graduation was the last one. St. Anthony’s closed the year after that.

Maybe it was because the nearest private middle school was over thirty minutes away, or because Tommy’s father was busy managing the store on the south side. Whatever the reason besides financial constraint, the Goodspeeds sent Tommy to Veddersburgh’s public middle school.

Which was where he met me.

We moved to Veddersburgh the summer before sixth grade because my dad’s mail route was switched to Smithson, the rural/suburban ring that surrounded Veddersburgh proper on all sides. But we couldn’t actually afford a house in Smithson, at least not one my parents liked well enough or was big enough for them and me and my sister, nor could my father stand living so near where he delivered, and so nearby Veddersburgh was the landing spot, in a little part of town called University Heights, where we lived on Harvard Street in a modest house a postman and home health aide could afford, not far from Tommy and his family on Lindbergh Street, the one with the median and the lampposts that, back in the ’20s, they called “Millionaire’s Row.”

Most of Tommy’s cohort at St. Anthony’s elementary continued their education at other private schools or went to Smithson. When Tommy and I met at lunch that day, we were both “new kids” in our own way.

The gravity of our mutual loneliness brought us together, and it only took a small spark between us to ignite a friendship that would tumble across our lives, through high school, through college, and into our young adulthood—until the flame within one of us was extinguished forever.

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