Audience of One Another

I’ve been thinking about one of my best friends from college lately. I do every year as February becomes March. I think of him intermittently regardless of month, but especially around now because now is his birthday. Mike Manning was born on March 13.

I became aware of this fact sometime prior to Spring Break 1983. Mike and I were in a couple of classes together the previous fall. I don’t remember what drove us to strike up an initial conversation. Probably some mutual dissatisfaction with a particular professor. We chatted some, palled around before and after class, even went out for end-of-the-semester beers with another classmate when the term was over. Mike and I each liked to emote and we each liked that somebody would absorb what we were going on about. We were a good audience for one another. That makes sense. The class where we began to hit it off was Public Speaking.

Spring Break in ’83 where we went to school, at the University of South Florida in Tampa, ran the second week of March. He let me know that with his birthday coming up on the 13th, it would be great if I could come by his apartment on Saturday night the 12th for a party. He’d be turning 21. I was impressed that he considered it a big enough milestone to celebrate. Basically, everybody turns 21 when you’re in college. But Mike made a thing of it, and I was touched to be invited. I made sure to be back in town in time for it (and it gave me a good excuse to hit the road from my parents’ place down in Hallandale a day sooner than I would have normally).

The occasion of Mike’s 21st birthday made for a perfectly lovely party. I met some perfectly lovely friends and family members of his, even if small talk is a skill that eluded me than as it does now. I wore my Mets jacket. Mike saw it and tried to remember which famous baseball player he was a distant cousin to. One of his siblings reminded him: Gaylord Perry. Mike was a little tipsy, but what the hell, he was home and on the verge of a significant number. The clock eventually struck midnight. Those of us who hung in there toasted him. However close we were before March 13, it seemed we got closer after. Like I said, Mike was one of my best friends.

Mike turned 21 nine-and-a-half months before I did. It was a process that would repeat annually. I always got a kick out of catching up to him agewise and then shrugging that it was only temporary. He was a year ahead of me in school and about a generation wiser. He didn’t need to turn 21 to be an adult. I suspect I wasn’t in that much of a rush to fully grow up. Mike had not had an easy upbringing and compensated for it by getting a head start on being in the real world. Me, my priorities were pretty much what they’d always been.

On April 2, 1984, I dragged Mike ever so briefly into one of them. To Mike, it was a Monday; on Mondays we had one class together late morning and one after lunch. We’d usually spend the interval together. To me it wasn’t just any Monday. It was Opening Day, and the Mets for the first time I could remember were in the Opening Day game, at Cincinnati. What made it particularly resonant was, because the Reds trained in Tampa, an AM station carried their afternoon games locally (the station was daytime-only). Listen, I asked, would you mind if we stopped by my dorm room between classes? I explained this serendipitous confluence of Mets, Reds and radio that never otherwise happens and I can’t believe I actually get to hear the beginning of the season!

Mike was very much, sure. We get to my room, I turn on the radio and…WHBO AM 1050 is playing a song. And then another song. The station had changed formats recently and dropped the Reds games entirely. I was very apologetic for wasting Mike’s lunch hour and felt embarrassed my media-savvy credibility had been undercut by the erstwhile Reds affiliate. Mike was very much, that’s all right. He continued to trust my instincts, even if they once in a while went awry. We got up and headed to class. The Mets lost, 8-1, at Riverfront. Darryl homered in the losing cause, but I wouldn’t find out any of that until the Six O’Clock News.

A couple of college friends. Mike’s the one dressed better than that day’s graduate.

Mike graduated in ’84, me in ’85. For his graduation, I bought that week’s No. 1 single — “Against All Odds” by Phil Collins — and mounted it in a frame, which he hung up in living room. For my graduation, he and his girlfriend brought me back a couple of baseball tchotchkes from their recent trip to Chicago: an oversized White Sox button, which I got a huge kick out of (Seaver was a Sock then), and a Cubs pennant, which I accepted politely despite absolutely fucking hating the Chicago Cubs following the 1984 pennant race. Yet I still have the pennant because the gesture was far more thoughtful than it was clueless…even though it was more than a little clueless…which is absolutely understandable because my friend and his girlfriend literally didn’t have a clue about who a Mets fan might hate at a given moment, but they knew I loved baseball, and they were very thoughtful people.

I moved back to New York. I would make a couple of March trips back to Tampa as the ’80s rolled on — Spring Break was apparently still in my system — and we’d get together, but usually I’d settle for calling him come March 13. Hey, we’re no longer the same age, one of us would say and the other would laugh and we’d catch up. Mike married his aforementioned girlfriend, a woman different in manner and accent from him — she was a New Yorker with all that implies (I can say that as a New Yorker); he was a courtly Southerner at heart — but they were fully compatible in their warmth and decency. I was a groomsman at their wedding, having flown down in November of ’86, resplendent in that same Mets jacket I wore to his 21st birthday party. Why shouldn’t you be wearing it? he asked when he picked me up at the airport, overlooking the fact that November in Tampa didn’t necessarily require an outer layer. Your team just won the World Series.

Mike and Maria had a beautiful wedding ceremony. Then they shared a beautiful first dance to “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do,” the Anne Murray/Dave Loggins duet. Then, as they and their dozens and dozens of guests rightfully went about reveling in their nuptials, I receded into a sulk from which even the knowledge that my team had just won the World Series could not extricate me. Not the happy couple’s fault, nor the caterer’s. I was attending their wedding stag after a potential date fell through and I was becoming sure I’d never find anybody the way they’d found each other. A wedding was not the place to be in that state of mind. I sought them out, wished them well and left. They managed to work a concerned phone call into their honeymoon to see if I was OK. Warm and decent, indeed. (I met Stephanie six months later and became a more reliable wedding guest thereafter.)

Mike and Maria settled down in Tampa. Hardly anybody was actually from Tampa. Mike grew up there. They eventually had a son who died in infancy, which of course was horrible. Stephanie and I visited them shortly after the tragedy. I approached Maria gingerly. It’s OK to hug, she assured me, I won’t break. The Mannings were indeed made of strong stuff. Blessedly, they were soon able to adopt a boy who it turned out was the same age as the son they lost.

Somewhere along the way, the three of them moved to Atlanta, where Mike established himself in his profession. The birthday calls became birthday cards. The birthday cards became birthday e-mails. Then those faded. Mike was always mentioning how busy he was. He was never curt about it, but I picked up a vibe that time was tight and he couldn’t be the audience he used to be, and maybe he didn’t need me to be the audience I used to be. I didn’t want to be a bother, so I stopped reaching out. Occasionally I’d search online a bit, just out of curiosity, to see if he was on social media. He wasn’t. That didn’t seem like his scene. Mike was too serious for most of that nonsense. He took himself right up to the edge of too seriously, but inevitably knew how to pull back (says the man who bolted from a wedding reception in a self-pitying snit despite carrying the honor of groomsman and the Mets being world champs). I knew him well enough to know how he was doing even if I wasn’t up to date on what he was doing.

We’d lost touch, but somehow I never felt like we hadn’t remained friends in absentia. I figured Mike and I existed on plane that wasn’t defined by time. Our conversations, when they had transpired, didn’t more than dabble in remember when we…? nostalgia. If they had, Mike would have been overmatched. I was driving him around Tampa on some pre-wedding errand when “Maneater” came on the radio. Mike randomly exclaimed, “high school!” as if he’d decided some splendid twelfth-grade or earlier coming-of-age moment was soundtracked by this particular Hall & Oates number. I couldn’t let it stand. Mike, I said, “Maneater” came out in the fall of 1982. We were both in college. It was when we met in that speech class. He stood amiably corrected. These days, I usually let people make their connections as they see fit, unless the Mets are involved.

I hear “Maneater” and I think of Mike and I smile. I hear any number of things and I think of Mike and I smile. The word “woods,” for example. We were driving around once in some section of Tampa that had been built up since his childhood. “This used to be woods,” he said as we passed strip mall after strip mall. I told him I’d never heard of a retail chain called Woods. No, he said, they were actual woods out here. I laughed. He continued to give me the tour of the town he knew better than most. Stuff like that. For years I’d think of some random exchange from forever ago and smile at what Mike said or how he reacted to what I said. So what if we hadn’t had any of those types of talks lately? He’s out there somewhere, was my conclusion. I know I could call him and we’d pick up wherever we left off.

Except I can’t do that because, as his 60th birthday approached here in March of 2022, I got curious and slightly ambitious and searched a little harder and discovered that my good friend Mike Manning died in February of 2011. He was 48, a little more than a month shy of 49. Lung cancer, if I read the death notice correctly, which reminded me that, oh yeah, Mike smoked in college. Was apologetic about it, knew it wasn’t a good idea, but, well, that was something he did. I suggested he quit, but I never had it in me to berate him about it.

So Mike’s 60th birthday arrived today without Mike. Same as had been the case for his 50th. I still thought about him every March 13th, how his age retook the lead on my age. I guess I caught and passed him somewhere back there. I really would have preferred not to.

The last time I heard from Mike was after USF had climbed to No. 2 in the college football rankings in the fall of 2007. It was in an e-mail in response to one I sent him full of amazement that our Bulls were stampeding. USF didn’t have a football team when we were there. Mike wasn’t much of a sports fan, but he lived outside Atlanta. Georgia’s into college football, I figured, so Mike must have stumbled across this data point. We could bond anew, laughing at the absurdity that our heretofore obscure alma mater was listed behind only Ohio State and ahead of everybody else. It would give us an excuse to catch up. Except Mike’s e-mail on the subject was of the “been busy” variety. Not rude, but not looking to talk Bulls football or anything else. “I haven’t had much time for news from home lately” is the line that stays with me. I let it go. I let him go. Not much later, he’d be gone.

Still with me, at least, are all the bits and pieces that added up to one of the best friendships I was ever a part of, even if it did lapse. Also still with me: one final greeting card. It was from Mike to me, April of 2007. The picture on the front is of a few dozen pencils of many colors. The envelope it’s been in for fifteen years is yellow. Not only did I save it, I’ve kept it in a small pile of books and notepads that have sat next to my bed for ages. I’m not quite sure why it, among countless pieces of paper, earned its specific pluckable place. I don’t have any other cards in that particular pile. When I learned of Mike Manning’s passing, I knew exactly where to lay my hands on it and read it again.

Hey Greg —

So, it’s opening week for baseball — GO METS! Thanks so much for the b-day card & sorry for the long response pauses. I feel like I’m always working & traveling — maybe because I am. I was working in EU for a couple of weeks a couple of months ago. How about you — how’s consulting & writing going? How’s Stephanie doing? Maria is great & so is Charlie — who just turned 17! Can you believe my nephew Franco (altar boy @ my wedding) is a month away from being a dad…and his sister Michelle is about to get married? I chose this card as a reminder of all the times I could have written colorful notes to you!

I am six weeks away from completing my four-year theology class. Maybe then I’ll have time. No matter what, I would love to see you guys next time I’m there — maybe summer in DC & Boston until then. Thaw out, enjoy the spring air in Shea Stadium.

Always know we think and talk about you all when we are out and about doing our routines! See you soon…

Your friend,

Mike

He had me at GO METS! He had me long before that.