1. Barbee 1
Russ Barbee
Erin Bond
English 306
6, December 2014
The Nail
"Pals"
Everyone has that special group of friends that are always together when they are
growing up. To understand mine, you have to understand the meaning of the word "pals." Back
in 1990, there was a movie released called Young Guns II. It was about Billy the Kid and his
band of outlaws being hounded by the law while trying to make it to the Mexican border. During
their journey they get cornered by a lynch mob led by a local Deputy. The Deputy offers to let
them all go if they give up the Indian in their group. Billy tells the Deputy he obviously doesn’t
know the meaning of the word "pals" and the idea that he would hand over his friend is an insult.
To make a long story short they trick the mob into killing the deputy and Billy offers up a one
word toast. Pals.
That pretty much sums up our group. Now I don’t mean we went around tricking people
into killing Deputies, but we were closer than friends. We were like a tribe. We always had each
other’s back. We were very much like outlaws in our hometown. We didn’t really fit into any
group but we had connections to every element in our town: rich folks, poor folks, criminals and
even a few lawmen.
There were six of us in all. We were two groups of best friends and two additions. Mike
and I had been causing trouble together since the fourth grade. Tim and Kenny were new to the
area and connected on the basketball court. Johnny lived near Kenny and introduced us to

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Jeromia (pronounced Jeremiah) in our freshman year of high school. Jeromia was in the eighth
grade and about three years younger than us, but he was smarter and cooler than us too. We
welcomed him into the group without hesitation. We just knew he was one of us.
We were all pretty smart kids. Any one of us could have made straight "A"s if we applied
ourselves. Most of us did for a little while, but it wasn’t a priority for anyone. We just wanted to
party and have fun. Jeromia was the exception. He wasn’t just pretty smart. He was an honor
student. He could also drink us under the table, any time, every time. If he had a big test the
following day, he could drink any one of us under the table and still ace the test the next day. His
partying never interfered with his education, and he partied a lot.
Jo, Jeromia’s mom, was a bartender and Jeromia grew up in bars and pool halls. When
he was a kid he would sneak a drink here and there, but he never developed a problem. Jo was a
bit of an enabler. When we all started hanging out, she told us that if we wanted any booze to
ask her. She would rather get the beer for us and have us drink at her house than be out on the
road. We respected that; so that’s what we did. Without having to worry about going anywhere
or getting home, we got drunk past the point of silliness every weekend. We made it to that, "I
love you guys" stage of drunkenness more than once. We were closer because of it.
One night when we were sixteen years old, we were drunk and playing hide and go seek
at Jeromia’s house, because that’s the kind of thing you can do when you’re a drunk kid. I was
it, so I had to find everyone. After finding Tim, he started running for home and it became this
crazy drunken race around the yard. Tim stumbled down the driveway and I tackled him in the
street. Everyone was laughing, even me and Tim.

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When a car started coming down the road Tim refused to get up. He lay there laughing
while I dragged him out of the road. Five minutes later, we were all sitting on Jeromia’s front
porch drinking more beer. We had built a three foot pyramid of beer cans and were about to add
another six empties to the structure when blue lights flashed in the driveway. Evidently the
driver of the car saw me dragging Tim out of the road and called the law. Jeromia deconstructed
the pyramid while calmly smiling at the officer and we all vanished into the house.
Jeromia’s room was the second floor attic of his house, so that’s where we all went. I
heard some paper rustling frantically, like a rat stuck in a garbage bag, and then we were all
called back downstairs. Jo presented us to the policeman and all he wanted was to make sure we
were all okay. It was around the time of the 1992 Los Angeles riots over the Rodney King
verdict and people were on edge. Evidently, seeing a teenager being dragged off the road was a
red flag to someone. After the cop left and we went back up to Jeromia’s room, I noticed Mike
was chewing gum.
"Hey man, give me some gum."
"This is all of it," Mike mumbled pointing to his mouth.
"The whole pack?" I asked.
"Hell yeah, no beer on my breath," Mike laughed.
I looked towards the window of Jeromia’s room. There was pile of wrappers on the floor
from an entire pack of chewing gum. The rat in the garbage bag I heard moments before was
Mike tearing open a pack of Big Red while we were hiding from the cops. Jeromia was sitting
on his bed when he saw the pile of wrappers and started laughing. Mike tried to talk through the

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wad of gum in his mouth and Jeromia’s laugh became a cackle. He fell backwards on his bed
with tears in his eyes and laughed until he fell off the bed. By that point everyone was laughing.
We didn’t stop laughing for several years.
"O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art
and perfect our lives."
―Ghost Song by Jim Morrison
By 1995, the rest of the tribe had been out of high school for two years, but we all knew
something special was in store for Jeromia. Handling the last two years of high school was
nothing for him. He was the best of us. He was the little brother we all looked up to.
The details of the wreck were always sketchy. They were going over a hundred miles an
hour, but the road was too short to get to that speed. They were drunk or not drunk. The brakes
on the truck failed or didn't. One story involved swerving to miss a deer. I don't know, we never
really talked about it.
All I’m certain of 19 years later is this. On a curvy little road near my house is a creepy
little bridge through the swamp. The concrete railings were only a few feet off the pavement.
They flipped over one of those railings in Mike’s new truck and he had to hold Jeromia to keep
him from sinking into the swamp. Somehow, I didn’t find out about the wreck until I got home
from work. Mike and his girlfriend survived with minor scratches but Jeromia had been airlifted

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to Greenville and was in a coma. Back then, we didn’t have Google to explain what brain death
was but I knew Jeromia wasn’t coming home. It was six months before Jeromia’s high school
graduation.
Before I said anything to the hospital receptionist, she asked if I was there for Jeromia
Barnwell. It seemed odd but when I reached the ICU I understood. Everyone was there.
Friends from school and work, friends from our crowd, friends from Jeromia’s crowd, all
gathered in the intensive care ward consoling each other. There were people who knew each
other and people who didn’t but we all knew and loved Jeromia. It was like a really shitty family
reunion where everyone looked sick from the green tint of the hospital lights.
Off to the side were two figures keeping their distance from the group, a girl and her
grandmother. The girl's eyes and mine locked for a moment as a nurse rushed through the
crowd. She was surrounded by people united in pain but she could not have been more alone.
Five days later they shut off the machines keeping Jeromia alive. He was an organ donor,
so his organs and tissues helped more than two hundred people. Respecting his wishes, Jo had
him cremated and there was no funeral. The students and teachers at his high school were so
distraught, they held a memorial service at the school. His English teacher, Wanda Brown,
compiled the students’ memories of him into a eulogy which was read to a stadium of nearly 800
people. He had plenty of friends at the school, but we were his pals. None of the tribe attended.
I think Jim Morrison said it best, we "prefer a feast of friends to the giant family." Jeromia would
have understood.

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"Save us from the divine mockery of words, Music inflames
temperament."
―Ghost Song by Jim Morrison
Every song we heard reminded us of Jeromia. Live and Let Die, Knockin’ on Heaven’s
Door, We Die Young, all seemed to be mocking us. All our favorite music was too painful to
listen to. We couldn’t talk without eventually getting depressed. It was like Jim Morrison’s,
"divine mockery of words," was being played out in front of us. Jeromia’s absence made the
group seem infinitely smaller. Within a few weeks everyone had new friends. The tribe didn’t
hate each other or anything like that. We just couldn’t be around one another. When Jeromia
graduated from 8th grade in a tuxedo, we knew he was going to make something of himself.
Now all our hopes were gone. He was gone. The tribe was broken.
"Ghosts crowd the young child's, Fragile eggshell mind."
―Ghost Song by Jim Morrison
A month or so later life had struggled back to normalcy. Jeromia was still with us in
spirit and we all played foosball and pool just like he would have wanted. My new best friend,
Danny, and I were playing foosball against some out-of-towners. We had beaten them about ten
times already but they kept paying for another chance. So we kept playing. We had been

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playing for several hours and I was getting bored with the game. So when someone came in and
told me there were two hot girls outside wanting to see me, I bowed out of the game.
Someone pointed me to a red Chevy Lumina. I didn’t know anyone who owned a
Lumina so I had no idea who these girls were. The girl in the passenger seat was the one who
wanted to see me. I had only met her once. About six months before he died, Jeromia
introduced us. They had met working together at the local Hardees. She was his on-again-off
again-kinda-sorta-girlfriend. She was extraordinary. She was beautiful with dark curly hair,
deep brown eyes and a smile that seemed to call you over. Odysseus would have been powerless
against her. I was speechless when I met her, but she was so friendly and inviting that she put
me at ease immediately. Within ten minutes of meeting her we were already picking on each
other.
I say she was Jeromia’s "kinda-sorta-girlfriend" because she actually had a boyfriend.
Jeromia told me the guy was a colossal dickhead, but he was still her boyfriend. They would
always fight over something and she would come running to Jeromia before eventually going
back to the boyfriend. It wasn’t until after he died that she realized how much Jeromia meant to
her.
I had not seen her since that night at the hospital when she was alone in a crowded
hallway. I didn’t recognize her at first. She had cut her long hair and replaced it with a short
choppy bob cut. Her smile, which always made you feel warm inside, was gone. She didn't
laugh anymore. She wanted to know if I hated her.
"Why would I hate you?"
"Everyone else does."

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"Then everyone else is stupid."
I told her I didn’t have any reason to hate her. She was stuttering and fidgeting,
uncomfortably trying to find words to express herself. I could tell she was hurting but I didn’t
know how bad. I just knew she needed a friend. After we talked for a few minutes she seemed
to feel a little better. I told her to come find me if she wanted to talk and she forced a smile
through teary eyes and left. While she was driving away it felt like Jeromia was tugging on my
shirt sleeve. I told him if she needed a shoulder to cry on, I would be there for her.
"You became the light on the dark side of me."
―Kiss From a Rose by Seal
She started to come around about once a week. I would be sitting somewhere with some
friends and her white Camaro would pull up. We would ditch my friends and go somewhere and
talk for a few hours. It seemed like she was punishing herself for something. She was always
down on herself and apologizing for nothing. It turned out her boyfriend really was a colossal
dickhead. After Jeromia died, he wouldn’t let her mourn. He told her he was glad Jeromia was
dead and tried to continue their relationship like everything was fine. One day, I told her he was
a piece of shit and she laughed. It was the first time I had seen her laugh since Jeromia died.
Over the next few months we spent more time together. At first we talked about Jeromia.
I told her about the night of drunken hide and seek. I told her things that Jeromia would have
been too embarrassed to tell, but she was smiling and that was all I cared about. Little by little

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she was coming out of the shell she had built around herself. Eventually the visits stopped being
about Jeromia and it was just us growing closer.
One time she came to me really upset. One of her boyfriend’s buddies wanted to sleep
with her. Her boyfriend didn’t mind, so he told his buddy to give it a shot. She was with them
when they had this conversation and was naturally angry about it. The buddy tried to have his
way with her while she was fighting him off. Her boyfriend was watching and laughing, while
his buddy was trying to rape her. He did pull the guy off before he did anything but naturally she
was upset. I’m not sure what I told her but it involved the brutal beating I would give her
boyfriend if I ever met him.
After that, we started going to the beach together on a regular basis. We developed our
own batch of inside jokes. The kind of jokes you only have when you’ve grown close to
someone. I guarantee if you ask her today what ‘little green things’ are, she’ll laugh. They’re
pickles by the way. We spent hours on the phone talking about everything. I started to live for
her laugh and the spark in her eye when she was smiling at me.
One time at the beach, we were having one of those playful fights that shows how much
you care about someone. We were "arguing" over playing a song on the jukebox. I wanted
something from Smashing Pumpkins and she wanted to play Kiss From a Rose by Seal. She
knew I liked it but would never admit it, so she insisted. Naturally she won the "argument" and I
popped the quarters into the jukebox. While we were laughing at the jukebox, her boyfriend
walked in behind us. Danny was there too and he spotted the boyfriend right away. As he
started to walk over, Danny intercepted him. He told her boyfriend that if he knew what was

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good for him he would go home, and he did. We never knew her boyfriend was there until
Danny told us he was gone. After that trip, she vanished for a few weeks.
"Cause nothin' lasts forever, And we both know hearts can change"
―November Rain by Guns N’ Roses
I was staying at a friend’s house, his parents were in Mexico so we had the place to
ourselves. No one knew where we were, so when she pulled into the yard I was shocked. She
didn’t have long but we talked like always. For some reason, this time it was harder to make her
smile. Something was troubling her, but I couldn’t get her to tell me what it was. I asked her
how she found me.
"I followed my heart," she said.
At that moment our whole future together flashed before my eyes. I wanted to tell her
that I loved her and had for a long time. Yet, wanting to carry the relationship farther didn’t
make it feel any less like betraying Jeromia. As far as I was concerned she was Jeromia’s girl. I
don’t know what I said, or if I just sat there like a drooling baboon, but she left a few minutes
later.
A few days later, I went by her house and her car was gone. The house was dark and
there was a for sale sign by the road. I knew she was gone. She moved away and I never knew
what happened to her. That first night she tracked me down playing foosball, I made a choice
that I was not going to take advantage of her. I accomplished that, but I also gave her no reason

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to stay with me and had to live with that decision. I missed her but I knew I was never going to
see her again. Over the next few weeks I fell apart. I had grown to live for her smile and with
her gone it was like my lifeline had been severed. I spiraled into a depression that lasted for
months.
Six months after she vanished I jumped into an abusive relationship of my own. It
brought out the worst in me and made me miserable. When it eventually ended, I swore off
women and decided to stay single until I got my head on straight. After a few months, I just
switched off emotionally and stayed that way for a few years.
"And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you."
—Time by Pink Floyd
After twelve years, my life was fairly normal. I had a good job and good friends. The
various members of the tribe kept in touch but we rarely hung out anymore. I had rediscovered
how much I loved to write and had a couple of hundred people reading the stuff I was writing on
Myspace. It was not unusual to have someone I didn’t know write me wanting to talk.
One day at work, I get a message on Myspace from someone calling herself Natty Dread.
She was cautious in her wording. She wanted to know if I was the guy who helped her through
the toughest time of her life. She had lost someone and didn’t realize how much she had cared
about him until he was gone. She apologized if I was not the Russ she thought I was.

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I stared at the words on the screen, speechless once again. I checked the profile picture
and there it was, the smile I’ll never forget. She had never really left my thoughts but I certainly
never expected to hear from her again. I didn’t know what to do. A lump formed in my throat
and I had to get away from the computer. I left my desk in the advertising department and went
outside for a walk. After all these years? What were the odds? It had to be her. After a few
minutes, I went back inside and sent her a one word response. Jill?
Within a few minutes she responded and apologized for disappearing on me twelve years
ago. I blew it off like it hadn’t nearly killed me when she disappeared and we kept talking. We
got caught up on everything. She told me she had always felt bad about vanishing on me but she
had to get away from our town. She had followed me in the papers. She was happy when I
made it on the dean’s list and was excited for me when she saw my name in the credits of the
Jacksonville Daily News. She had married the dickhead boyfriend but it ended in divorce. They
had a girl that was twelve years old. The last day we saw each other she was pregnant. I told her
everything.
"I was so in love with you, but I could never say it."
"Really?"
"Oh yeah, but I felt like was betraying Jeromia."
"I wished you had said something. That was all I wanted to hear."
She had married another guy. They had their honeymoon in Jamaica and saw all the Bob
Marley related sites. They had a little girl. After a few weeks of chatting like this, all the
catching up was done. She told me she had something serious she wanted to tell me.

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"It may affect the way you feel about me."
"Not a chance. What’s up?"
She told me about the night of Jeromia’s accident. That night at work Jeromia had asked
her to spend the night with him and she brushed him off. She went back to her boyfriend and
Jeromia went out. He got in the wreck and the next day when she found out her whole world
came crashing down.
Somehow almost everyone in town had heard about this but me. All of her friends
blamed her for Jeromia’s death. Everyone in the high school hated her. It got so unsafe for her,
she had to switch schools. Her boyfriend wouldn’t let her mourn and no one wanted to hear from
her. So she took a chance on a guy she met in the IGA parking lot one day, me.
"If I had stayed with him, he would be alive. That’s why everyone hated me," she said. I
stared at the words on the screen and a ton of stuff started to make sense. All those years ago, I
never understood why she punished herself so much. I just thought she was a mess because she
realized she loved Jeromia too late. Now I knew she was blaming herself for his death.
"I still think everyone was stupid. There’s no way you could have known what was going
to happen," I told her I didn’t blame her. It was an accident and the sad truth is, sometimes they
are unavoidable.
"Thank you. I’m crying now. LOL"
"How long have you been holding that in?" I asked.
"Too long."

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"Well quit it. We’ve got to be goofy and make each other laugh, okay?"
"LOL Okay. "
We talk like this online for about two weeks. She said her kids could always tell when
we were talking because she would smile. She told me her oldest liked me because I "made
mommy smile." After a month she let it slip that her marriage wasn’t all roses. Her husband was
one of those guys who thinks he’s entitled to sex whenever he feels like it. Whether or not she’s
willing doesn’t really bother him. He had raped her several times.
I talked to her about getting out of the house, but she had nowhere to go. I told her about
several women’s shelters and she started talking to one of them. She tried to get things situated
so she could get her kids and leave but she didn’t have a way to support herself. After a few
months, it was apparent that she wasn’t going anywhere. She said maybe we should stop talking
to each other. I couldn’t leave her like that so I wouldn’t let her go. But after a few more weeks
it was obvious we were making each other miserable. I sent her a long letter explaining that I
thought she was right; we should stop talking to each other. This is a small excerpt:
"If we ever happen to bump into each other out there in the world,
you better expect a big hug. I don’t think I could see you without
giving you one. You made me a better man, and for that you will
always have a special place in my heart.
You once rewrote some lyrics for me and I was going to redo the
whole song including what you wrote but I could never get past the
title. So I’ll end this all on that note. Take care of yourself Jill and
be blessed in all your days.
Natty No Cry"
She responded:

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"May the Light always be at your paths journey. . . .
Good friends we have had and good friends we have lost. . . . .
along the . . . way
And Russ kept the fiyah bright. . . .
We don't need myspace to talk. . . . .
BlessedBeLivity"
And that was it.
A friend who was there through the whole ordeal described us as a corrosive influence in
each other’s lives. "Star crossed lovers caught in the wrong time and place with too much bad
history," were her exact words. She said it was like we were snagged on a nail in regards to each
other. I can’t say that I disagree, but I don’t think it was all for nothing. I like to think I helped
her out one final time. The last time we talked it was right after Christmas. She said she had
been alone for over a month, away from her abusive husband. I was glad for that, but if she had
put her phone number in that last message I would have called her in a heartbeat.
"Ere, little darlin', don't shed no tears, No, woman, no cry."
—Bob Marley