My Friend Ric

By Angela Welch

Ric (Angela)
My friend Ric wrote screenplays, a lot of screenplays. He did other things too – he directed some videos awhile ago that were famous in their own right, about Brooklyn and about parties and pie fights and girls dancing in a place called Hollywood. But mostly he wrote screenplays. If you asked him when he was alive, nothing fancy like “what would you want as your epitaph;” just asked what he would want to be remembered for, I’m pretty sure he’d say something like “tell ‘em I wrote some movies.”

I haven’t written much about Ric since he died, little bits here and there, mostly on facebook, and the piece I wrote for his funeral, but nothing substantial. I know I need to write something more, something that shows at least a little about how much he meant to me, how fortunate I am to have had him in my life. He was my friend after all, and I’m a writer; it’s what I do. I need to write about him. But it’s been hard. For a long time I thought it was a matter of not being ready emotionally, but the truth is, I haven’t written more because I’m afraid that I won’t find the words to do him justice.

It’s not an easy thing to do justice to someone’s life, to find the essence, especially when that someone is a close friend, but of course we never know everything about the other. Ric was 60 when he died; I’d known him for five years, the last two of which found him in my kitchen at least three nights a week. We seldom went a day without some kind of communication, in person, phone or email, but what about the other 55 years of his life? I know some things about those years, but not a lot.

Why does it matter to me that you know all this? Why do I feel the need to validate my connection to Ric, to provide proof that I have a right to my grief? I think it’s human nature, we rank people in a way, family sits in the front pew at the funeral, and on like that. When people talk to me about Ric, they often say things like, “I didn’t know him that well, but I always wanted to know him better,” as if they don’t feel they have the right to miss him too. Then they tell me a story about Ric, a movie conversation or something he said that stuck with them. That is right, that was Ric. And it makes perfect sense to me that people would feel the loss, however short the time they knew him, however brief their interaction with him. That was Ric too.

I could regale you with story after story about Ric – anyone who knew him more than five minutes could probably do the same. I could tell you what a talented screenwriter he was, but you don’t need my opinion to know that about him. So I’ll tell you what I tell everybody who asks me about Ric, the two things I most want people to know about him – he was incredibly funny and incredibly kind.

More than once Ric said to me “I will do anything for you, as long as you give me lunch, and I will go anywhere for you as long as you pay for a car service. Well, anything but clean the cat box; that I won’t do because I just can’t.” It seemed reasonable. But you don’t need to know how good a friend Ric was to me; what you need to know is how much of a friend he was to so very many people, how much a part he was of the Brooklyn neighborhood we shared, how deeply ingrained he was in the community here. I can’t possibly tell you why that was, what magic made it so, I can only tell you that it was so. People loved Ric, loved being around him, and at least part of that Ric magic was his ability to give people what they needed in the moment. He could be the person they needed him to be, but at the same time he knew exactly who he was, and he wouldn’t compromise that for anyone. That may seem paradoxical, but paradoxical or not, it was true.

The whole time I’ve been writing this, struggling to get it right, trying to share with you the Ric Menello I knew, he’s been standing behind me, looking over my shoulder at the page. I can hear him speaking and he’s saying, “just tell ‘em I wrote some damn movies.”

© 2014, Angela Welsh

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